WA - 2BA ELTIT (2021/22)

Course title

Principles of Natural Phonology

Course description

The course will acquaint the students with the principles of Natural Phonology, the theory originated by David Stampe and Patricia Jane Donegan in the 1960’s and 70’s, and further developed and elaborated by Wolfgang U. Dressler and followers. Natural Phonology belongs to the unorthodox approaches to phonology and acquisition. Its focus is on the speaker and language use as well as on the extralinguistic conditions that shape the usage and acquisition of language. It aims at providing a big picture view on language, informed by disciplines outside of linguistics.

Credit

There will be a final credit quiz based on the classes as well as a final short report on the attended IAS lectures.

Topics

PART ONE. Foundations of Natural Phonology (presentation of Stampe and Donegan’s classical Natural Phonology).

1.     An overview: phonological processes, phonetic motivation of phonological systems, processes and rules, the phoneme, the principle of naturalness, external evidence

2.     Processes in first language acquisition

3.     The nature, function and organization of processes; representations

PART TWO. Presentation of the most essential aspects of Dressler’s contribution to the theory.

1.     Explaining Natural Phonology by Dressler: the notions of naturalness, functional explanation, semiotic metatheory of natural linguistics, external/substantive evidence, universals-performance quintuple, preference, phonology and morphology

2.     Principles of naturalness in phonology and across components

3.     The theory of preferences in language

EPILOGUE. Raison d’être of the Natural Linguistic framework in the present and future research on language.

Bibliography on Natural Phonology: background and overview

Donegan, Patricia  & David  Stampe.  1979.  The study of Natural Phonology.  In Dinnsen, D.A.  (ed.).  Current Approaches to Phonological Theory.  Bloomington: IUP.  126-173.

Dressler, Wolfgang.U. 1985. Explaining Natural Phonology. Phonology Yearbook 1. 29-50.

Dressler, Wolfgang.U. 1996. Principles of naturalness in phonology and across components. In Hurch & Rhodes (eds.) Natural Phonology: The State of the Art. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 41-52.

Dressler, W.U. 1999. On a semiotic theory of preferences in language. The Pierce Seminar Papers. vol. 4. New York: Bergham Books. 389-415.

Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna.  2002.  Beats-and-Binding Phonology.  Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2002. Challenges for Natural Linguistics in the twenty first century: a personal view. In University of Hawai`i Working Papers in Linguistics,  Vol 23 (2001-2002).15-39. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. and in Dziubalska-Kołaczyk & Weckwerth (eds.).

Stampe, David. 1969. The acquisition of phonetic representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club (1979).

Stampe, David. 1979. A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. Bloomington: IULC.