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Aspects Of Bura Phonology
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1.9 BRIEF REVIEW OF THE CHOSEN FRAMEWORK
This
project is theoretically built on the mode of Generative Grammar (G.G).
The generative approach of language puts greater emphasis on the need
for a linguistic analysis to have explanatory power, that is, to explain
adequately what the native speaker intuitively ‘knows’ about his
language (Hawkins, 1984: 22). Generative grammar’s meaning is something
like ‘the complete description of a language’, that is, what the sounds
are and how they combine, what the meaning of the words are, etc.
(Davenport and Hannahs, 2005: 4).
Generative Phonology is
particularly associated with the works of the American linguist, Noam
Chomsky and his followers. The joint work on phonology by Chomsky and
Halle published in 1968 as ‘sound patterns of English’ (SPE) marked the
emergence of generative phonology as a new theory and framework of
description.
Generative Phonology is an alternative to ‘taxonomic’ or
‘classical’ phonemics, and on the other an ambitious attempt to build a
description of ‘English’ phonology on a transformational-generative
theory of language (Clark Yallop and Fltehcer, 2007: 129). Chomsky
criticizes the taxonomic phonologists concerned with segmentation,
contrast, distribution and biuniqueness and puts forward the view that
phonological description is not based on analytic procedures of
segmentation and classification but rather a matter of constructing the
set of rules that constitute the phonological component of a grammar (P.
129).
1.9.1 MOTIVATION FOR GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY
Generative
Phonology is a theory which built on the insights of taxonomic phonemes
even while remodelling the focus of phonological analysis (Oyebade,
2008: 9). It seeks to resolve many issues that the former theory
(Taxonomic Phonemics) left unaddressed. These include: Linguistic
intuition, Foreign Accents, Speech errors and Language aquisition.
Talking
about ‘Linguistic Intuition’, the question that Generative Phonology
attempt to answer is ‘how do we know that native speakers know the
sequential constraints of their own language (Hyman, 1957: 19)’? Chomsky
and Halle (1968: 38) affirm that knowledge of the sequential
constraints is responsible for the fact that speakers of a language have
a sense of what sounds like a native word and what does not. In other
words, speakers usually subject the sounds of foreign languages they
intend pronouncing to the phonological pattern of their own language.
A
third motivation for GP is ‘speech errors’. Oyebade (2008: 11) reports
that a large number of utterances heard by man are defective, possibly
as a result of slips of the tongue, stress, stage fright, paralinguistic
factors, psychological, as well as physiological factors.
The final
motivation of GP is ‘language acquisition’. The errors children usually
make when they are attempting to discover the phonology of their own
language during the stage of language acquisition is quite revealing.
1.9.2 OPERATIONAL LEVELS OF GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY
There
are two operational levels/representations of generative phonology: the
underlying level/representation and the surface level/representation.
Between these two extremes is an intermediary that mediates or the
underlying level to generate surface representations. The mediators are
phonological rules (Oyebade, 2008: 15).
1.9.3 THE UNDERLYING LEVEL
The
underlying level/representation is also called the phonemic or
phonological level/representation. The underlying representation
represents the native speaker’s tacit knowledge (Chomsky and Halle 1968:
14) specifically propose that phonological representation are mentally
constructed by the speaker and the hearer and underlie their actual
performance in spelling and “understandingâ€. The underlying
representation are relatively abstract and do not manifest surface
variants.
1.9.4 THE SURFACE LEVEL
The surface
representation, on the other hand, is the physical instatiation of
underlying forms (Davenport and Hannahs, 2005: 122). The surface
representation can be likened to performance – the actual use of
language. It is also called the phonetic level because it deals with the
physical manipulation of the organ speech to produce linguistic forms.
It is accompanied with a lot of nuances that do not characterize the
native speaker’s competence, hence, its predictableness. They are
complete with lexical items and reflect the grammatical rules of the
language.
1.9.5 PHONOLOGICAL RULES
Since the
underlying/phonemic level differs from the surface level, phonological
rules serve as mediators between these two extremes. Phonological rules
link them together. Phonological rules are facts that are expressed in
formal statements which act on the information stored in the human’s
(native speaker’s) instinct. Phonological rules that act on underlying
forms of the language to yield surface phonetic forms.
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