Chapter 3 Phonology

l        What is phonology?

n        Phonology is the study of sound systems and patterns.

n        Phonology and phonetics are two studies different in perspectives, which are concerned with the study of speech sounds.

n        Phonology focuses on three fundamental questions.

u      What sounds make up the list of sounds that can distinguish meaning in a particular language?

u      What sounds vary in what ways in what context?

u      What sounds can appear together in a sequence in a particular language?

l        Phonemes and allophones

n        A phoneme is a distinctive, abstract sound unit with a distinctive feature.

n        The variants of a phoneme are termed allophones.

n        We use allophones to realize phonemes.

l        Discovering phonemes

n        Contrastive distribution – phonemes

u      If sounds appear in the same environment, they are said to be in contrastive distribution.

u      Typical contrastive distribution of sounds is found in minimal pairs and minimal sets.

l        A minimal pair consists of two words that differ by only one sound in the same position.

l        Minimal sets are more than two words that are distinguished by one segment in the same position.

u      The overwhelming majority of the consonants and vowels represented by the English phonetic alphabet are in contrastive distribution.

u      Some sounds can hardly be found in contrastive distribution in English. However, these sounds are distinctive in terms of phonetic features. Therefore, they are separate phonemes.

n        Complementary distribution – allophones

u      Sounds that are not found in the same position are said to be in complementary distribution.

u      If segments are in complementary distribution and share a number of features, they are allophones of the same phoneme.

n        Free variation

u      If segments appear in the same position but the mutual substitution does not result in change of meaning, they are said to be in free variation.

l        Distinctive and non-distinctive features

n        Features that distinguish meaning are called distinctive features, and features do not, non-distinctive features.

n        Distinctive features in one language may be non-distinctive in another.

l        Phonological rules

n        Phonemes are abstract sound units stored in the mind, while allophones are the actual pronunciations in speech.

n        What phoneme is realized by what allophones in what specific context is another major question in phonology.

n        The regularities that what sounds vary in what ways in what context are generalized and stated in phonology as rules.

n        There are many phonological rules in English. Take the following ones as examples.

l        [+voiced +consonant] – [-voiced]/[-voiced +consonant]_

l        [-voiced +bilabial +stop] – unaspirated/[-voiced +alveolar +fricative]_

l        Syllable structure

n        A syllable is a phonological unit that is composed of one or more phonemes.

n        Every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel.

n        The nucleus may be preceded by one or more consonants called the onset and followed by one or more consonants called the coda.

l        Sequence of phonemes

n        Native speakers of any language intuitively know what sounds can be put together.

n        Some sequences are not possible in English. The impossible sequences are called systematic gaps.

n        Sequences that are possible but do not occur yet are called accidental gaps.

n        When new words are coined, they may fill some accidental gaps but they will never fill systematic gaps.

l        Suprasegmental features

n        Features that are found over a segment or a sequence of two or more segments are called suprasegmental features.

n        These features are distinctive features.

n        Stress

u      Stress is the perceived prominence of one or more syllabic elements over others in a word.

u      Stress is a relative notion. Only words that are composed of two or more syllables have stress.

u      If a word has three or more syllables, there is a primary stress and a secondary stress.

u      In some languages word stress is fixed, i.e. on a certain syllable. In English, word stress is unpredictable.

n        Intonation

u      When we speak, we change the pitch of our voice to express ideas.

u      Intonation is the variation of pitch to distinguish utterance meaning.

u      The same sentence uttered with different intonation may express different attitude of the speaker.

u      In English, there are three basic intonation patterns: fall, rise, fall-rise.

n        Tone

u      Tone is the variation of pitch to distinguish words.

u      The same sequence of segments can be different words if uttered with different tones.

u      Chinese is a typical tone language.