Chapter 2

Phonology Basics

Phonology vs. Phonetics

Phonetics deals with how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received. Phonology, on the other hand, deals specifically with the ways those sounds are organized into the individual languages. Phonology is, in effect, a sub-category of phonetics.

Phonetics is the study of all the sounds that the human voice is capable of creating whereas phonology is the study of a subset of those sounds that constitute language and meaning. In the case of this course, Received Pronunciation (RP) is the subset that is looked at in detail.

Phonology is concerned with how specific languages organize and use speech sounds. While phonetics is a party of phonology and provides the means for describing speech sounds, phonology is concerned with the ways in which these speech sounds form systems and patterns in human language.

Unlike phonetics which is concerned with sounds as they occur in the real world, phonology, a sub-category of phonetics, is interested in sounds as they are represented in the mind of the speaker and in the relationship between these mental representations and the real-world sounds.

Phoneme

Consonant and vowel

Articulation

Enunciation

Voiced and voiceless

Continuant and non-continuant

Place of articulation

Manner of articulation

Distinctive Features

Distinctive feature is a feature that distinguishes one phoneme from another. A single feature can be thought of as having two values, plus (+), which signifies its presence, and minus (-), which signifies its absence.  For example;  

	/p/	/b/	/m/
Stop	+	+	+
Labial	+	+	+
Voiced	-	+	+
Nasal	-	-	+
Continuous	-	-	+

Features are also used to capture a generalization about several phonetically different sounds.  For example, we can capture the similarity between /m/ and /n/ by using the feature  [+nasal].  Groups of sounds that can be described with a common feature are called natural classes, e.g. Natural Classes: Bilabials  /p, b, m, w/

Phonemes

Now we will think about what a phoneme is. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language, a minimal unit that serves to distinguish between meanings of words. It is an abstract sound stored in our memory. Let us take a look at an example of phonemes.

Here is an example of the phonemes /r/ and /l/ occurring in a minimal pair.

(1) rip lip

(2) sit seat

(3) flight plight

· Mental representation of the sounds

· Finite number of phonemes

· Organizable (labial, interdental, alveolar, etc.)

· Contrastive phonological segments, distinctive sounds

· The substitution of one for the other makes a different word.

· Phonemes vary from language to language

Example 1: In English, /p/ and /p^h/ are not separate phonemes, while in Thai, these two sounds are separate phonemes: /p/ and /p^h/.    
/paa/ (forest) vs. /p^haa/ (split)

Phones

The smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech.

· Concrete phonetic segments  

· Actual realization of the phonemes

· Non-contrastive 

· Hard to organize 

· Infinite number of phones

You never hear same phone twice.

Allophones

The different phones that are the realizations of one phoneme

· Predictable 

· Phonetic variants of a phoneme

· Rule-governed 

· No difference in meaning, no minimal pairs

Example: [u] and [ ű] are allophones of the same phoneme /u/.

Articulation

Articulation is the production of individual speech sounds. It refers to the manner in which people produces a sound and the placement of the tongue, lips, and teeth.

Enunciation

What does enunciation means? It means "moving one's lips, jaw, and tongue actively for clear articulation."

Place of articulation

The active articulator usually moves in order to make the constriction. The passive articulator usually just sits there and gets approached.

A sound's place of articulation is usually named by using the Latin adjective for the active articulator (ending with an "o") followed by the Latin adjective for the passive articulator. For example, a sound where the tongue tip (the "apex") approaches or touches the upper teeth is called an "apico-dental". Most of the common combinations of active and passive articulator have abbreviated names (usually leaving out the active half).

These are the abbreviated names for the places of articulation used in English:

Bilabial

The articulators are the two lips. (We could say that the lower lip is the active articulator and the upper lip the passive articulator, though the upper lip usually moves too, at least a little.) English bilabial sounds include /p/, /b/, and /m/.

Labio-dental

The lower lip is the active articulator and the upper teeth are the passive articulator. English labio-dental sounds include /f/ and /v/.

Dental

Dental sounds involve the upper teeth as the passive articulator. The active articulator may be either the tongue tip or (usually) the tongue blade - diacritic symbols can be used if it matters which. Extreme lamino-dental sounds are often called interdental. English interdental sounds include // and //.

Alveolar

Alveolar sounds involve the alveolar ridge as the passive articulator. The active articulator may be either the tongue blade or (usually) the tongue tip -- diacritic symbols can be used if it matters which. English alveolar sounds include /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/, /z/, /l/.

Postalveolar (palato-alveolar)

Postalveolar sounds involve the area just behind the alveolar ridge as the passive articulator. The active articulator may be either the tongue tip or (usually) the tongue blade - diacritic symbols can be used if it matters which. English postalveolars include // and //.

Retroflex

In retroflex sounds, the tongue tip is curled up and back. Retroflexes can be classed as apico-postalveolar, though not all apico-postalveolars need to be curled backward enough to count as retroflex. The closest sound to a retroflex that English has is []. For most North Americans, the tongue tip is curled back in [], though not as much as it is in languages that have true retroflexes. Many other North Americans use what is called a "bunched r" -- instead of curling their tongues back, they bunch the front up and push it forward to form an approximant behind the alveolar ridge.

Palatal

The active articulator is the tongue body and the passive articulator is the hard palate. The English glide /y/ is a palatal.

Velar

The active articulator is the tongue body and the passive articulator is the soft palate. English velars include /k/, /g/, and //.

