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PHONETICS

The study of the sound system of all languages is called phonetics. For words to have meanings, they

must be made up of different sounds so that they aredistinctive. English, for instance, depending on

the variety to which it belongs is made up of 40 contrastive sounds, while only 26 alphabet letters

exist to represent the sounds of English language. To have one symbol representing one distinct

sound, theInternational Phonetic Alphabet was developed.

How is speech produced?

Most speech sounds are formed when air passes through the larynxpast the vocal folds.

This sound is modified in the nose, throatand oral cavityto produce the distinctive sounds of all thelanguages. All of the sounds of English are produced through this process called the pulmonic

egressive airstream mechanism. However, some languages like Kpelle, spoken in Liberia, have

sounds made through the intakeof air, which is modified as the air goes through the mouth, a process


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called theingressive airstream mechanism. Press your lips together as if you were going to make

the [b] sound, but instead of sending air out of your mouth, suck in air as you release your lips and

make a [b] sound. This is different from the egressive [b]. This [b] is the first sound in the Kpelleword

banan (camp kitchen).

The consonants

Consonantsare sounds made by obstructing the airstream in differing ways after it leaves the lungs.

They are produced by three mechanisms:

Voicing-the vibration of the vocal folds

Manner of articulation-modification of the airstreamas it travels through the larynx and

mouth

Place of articulation-the movement of articulatorswhere the main modification of the

airstream takes place

Voicing

When air rushes out of the lungs and pushes pastthe closed glottis, the foldsopen and shut rapidly

causing a vibration.

For instance, the sound [s] is made in exactly the same way as the sound [z], except that for [z], the

vocal folds vibrate. This distinctive vibration is known as voicing. It is one of the three featureshumans use to distinguish the sounds of their languages.

There are many other sets of sounds that only differ by this feature of vibration. These sets of sounds

are known as minimal pairs. Examples of minimal pairs include [t] and [d], [k] and [g], [s] and [z].


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Place of articulation

A second descriptor of consonants is to note which articulator, in combination with the tongue, is used

to modify the airstream to produce a particular consonant. The articulators are:

Lips-labials

Teeth-dental or interdental

Alveolar ridge-raised part of the mouth above the teeth

Palate-top of mouth

Velum-the extreme back of the roof of the mouth

For instance, for the words tightand kite,the only difference in pronunciation is that the front of the

tongue is touching the alveolar ridge when the word begins, and the back of the tongue is raised

towards the back of the mouth for the word kite

Manner of articulation

The third aspect of making a consonant is how the airstream is blocked and released in the vocal

cavity.Airstream may be allowed to flow without obstruction by any articulators as it travels out of the

larynx

It may be partially or completely obstructed at different places in the mouth and throat.

Stops or Plosives

Stops or plosivesoccur when, in the production of a consonant, the air cavity is completely blocked

for a short time before it is released. A little puff of airexplodes from the mouth when the consonant

is released. English speakers use three sets of consonants made in three places in the mouth [p]and

[b]are made with the lips closing completely to block the air which is then released [t]and [d]whichare produced when the tongue blocks the air from escaping at the alveolar ridge [k] and [g] are

produced when the back of the tonguerises to close off the air at the back of the mouth.

Another stop, which is not in a paired set occurs only in some varieties of English. It is called the

glottal stop. It can occur in American English expressions in non-word expressions such as:

Uh-oh Whoops

Uh-uh No

Uh-huh Yes

You can also say these words with your lips closed in which case the sound that comes outapproximates:

M?m

Mhm

The glottal stop occurs in varieties of Cockney English where it systematically replaces the [t] sound

in words likebottle [bo?l].

Variations in stop sounds

Aspiration occurs whenever [p] or another voiceless stop are the first sound in a word or

syllable,like in the word pepper.When these sounds occur at the end of a syllable or word, like in

the word step,they are unaspirated,meaning that the puff of air associated with aspirated sounds is

greatly reduced.


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Switch the normal pronunciation of the words patand stop. It ispossibleto aspirate the final stop in

[p], but it is notnormal English pronunciation.

Slight changes in tongue position can also make a noticeable difference in the pronunciation of

stops. For instance, Latin American Spanish speakers block the airstream at the teeth and not the

alveolar ridge, when making the [t] and [d] sounds. This is one of the many differences that

contributes to their accents when speaking another language such as English.

