Phonetics and Phonology Similarity

Course Description

This course will focus on the role of similarity in phonetics and phonology. Everybody uses puns (A. Zwicky & E. Zwicky 1986) and rhymes (Kawahara 2007), and experiences speech errors (Fromkin 1980) and speech misperception (Tang 2015). However, have you asked yourselves – what makes a good pun and a good rhyme? How come “Merry Christmas” is [mele kalikimaka] in Hawaiian? Who is Lady Mondegreen in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray”? In this course, we will look into these naturally-occuring linguistic phenomena with a focus in phonetic and phonological similarity. We will see these powerful linguistic external evidence has played an important role in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. We will examine primary literature that use linguistic external evidence and we will learn how they can be quantitatively collected and analysed.

There will not be a single textbook as such, but rather we’d sample from existing research studies on these topics.