Lectures

The term sound is often regarded as not being a precise one in the fields of phonetics and phonology and is thus replaced by the term phone. Sound could mean any noise or sound, while phone is restricted to the human voice (‘Phone’ comes from a Greek word ‘phone’ [human voice] and is regarded as a speech sound which can be cut out from the speech stream.

Phone is “the smallest perceptible discrete segment of sound in a stream of speech” (Crystal 2008: 361).

A phoneme is the smallest independent unit that can cause a change in meaning. Roach (2009) calls phonemes “abstract sounds” as there may be slightly different ways to realise the same phoneme. An example of a phoneme is the sound /t/ and /d/ in the words tip and dip - a change in a phoneme causes a change in meaning.

An example of an allophone is the sound /t/ in the words team and steam. The slight difference in the realisation of this phoneme is that the /t/ in team is aspirated [tʰ], while the /t/ in steam is not [t]. Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. Allophones do not affect the semantic meaning of the word, while a substituted phoneme could bring a semantic change. For example, team pronounced with any allophone of the phoneme /t/ maintains its meaning, but if it is substituted with the phoneme /b/, then it brings about a semantic change (a change in meaning).

These two words then (team /tiːm/ and beam /biːm/) form a minimal pair, which is an opposition of two words showing the existence of these two phonemes. For a set of words to form a minimal pair, they may differ in one phoneme only. Phonemes cannot, in fact, be pronounced – in actual speech, they are realised through phones and allophones.

A minimal distinctive sound is one which can distinguish one word from another when all other sounds are identical. These phones are said to be in contrastive distribution.

If you cannot find a minimal pair, the phones are said to be in non-contrastive distribution. They may be in complementary distribution or free variation.

Complementary Distribution indicates that two basic sounds are not independent phonemes, but conditioned variants of the same phoneme (allophones), of the same minimally distinctive sound. Sounds are in complementary distribution when one occurs under condition A but never B, while the other occurs under condition B but never A. That is, the allophonic variation is predictable from the phonetic environment.

Two sounds do not represent two separate phonemes if they are in free variation; that is, if you may use one in any position you may use the other without any semantic effect. For example, aspiration may be omitted from plosives at the end of words in English, too; however, whether it is dropped or not is indifferent; the meaning of the word does not change.

The symbols for the English phonemic chart have been compiled from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) devised by International Phonetic Association (also abbreviated IPA). The association was established in 1886, and since then, it has been functioning as the major as well as the oldest representative organisation for world phoneticians.

https://www.ipachart.com/

The alphabet is based on the Latin letters and diacritics that indicate slight alterations to the usual value of phonetic symbols, e.g. [t] (meaning /t/ is retracted).

Principally, there are two kinds of transcription: phonemic and phonetic transcription. Phonemic transcription gives only a basic idea of the sounds, and is thus often termed as broad transcription. It uses the 44 English phonemic symbols and does not show any phonetic details of the sounds. The symbols are enclosed in slashes / /.

Phonetic (allophonic) transcription has a high degree of accuracy and shows a lot of articulatory and auditory details. It is often termed as the narrow transcription or transcription proper because it aims to represent actual speech sounds in the narrowest sense and uses additional diacritics. The symbols are therefore enclosed in square brackets [ ].

The allophones to be covered in class:

Aspiration

Types of Explosion

Syllabicity

Tapping of /t/

Retracted /t,d/

Dentalization

Pre-Fortis Clipping

Voicing

Glottal Stops

Nasalization

Sounds and words are pronounced differently when they are pronounced in isolation and when they are connected in speech as strings. Sounds affect each other and contribute to the more natural sound of speech. Imagine if you were to utter each word separately - you would sound like a robot! The features of connected speech that we will cover in class are the following:

Different Forms of Assimilation

Yod-Coalescence and Yod-Dropping

Linking/Liasion

Elision

Epenthesis

Catenation

Juncture

The syllable is defined as a unit of pronunciation which has vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants and which forms the whole or a part of a word (Crystal: 2009, p. 214). “The process of breaking down a polysyllabic word into successive syllables is called syllabification” (Jones: 1972, p.56). It usually obeys the phonological rules which determine the structure of a syllable in a language.

Vowels can form a syllable on their own or they can be the "centre or nucleus" of a syllable , e.g. [e] in bed [b |ed].

Some consonants like / m, n, ŋ , l/ are called syllabic consonants since they function as syllables in final position and also we have what is called " minimum syllable ", as in [ |m ] to show agreement and [ |∫ ] to keep someone quiet, and these are consonant sounds, but they have meaning. (Roach 2002: 76).

A syllable is usually divided into two parts onset plus rhyme (which in turn consists of nucleus & coda). For example, bed consists onset[b]+nucleus[e]+coda[d]]; therefore [ e ] + [d] represent the rhyme part of the syllable.

Syllables are divided into open and closed according to the ending of the syllable. Open (free) syllables are those that end with a vowel or diphthong, i.e., they end with „nuclei‟. Closed syllables (also called complete or blocked) are those that have at least one consonant following the vowel, i.e., they end with 'coda'.

English syllables are also classified into simple and complex according to their structure. The simple syllable consists of a nucleus only or a nucleus with one consonant preceding it and /or another consonant following it. Consequently, the simple syllable has the structures: V, CV, VC and CVC as in “I” ['aI] , „knee‟ [n'i:] , „if‟['If] and dog[d'ɒg].

A syllable that is open and ends in a short vowel is referred to as a light syllable. If the syllable is open, but the nucleus is a long vowel or a diphthong, the syllable is referred to as a heavy syllable. Any closed syllable, no matter how many consonants are included in its coda, is also referred to as a heavy syllable. All stressed syllables must be heavy. The feature that distinguishes light and heavy syllables is termed weight.

Phonotactics is a branch of phonetics that studies the rules of sound distribution and syllable structure.

Stress is a quality of vowel sounds. It has three primary characteristics:

1. Length

2. Volume

3. Pitch

Stressed vowel sounds are longer, louder, and/or higher in pitch than vowel sounds without stress. You can use just one of these features, or any combination of these features at the same time. Overall, stressed sounds are “stronger” than unstressed sounds. When you learn new vocabulary words, it’s important to learn stress placement. Listeners depend on stress as a cue to recognize words.

In English we speak of the degrees of stress - primary and secondary (sometimes even tertiary but rarely). The amount of effort and intensity is different in primary and secondary stress in that the primary stress is louder and stronger.

In the word ‚fun.da'men.tal the primary stress is on the -men- syllable and the secondary stress is on fun-. we mark the ends of syllables with a dot.