Distributional unit: Hypothesis and testing
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter deals with one of the most innovative contributions of Axiomatic Functionalism to phonological theory: distributional unit. The unit is meant to be a model which can be effectively used for description of the phonotactics of languages. It is defined as a relational network of positions with the latter being a slot where a phoneme can stand and be replaced by other phonemes or left out (replaced by zero). The chapter discusses the motivation and justification of this concept with reference to the syllable which is another concept used in phonotactics but has proven inadequate. In the latter part of the chapter the efficiency of the distributional unit is illustrated on Czech. |