Course contents and suggested bibliography

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Lecture 1. Monday, September 1. Introduction and overview. What is typology? What is phonological typology? What in phonology should be typologized? How and why should phonology be typologized? Universals vs. language particulars. Phonetics vs. phonology. Typologizing by underlying system, surface system, and/or the relation between the two. Synchronic vs. diachronic explanation. Brief discussion of past and current approaches.

Lecture 2. Tuesday, September 2. Prosodic systems: Stress, tone, pitch-accent. Stress as metrical structure vs. tone as the phonologization of Fo. Types of so-called pitch-accent systems. Languages with both stress and tone. Reduced tone systems. Interactions of stress and tone with segmental phonology, grammar, and meaning (e.g. focus).

Lecture 3. Wednesday, September 3. Syllable structure. Basic differences in the types of syllables found in the world’s languages. Presence vs. absence of onsets and codas and complex nuclei and margins. Syllabification and resyllabification. Syllable contact phenomena. Extrasyllabicity. Is the syllable universal?

Lecture 4. Thursday, September 4. Vowel systems. Basic underlying vs. surface vowel systems. Organization of vowel systems in terms of contrasts: degrees of front-back, degrees of open-close, rounding, nasality, tongue root, length. Featural approaches to systematizing underlying oppositions and surface vowel systems.

Lecture 5. Friday, September 5. Vowel harmony. Palatal and round harmonies. Height and ATR/RTR harmonies. Transparent and opaque neutral vowel phenomena. Root- vs. affix-controlled harmony. Is the directionality of vowel harmony predictable? Are there vowel features which cannot harmonize? Length harmony?

Lecture 6. Monday, September 8. Consonant systems. Types of oppositions found in the world’s languages: Place of articulation, manner of articulation, state of larynx (voiced/voiceless, ejective, implosive), clicks, geminates. Nasality.

Lecture 7. Tuesday, September 9. Tone system typology. So-called register vs. contour tone systems. Discrete- vs. terrace-level tone systems. Typology of tone rules. Tone sandhi. Floating tones. Examples of tonal properties from different parts of the world.

Lecture 8. Wednesday, September 10. Stress system typology. Fixed vs. so-called “free” stress. Left- vs. right-edge assignment of stress/different foot types  (iambic, trochaic etc.). Secondary stress.

Lecture 9. Thursday, September 11. Phonological typology and grammar. Prosodic domains. Syntactic conditioning of phonology. Interactions of phonology and morphology. So-called cyclic effects.

Lecture 10. Friday, September 12. Summary and conclusions. Other phonology typologies not covered in the course. Outstanding questions in phonological typology. Further work needed.

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