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UNIT 1 – GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1. Phonetics and Phonology: two branches of the Linguistic Sciences.
Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds / phones / phonic substance (any speech sound a person is able to produce).
Phonetics deals with allophones, realizations or variants of the abstract units called phonemes.
Phonology is the scientific study of the selection, function and organization of speech sounds into a given system.
Phonology deals with phonemes “the smallest contrastive phonological unit which can produce a difference in meaning”
1.1.1. Phonetics
Phoneticians are only interested in sounds that are used in meaningful speech, and in discovering the range and variety of sounds used in this way in all the known languages of the world.
The central concerns in phonetics are:
- The discovery of how speech sounds are produced
- How they are used in spoken language
- How we can record speech sounds with written symbols
- How we hear and recognise different sounds
In 1 , when we study the production of speech sounds, we can observe what speakers do (articulatory observation) and we can try to feel what is going on inside our vocal tract.
In the second area, phonetics overlaps with phonology since in order to know how sounds are used you need to understand how they function and how they can be organized.
Thirdly, phonetics needs agreed conventions for using phonetic symbols that represent speech sounds.
In 4, phonetics deals with the auditory aspect where it is shown that the ear is capable of making fine discriminations between different sounds.
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Phonetics looks at human speech as a speech-chain that starts in the speaker’s brain (where a psychological activity drives the speaker to arrange his/her thoughts into a linguistic form) and ends in the listener’s brain (where a psychological activity stimulates the hearer to decodes the linguistic message in order to recognize it).
Within these two ends of the speech-chain, a physiological activity takes place. In it, the speaker’s vocal tract, the transmission of sound through the air and the listener’s ear will constitute stages of primary importance:
- The articulatory stage, where muscles are activated in order to produce the sound.
- The acoustic stage, where the movement of these muscles produces sound waves that must reach the listener’s ear.
- The auditory stage, where the vibration of these sound waves reaches the listener’s ear muscles, whose movements must be interpreted by the listener’s brain.
Each of these stages constitute the domain of the three main branches of phonetics:
- Articulatory phonetics It studies speech production and tries to understand the anatomy of speech and the airstream mechanisms.
- Acoustic phonetics It studies the speech sound as a physical event in which sounds are regarded as waves whose amplitude, intensity, duration and pitch are investigated and interpreted.
- Auditory phonetics It studies the way in which humans perceive speech sounds. This hearing process involves the understanding of the human hearing system and its three central components: the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear.
1.1.2. Phonology
Phonology studies how sounds interact as a system in a particular language, how they combine and how they change in combination, as well as which sounds can contrast to produce differences in meaning (phonemes).
The first stage of phonological analysis simply involves an exhaustive phonetic analysis.
In a second stage, phonology is concerned with determining which sounds are redundant and which phonemic (identification of minimal pairs).
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1.2. Articulatory phonetics
Within Articulatory phonetics two basic segments of speech are differentiated:
The production of consonants involves some sort of obstruction to the airstream in the vocal tract.
The classification of consonants is along 3 criteria:
- The place of articulation Where does the obstruction or closure (stricture^1 ) occur?
- The manner of articulation What type of obstruction or stricture is involved?
- The state of the glottis/voicing Do the vocal cords vibrate or not?
According to the place of articulation, consonants can be classified into:
- Labial
- Bilabial
- Labiodental
- Coronal
- Dental
- Interdental
- Alveolar
- Retroflex
- Palato - alveolar
- Palatal
- Dorsal
- Velar
- Glottal
According to the manner of articulation, consonants can be classified as:
- Plosives : Characterized by the closure, the hold, the release and the post-release phases.
- Fricatives : The air stream is pushed out through a narrowing (light contact) of the two articulatory organs or articulators and a friction may be heard.
- Affricates : Complex phonemes in which there is a sequence of a stop followed by a homorganic fricative.
- Nasals : Characterized by a complete closure in the oral cavity.
- Approximants : Characterized by an approximation of the articulating organs with no production of friction or turbulent airstream.
- Laterals : Characterised by the way in which the air escapes through one or both sides of the tongue.
- Taps : An active articulator taps against a passive one (i.e. Sp. faro ).
- Rolls : It is produced by a rapid succession of taps where intermittent closures are technically occur (i.e. Sp. perro ). (^1) Term introduced by K.L. Pike in Phonetics: A Critical Analysis of Phonetic Theory and a
Technic for the Practical Description of Sounds (1943) to indicate the partial or complete closure of an air passage.
