Intro to el, phonetics, lesson 3, 2015

Phonetics and Phonology Lesson 3 October 27, 2015

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Phonetics is “language general” • Phonetics is a level of linguistic analysis which studies articulation, transfer and reception of sounds.

• It is divided into – a) articulatory phonetics, – b) acoustic phonetics and – c) auditory phonetics.

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• On the basis of their articulation, sounds are first divided into vowels and consonants, then further subdivided.

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The sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet

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http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart

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Places of articulation

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Manner of articulation

• The way in which the airstream is affected as it flows from the lungs and out of the mouth and nose.

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English Vowels

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English Consonants

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Phonology is “language specific”

• Phonology studies the function of sounds in a language system.

• Its basic unit is the phoneme, with phone as the concrete realization of a phoneme and allophone as the contextually conditioned variant of a phoneme.

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What is a phoneme?

• Phonemes are the smallest linguistic units without their own meaning - they only mark the differences between larger units in which they occur (i.e. words ).

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Distinctive features

Any of a set of phonetic properties, as voicing, place of articulation or manner of articulation, serving to characterise and distinguish between the significant sounds or phonemes in a language.

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For example: /p/ has to be defined as an unvoiced bilabial plosive to account for all the oppositions found with the other consonants in English.

Hence we can say that 1) voiceless 2) bilabial 3) plosive are the distinctive features of /p/.

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A positive value, [+], denotes the presence of a feature, while a negativevalue [−], indicates its absence.

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Complementary Distribution

Two sounds (phonemes) are in complementary distrubution if they never occur in the same context.

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Phonemic differences vs. allophonic differences

• Differences in speech sound that can signal differences between two different words are phonemic differences • Other differences in speech sound that are clearly audible are only allophonic differences – ‘pronunciation variants’ that cannot signal different words.

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A good example is provided by the allophones of the /l/ phoneme in BBC English:

‘Clear l’ which occurs before vowels, eg. lap, lord, liquid.

‘Dark l’ which occurs elsewhere (i.e. before consonants or before a pause), eg. call, trial, milk.

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Free Variation

If two sounds that are different from each other can occur in the same phonological context and one of those sounds may be substituted for the other, they are said to be in free variation.

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Free variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.

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For example:

The phoneme /t/ in butter can be realised as a glottal stop [d], by speakers of some non-standard British accents, but the same speakers may realise the phoneme as [t] when they aim at a more standard pronunciation (these are also allophones)

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Vocalic phonemes (vowels) in free variation include /i:/ and /e/ as the initial sound in the words economics and evolution ,and /i:/ and /aI/ as the initial sound in either.

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What is a minimal pair?

• Two words which differ in only one phoneme are called minimal pairs (e.g. peak and beak).

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Write the phonological transcription for the following words:

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physics merry weather coat yellow marry tease Mary

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Choose the odd one out:

a) your court neighbor pour b) would should shoulder could c) accountant country count fountain d) drought ought bought thought e) enough cough rough tough f) anonymous mouse enormous furious g) trouble double doubt country h) through group soup though

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Transcribe the following minimal pairs:

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sheep : ship bean : bin meal : mill lead : lid Jean : gin seek : sick chip : cheap carp : cup shark : shock coals : curls

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lay : lie joke : jerk pain : pine foil : file hope : hoop pack : back big : pig chill : Jill fought : thought thumb : sum

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https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/ minimal-pairs.htm

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