Friday, April 1, 2011

How a morphosyntactician teaches phonetics

I suppose this is sort of a disingenuous title, since I am a documentary linguist by profession. And that entails a fairly broad range of background training in all the subfields of linguistics, in order to ensure that we can do adequately comprehensive coverage of all the features of the languages we seek to document.

But the reason I choose this title is because even the ostensible morphologist and syntactician (proof, such as it is, of this allegiance: my dissertation is titled "Referential-Access Dependency in Penobscot") that I am is thoroughly distressed at how we tolerate thin to dismal training in practical phonetics for all but those who go on to specialize in that field.

One might argue that this is just the normal course of specialization: we syntacticians can slack on producing and perceiving uvular ejectives and retroflex vs. alveolar contrasts because, well, we can always call in a phonetician when the need arises.

But this is not really true, for at least two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that one cannot collect remotely accurate syntactic data without solid control of any and all phonological contrasts: if tone is how they mark relative clauses, one cannot beg off on the difficulty of hearing tone.

The second and more important is this: the deeper I go into the syntax, the more I see how much of the surface syntactic patterning that we attribute to abstracted and empty features might better be accounted for by attending to prosody.

Rank unawareness of how much the phonological form of morphemes, of phrases, and so on, contributes to the surface orderings and surface wellformedness of language, can lead to some needless formal floundering, positing features that do not really do anything except make the bits show up in the surface form they actually do. In short: any work in syntax that is going to deal with PF had better, well, deeply understand all that "P" can involve.

There's a case to be made in the opposite direction, i.e. for how phoneticians and phonologists would do well to attend deeper than they already do to morphology and syntax. This is largely because the latter domains set up and drive the environments of combination and interaction in which we identify the most illuminating phonetic and phonological phenomena. But the dependency is really quite asymmetrical: phonetics in particular does not radically depend on syntactic form for all its data---whereas there is no access to syntactic data at all except through the intermediary of phonetic-phonological form.

My suggestion: have every linguistics major master the full set of contrasts (and their phonetic details) in the White Hmong system. With that done, students will have command of a rich tonal system (including breathy and creaky phonation contrasts) and some of the more challenging segmental contrasts: preglottalization, prenasalization, aspiration, extensive coronal (dental, retroflex, palatal) and dorsal (velar, uvular) features, among others. Toss in some training in pharyngeals, ejectives, length contrasts, and some of the more baroque vowel systems of the world (English, Khmer, Scandinavian), and students should be well set to handle most of what the world's phonetic-phonological diversity can throw at them.

This seems an oddly specific choice, but it is grounded in the practical fact that White Hmong is rather well documented, and fairly accessible worldwide, as a major language of the Hmong diaspora, who are substantially represented at least in North America, Europe, Australia, and of course, China and Southeast Asia.

More in the next installment on exactly HOW to teach the (supposedly) "tin-eared" to approach the challenge of non-mother-tongue sound contrasts....