Understanding Phonology

There are about 6000 languages in the world today. Almost certainly, no two of them have the same sound structure: they vary widely in the number of consonants and vowels they have, in their use of tonal contrasts, in their stress patterns, in the shape of their syllables, and so on. At the same time, all these languages show striking similarities in the way they structure their sound systems. Phonology is a thriving field of linguistic research that strives to understand the structure behind these systems. How do these similarities arise? Or again, why is there so much variation? How is our knowledge of the pronunciation of our language represented in our brain? How can we describe the pronunciation of a language? What do people do when they play language games? Why do loanwords often sound so totally different from the way they are pronounced in the donor languages? These and many other questions are dealt with in this book. In our discussion, we have tried to sketch the development of scientific thinking about the sound structure of languages and to take an unbiased view of the cognitive or physiological nature of the explanations. We hope we have succeeded in this task in at least some places in the book, and have got close enough to this ideal for it to serve as a reliable and relevant introduction to an important and exciting field.

جهت استعلام قیمت و سفارش چاپ این محصول لطفا با انتشارات گنج حضور تماس حاصل فرمایید