Stops and the past tense in English

Past tense endings in English are produced systematically. It is the final sound in the root word,

which determines the endingthe word will take in the past tense.

If the root ends in a voicedsound (the vocal folds vibrate), then the suffix that gets added will

also be voiced, that is the [d]ending. Example, roam-roamED

For a root word that ends in an unvoicedsound, the [t]suffix is used. For instance, the word

walk([k] being an unvoiced sound) gets the voiceless [t].

If the root ends in [t],then a vowel [Id]is used to make it easier to say. Example, elect-elect[Id].

The same is done for root words ending in [d]. Example, record-record[Id].

Try finding out the endings for the following:

Xerox

Fedex

Sob

Countload

Oral and nasal stops

At the very back of the mouth is the velum,which is moveable. When the velum is lowered, the air

coming up from the lungs escapes through the nasal cavity instead of through the mouth. The

sounds created when the air passes over the velum and out through the nose are called nasal

sounds.English has three nasal stops:

[m]---voiced bilabial stop

[n]----voiced alveolar stop[ng]---sing, ring

Fricatives

Fricatives are another manner of articulation. Fricative consonants are formed by bringing two

articulators close together and forcing the air through the remaining space, with the

movement of air generally causing a hissing or rushing sound. English has pairs of voiced and

unvoiced fricatives at several places of articulation:

Labiodental fricative [f] [v]

Interdental fricative [ ] theta as in though [ ] eth as in thought.

Voiced alveolar ridge [s] as in sip, trucks, mistake and [z] as in zip, buzzard, zoo


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Two sounds are produced with the tongue raised towards the centre of the palate which differ only by

voicing.

[] ship

[] pleasure, measure, leisure, genre

The final point of articulation to create fricative sounds is the glottis. The fricative, [h],as in hot

is unvoiced. Airstream passes without obstruction or modification through the glottis and out of the

mouth.

Labiodental, interdental, alveolar, palatal, glottal

Affricates

A third manner of articulation is created when the airstream is stopped for a very brief instant at

the palate and then forced through a narrow space, thus making these sounds a combination of a

stop and fricative:

[] church [d] judge

Liquids and Glides

The final two categoriesfor English manner of articulation are the liquidsand glides. These sounds

are produced with little or no obstruction of the airstream:

Glides bilabial [w] wet palatal [j] yellow (both are voiced)

Liquids alveolar, both voiced [l] let [r] red

Vowels

Written English has only six vowel letters, but it actually has 11 or mor vowel sounds that are

commonly pronounced by speakers of varieties of English across the world. Vowels differ from

consonants in that the airstream is never blocked or even seriously constricted by the articulators.

Unlike most consonants, they can stand alone.

Classification of vowels

Vowels are classified by some basic features:

Tongue height high, mid or low in the mouth

Part of the tongue being raised tip, middle or back

Shape of lips spread, neutral or round

Other descriptors can include tenseness and laxness depending on the muscular tension used to

produce them, and duration the vowel is held.


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The vowel chart

The vowel chart is made to roughly approximate the shape of the tongue with the tip of the tongue

represented at the left side of the chart.

Vowel symbol examples:

Diphthongs

Three very common vowel sounds in English are known as the diphthongs. They are a combination of

two sounds (a vowel + glide) resulting in a single unit:

[aw] flout cow cloud

[aj] I fly wide[j] toy toil moist

Vowel length

In English, vowel length is not a contrastive feature. For example, in Finnish, the double or single iteration

of a vowel changes the meaning:

Tapaan sinut puistossa I will meet you in the park

Tapan sinut pusitossa I will kill you in the park


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Vowel duration

bit/beet

bet/bait

food/foot

Suprasegmentals

Aspects of speech that influence stretches of sound longer than a single segment are known as

suprasegmentals. Segments are vowels, consonants, which combine to produce syllable, word,sentence.

Aspects include:

Length, tone, intonation, syllable structure, stress

Length

Difference in vowel length can depend on how different vowels are articulated. Lowe vowels (mouth

open wide) and high vowels (little movement needed) take less time to articulate. Sometimes two

segments may differ in how long they are held while everything else remains the same. While in

Japanese, length distinctions exist for both consonant and vowels, in English long and short

consonants within words are not differentiated.

