Phonological hierarchy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Phonological Hierarchy)
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008) |
Phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance. From larger to smaller units, it is as follows:
- Utterance
- Prosodic declination unit (DU) / intonational phrase (I-phrase)
- Prosodic intonation unit (IU) / phonological phrase (P-phrase)
- Prosodic list unit (LU)
- Clitic group
- Phonological word (P-word, ω)
- Foot (F): "strong-weak" syllable sequences such as English ladder, button, eat it
- Syllable (σ): e.g. cat (1), ladder (2)
- Mora (μ) ("half-syllable")
- Segment (phoneme): e.g. [k], [æ] and [t] in cat
- Feature
The hierarchy from the mora upwards is technically known as the prosodic hierarchy.
There is some disagreement among phonologists on the arrangement and inclusion of units in the hierarchy. For example, the clitic group is not universally recognised, and the P-phrase and IU come from different traditions and have different definitions.
[edit] See also
 |
This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
