4. Despite the infinite variations which occur when we speak, all speakers of
language agree that certain utterances are the «same» and others are «different».
Phonology tells us why this is the case.
Note that, everyone who knows a language knows its phonology unconsciously.
5. PHONETICS
How are speech
sounds made?
PHONOLOGY
How are speech
sounds
classified?
PHONOLOGY is concerned with the abstract,
PHONETICS is concerned with the physical properties of sounds.
PHONOLOGY is study of sounds in context,
PHONETICS is study of sounds in isolation.
6.
7. Phonology deals with the following questions:
1. Why do related forms differ?
2. What is stored in the mind?
3. What sounds go together?
4. How are sounds organized into syllables?
5. What are the differences between languages?
8. 1. Why do related forms differ?
Sane—Sanity. Electric—Electricity/ Atom—Atomic
Phonology finds the systematic ways in which the forms differ and explains them
9. 2. What is stored in the mind?
Phonology studies abstract mental entities, such as structures and processes.
This contrasts with phonetics, which deals with the actual production and
acoustics of the sounds of language.
10. 3. What sounds go together?
Looks at what sounds/sound combinations are accepted and why.
11. 4. How are sounds organized into
syllables?
With the use of phonological trees syllables are broken up more easily.
Syllables are made up of a rhyme and an onset (any consonants before the rhyme).
The rhyme made up of a nucleus (the vowel sound(s) in the syllable, the key
component of all syllables) and a coda (any consonants following the nucleus).
12. 5. What are the differences between
languages?
For example, different languages can use different phonemes, or different
syllable structures (what sounds can go together to make sequences or words)
and phonology identifies these differences.
15. Phone is a sound.
It is the smallest unit of sound.
The speech sounds we hear and produce are all phones.
It is represented with phonetic symbols.
i.e. [t]
16. PHONEME is a speech sound that signals a difference in meaning
i.e. dime vs dine
They sound exactly alike but their meanings are different. It is
the /m/ and /n/ that made the difference in meaning.
22. BRANCHES OF PHONOLOGY
A. SEGMENTAL
PHONOLOGY
B. SUPRASEGMENTAL
PHONOLOGY
1. Assimilation
2. Elision
3. Linking
4. Phonotactics
1. Word stress
2. Sentential stress
3. Tones
23. A. SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
Phonological rules are based on the observation of changes in the
character, quality, loss, or addition of sounds in the normal, natural use
of language.
When two words, or even syllables, interact at the boundary, three
main classes of change seem to occur:
These are;
1) changes in sound character = ASSIMILATION
2) loss of sounds = ELISION
3) addition of sounds = LINKING
4) Sound and phoneme combinations = PHONOTACTICS
all of which are features of segmental phonology.
24. 1. ASSIMILATION
Note that the overall phonological environment of a word (or even a
series of words) conditions the exact way in which different allophones
of a phoneme are pronounced.
A back vowel, for example, might cause the speakers of a particular
language to produce a farther-back version of a consonant. A nasal
consonant might influence a neighbouring vowel to be produced with
nasalization. When one sound is drawn closer to another in this way,
the process is called assimilation; one sound is said to have
assimilated to another.
Assimilation can cause sounds to be raised or lowered, voiced or
devoiced, aspirated or unaspirated, and more, depending on the
phonological environment and the way in which it “conditions” the
sounds around it.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29. Progressive assimilation works from left to right. That is, the assimilated phoneme
comes after that which forces the assimilation process. Good candidates for this type
of assimilation are the past tense forms of verbs and plurals of nouns in English.
meaning that
form and function
are the same,
but pronunciation.
34. 3. LINKING
The sound /r/ functions as a linking device when two words, the first ending
in a vowel and the next beginning with a vowel, are spontaneously pronounced
35. 4. PHONOTACTICS
Phonotactics is independent of syllable structure. The way
sounds in a language are grouped, clustered is known as
‘phonotactics’. In other words, phonotactics is about the
possible phoneme combinations of a language.
Syllable is a fundamental but elusive unit in phonology. Every
word consists of a sequence of some number of syllables, and
even speakers with no knowledge of phonetics or of linguistics
usually find it easy to agree on how many syllables a word
contains.
For example, we all agree that girl contain one syllable, that
butter contain two, that linguistics contain three, that
education contain four, and so on.
