Linguist Forum
Specializations => Phonetics and Phonology => Topic started by: zaba on March 06, 2014, 11:50:57 PM
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They seem to have something in common...
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I would call them opposites, if anything.
| (Universal) | (Mental Entities) |
| Platonic forms | + | - |
| Phonemes | - | + |
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Right. Makes sense. Let me rephrase: In what way are distinctive features like Platonic forms?
(Universal) (Mental Entities)
Platonic forms + -
DFs + -
Phonemes - +
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I don't know of any models of phonology that treat features as either universal or non-mental. The gestural phonetics people hint in this direction, but they usually make a point of avoiding the word "feature" for exactly this reason.
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But features are definable as units of sound that can be described in terms of physical features (e.g. [labial][voice]) no?
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The question gets a bit technical within generative theory. In precise terms, a feature is minimal basis of contrast. It is an abstract unit, and it does not describe something universal across languages. There's a lot of empirical work done to demonstrate, for example, that German's [voice] is not the same as English's [voice].
The issue is complicated by the fact features are typically correlated to acoustic properties of sound. This is not a coincidence, of course, but nor does it imply that features somehow are sound. When you start looking at phonetic data, it becomes clear that you really do need another level of abstraction to account for language, and that abstraction is generally understood to be mental. To quote a familiar example, throw the words "writer" and "rider" at your average English speakers and they'll swear up and down that the basis of difference is contained in the intermediate consonant. Acoustically, however, the difference is actually present in the preceding vowel.
Edit: "it does describe" -> "it does not describe". Derp. That "not" is important.
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If you are interested in really getting into a detailed look at this, I recommend looking through Kathleen Currie Hall's dissertation (http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kchall/kchall/Home_files/single_file.pdf) that examines a range of perspectives and lines of evidence for what phonemes and features might be. The short answer is that this is actually all very complicated, and people tend to mean different things by these categories depending on their purposes and theoretical outlook, and, as MalFet said, you can't simply draw a correspondence between features and sound or phonemes and sound.
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a feature is minimal basis of contrast. It is an abstract unit, and it does not describe something universal across language
But is it not true that phonetics constrains phonology through the phonetic definitions associated with distinctive features? Clements thought so anyway. What am I misunderstanding?? :'(
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a feature is minimal basis of contrast. It is an abstract unit, and it does not describe something universal across language
But is it not true that phonetics constrains phonology through the phonetic definitions associated with distinctive features? Clements thought so anyway. What am I misunderstanding?? :'(
The key word here is associated, and I'd avoid using the word "constrain" since that has a very particular meaning in generative theory. Phonological categories must, of course, be derivable from a phonetic signal, and conversely a speaker must know how to effect phonological categories via a phonetic signal, but it is not possible to reduce one to the other.
What you're wrestling with here is nothing less than the dyadic nature of the linguistic sign, and it's no overstatement to say that modern linguistics itself began when Saussure introduced this idea to Europe.
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Sentences like the one you made below are as close as I get to feeling like I make any progress on this issue:
What you're wrestling with here is nothing less than the dyadic nature of the linguistic sign, and it's no overstatement to say that modern linguistics itself began when Saussure introduced this idea to Europe.
You have no idea how grateful I'd be if you could elaborate on this issue with a sentence or two.
tHANKS
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I'm happy to elaborate however I can, but Saussure's account of the sign is only a few pages long and any attempt by me to rehash it would only serve to butcher. Check out page 65-70 of the Cours and if there's anything that's not clear please let me know what I can do to help.
https://archive.org/stream/courseingenerall00saus#page/64/mode/2up
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Thanks for the link to the original source. Nice to read it directly and not from an intermediary.
OK, so a (0) sign is made up of (1) signified and (2) signifier.
0. The "sign" is a unit with two sides:
1. signified is the thing in the world which is referred to by an utterance
2. signifier is the meaningful (linguistic) sequence that points to (1).
As such, (2) is made up of two layers on its own (and here begins my interpretation):
2a. phonetic layer (parole)
2b. phonemic layer (langue, sort of), which is composed of phonemes, which are, in turn, decomposable into distinctive features. In fact, the inventory of sounds in the phonemic layer are affected by distinctive features, in some way.
Before going further, is this reasonable?
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Thanks for the link to the original source. Nice to read it directly and not from an intermediary.
OK, so a (0) sign is made up of (1) signified and (2) signifier.
0. The "sign" is a unit with two sides:
1. signified is the thing in the world which is referred to by an utterance
2. signifier is the meaningful (linguistic) sequence that points to (1).
As such, (2) is made up of two layers on its own (and here begins my interpretation):
2a. phonetic layer (parole)
2b. phonemic layer (langue, sort of), which is composed of phonemes, which are, in turn, decomposable into distinctive features. In fact, the inventory of sounds in the phonemic layer are affected by distinctive features, in some way.
Before going further, is this reasonable?
Yes, until this last sentence. There is no inventory of sounds in the phonemic layer. The phonemic layer is composed entirely of mental categories. Sounds are the other side of the "coin", and categories and sounds associate to produce "signs", but there is a firewall of sorts between them.
What Saussure is accomplishing here is very significant in the history of thought. He is arguing that material things ("sounds") and ideational things ("categories") can travel together without being somehow of the same sort. He's demonstrating that language can be understood as formal system.
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Coming to this understanding means a lot to me. Thanks.
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Let me just try once more, since this is crucial to understanding whatever it is linguistics is.
