For the moment, our presentation of phonology will be restricted to a subset of the aspects of phonological structure that are relevant to the description of English and German inflection. That includes syllable structure but does not include any structure above the level of the syllable, such as metrical structure. Although lexical stress is relevant to inflection (in German nouns, for example) we will simplify matters here and ignore it.
In the discussion of inflection that follows, we will also restrict ourselves to a segmental representation of phonology. In practice, the step from representing phonological structures with segments to representing the same structures with full feature sets at each point in the tree is relatively simple. Although the use of featural representation typically makes it easier and more elegant to state phonological rules and capture phonological and morphophonological alternations, it has the pedagogic disadvantage of making the formal encoding much harder to read. We will, however, become altogether more serious about phonological representation in the sections on nonsegmental phonology and lexica for speech.
Thus we assume below that a fully inflected form is simply a string of phonological segments. For our present purposes, there is no need for the implicit tree structure of phonological objects to be made manifest in the output. It is, however, a simple task to modify the rules we give so as to make the tree structure explicit in the way inflected forms are encoded.
Exercise 6007
Use SAMPA to represent the following English words: bather, foghorn, ghosts, lather, rather, though, thought, throughout.
