PHONOLOGY

PHONOLOGY

• Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages. It  is the branch of linguistic concerned with the study of speech sounds with reference to their distribution and patterning. Adjective: phonological. A linguist who specializes in phonology is known as a phonologist.
  As discussed below, the boundaries between the fields of phonology and phonetic are not always sharply defined.

  The phonological system of a language includes
  an inventory of sounds and their features, and rules which specify how sounds interact with each other.
  Phonology is just one of several aspects of language. It is related to other aspects such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.  Different models of phonology contribute to our knowledge of phonological representations and processes: In classical phonemics, phonemes and their possible combinations are central. In standard generative phonology, distinctive features are central. A stream of speech is portrayed as linear sequence of discrete sound-segments. Each segment is composed of simultaneously occurring features. In non-linear models of phonology, a stream of speech is represented as multidimensional, not simply as a linear sequence of sound segments.