Phonology: Week 1 PDF

# Hanan Etalib / Phonology: Week 1 ## Phonology: An Introduction - Languages differ in the ways in which consonant and vowel sounds can be grouped into syllables in words. - English and German tolerate several consonants before and after a single vowel. - Strengths has three consonant sounds befo...

# Hanan Etalib / Phonology: Week 1 ## Phonology: An Introduction - Languages differ in the ways in which consonant and vowel sounds can be grouped into syllables in words. - English and German tolerate several consonants before and after a single vowel. - Strengths has three consonant sounds before and three after a single vowel sound. - Italian does not have such complex syllables. - The same thing applies to Japanese and Swahili. - Speakers of such languages find English words of the sort just mentioned very hard to pronounce. - Though, to a native speaker of English, they are perfectly natural, natural in this context meaning "within the sounds and sound sequences whose mastery is acquired in early childhood as part of one's primary language." - All these considerations relating to the use of speech sounds in particular languages, fall under the general heading of phonology, which may be defined as the sound system of a language. - Therefore, phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages. ## The phonological system of a language includes: - An inventory of sounds and their features. - Rules which specify how sounds interact with each other. ## Phonology studies the ways in which speech sounds form systems and patterns: - The relationship between how sounds are pronounced and how they are stored in the mind. - Which phonetic distinctions are significant enough to signal differences in meaning. - The ways sounds are organized within words. ## Phonology in relation to other aspects of language - Phonology is just one of several aspects of language. - It is related to other aspects such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. ## A diagram showing the place of phonology in an interacting hierarchy of levels in linguistics: - **Pragmatics** - **Semantics** - **Syntax** - **Morphology** - **Phonology** - **Phonetics** ## [Question] How is phonology different from phonetics? - Phonetics studies the nature of speech sounds: - Their production by the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics). - Their perception by the auditory system (auditory phonetics). - Their physical properties as sound waves (acoustic phonetics). ## Comparison: ## Phonology and phonetics: - Phonetics along with phonology take on a fundamental role of exploring the sounds of human speech. - Hence, they form a significant part of the study of language. ## [Question] How is phonetics different from phonology? ## Phonetics - Is the basis for phonological analysis. - Analyses the production of all human speech sounds regardless of language. ## Phonology - Is the basis for further work in morphology, syntax, discourse, and orthography design. - Analyses the sound patterns of a particular language by determining which phonetic sounds are significant, and explaining how these sounds are interpreted by the native speaker. ## Phonology as grammar of phonetic patterns: - It is easier to put it this way: the ear hears phonetics, but the brain hears phonology. - Your ear is capable of processing whatever linguistic sounds are given to it (assuming someone with normal hearing), but your language experience causes your brain to filter out only those sound patterns that are important to your language. - There is some overlap between these two subdisciplines of linguistics, just as there is overlap between syntax and morphology. - But you're not far from the right track when you say: - Phonology is also called the grammar of phonetic patterns. - The consonant cluster /st/ is OK at the beginning, middle, or end of words in English. - At beginnings of words, /str/ is OK in English, but /ftr/ or /ftr/ are not (they are ungrammatical). - /str/ is OK at the beginnings of words in German, though, and /ftr/ is OK word-initial in Russian, but not in English or German. ## [Question] Can you think of other phonological rules of English? ## Can you think of similar phonological rules of Arabic? ## Types of Phonology: - **Segmental Phonology**: - Studies the way speech can be analysed into discrete units or segments, (later to be called phonemes) such as vowels and consonants. - Segmental phonology is interested in the function and possible combinations of sounds within the sound system. - **Suprasegmental Phonology**: - Is interested in the features that cannot be segmented. - Those features are speech attributes that accompany consonants and vowels but which are not limited to single sounds and often extend over syllables, words and phrases. - Suprasegmental features are stress, intonation, pitch and rhythm. ## [Question] How is Phonology different from phonetics? Phonetics studies the nature of speech sounds like the production of sound by the vocal tract, perception by the auditory system, and their physical properties as sound waves. Phonetics is the basis for phonological analysis, which studies sound patterns of a particular language by determining which phonetic sounds are significant, and explaining how these sounds are interpreted by the native speaker. Phonology is also further used in morphology, syntax, discourse, and orthography designs.