Vowel length can change meanings:

Hawaiian

Kau to place

Ku to belong to you

Kala to forgive

Kla moneyKa l the sunIn English, if you were to pronounce beat the same as bead, the pronunciation could sound strange

but the meaning would remain the same.

Intonation, syllable, stress


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Phonology

The aim of phonology is to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in

languages,and to explain the variations that occur.

For instance, consider the following:

Ngfri fring firing

Rkba tark bark

Although the second word has no established meaning in English, it follows an established sound

pattern as seen in the thirdexample. Therefore, it has the possibility of gaining meaning. On the other

hand,Ngfri or Rkba is not a recognized pattern in the English language.

Individual languages are analyzed to determine which sound unitsare used and whichpatternsthey

form-the languagessound system.

The difference between phonetics and phonology can be seen from another point of view. The

human vocal apparatuscan produce a wide range of sounds, but only a small numberof these are

used in a language as units to construct all of its words and sentences. For example, some

languages such as Rotokas in Pacific Islands use only 11. By contrast, Xu in southern Africa has

141. English has 44. Whereas, phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds, phonology

studies the way in which speakers of a language systematically use a selection of these sounds in

order to express meaning.

Further, no two speakers have anatomically identical vocal tracts, and thus no one pronounces

sounds in exactly the same way as anyone else. Considerable variation exists also in the sounds

produced by a single speaker.While acoustically, there may be much variation in sounds produced

by speakers of the same language, much of this variation is discounted by us as we interact with fellow

speakers.

Identifying phonemes

Certain sounds cause changes in the meaning of a word or phrase, whereas other sounds do not. A

simple methodology to demonstrate this, which is the minimal pairs test, is to take a word, replace

one sound by another, and see whether a different meaning resulted. For example, consider:

Pan-ban, par-bar, pat-bat

Changing [p] and [b] within these words results in a change of meaning. Similarly, [i] and [e] are

important sounds in English they help to distinguish between pin and pen, tin and ten.

This approach has its limitations as it can be difficult to find pairs of words, but it has worked quite

well in English. There are 44 important (distinguishable) sound units in English. These units are called

phonemes.

Phonemes are transcribed not within square brackets but within forward slashes /p/, /b/, /t/. etc

Identifying allophones

When we try to work out the inventory of phonemes in a language using this approach, we soon

come across sounds that do not changethe meaning, when we make substitutions. For instance,

consider the consonants at the beginning ofshoe andshe. They seem the same, but in fact they have


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very different sound qualities. For shoe, the lips are rounded, because of the influence of the

following [u] vowel; for she, the lipsare spread. If we now change substitute one of these sounds

for the other, we do not get a change of meaning-only a rather strange sounding pronunciation.

There is only one phoneme here, which we can represent as/f/, but it turns up in two different

phonetic shapes or variant forms, in the two words. These phonetic variants of a phoneme are known

as allophones.

Consider leaf and pool. Although the first l is pronounced much further forward in the mouth than

the second l, both are allophones of the single phoneme /l/. Simply, these are pronunciation

changingrather than meaning changingdifferences.

Identifying distinctive features

We need to recognize smaller units than the individual phoneme, in order to explain how sets of

sounds are related. We can see this by comparing any two contrasting phonemes in English, using the

articulatory criteria.

For instance, /p/ and /b/ are both bilabial, plosive, oral, and pulmonic egressive. They differ only in

that /p// is voiceless and /b/ is voiced. /p/ and /g/ differ in voicing and being bilabial vs velar. /p/and /z/ differ in voicing, as well as manner (plosive vs fricative) and place of articulation. We can use

the and + signs to indicate the absence and presence of distinctive features in these phonemes, e.g[n] is voiced and nasal so we note it as [+voiced] and [+nasal]. [p] is unvoiced and bilabial so we note

it as [-voice] and [-nasal]

Identifying syllables

In a phonological approach, we focus on the way sounds combine in a language to produce typical

sequences. Syllables are seen as combinations of vowels and consonants. Vowels (V) are now

defiend as units which can occur on their own, or which appear at the centre of a sequence of sounds.

Consonants (C ) are units which cannot occur on their own or which appear at the edge of a sequence.