Yes, until this last sentence. There is no inventory of sounds in the phonemic layer. The phonemic layer is composed entirely of mental categories. Sounds are the other side of the "coin", and categories and sounds associate to produce "signs", but there is a firewall of sorts between them.
What Saussure is accomplishing here is very significant in the history of thought. He is arguing that material things ("sounds") and ideational things ("categories") can travel together without being somehow of the same sort. He's demonstrating that language can be understood as formal system.
FROM A SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVE:
0. The "sign" is a unit with two sides:
1. signified is the material thing in the world that (2) points to
2. signifier is the ideational thing: the language used to point to (1)
FROM A SPEECH SOUND PERSPECTIVE:
2a. The signifier itself is a kind of "sign" with two sides of its own:
2b. signified is the material thing: phonetic sequence [sound]
2c. signifier is the ideational thing: phonemes & distinctive features [category]
Sorry if I am pushing it, but I just want to make sure I'm not "mixing levels" of description here. What do you think of this understanding?
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Zaba, what you wrote is basically my understanding. I'd take it further and say there are several ways of analyzing language into "signs." When we study syntax, we are concerned with signs whose signified is grammatical relations and whose signifier is a string of words (or lemmas and paradigms). When we study sociophonetics, we are concerned with signs whose signified is, say, socioeconomic class and whose signifiers are, say, talker-specific vowel spaces. However, I don't know whether Saussure would agree with this view.
(By the way, this is one reason I like information theory as an approach to language. In information theory, the "signs" are called "codewords," the "signifieds" are called "messages," and the signifiers are called "signals").
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Yep, looks good!
And, as a bonus, you're intuiting (and jkpate is elaborating on) a very interesting dimension to this all, which is that any particular speech event can and often must be analyzed in multiple dimensions simultaneously to be intelligible. In other words, a sound can be a phonological sign, a semantic sign, a sociolinguistic sign, a pragmatic sign, etc. all at the same time.
Saussure was certainly aware of this, but his analysis was fairly limited. Figuring out how to account for this simultaneity has been a major focus of linguistic and semiotic theory ever since. The generativists have mostly dodged the issue by postulating module independence, Relevance Theory and the Information Theory folks have focused on communicative intention, semiotics has elaborated the dyadic sign to include a third dimension, and I'm sure there are other major approaches I'm just not familiar with.
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FROM A SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVE:
0. The "sign" is a unit with two sides:
1. signified is the material thing in the world that (2) points to
2. signifier is the ideational thing: the language used to point to (1)
The signifier for this sign is both phonetic sequence and phonemes, right?
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Is it crazy to think of it as a kind of chain? I guess I'm pushing it... but it's elegant insofar as it gets from semantics to distinctive features of phonemes, which is sorta cool.
FROM A SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVE:
0. The "sign" is a unit with two sides:
1. signified is the material thing in the world that (2) points to
2. signifier is the ideational thing: the language used to point to (1)
2. FROM A SPEECH SOUND PERSPECTIVE:
2a. The signifier itself is a kind of "sign" with two sides of its own:
2b. signified is the material thing: phonetic sequence [sound]
2c. signifier is the ideational thing: phonemes & distinctive features [category]
2c. FROM A PHONEMIC PERSPECTIVE
2ci. The signifier = the phoneme
2cii. the signified is the material-like component represented by distinctive features
2ciii. The signifier is the ideational thing: the phoneme itself
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I'm not sure that "chain" is the right technical term, but I think the basic idea is reasonable. If we have a variable for everything that can be either a signifier or a signified (or both), we can indicate what the signs are by drawing a black square for each sign instance and then drawing lines between the square and the signified and signifier variables that participate in the sign instance. So for example we could have a string of "phoneme" variables, a string of "word" variables, and a string of "phrase" variables. To indicate that /kæt/ signifies the word "cat", we draw a black square between them, and draw a line from the square to the "cat" word variable, and from the square to the /k/ /æ/ /t/ phoneme variables. Similarly, we could have a "the" word variable, and an "NP" syntactic variable, and indicate that "the cat" signifies a noun phrase by putting another square between them and then drawing lines from each of "NP", "the", and "cat" to that square. So we have one black square for each sign, and it connects to variables that are part of either the signified or the signifier of that sign.
If we do this, we'll be drawing a factor graph (http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/frank/papers/KFL01.pdf) for the syntax and word segmentation of the phoneme string. Factor graphs are used in information theory to devise near-optimal codes, and are used in probability theory to define structured probability distributions over a given set of variables (in fact, those end up being the same thing). And there's no reason, in principle, not to include semantic, pragmatic, social, or other variables. And if you decide you want to explore some non-modular correspondence, such as an influence of social variables about interlocutor identity on syntactic ambiguity resolution, you can just draw a line between the relevant indexical variables and one or more "sign" squares whose signified is syntactic.
So probabilistic models of language structure embody your intuition that there are series of signs that "feed into" each other, and provide a natural framework for formulating and evaluating hypotheses about what the signs are. Of course, actually implementing and running these models takes a lot of effort, especially if you want to include lots of "cross-module" correspondences.
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I'd hesitate to use the term "chain" for two reasons. First, when you start looking at actually interpretive process, the matter gets very complicated very quickly. There's a lot of good work on this in (for example) gestalt psychology. Second, the idea of chained signs is a technical term of art in some fields of semiotics, where it has a very particular meaning that's probably not identical to what you intend.
But, as far as your actual description goes, I suspect that's more or less accurate.