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According to the state of the glottis/voicing, consonants are regarded as:
The production of vowels involves less obstruction than that of consonants as the flow of air passes from the larynx to the lips.
In order to be able to express graphically the different vocalic phonemes we can use a quadrilateral (usually referred to as Hellwag’s triangle since it started being an isosceles triangle designed by this author) representing the space that the tongue occupies in the mouth when we produce vowels (vowel diagram).
The diagram below represents D. Jones’s Cardinal Vowel Chart, which relates to: ii. The manner of articulation (according to which we can classify vowels into close, half-close or close-mid, half-open or open-mid, and open) iii. The point of articulation (according to which we can classify vowels into front, central and back)
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The quality of an existing sound also depends on the cavities or resonators (hollow spaces containing air) in the speech chain.
The human speech mechanism has three resonators:
- The pharynx
- The nasal cavity
- The oral cavity
The oral cavity is the most important resonator, due to the great mobility of its organs (changes of size and shape)
In the vocal tract (the long tubular structure formed by these cavities), the airstream is modified by means of several organs called articulators:
- Active articulators: They can actively affect the airstream.
- Passive articulators: They serve as contact positions for the active articulators.
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1.4. The phonemic symbols
Since the orthography of the languages is only imperfectly phonetic and since the number of speech sounds exceeds the number of characters in the Roman alphabet, the IPA alphabet was designed as a separate system to represent the actual sounds of the human language.
This alphabet has a distinctive symbol for every sound in human speech and is applicable to all languages.
For the purpose of accuracy in phonetic detail, phoneticians have developed systems of transcriptions which are:
- Narrow: It makes use of allophones. Here details are taken account, and the symbols are enclosed between [square brackets].
- Broad: It makes use of phonemes. Here details are not taken account and the symbols are enclosed between /slant bars/.
Names of English symbols
- Vowels:
- No. 1 Lower-case i /i:/
- No. 2 Small capital i /I/
- No. 3 Lower-case e /e/
- No. 4 Ash /æ/
- No. 5 Script a /ᵅ:/
- No. 6 Turned script a /ᶛ/
- No. 7 Open o /ᴐ:/
- No. 8 Upsilon /Ʊ/
- No. 9 Lower-case u /u:/
- No. 10 Turned v /Ʌ/
- No. 11 Reversed epsilon / 3 :/
- No. 12 Schwa /ə/
- Consonants:
- Lower-case p /p/
- Lower-case b /b/
- Lower-case t /t/
- Lower-case d /d/
- Lower-case k /k/
- Lower-case g /g/
- Lower-case f /f/
- Lower-case v /v/
- Theta /θ/
- Eth /ð/
- Lower-case s /s/
- Lower-case z /z/
- Esh/Long s /ʃ/ or Wedge s /š/
- Yogh/Long z /Ʒ/ or Wedge z /ž/
- Lower-case h /h/
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GenAm has /ɑː/ where RP has /ɒ/, thus God /ɡɑːd/ vs. /ɡɒd/, stop. GenAm has /æ/ where RP has “broad a” /ɑː/, thus dance /dæns/ vs. /dɑːns/.
- Distributional: which sounds are used in which words: Most of England, including RP, is non-rhotic, while GenAm, and most of North America is rhotic. GenAm generally avoids /tj dj sj nj/ at the beginnings of words, thus dune /duːn/, tune /tuːn/vs. RP /djuːn/, /tjuːn/.
- Lexical: some words have, incidentally, different pronunciations
GenAm RP
progress ’ pra:gres ’prƏƱgres z zi: zed neither ’ni:đƏr ’naIđƏ lieutenant lu:’tenƏnt lef’tenƏnt tomato tƏ’meItoƱ tƏ’ma:tƏƱ schedule ’skedƷu:l ’ʃedju:l
- Phonetic: essentially the same phonemes are realized in different ways. /æ/ is “higher” in GenAm. /ɔː/ much “higher” and quite rounded in modern RP. In the RP goat diphthong, there is no initial lip rounding, thus /ɡəʊt/. The tapping of /t/ is practically obligatory in GenAm. There is a distinct clear-dark distribution for /l/ in RP. Glottalization of /t, tʃ/ and (less often) /p, k/ is much more common in all accents of British English
1.6. Practice
- Match Phonemes with Pictures
- Articulation Description Exercise
- Speech Animator
- Fill-in-the-gap exercises
- Exercise on cardinal vowels
- Dictations
- Dialogues
- English accents
