phonetics and phonology

1. DIFFERENCE?
/k/
kit [ko]
after s
[kh]
Initial
[k]
elsewhere
k
s ill
sac k
We pronounce them differently but we know they are the
same sound.
How do we know two sounds are the same or different? 1

2. 2

3. PHONOLOGY
 Phonology is how speech sounds are organized and
affect one another in pronunciation.
 Key terms:
 Phone
 Phoneme
 allophone
 This organization is explained in phonological rules
3

4. CONCEPTUALITY
Articulatory phonetics • Phonology
Real sounds = phones • system and rules of sound
patterns
• [p], [t], [k]
• Abstractions = phoneme
• [i], [æ]
• /p/, /t/, /k/
• /i/, /æ/
• Inventory of sounds and
how they are realized.
4

5. Phonetics Phonology
• Phone • Phoneme
5

6. PHONEME
a PHONEME is the minimal distinctive
(contrastive ) linguistic sound
Phoneme Mental unit Meaningful Not realized
Phone Physical/environmental Meaningless Realized
unit
Allophone Phonetic unit Variation of phoneme variations

7.  phoneme
 (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is
the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form
meaningful contrasts between utterances. (Wikipedia)
 Segment: "any discrete unit that can be identified,
either physically or auditorily, in the stream of
speech."
1. separate and
individual,
multiple segments
vowels, consonants
supra-segmental such as consonants and
tone,stress, length,intonation vowels,
secondary articulations
nasalization 2. occur in a distinct
vowel harmony temporal order 7
Marginal segments
onomatopoeic words, Source: Wikipedia
interjections, loan words

8. PHONEME
 A unit of speech that can be used to differentiate
words(e.g.“cat”/kaet/vs.“bat”/baet/).
 Phonemes identify minimal pairs in a language.
 The set of phonemes in a language subject to interpretation;
most languages have 20 to 40 phonemes.
 The phoneme cannot therefore be acoustically defined. The
phoneme is instead a feature of language structure. 8

9. what is the
What sort of content how does
entity is the one identify
phoneme? of the phonemes
phoneme
Issues
9

10. 1. WHAT SORT OF ENTITY IS THE PHONEME?
 Twaddell (1935)
 1) phoneme is a physical reality
 “count for practical purposes as if they were one and the
same.” JONES (1967: 258)
 2) it is a psychological notion
 a mental or psychological reality
 the phoneme is a constant acoustic and auditory image (Sommerfelt); a
thought sound (Beni); a sound idea (Trubetzkoy); a psychological
equivalent of an empirical sound (UÓaszyn);
 In modern terms:
 phoneme is some sort of mental representation
10
TWADDELL criticized this mental phenomenon

11. 2. WHAT IS THE CONTENT OF THE PHONEME
 What are phonemes made of? How are they represented?
 what position specific phoneme takes in the
given phonemic system.
 Which phoneme is in the opposition to a specific phoneme
 Sapir (1925, 1933) Sapir’s “point in the pattern.”
 phoneme as a set of contrastively underspecified features
 underspecified, in the sense that it consists only of contrastive
properties and other features are omitted
 This notion further corresponded to the theory of Distinctive feature
⇒ this underspecification theory has been proposed under generative phonology
under the name Modified Contrastive Specification
11

12. CONTINUE…
 Prague School: Phonemic make-up or content
 phonemic make-up(Jakobson)
 phonemic content of the phoneme (Trubetzkoy)
those properties which are common to all
variants of a phoneme
Each phoneme has a definable phonemic
content only because the system of
distinctive oppositions shows a definite
order or structure.
12

13. 13

14. 3. HOW DOES ONE IDENTIFY PHONEMES
Practical aspect of phoneme:
phonemic analysis
 whether a sound is a
 single phoneme (/ts/,/nd/, or /oe/)
 a sequence of phonemes (/t-s/, /n-d/, or /s-j/).
 Minimal pair
 Differ in one phonological element (phone, phoneme, toneme or
chroneme )
 complementary distribution
 Contrastive distribution
 Free variation
 Mutation methods
14

15. VIEWS OF WHAT THE PHONEME IS
 Empiricist notion: Twaddell
 the phoneme is a collection of sounds (a fictitious unit )
 Mentalist: Chomsky ( realistic view)
 the phoneme is the mental category that corresponds to a
coherent set of sounds in a language
 American structuralist tradition:
 a phoneme is defined according to its allophones and
environments
 generative tradition:
 a phoneme is defined as a set of distinctive features. 15

16. BLOOMFIELD‟S PHONEME
 “The smallest units which make a difference in meaning”
 “A minimum unit of distinctive sound feature” (p. 77).
 non-mentalistic unit
 He identifies “primary” (segmental sounds) and “secondary”
(stress and tone) phonemes according to their function in
language (primary: syllable forming; secondary: structuring
larger units).
 Phonemes are defined by their participation in structural sets.
 (syllabic, open-syllable, closed syllable, non-syllabic, initial,
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 medial, final, initial cluster, final cluster, etc.)

17. COMMON PHONEMIC RULES
 Aspiration [h]
 Unreleased Stop [ ̚ ]
 Flap [ɾ]
 Dental Consonants [⊓]
 Velarization [ɫ]
 Voicelessness [˚]
 Vowel lengthening [ ]
 Vowel nasalization [~]
17

18. Phonemic Awareness
 Phonemic Awareness is a
subset of phonological
awareness in which listeners
are able to hear, identify and
manipulate phonemes, the
smallest units of sound that can
differentiate meaning.
 Separating the spoken word
"cat" into three distinct
phonemes,
/k/, /æ/, and /t/, requires
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phonemic awareness skill.

