Autosegmental phonology

Assignment in phonetics and phonology

submitted by :Wasan Fadhil to Professor : Basim Muftin PhD.

Introduction

autosegmentals were firstly introduced by john Goldsmith in his dissertation 1976 .The
main idea is to represent tone and other the suprasegmental phenomena .Goldsmith
intuition lied in that the autosegments constitute an independent conceptually an equal tier
of the phonological representation. The analysis of suprasegmentals came late to generative
phonology, even that it had been undertaken by the American structuralism with a long
article in 1944”simultaneous components in phonology”.

The Autosegmental structure

Autosegmental phonology is non-linear approach to phonology that allows phonological

processes such as tone and vowel harmony to be independent of and extended beyond
individual consonants and vowels; as a result phonological process may influence more
than one vowel or consonant at a time .There is one –to-many associations and spread to
adjacent elements as characteristic of tone. In long -distance phenomena spreading to
intonation, nasality, vowel harmony, and nasal prosodies, as well as with the partial or full
assimilation across the adjacent elements .The early autosegmental notion of tiers
represents one basic tier for particular kinds of articulation, including , tone, intonation,
nasality ,and vowel features. This has led to hierarchical representations of phonological
features.

Distinctive features

The auto segmental formalism makes use of distinctive features, which provide greater
granularity and make identification of natural classes easier. A segment is identified by a
+/− dichotomy of a series of binary features

For example, [p], the voiceless bilabial stop, is indicated [−sonorant, −continuant, −voice,
labial], and the set of voiced coronal stops can be indicated [−sonorant, −continuant,
+voice, coronal].
[coronal]P[+ voice][− continuant][− sonorant]

Feature dependencies
For unary features to be fully specified, it is necessary to include binary sub features that
correspond to them. In the autosegmental formalism, this is depicted by placing the binary
sub feature at a horizontal counterbalance from the unary feature and connecting them with
A line. The next top-level feature in the segment would then be connected to the unary
feature as well as opposed to the tone.

The autosegmental formalism deals with several separate linear sequences that
express the phonological representations shown by separate tiers of a different
languages:

-The segmental tier which contains the features that express any discrete unit that can be
identified within the speech and features are assigned to that segment.

Timing tier which contains timing units that define the length of segments in the
phonological representations .These timing units are commonly shown as X’s ,and
assigned to segments.

Stress tier which contains features that display distribution of stress in the phonological
representation, the features can be represented in the tier [+/_ main] the syllables are the
unit that bears the stress.
Tone tier which contains the features that show distribution of tone in the phonological
representation, shown as [+/_high pitch ],[+/_low pitch] that are allotted to the unit that
bears the tone(syllable).