A Manual of Phonology

260 Pages·1955·16.263 MB·English

by  Charles Francis Hockett

PART
1
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Vol. 21, No. 4, October 1955
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS
in
ANTHROPOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS
MEMOIR
11
of the
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
A MANUAL OF PHONOLOGY
By
CHARLES HOCKETT
F.
Published at the Waverly Press, Inc.
Mt. Royal and Guilford Aves.,
Baltimore 2, Md.
by Indiana University
under the auspices of
Linguistic Society ofAmerica
American Anthropological Association
with the cooperation of
Joint Committee on American Native Languages
572.082
I39m
no. 11
c. 2
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in 2011 with funding from
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A MANUAL OF PHONOLOGY
MEMOIR
11
By
CHARLES HOGKETT
F.
WAVERLY PRESS, INC.
Baltimore
J955
IVmm
FLORW* fviCJ
UNIVERSITY OF
\'/a
Indiana University Publications
in Anthropology and Linguistics
Editors: C. F. Voegelin
Glenn A. Black
George Herzog
Paul Radin
Thomas A. Sebeok
Memoir 11, i-vii + 1-246
Issued October, 1955
Paper$3.50
Memoir of
International Journal of
American Linguistics
International Journal of American Linguistics is published quarterly at the
Waverly Press, Inc., Mt. Royal and Guilford Avenues, Baltimore i, Md., by
IndianaUniversity. Subscriptions ($4.00 a year) will be received by the Waverly
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EnteredassecondclassmatterMay11,1945atthepostofficeat Baltimore,MarylandundertheActofMarch3,1879.
;
PREFACE
This manual was begun during the Spring Semester of 1952-3, while I was on
Sabbatical Leave from Cornell University, and also the recipient of a grantfrom
The Rockefeller Foundation, administered through the University. I wish to
express my gratitude to both of those institutions, whose assistance made it
possible for me to spend my time in research and writing rather than in directly
remunerative activities.
When first planned, what appears here was to be but the initial section of a
treatisedesigned to cover allphases of linguistics. The size of the presentvolume
will convince the reader, I am sure, that my original notion was hardly feasible.
I hope thatin due time otherportions of the treatise as originally conceived may
appear, but the expression of this hope must not be construed as a guarantee.
My debt to my colleagues, both at Cornell and elsewhere, is of course enor-
mous. The bibliographical references will indicate some small portion of this
debt. It would be impossible to single out, for mention here, all the individuals
who have been ofmore direct assistance; were I to attemptsuch athing, Iwould
be bound to commit unforgivable errors of omission. However, there are several
acknowledgments which must be overtly made.
First:to Gordon H. Fairbanks, whohasread theentiremanuscriptin (almost)
finalform. I have not always accepted his suggestions, and the bookis doubtless
the worse for that fact; but it is certainly the better for those which I have
accepted, and no blame must attach to him for errors which remain.
Second: to RomanJakobson, whohas been, overtheyears, asource ofinspira-
tion which I value highly. I am particularly anxious to be emphatic about my
debt to him because, in several places in the body of the book, I have been
forced to express sharp disagreement with, or criticism of, some of his most
fondly held views. Unfortunately, the spirit of scientific investigation leaves no
place for a softening of criticism forfriendship's sake, norfor any worship of the
Idols of the Marketplace.
Third to Martin Joos, who read an earlier draft of §5 with extreme care, and
:
was (by request) remorselessinhis criticism. He has alsoscrutinized §5 asit now
appears, and allows me to state that he is in complete agreement withthepoints
of view and the interpretations of fact which the reader will find in that section
wherever there is disagreement between what is said there and Joos's earlier
statementsinhisAcousticPhonetics (1948),themorerecentstatementsrepresent
his current view, as well as my own. This sort of help verges on collaboration,
and I should have been happy to acknowledge the fact by having Joos's name
appear on the title page as co-author of §5; but he has preferred merely this
prefatorial credit.
Fourth: to Carl F. Voegelin, editor of the series in which this work appears,
to Thomas A. Sebeok, the business manager, and to Mrs. Elsie F. Dosch, their
—
very competent editorial assistant for accepting the work, for raising most of
iii
the necessaryfundsfor publication, and for their great care in guaranteeingthat
the typography and format should be of maximum help to the reader.
Fifth: to Indiana University for defraying the cost of the text of this book,
and to the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University for defraying
the cost of illustrations.
This volume is dedicated to the Grand Old Man of American linguistics,
George Melville Boiling, in sincere appreciation of his clear guidance when the
writerwas first discovering whatBloomfield has called the "strangeness, beauty,
and import of human speech."
Charles F. Hockett
Cornell University
26 January 1955
IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0. Purpose and Plan 1
1. The Organs of Speech and their Functions; Phonetic Notation 23
2. A Typology of Phonologic Systems 42
21. Pause and Macrosegment 43
22. Syllables and Juncture 51
23. Accentual Systems 65
24. Syllable Peak Systems 72
25. Syllable Margin Systems 91
26. Ultimate Phonologic Constituents 126
27. Balance and Symmetry 138
3. The Principles of Phonologic Analysis 143
.
31. Gathering 144
32. Collation 149
4. Structure, Pattern, and Abstraction 175
5. Acoustic Phonetics 180
51. Sound and its Physical Analysis 181
52. The Problem of Acoustic Phonetics 190
53. Tentative Results 193
54. Summary 208
6. Functional Load and Analytic Norms 211
Notes 222
Glossarial Index and Bibliography 226