19. 19

20. COMMON TYPES OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS
 Isolating
 Hear and isolate sounds in initial, medial or final positions in
word (e.g. bat, ball, bell, pal)
 Segmenting
 Pronounce each phoneme in order as it occurs in word (bat
>> b-a-t)
 Blending
 Combine phonemes to make a word (hear sh-ip and say ship)
 Manipulating
 Add or delete sounds in word to make new word
 (add a “t” to an” and say ant; replace the sound “d” in sad with
a “t” and say sat)
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21. THEORETICAL TIMELINE OF PHONEME
 Ancient forerunners of modern descriptive linguistics (P¯ANINI, PATAÑJALI
(India), the Greeks & “Anon” (Iceland, 12th C.)) clearly recognized the
systematic nature between distinctive sound properties and the identity of
words in their languages
 DE SAUSSURE (1857-1913) used “phonème”, first as a term for speech
sounds, later as a purely functional entity.
 A. Dufriche-Desgenettes 1873
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 French word phonème as a speech sound
Source: B. Elan Dresher

22. TIMELINE…
 Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure(1879), E. Sapir, and L. Bloomfield)
 Tried to eliminate cognitive and psycholinguistic function of phoneme
 Used to refer to a hypothesized sound in a proto-language together with its
reflexes in the daughter languages
 Polish Kazan school (Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and MikoÓaj Kruszewski
1875–1895)
 As an abstract set of alternating invariant psycho phonetic elements : fonema,
 Prague School 1926–1935
 the first group to formulate an explicit phonological theory
 Generative linguistics (Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle)
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 modern phonology

23. What:
• Distinctive Feature Theory
When:
• 1939, 1949 ( around 1050s)
Who:
• Roman Osipovich Jakobson
Russianlinguist literary theorist
Where:
• Czech Academies
How:
• by considering the phonological concepts
of de Saussure and Hjelmslev

24.  De Saussure‟s emphasized on the differential function of
linguistic elements .
 Jakobson and Trubetzkoy attached great importance to
the oppositions among phonemes rather than to the
phonemes themselves
 The notion of component features is already implicit in
the idea of opposition. The notion was made explicit by
Jakobson‟s and Trubetzkoy‟s recognition of such
features as „differential qualities‟ or „relevant properties‟.
(binary features + - )

25.  Jakobson‟s greatest insight, distinctive
feature, (after the phoneme) belongs to the
(Functional) Structuralist Phonology.
 Jakobson (1939, 1949) drawing on earlier
phonological concepts of de Saussure and
Hjelmslev, pointed to the limited number of
“differential qualities” or “distinctive features” that
appeared to be available to languages.

26. Original set appeared in Jakobson, Fant and Halle: 12 features
Chomsky and Halle : 45 features
Most modern phonologists:
A binary system of indexing features: a segment either
possesses or does not any one particular features.
English (with around 45 phonemes) would be six, giving us 26
or 64 segments

27. JAKOBSON AND HALLE: 12 FEATURES
 All of the features are polar oppositions, allowing
relative values
 Each feature is binary, with only two opposed
values along a single dimension.
 They employed features listed with articulatory
correlates as well as acoustic cues.
i) The vocalic portion
ii) The presence of release burst
iii) Duration of the closure interval
iv) rise-time of the fricative time
v) Duration of the fricative noise

28. Sonority
Protensity

29. Sonority
Tonality

30. If the word high-handed falls out of use, then
synonyms like arrogant and presumptuous will extend
their uses. If we drop the final f or v the results in
English are not momentous (we might still recognize
belie as belief from the context), but not if the final s is
dropped (we should then have to find some new way
of indicating plurals).
Markedness Universal
hierarchy of Saussurean structural-
distinctive hypotheses functional theory
features of phonology

31. DISTINCTIVE FEATURE THEORY

32. THREE PRINCIPLES SURROUNDING THE
DISTINCTIVE FEATURE SET
 It should be able to characterize all contrasting segments
in human languages
 It should be able to capture natural classes in a clear
fashion
 It should be transparent with regard to phonetic correlates

33. DISTINCTIVE FEATURES …
 Are minimal linguistic units
 Are limited
 Only binary oppositions are accepted
 The universal set of cognitive properties
 Are associated with speech sound
 Determine the contrast between speech sounds
 Describe the ways in which these sounds change
 Define the natural classes ( set of sounds)

34. NATURAL CLASSES
 A natural class of sounds in a language consists on
those sounds which share certain distinctive feature
to the exclusion of all other sounds in a language.
 They often pattern together in similar ways.
 The labio-velar sound [w] as in „wit‟ can not follow a
specific group of sounds in English;
 [w] may follow [d] or [k] sounds as in „dwell‟,‟quell‟
 But can not follow natural class of „labials‟ and „labio-
dentals‟ [ f,v,b,p]

35. FEATURE VALUE
 The distinctive feature values for the sounds of a
language are arranged as a matrix with + or – or 0
(non-relevant values
obstruent vowels glides liquids nasals
s
[consonental] + - - + +
[Vocalic] - + - - -
[sonarant] - + + + +
examples [p b z θ] [i: a] [j w] [l r] [m n]

37. FEATURES AND MARKEDNESS OF SPEECH SOUND
 Implicational law
 Most common sound: unmarked
 Progressively rarer sounds: marked
The relationship that holds between them is called
implicational law