Glottal

This isn't strictly a place of articulation, but they had to put it in the chart somewhere. Glottal sounds are made in the larynx. For the glottal stop, the vocal cords close momentarily and cut off all airflow through the vocal tract. English uses the glottal stop in the interjection ^uh-uh (meaning 'no'). In /h/, the vocal cords are open, but close enough together that air passing between them creates friction noise.

Manners of articulation

Constriction degree

Place of articulation refers to where the narrowing occurs - which active articulator gets close to which passive articulator. Therefore constriction degree refers to how close they get. The main constriction degrees are:

Stop

The active articulator touches the passive articulator and completely cuts off the airflow through the mouth.

English stops include: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /m/.

Fricative:

the active articulator doesn't touch the passive articulator, but gets close enough that the airflow through the opening becomes turbulent.

English fricatives include /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /š/, /ž/

Approximant:

the active articulator approaches the passive articulator, but doesn't even get close enough for the airflow to become turbulent.

English approximants include /y/, /w/, /r/, and /l/.

Affricate:

Affricates can be seen as a sequence of a stop and a fricative which have the same or similar places of articulation. They are transcribed using the symbols for the stop and the fricative. If one wants to emphasize the affricate as a "single" sound, a tie symbol can be used to join the stop and the fricative (sometimes the fricative is written as a superscript).

/tš/ as in church

/dž/ as in gentlemen

Your attention! A stop cuts off airflow through the mouth. Airflow through the nose does not matter - you can have both oral and nasal stops. Oral stops are often called plosives, including in the IPA chart. Nasal stops are usually just called nasals.

Approximants that are apical or laminal are often called liquids (e.g., /r/, /l/). Approximants that correspond to vowels are often called glides (e.g., /y/ corresponds to /i/, /w/ to /u/).

English has the affricates /tš/ and /dž/. The stop and the fricative halves of these affricates are at the same place of articulation: the stop is in fact postalveolar rather than alveolar. We could be explicit about this and underline the /t/ and /d/ (in IPA, a minus sign under a symbol is a diacritic meaning "pronounced further back in the mouth"), but most phoneticians believe this difference in the place of articulation is so predictable that it doesn't have to be marked.

State of the glottis

For now, we can simply use the terms "voiced" and "voiceless" to answer the question of what the vocal cords are doing:

· In voiced sounds, the vocal cords are vibrating.

· In voiceless sounds, the vocal cords are not vibrating.

Ultimately, we will see there are different ways of being voiced or voiceless. The vocal cords can do a number of things. They can:

· be held so wide apart that the air makes no sound passing through them. (This is nice when you have to breathe 24 hours a day, but not as useful for speaking.)

· be held together so that the air passing through them causes them to vibrate. This is called voicing.

· be held together so tightly that no air can pass through at all, as in a glottal stop.

(By varying their tension and position, the vocal cords can also produce many other effects like breathy voicing, creaky voicing, and falsetto.)

What the vocal cords are doing is independent of what the higher parts of the vocal tract are doing. For any place of articulation and any degree of stricture, you can get two different sounds: voiced and voiceless. For example, /t/ and /d/ are formed identically in the mouth; the difference is that the vocal cords vibrate during a /d/ but not during a /t/. (The obvious exception is the glottal place of articulation - you can't vibrate your vocal cords while making a glottal stop.)

In each cell of the IPA chart, the symbol for the voiceless sound is shown to the left and that for the voiced sound to the right. Some rows only have voiced symbols (e.g., nasals and approximants). You can write the corresponding voiceless sound using the voiceless diacritic (a circle under the voiced symbol).

Nasals

The only three nasal phonemes in English are: "m" as in "mam," "n" as in "noon," and "ng" as in "bring."

If you prolong those three sounds while placing your fingers on the side of your nose, you can feel the resonance. Try it and then alternate making a non nasal sounds (i.e., any vowel or other consonant).

Although there are only three nasal phonemes, they occur in speech with an especially high frequency.

Nasality

The soft palate can be lowered, allowing air to flow out through the nose, or it can be raised to block nasal airflow. As was the case with the vocal cords, what the soft palate is doing is independent of the other articulators. For almost any place of articulation, there are pairs of stops that differ only in whether the soft palate is raised, as in the oral stop /d/, or lowered, as in the nasal stop /n/

Laterality

When you form an /l/ sound, your tongue tip touches your alveolar ridge (or maybe your upper teeth) but it doesn't create a stop because one or both sides of the tongue are lowered so that air can flow out along the side. Sounds like this with airflow along the sides of the tongue are called lateral, all others are called central (though we usually just assume that a sound is central unless we explicitly say it's lateral).

The side of the tongue can lower to different degrees. It can lower so little that the air passing through becomes turbulent (giving a lateral fricative like [] or []) or it can lower enough for there to be no turbulence (a lateral approximant). The /l/ of English is a lateral approximant.

Air-stream mechanism

Speech sounds need air to move. Most sounds (including all the sounds of English) are created by modifying a stream of air that is pushed outward from the lungs. But it's possible for the air to be set in motion in other ways. Sounds which use one of the other three most common air-stream mechanisms are called ejectives, implosives, and clicks. We'll discuss these possibilities later in the course.

Describing consonant segments

A consonant sound can be described completely by specifying each of the parameters for place and manner of articulation. For example, /k/ has the following properties:

active articulator: tongue body (dorsum)

passive articulator: soft palate (velum)

Constriction degree: stop

state of glottis: voiceless

nasal: no

lateral: no

air-stream mechanism: normal

So /k/ is a voiceless oral central dorso-velar stop.