Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.

An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, eg Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.

In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.

More on [ Phonology ]

UC Davis News: General Interest

Plant Protein 'Doorkeepers' Block Invading Microbes, Study Finds
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700
A group of plant proteins that “shut the door” on bacteria that would otherwise infect the plant’s leaves has been identified for the first time by a team of researchers in Denmark, at the University of California, Davis, and at UC Berkeley. Findings from the study, which appears in the June 29 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science Biology, provide a better understanding of plants’ immune systems and will likely find application in better protecting agricultural crops and horticultural plants against diseases. “The ability of a plant’s immune system to recognize disease-causing microorganisms is critical to the plant’s survival and productivity,” said Gitta Coaker, a UC Davis plant pathologist and lead author on the study. “In this study, we identified a complex of proteins in the common research plant Arabidopsis that appear to play important roles in the biochemical mechanisms that enable plants to recognize and block out invading bacteria,” Coaker said. She noted that, over the last 20 years, scientists have identified a number of proteins that are important for regulating the plant immune system but still do not have a good sense of what protein complexes these proteins belong to and how they signal to confer disease resistance. “Our ability to purify an immune protein complex will serve as a starting point to understand how these proteins signal in the plant,” Coaker said. “A greater understanding of how these proteins function is fundamental knowledge that can be applied to prevent plant disease.” Plant immunity Plants are continually exposed to bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms, many of which have the ability to infect the plant and cause disease. Animals have what are known as innate, or preformed, immune systems as well as adaptive immune systems that learn to recognize and defend against disease-causing microbes. Plants, however, only have innate immune systems. Rather than developing immunity as they are exposed to various microbes, plants make use of certain built-in cells and genetically programmed systems to protect themselves against microbial invasion and related diseases. This type of innate immune system has two branches: one makes use of receptor proteins outside the cell to recognize specific molecular features of an invading microbe, while the other branch uses similar proteins within the cell to recognize an invading microbe during the infection process. Up until now, scientists had identified only one protein, known as RIN4, which is able to regulate these two branches of the plant immune system in Arabidopsis. The protein is found in the permeable plasma membrane that encases the cell on the inside of the cell wall. It has been unclear exactly how the protein and the two branches of the immune system interact to trigger an immune response in the plant. The new findings In studying the RIN4 protein, Coaker and her colleagues identified six previously uncharacterized proteins that can associate with RIN4 inside plant cells. One protein, called AHA1, was characterized in-depth and found to be key to the immune response in Arabidopsis plants. AHA1 can act to regulate the opening and closing of tiny holes called stomata, found on the underside of the leaf. The stomata allow gases and water to pass in and out of the leaf. This is the same opening that allows bacteria and other invading microbes to gain entrance to the plant. The stomata are each flanked by two guard cells, which control these vitally important portals to the leaf. When the guard cells swell, the stomata close. Conversely, when the water content of the guard cells decreases, the stomata open. The six proteins identified in this study were found to be intricately involved with the biochemical processes that enable the plant to recognize and block out invading bacteria. The researchers found that RIN4 can act to regulate AHA1 and that both proteins work together to control stomatal openings in response to a disease-causing microorganism. “These findings highlight how important regulation of the stomata is in Arabidopsis immunity,” Coaker said. “Further research is needed to determine if RIN4 and its associated proteins play the same role in other plant species.” Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Collaborators on this study were Coaker, Jun Liu and James M. Elmore, all of UC Davis; Anja T. Fuglsang and Michael G. Palmgren, both of the Danish National Research Foundation and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; and Brian J. Staskawicz of UC Berkeley. About UC Davis For 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has 31,000 students, an annual research budget that exceeds $500 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges -- Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science -- and advanced degrees from six professional schools -- Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.
Watch 800-plus Topics on UC Davis’ iTunes U Channel
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700
Whether it’s a debate on Obama’s economic policies or daily conversations in Arabic, UC Davis is providing news and a stimulating education free to the public on iTunes U, thanks to a partnership with Apple Inc. Since its debut on iTunes U in May 2008, the university site (accessed through http://itunes.ucdavis.edu) has gathered 835 videos and audio files. In any single month, up to 40,000 files are downloaded to computers or portable media players. The site hosts 13 courses by professors, instructional videos to supplement class discussions, 125 lectures by autism researchers, more than a dozen preperformance talks from the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and featured news videos that spotlight various aspects of campus and city life. The most popular downloads are UC Davis academic courses that range from plant biology to developmental psychology and computer security. UC Davis English professor Tim Morton decided to make two of his classes, "Literature and the Environment" and "Romanticism," available to the public. “We have a responsibility to educate people — it's as