Grounded Phonology

Grounded Phonology

Diana Archangeli

Diana Archangeli-- one of the authors of Grounded Phonology

web sites about Archangeli's research fields :

Diana Archangeli is Associate Dean for Research and is the Director of the Social & Behavioral Sciences Research Institute. She is also a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Archangeli's most recent work in linguistics is exploring the sets of rules which may or may not co-occur within a language. Her work in this area takes an optimization approach to integrating the formal parameters of the rule sets with their physically rounded conditions. Archangeli's research also includes (I) study of prosodic templates; (ii) fieldwork in Indonesia on the phonology of Sasak and Bugis; (iii) exploration of the syntactic behavior of Sasak clitics (jointly with Dr. Husni Muadz, Universitas Mataram).

adapted from http://sbs.arizona.edu/College/subcategory.asp?cat=DeanOffice&sub=Administration

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~dba/

http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~sbs/diana_archangeli.htm

Introduction to grounded phonology

"The approach in Grounded Phonology is modular, in that it presents a theory composed of subtheories, each of which is independently motivated, and the role of each module is to constrain the range of possibilities (of well-formedness)in its domain."

adapted from Amazon's book description of Grounded phonology

Grounding Conditions

The Grounding Conditions provide a theory of the restrictions on well-formed paradigmatic feature cooccurrence; substantively, the model proposes that languages make use only of implicational relations that are grounded in their phonetic correlates (articulatory or acoustic). Such grounded implications define well-formed feature combinations for specific languages; in languages where the implicational relations do not hold of representations as a whole, these implications may still play a role in restricting the application of specific rules. The interaction of Feature Markedness with the Grounding Conditions accounts for a variety of patterns attested cross-linguistically.

Conditions used in natural language directly reflect physical correlates of the F-elements involved. Thus, such conditions are physically grounded. As an example, consider certain physical properties associated with the F-element [+nasal]. On the one hand, velic opening allows air to pass freely through the nasal cavity, resulting in a configuration where there is no appreciable buildup of pressure. This produces a situation amenable to periodic vocal cord vibration. Nasal segments are typically characterized by such modal voicing in languages of the world. The result is a phonetically based implicational relation between [+nasal] then[-voiced]. Since this implicational condition reflects a physical correlation between [+nasal] and [-voiced], it is permitted under the Grounding Hypothesis.

Reference

Archangeli, Diana and Douglas Pulleyblank. Grounded Phonology. MIT Press, 1994.