0. Purpose and Plan. As its title implies, this manual is intended as a survey
of the methods sofar developed, and of the results so farattained, in the field of
phonology. The title fails to indicate certain restrictions on the intended cover-
age. First, we shall not be concerned with the phonologic aspect of linguistic
change: the coverageissynchronic. Second, we shall not be concernedwithvaria-
tions of phonologic pattern from individual to individual, or from group to
group, within a speech community, but with coherent linguistic systems viewed
as undifferentiated into dialects or idiolects: the coverage is not merely syn-
chronic, but descriptive. What we take as a "coherent linguistic system" will in
onecasebeanidiolect;inanothercase, the commoncoreofanumberofidiolects;
in yet another, the overall pattern of a number. The logic of common core and
overall pattern is dealt with briefly in §03 below.
Despite the presence of some discursive sections, this book is intended to be
—
consulted, not to be read certainly not to be read as a unit. The discussion is
therefore not broken up into chapters, in the ordinary pedagogic way. Instead,
the entire text is sectioned by brief descriptive headings preceded by section
numbers in decimal notation: §23 is the third subdivision of §2, §232 the second
subdivision of §23, and so on. A cross-reference ending in zero, such as §10,
refers to that part of §1 which precedes §11, though the actual section numbers
never end in zero. The index is also a glossary of technical and semi-technical
terms. Notes are few, mainly by way of scholarly credit, and are placed at the
end (cross-referenced by section number) rather than being run as footnotes.
01. Special Features. Our approach to phonologic pattern is marked by two
special features which must be described here.
—
The first is that we attempt to develop a typology a taxonomic frame of
reference in terms of which different phonologic systems can be classified and
compared. Thisisbynomeansanewaiminphonologic study. Trubetzkoy, Jakob-
son, and others of the so-called "Prague group" did a great deal of typologic
classification: Trubetzkoy's Grundzuge is, among other things, a suggested
typologic framework. Some American linguists have felt not only that Tru-
—
betzkoy failed, but that failure in such an attempt is inevitable the goal is a
false one. I do not agree with either part of this view. Trubetzkoy's frame of
reference was not sufficiently complex, but it was a worthwhile first approxima-
tion,somepartsofwhichcannotyetbeimprovedon. Morerecently,anditwould
seem quite independently, Voegelin has proposed the value of a general (even if
arbitrary) typology for archiving purposes. The typology developed in §2 of
the present manual is not supposed to be arbitrary, and it is considerably more
complex than either Trubetzkoy's or Voegelin's; but I am sure that it falls far
short of what we must eventually develop.
Weareinanincomparablybetterpositionfortypologicworknowthanwewere
in the thirties. We have reasonably reliable and reasonably homogeneous re-
ports on a much larger number of languages than we did twenty years ago, or
even ten unfortunately, some of the reportswhichwereunquestioninglyused in
;
earlier years must now be regarded as not wholly trustworthy. A number of
a
1 A MANUAL OF PHONOLOGY
factors have contributed to this widening of our empiric base, but one above all
others deserves mention here: the far-flung field research of missionaries trained
by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Their brief factual reports are perhaps
rarely exciting, but show on the average a high reliability; furthermore, since
much the same methodologic approach is involved in most of them, one quickly
learns to interpret them. Alsoworthy ofspecialmention is thevital archival role
of the International Journal of American Linguistics since 1944.
The other special feature is closely related to the first: we have sought a con-
sistent and complete working-out of an immediate constituent approach on the
phonologiclevel. This, also,isnotanewaim. Bloomfield'sterminologyof "simple
primary phonemes," "compound primary phonemes," and "secondary pho-
nemes"isahintin thedirectionofahierarchicapproach. TheinsistenceofHjelm-
slevonakindofparallelism ("isomorphism,"thoughnotintheusualmathemati-
cal sense) between the level of expression and the level of content opens the way
foranextensiontophonology (expression) oftheimmediate-constituentapproach
which has long held a prominent place in grammatic study (study of content);
— —
Kurylowicz has recently developed this theme. Last but by no means least
few years ago Pike and Pike prepared and published an IC analysis of Mazateco
phonology. Their article seems almost to have been worked out with tongue in
cheek, as a sort of offhand experiment; but in my opinion it is one of the really
germinal contributions to linguistics in the last few decades. When more fully
elaborated, the IC approach in phonology proves to be of key importance in the
developmentofaphonologic taxonomy;weshallseein §2howthisis.
Although it hardly constitutes a "special feature" of this manual, it would be
well to state explicitly that ourview will be empiric: I accept Bloomfield's asser-
tionthat "theonlyusefulgeneralizationsaboutlanguageareinductivegeneraliza-
tions," and hence affiliate with the "god's-truth" school of thought rather than
with the "hocus-pocus" school. A mere acceptance of this approach does not in
itselfguaranteesuccess, and themanualiscertainlyfullofmistakesofeverysort.
One result of an empiric approach that will be regretted by some is that it in-
evitably involves a recognition of areas of indeterminacy. Empiricism forces the
overt formulation of criteria for making classificatory decisions, and always, it
would seem, the criteria fail in some instances. The hocus-pocus approach does
not encounter this difficulty in quite the same way, since it allows greater free-
dom in making ad hoc decisions arbitrarily.
Arbitrariness can manifest itself at various different levels of abstraction.
Trubetzkoy's typical manipulation of the data on a single language is not ar-
bitrary, since he operated with a fairly well formulated set of principles, which
specified in advance, for example, the conditions under which a segment would
be regarded as a single phoneme and those under which it would be interpreted
as a cluster. Yet these general principles can in turn be regarded as arbitrary,
at least in that various other equally self-consistent operating principles can be
formulated. This particular kind of arbitrariness is comparable to ourfree choice
between feet and meters in measuring lengths, except for one detail: conversion
from feet to meters, or vice versa, is easy and mechanical. The non-arbitrary