simple as that,” he said. “Our world is changing, and we all need to think carefully and reflect on what that means.” People interested in learning Arabic can watch “Arabic Without Walls,” an introductory distance-learning Arabic course. It was developed by the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching, the National Middle East Language Resource Center at Brigham Young University and the Near Eastern studies department at UC Berkeley. Beyond the academic courses are a number of lecture series, such as “Energy, Sustainability and Design,” organized by Ann Savageau, a professor of design, which features design industry leaders; or talks from conferences, such as “Computers and Writing 2009,” hosted at UC Davis in June to explore the impact of technology on literacy. The most-downloaded lecture series from the UC Davis site is titled “Perspectives on the Obama Administration,” sponsored by the UC Davis Institute of Governmental Affairs. It focuses on the historic election of President Obama and the challenges and opportunities for his administration. The series includes two economists in a lively debate called “Stimulus Smackdown: Can Deficit Spending Save the Economy?” Videos range from 90-second to 90 minutes or more. Shorter videos include many on student life and the community, such as student-produced interviews on Picnic Day — UC Davis’ annual open house that draws more than 100,000 people — and the weekly Davis Farmers Market. For more information about UC Davis on iTunes U, contact Susanne Rockwell at sgrockwell@ucdavis.edu. About UC Davis For 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has 31,000 students, an annual research budget that exceeds $500 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges -- Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science -- and advanced degrees from six professional schools -- Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.
UC Davis Physicist Earns Swedish Honor
Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700
Charles Fadley, a distinguished professor of physics at UC Davis, has been elected into the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. Founded in 1710, this prestigious Swedish institution has counted as members some of the world’s most renowned scientists, including Anders Celsius, Carl von Linnaeus, Johann Gauss, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Leon Foucault, and the Swedish father and son Nobel laureates in physics, Manne and Kai Siegbahn. Fadley is widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of photoelectron spectroscopy, a technique used for studying the composition and electronic state of a material using X-ray beams to excite electrons and a spectrometer to measure their energies. In recent years he has been a leader in the development of methods for studying very thin “nanolayers” of materials buried below surfaces, work that is integral to the development of next-generation computers, memory storage devices and other applications in the emerging field of nanotechnology. He holds a joint appointment as senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and conducts his research at a facility there called Advanced Light Source. Fadley’s long association with Sweden’s eminent physics community dates to his years as a doctoral student with David A. Shirley at UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s. There he became the first American student to work on the kinds of photoelectron spectroscopy investigations that Kai Siegbahn and his group were pioneering in Sweden. In 1969, Fadley spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher in Göteborg, Sweden, with Stig Hagström, a physicist who had earned his doctorate with Siegbahn’s group. Since then, he has returned to Sweden many times on a variety of academic missions. While he and Siegbahn worked in friendly rivalry in the early years, Fadley said, they soon took their work in different directions. “Siegbahn’s group and I had a long, good relationship,” he said. Siegbahn shared a Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work in photoelectron spectroscopy. In 2008, a year after the Nobel laureate’s death, Fadley was the only foreigner invited to present a paper at a seminar held in conjunction with the opening of a permanent exhibit honoring Siegbahn at Uppsala University. Membership in the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala is one in a series of distinguished international awards Fadley has earned. He is also a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, a fellow of the Institute of Physics in London, the recipient of a coveted Helmholtz-Humboldt Award from the German-based Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and an awardee of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. The Uppsala society limits its membership to some 130 Swedish and 100 foreign members, who are elected for life. Fadley’s election brings to 14 the number of U.S.-based scientists in the society.

University of Chicago Press: Current Anthropology: Table of Contents

Anthropological Currents
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:11:37 -0000
Current Anthropology, Volume 50, Issue 4, Page 411-412, August 2009.
Current Applications
help@www.journals.uchicago.edu (Y. A. Orr) Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:11:29 -0000
Current Anthropology, Volume 50, Issue 4, Page 413, August 2009.
Language, Asylum, and the National Order
help@www.journals.uchicago.edu (Jan Blommaert) Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:12:43 -0000
Current Anthropology, Volume 50, Issue 4, Page 415-441, August 2009. This paper discusses modernist reactions to postmodern realities. Asylum seekers in Western Europe—people typically inserted into postmodern processes of globalization—are routinely subjected to identification analyses that emphasize the national order. The paper documents the case of a Rwandan refugee in the United Kingdom whose nationality was disputed by the Home Office because of his “abnormal” linguistic repertoire. An analysis of that repertoire, however, supports the applicant's credibility. The theoretical problematic opposes two versions of sociolinguistics: a sociolinguistics of languages, used by the Home Office, and a sociolinguistics of speech and repertoires, used in this paper. The realities of modern reactions to postmodern phenomena must be taken into account as part of the postmodern phenomenology of language in society.

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