36. A word has as many syllables as the number of vowels it has. Then, the first
letter of English alphabet (a) is a syllable when used in the meaning of “one” or
“some”. A notation is useful for a discussion of syllables here.
Vowels are abbreviated as (V) while consonants as (C).
A typical syllable consists of three main parts:
1. Onset (beginning sound)
2. Nucleus (center)
3. Coda (final sound)
As such, the onset in the syllable pen is /p/, the nucleus is /e/ and the coda is /n/.
PHONOTACTICS
39. B. SUPRASEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
1. Word Stress
Stress is contrastive; that is, for a word to have stress, it has to have more than
one syllable: one stressed, one unstressed. A stressed syllable is produced
with greater amount of energy than an unstressed one. A stressed syllable is
spoken and heard louder and longer, since an extra pushing of air from lungs is
involved. Clearly, the muscles on chest, lungs, and larynx expend more energy
in producing such syllables.
41. Depending on the syllable stressed, the syntactic function (e.g. noun, verb, etc.)
and meaning of a word may radically change
Word Stress
42. Depending on where stress is, its noun or verb function can be determined.
Word Stress
43. “…the stress pattern of a word is an important part of its identity for the native
speaker. There is a great deal of evidence that native speakers rely very
much on the stress pattern of a words when they are listening. In fact,
experiments have demonstrated that often when a native speaker mishears a
word, it is because the foreigner has put the stress in the wrong place, not
because he or she mispronounced the sounds of the word.”
Word Stress
45. 3. Sentential Stress
An examination of quite a number of utterances (i.e. sentences) in English
(both in British or American), reveals that almost every utterance will have a main
stress, located in one of its words. Such stress is known as ‘sentence stress’ in the
literature. Which word in the following sentence has the sentence stress?
I’m a student.
Your guess is right: it is on student. Because student has more than one
syllable, we need to take another step and identify the stressed syllable. Which
syllable in student gets the stress? The answer is the first syllable: student
Under normal circumstances, words that carry higher information content in
the utterance are given higher stress than those carrying lower information as well
as those that are predictable from the context. It is generally the case that one word
is stressed more than any other since it possesses the highest information content
for an utterance in a discourse; stressed item informs the hearer most.
46. Sentential Stress
All words can be divided into two in view of what they do in a sentence: content and function
words. Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs while function words are articles,
prepositions, conjunctions, and modal auxiliaries.
Generally speaking, then, it is the content words that receive the sentential stress in English.
In other words, the items on the left hand column are (potentially) stressable in unmarked
utterances whereas the ones on the right column are not stressable in the normal course of
speaking. What we have so far explained is in fact one of the four types of sentence stress,
known as ‘tonic stress’.
47. Types of Sentence Stress
Four major types of stress are identified at the utterance level:
o Tonic Stress (i.e. Sentential),
o New Information Stress,
o Emphatic Stress, and
o Contrastive Stress.
Sentential Stress
• Tonic stress is characterized by reporting, proclaiming statements.
She dislikes lectures.
Show them how they can get out of the building.
Both sentences have tonic stress, which are in content words at the
sentence initial position. Tonic stress is regarded as the unmarked sentential stress
as it is the most widespread one in English. The following three types of stress are
so-called marked stress types, as they deviate from the usual tonic stress.
48. • The second type of stress is called ‘New Information Stress’.
As the name suggests, the new information in an utterance is stressed. New
information can typically be found in the answers to wh-questions.
Consider the following in which new information stress is underlined:
A) Where are you from?
B) I’m from Bonn.
• The third type of stress is called ‘Emphatic Stress’, which can be common in
the so-called emphatic speeches. Emphatic stress can generally be seen on
emphatic reflexives such as himself and own
adverbs such as very, so, and such
emphatic words by nature such as indeed, terribly, and utterly.
I cook my own dinner.
She was so furious.
I’m terribly sorry.
Sentential Stress
49. The final type of stress is ‘Contrastive Stress’, which is used to show contrast
in the same sentence or across sentences.
Study the exchange below how contrastive stress can be used:
A) How are you?
B) I’m OK. How are you?
A) I’m not too bad.
The following is a SUMMARY of what is said so far in regards to the types of
sentential stress:
I. Tonic stress is almost always found in a content word in utterance final
position. It is usually found in reporting, declarative utterances.
II. New information stress is found in words that contain new information,
especially in question and answer exchanges.
III. Contrastive stress can be placed on any word that is contrasted in
discourse.
Sentential Stress
