Phonological hierarchy

Phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance. From larger to smaller units, it is as follows:

1. Utterance (υ)
2. Prosodic declination unit (DU) / intonational phrase (I-phrase) (ι)
3. Prosodic intonation unit (IU) / phonological phrase (P-phrase)
4. Prosodic list unit (LU)
5. Clitic group
6. Phonological word (P-word, ω)
7. Foot (F, φ): "strong-weak" syllable sequences such as English ladder, button, eat it
8. Syllable (σ): e.g. cat (1), ladder (2)
9. Mora (μ) ("half-syllable")
10. Segment (phoneme): e.g. [k], [æ] and [t] in cat
11. 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.

References

• Hayes, Bruce (1989). Kiparsky, P.; Youmans, G. (eds.). "The prosodic hierarchy in meter". Phonetics and Phonology Vol. 1: Rhythm and Meter. San Diego: Academic Press: 201–260.
• Nespor, M.; Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
• Pierrehumbert, J.; Beckman, M. B. (1988). Japanese Tone Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Selkirk, E. O. (1996). Martin, J.; Demuth, K. (eds.). "The prosodic structure of function words". International Conference on Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie; Turk, Alice (1996). "A Prosody Tutorial for Investigators of Auditory Sentence Processing". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 25 (2): 193–247.

See also

• Syntactic hierarchy