Chapter 4: The Sound Patterns Of Language
Source: The Study of Language(book)
Talking about vocal tract, we wouldn't think of any large-sized person or tiny little guy specifically , they might sound different but of all possible producible voices , to pronounce the word "me" takes the same way as everybody else.
- Phonology
- Is the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. Phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual physical articulation of speech sounds.
- We think of the [t] sound in the words tar, star, writer, butter and eighth as a single one, we can visualize that, in the phonology of English. In reality ,these [t] sounds physically different from each other.
- Phonemes
- Each of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language is known as a phoneme. A crucial property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. For example, the two phonemes /f/ and /v/ are the only basis of the contrast in meaning between the words fast and vast, or fore and vore.
=> The sounds are distinct phonemes if we alter one sound in a word and the meaning changes.
- Natural Classes
The feature is marked with a plus sign (+) if it exists, and a minus sign (−) if it does not. Thus /p/ can be characterized as [−voice, +bilabial, +stop] and /k/ as [−voice, +velar, +stop]. These two sounds are sometimes referred to as belonging to a natural class of phonemes since they have certain characteristics in common.
- Phones and Allophones
-Phones: the many different versions of that sound type regularly produced in actual speech.
-Allophones: when we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme.
- Complementary Distribution
Two different pronunciations (allophones) of a sound type (phoneme), each used in different places in words.
For example:
- The [th] pronunciation of the phoneme /t/ with aspiration is used word-initially, as in tar, but never after another consonant in initial position, as in star.
- Minimal Pairs and Sets
-Minimal pair: when two words such as fan and van are identical in form except for a contrast in one phoneme, occurring in the same position.
-Minimal set: when a group of words can be differentiated, each one from the others, by changing one phoneme always in the same position in the word).
- Phonotactics
Syllables
- Must contain a vowel or vowel-like sound, including diphthongs. The most common type of syllable also has a consonant (C) before the vowel (V) and is represented as CV.
- Basic elements of the syllable are :
- Onset: consist of one or more consonants.
- Rhyme: consists of a vowel, which is treated as the nucleus.
- Coda: consist of any following consonant(s).
- Consonant Clusters
- Both the onset and the coda can consist of more than a single consonant. For example, combination /st/ is a consonant cluster (CC) used as onset in the word stop, and as coda in the word post.
- Coarticulation Effects
In English, large clusters may be reduced in casual conversational speech, particularly if they occur in the middle of a word :
-Coarticulation: the process of making one sound almost at the same time as the next sound
-Assimilation: when two sound segments occur in sequence and some aspect of one segment is taken or “copied” by the other.
-Nasalization: the anticipation of the final nasal consonant makes it easier to go into the nasalized articulation in advance and can be represented with a small diacritic (~).
-Elision: the process of not pronouncing a sound segment that might be present in the deliberately careful pronunciation of a word in isolation.
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