Phonetics and Phonology (lecture 1)

1.

Phonetics
Lecture 1

2.

Phonetics and Phonology
• Phonetics and phonology are the branches of linguistics
concerned with sounds.
• The English alphabet is comprised of 26 letters,
• while the sound system of English contains 44 sounds as
phonemes.

3.

Phonetics and Phonology
Phonetics is concerned with the physical
manifestation of language in sound waves and
how they are produced, transmitted, and
perceived, and also “provides methods for their
description, classification, and transcription”
(Crystal 2008: 363).
Phonology “studies the sound systems of
languages” (ibid: 365) and how sounds function
in relation to each other in a language.

4.

Phone, Phoneme, and
Allophon
Phone as “the smallest perceptible discrete segment of sound in a
stream of speech”
A phoneme includes all the phonetic specifications of phones and
is the smallest independent unit that can bring about a
change in meaning.
Roach (2009) calls phonemes “abstract sounds”.
Phones that belong to the same phoneme are called allophones.
Allophones do not affect the semantic meaning of the word,
while a substituted phoneme could bring a semantic change.

5.

Phone, Phoneme, and
Allophon
A MINIMAL PAIR 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
allophones.

6.

The Branches of Phonetics
ARTICULATORY PHONETICS, which studies the ways the
vocal organs are used to produce speech sounds;
ACOUSTIC PHONETICS, which investigates the physical
properties of speech sounds (duration, frequency, intensity, and
quality) that are generally measured by spectrographs to depict
waveforms and spectrograms;
AUDITORY PHONETICS, which is concerned with how
people perceive speech sounds, i.e. how the sound waves activate
the listener’s eardrum, and how the message is carried to the
brain in the form of nerve impulses.

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8.

MINIMAL PAIRS
Sheep – ship
Pen – pan
Cap – cup
Hat – hot
Fox- forks
Work – woke
Send- sent
Curl – girl
Price – prize

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ENGLISH PHONEMES
The English Phonemic Chart
Vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs), consonants, and
sonorants.

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The English phonemic chart and
the International Phonetic Alphabet
• The symbols for the English phonemic chart have
been compiled from the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA) devised by International Phonetic
Association (also abbreviated IPA).

12.

TRANSCRIPTION
• Transcription is the process and “the methods
of writing down speech sounds in a systematic
and consistent way” (Crystal 2008: 490).
• Each sound must be identified and written in
an appropriate symbol.
• Principally, there are two kinds of
transcription: phonemic and phonetic
transcription.

13.

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.
• Phonetic 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.

14.

Sound Classes: Vowels, Consonants,
and Sonorants
Vowels are the class of sounds that are
associated with the least obstruction to the flow
of air during their production.
Consonants are the class of sounds that are
associated with obstructed airflow through the
vocal tract during their production.
Sonorants are sounds that are voiced and do not
cause sufficient obstruction to the airflow to
prevent normal voicing from continuing.

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Vowel phonemes

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Consonant phonemes

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Sonorant phonemes