Introducing Phonology Odden Answers

On Finding Reliable Answers for Odden's Introduction to Phonology

Odden's Introduction to Phonology is the book everyone in my program had to get through. The problem isn't the book itself - it's the exercises. The end-of-chapter problems assume you've internalized formalism that takes real time to build. I've seen students waste weeks on Problem 3 from Chapter 4 because nobody bothered to explain how to actually approach featural matrices systematically. I'm not going to link to a dump of solved exercises. Those are everywhere and most of them are wrong or incomplete. What I'm going to tell you is how I worked through the problems and where to look when you're stuck. The book covers feature geometry, constraint-based phonology, autosegmental representations, foot structure, and optimality theory derivations. The answers aren't hidden somewhere you can just download - they require you to do the work in a specific way. Let me walk through my process.

For the autosegmental and feature geometry problems in the first half, I used pencil and paper. Every single time. Trying to do these mentally or in a text editor doesn't work because you need to see the tier connections and the tree structure simultaneously. When I ran into trouble with the X-Skeleton assignment in Chapter 2, Problem 7, I spent about three days trying to fit the moraic structure correctly before I realized I was misreading the underlying representation. The glosses in the problem statement don't always match the phonetic reality. I switched to redrawing the entire representation from scratch using the convention Odden himself uses in the diagrams, and it clicked within an hour. The trick is matching the notation exactly to his style, not some textbook you picked up elsewhere. The constraint ranking problems in Chapter 9 are where most people break down. You need to understand how tableau evaluation actually works before you can do the rankings. I made the mistake of treating the constraints as if they were just preferences rather than ranked violators. Once I started building the tableaux properly - with violation marks aligned column by column and strict domination checks - the rankings became mechanical. Each tableau took me about ten minutes to set up correctly the first time, but after Chapter 9 got easier. The ones involving markedness vs faithfulness conflicts, especially where correspondence theory comes in, are the hardest. Chapter 11 Problem 5 is notorious for this. I found that working through the problem backward - assuming a candidate wins and checking which rankings would force that outcome - was more reliable than starting from the surface form and deriving candidates. There are online forums where people share partial solutions. The Linguist List archives and the old Phonology Forum threads from the early 2000s still have some useful discussion, particularly around the syllable weight problems. Not all of it is accurate though. I once followed an answer from a now-dead blog that had the foot parsing direction wrong for a particular language example, and it sent me down a three-hour rabbit hole. Always cross-check against the main text's notation and conventions.

Where the Standard Approaches Fall Apart

Here's something most study guides won't tell you: Odden's exercises sometimes contain deliberate ambiguities. He does this intentionally because real phonological analysis is ambiguous. When you hit a problem where two different constraint rankings seem equally valid, the intended answer often depends on additional information embedded in the problem setup - like which constraint subset is being prioritized. Read the surrounding prose in the chapter carefully. The answer is often hinted at in the examples he used earlier. Another issue is that some of the languages he uses as examples have competing analyses in the literature. The prosodic phonology problems in Chapter 8 about Turkish vowel harmony, for instance, have been reanalyzed several times since the book was published. The answer key approach won't always match current thinking. I ran into this with a graduate seminar when our TA insisted on an answer that the primary literature had largely moved past. We spent a week on it before someone pointed out that the OT framework Odden was using had been refined since that edition came out. If you want actual solutions, the closest thing to official answers would be checking with the instructor who assigned the book. Some professors post their own answer sheets on course websites. Search for the course code plus "Odden phonology solutions" - you'll find scattered PDFs from university courses. These are usually the most reliable because they reflect what a working linguist actually thinks the answers should be.

The book itself is worth reading cover to cover even if you just need the answers. The explanations in the chapters are where the real understanding lives. Doing the problems without understanding the preceding material is why people struggle. I'd suggest reading Chapter 4 twice before attempting the problems, and Chapter 10 three times. The OT machinery is cumulative - everything builds on the constraint definition framework from Chapter 9.

A Few Specific Gotchas

When working through the feature geometry trees, make sure you're using the right set of features. Odden uses a specific inventory and some problems will fail if you substitute a different feature set. The Place node structure especially varies between frameworks. If your tree looks different from the textbook diagrams, that's probably why your answer isn't working. For the prosodic hierarchy problems, remember that the hierarchy is not universally fixed. Different languages instantiate it differently. I got burned on a problem involving Japanese pitch accent where I assumed the intermediate phrase boundary was present when the data didn't actually require it. The most economical analysis is usually the correct one in these exercises. Optimality Theory tableaux get messy fast when you have more than three candidates. Keep your violation lists short and your domination checks explicit. I used a grid system on paper where each constraint got its own column and candidates were rows. Made checking dominance trivial. Took me about a minute longer per tableau but eliminated an entire class of careless errors.

If you're stuck on a specific problem, post it with your working shown. People are more willing to help when they can see what you've tried. Vague requests like "can't do Chapter 6" get ignored. "Here's my tableau for Problem 4 and I keep getting dominated on MAX-IO vs DEP-IO, not sure which constraint should win" gets actual responses.

Introducing Phonology Odden Answers: The Bottom Line

There's no shortcut around doing the problems yourself. Any resource claiming to have complete verified answers for every exercise should be treated with skepticism. The value is in the wrestling with the formalism. I finished the book and honestly the problems in Chapters 7 and 12 were the ones I still needed to look back on months later. That's normal. Phonology is dense and the notation takes time to become second nature. Don't rush it.