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Segment Inventories
Author(s) -
Mielke Jeff
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
language and linguistics compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 44
ISSN - 1749-818X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00117.x
Subject(s) - linguistics , focus (optics) , phonological rule , computer science , phonetics , phonology , history , psychology , philosophy , physics , optics
The nature of speech sound inventories has been a focus of study by phonologists and phoneticians, facilitated in 1984 with the publication by Ian Maddieson of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. This article gives an overview of the study of inventories and summarizes some of the major findings. Crosslinguistic comparison of inventories provides a window into the phonetic factors that shape languages, but also reflects non‐linguistic factors. Models of the phonetic and phonological factors argued to shape inventories are discussed, along with some challenges that need to be dealt with in order to isolate linguistically interesting facts.