The Event Concept in Time Map Phonology

Abstract

Time Map Phonology takes an event-based approach to spoken language processing (cf. Carson-Berndsen 1991, 1992a) which is influenced by recent well-motivated developments in the area of nonlinear phonology, in particular autosegmental and constraint-based phonology (cf. Chapter 2). Autosegmental phonology has been criticised (Bird & Ladd, 1991) for not having enough to say about the phonetics/phonology interface. This criticism has also been applied to constraint-based phonology (Carson-Berndsen & Gibbon, 1992), which, although it incorporates a temporal dimension, makes no reference to the relationship between phonological events and actual speech signal tokens. The approach of this book goes further than previous formal interpretations of autosegmental phonology in that phonological relations are explicitly related to intervals in phonetic patterns or actual speech signals and in addition a solution to the projection problem in spoken language recognition is proposed. The task of this chapter is to define the basic concepts required for the event-based phonotactic description in Chapter 5 and for event-relation parsing in Chapter 7.