L212 Firthian Prosodic Analysis.
Lecture 8.
FPA and other phonologies
FPA has been widely misunderstood. There are two main problems: • a misunderstanding of the importance and nature of exponency, and what this implies for phonology • misunderstandings of the term 'prosody'. In this lecture, we will review what we know about FPA, and look at what it offers us as modern theoretical linguists: both in what it achieved and where we need to do some work.
Commentaries on FPA
It's worth taking a look at the commentaries of FPA, in the light of what we've learnt about FPA by looking at the original texts. It should be relatively easy to see the simplifications and misunderstandings. Note that the commentaries are often by quite influential people. Note also that they tend not to look at the kinds of papers we have looked at, but focus on papers that are intuitively easy to understand, but which on closer inspection are often flawed, or are phonetically not as informative as those by Sprigg, Carnochan, Henderson, etc. 
This is a very selective bunch of reviews; there are plenty of others. These are chosen for their hitorical and theoretical interest.
Note: Sprigg was Firth's only PhD student, so you can assume that his ideas are like those of Firth. Papers by Allen, Palmer and Robins are less 'authentic' in some respects. Note also that we've concentrated on papers not by Firth, and we've almost completely ignored his commentary-type papers: I've judged it more informative to look at the practitioners' work. Perhaps my interpretation of FPA is too partial. What do you think?
Robins (1957)
Hardly mentions exponency. Systematises prosodies into two kinds, extensional and demarcative (criticised by Henderson; see earlier handout). Criticises the phonemic approach as too paradigmatically based. Emphasises the "nominalist" approach of FPA (the lack of commitment to psychological reality, etc.: how does this square up with the generative programme?).
Lyons (1962)
This paper was slated by the prosodic analysis (in private). It appeared in an influential American journal, and they felt it misrepresented FPA. Problems: suggests that languages might be classified (typologically) into 'phonemic' and 'prosodic', thus weakening the status of FPA to something that only describes certain kinds of language (like phoneme theory); at the end of the paper deliberately confuses 'prosodic' with 'long-domain', which even Firth was careful not to do. Refers only to Robins, Allen and Waterson's work in the article, which isn't very representative or informative.
Broe (1992)
An attempt at formalising Allen (1957) into a Lexical Functional Grammar-like representation. Fails to understand the nature of FPA, in particular the nature of phonological categories. He treats prosodies as partially-specified bundles of conventional features. While the formalisation is welcome, the msiunderstandings of FPA aren't.
Strengths and weaknesses of FPA
Strengths:
It's amenable to formalisation
It forces you to take phonetic observation seriously
It allows the phonetic statement to be detailed, with the detail accounted for in a principled way.
It is a structure-based phonology, not based just on strings.
Emphasises relations over objects.
Weaknesses
The amount of formalisation is pitiful: lots of work still to do!
There's no general phonetic theory to constrain the exponency statements (but this is not unique to FPA: cf. Articulatory Phonology; Coleman's (1992) model = attempts at partial solutions).
Inaccessibility and impenetrability of the papers.
No upper limit on certain things like number of systems, or even the number of phonological categories.
It's not a predictive theory; it's descriptive. What's its explanatory power?
Similarities and differences between FPA and other phonologies
Similarities
(A quasi-similarity:) It's non-linear
It's non-segmental (but what is meant by this?!)
Its formulae are remarkably like generative phonology's underlying forms (unique underliers), because FPA attempts to explain variability in terms of relationships between one (phonological) form and a multiplicity of (phonetic) exponents; it puts the grammar (morphophonology) at its centre.
Differences
It is a non-derivational phonology. There is a monostratal mapping between the phonology and the phonetics: it doesn't change phonological objects into phonetic ones; it merely says that there's a consistent relationship between a category and its exponents. (cf. realisation rules like /p/ -> [p], where the symbol is phonological on one level and phonetic on the other; and the symbol captures the similarity of description assigned to the object on each side of therule. This isn't like eg. "the exponents of π are voicelessness, closure and bilabiality" because the ontological status of the things on each 'side' of the 'rule' is different.)
FPA puts grammar, "the piece", "context of situation" first in the analysis. So things like word joins are not treated as "postlexical processes", strapped on to the main bulk of the (word-based) phonology. Thus syntagmatic relations are considered primary.
What next?
• Re-read Sounds and Prosodies. It probably makes more sense now (as I promised it would).
• Read Firth (1957), A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory.
• Read other papers in the Firthian tradition.
• Please let me have any comments you have for how this course can be improved for next time round (which is 1999-2000!).
• If you want to continue: L310 Laboratory Phonology and L410 Research in Laboratory Phonology will run in the Spring and Summer terms from next year, annually. L310 is an informant-based class, where you (i) collect some data from a speaker of a language you don't know (ii) perform a phonological analysis of that data; this would be a good way to put FPA into practice for yourself. L410 is a more independent study based on the same kind of work. See the Handbook for more details!