Typical sequences in the English language are CV see, CVC hat, CCVC stopand CVCC pots.

Some languages use only V or CV syllables (e.g Hawaiian). English can have as many as three

consonants before a vowel, CCCVC strapand sprig.

Not all combinations of consonant and vowel can occur in a language. In English, we can combine

/s+t+r/ to produce words such as string, strum, stripbut we cannot put together /f/ with /t/ and

/r/. There is no word in English beginning with shtr.

An allomorph is a different phonological version of amorpheme.This occurs when the surface detail

of the morpheme is different, but the deeper meaning remains the same. This commonly occurs when

the letters performing the same function, such as plurality or time, produce a different sound or use

different letters. Examples of plural allomorphs include the difference between pots and taxes. Thestudying of allomorphs is part of the studying ofmorphology inlinguistics.

A morpheme is a basic unit of representing meaning in a language. These meanings can be either

lexical, in that they provide information, or structural. Intolerant, for example, has three morphemes:

in-toler-ant. All three elements of intolerant are lexical morphemes. Toler is the root stem indicating

the ability to endure or embrace something. The in morpheme means that there is no tolerance and

the ant at the end indicates someone who is intolerant.

There are several types of morpheme. Free morphemes can exist as a word in their own right. An

example of this is the break in unbreakable. On the other hand, morphemes such as toler in tolerantare bound morphemes because they cannot exist unless modified by other morphemes. The

allomorph is a bound morpheme that only occurs in order to modify a stem word.
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difference in sound of the s in pots, dogs and taxes when spoken aloud. The s in pots sounds likea phonetic [-s], while the s in dogs is more of a phonetic [-z]. The es of taxes, with the e used to

separate the x and s, is a phonetic [


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Phonotactic constraints gradually change through time (just like the number of phonemes changes

through time). The following word initial clusters have dropped out of English: [kn], gn], [xr], [xl].

Often, combinations of sounds that are allowed by the phonotactic rules of a language are not

actually used as words: [zib], [charp], [squill]. These are called accidental gaps in the vocabulary of a

language; they are potential words--perhaps someone will tomorrow use [charp] to describe the

green mutant potato chip found at the bottom of a bag of chips.

Every language has its own unique set of phonotactic constraints. Sound combinations that could

not possibly be English words might very well be words in another language. For instance both

English and Georgian have the sound segments [t], [A], [m].

In English we have Tom but no mot, mta or tma; although mot could be a word.

In Georgian we have mta, mountain; and tma hair, but no tom or mot.

Foreign borrowings often cause changes in phonotactic rules (just like they can lead to the

adoption of a new phoneme). Due to the influence of the original French, many people pronounce a

final [Z] instead of [dZ] in garage. Also note the sound combination [sv] in svelte, Sven and a few other

words from Scandinavian languages. As a final example, notice that the name Schmidt from German

entered the language even though it violated the phonotactic rules of English. Such is also the case

with many borrowings from Yiddish that contain consonsant clusters beginning with the sound [sh]:

schmooze, schmuck, shlep, shlok. Such foreign borrowings often eventually result in changes in a

language's phonotactic rules.Other phonological rules describe the changes that occur in sounds when they are brought

together. You will recall that in fusional languages, the morphemes alter their phonetic shape to

accommodate the sound of adjacent morphemes. Let's classify these type of changes on phonological

grounds. These rules may be classified according to the type of phonetic change that occurs.

1) Feature deletion or addition rules. Lengthening of English consonants before voiced obstruents.

a) Assimilation rules (the feature added is present in an adjacent segment) nasalization of English

vowels before nasals.

b) Dissimilation rules (the feature deleted is present in an adjacent segment) deletion of aspiration

after [s].

Assimilation and dissimilation may be progressive (velarization of English [l]) or regressive (nasality

in English vowels).

2) Segment deletion or addition rules (a whole sound is added or subtracted) French, also Eng.:

autumn, autumnal; athlete/"athalete". Adding schwa between sibilants when adding the English

plural ending: boxes.

3) Metathesis rule reorders the segments that are present: ask/aks; nuclear, "nucular", Georgian:

dzrokhi/rdze. These are examples of a rule randomly applied. For an example of a metathesis rule

regularly applied, see also the example from Hebrew on p 250.