English Phonetics and Phonology Lecture PDF

ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY 1  Phonology The study of the sound patterns in languages ⚫ Phonemes (vowels and consonants) ⚫ Prosody (stress, rhythm and intonation) 2 What is the difference between phone...

ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY 1  Phonology The study of the sound patterns in languages ⚫ Phonemes (vowels and consonants) ⚫ Prosody (stress, rhythm and intonation) 2 What is the difference between phonetics and phonology? ⚫ Phonology deals with the sound systems languages ⚫ Phonetics deals with the physical realisation of the elements of the sound system, e.g. how the sound is physically produced (articulatory phonetics), or the acoustic characteristics of the speech sound (acoustic phonetics) 3  Key concepts: the phone ⚫ Each time a speech sound is produced it is different ⚫ Each time you produce a /t/ it will be ever so slightly different ⚫ Hence the concept of the phone: a physical realisation of a speech sound 4  Key concepts: the phoneme ⚫ The smallest speech sound that has linguistic value ⚫ When a series of phones are similar in terms of articulation and can be distinguished from another group in terms of meaning and collocation, the group is given a name e.g. /t/. This is a phoneme. ⚫ The phoneme is an abstract term, specific to a particular language. 5  Key concepts: accent and dialect ⚫ The word accent is usually confused with the word dialect. ⚫ We use the word dialect to refer to a variety of language which is different from others not just in pronunciation but also in vocabulary, grammar and word order. ⚫ Differences of accent are pronunciation differences only. 6 Voiced and Voiceless Sounds ⚫ Sounds produced when the vocal folds are vibrating are said to be voiced. ⚫ Those in which the vocal folds are apart, which are said to be voiceless. ⚫ Try saying a long ‘v’ sound, which we will symbolize as [ vvvvv ]. ⚫ compare this with a long ‘f ’ sound [ fffff ]. 7 Voiced and Voiceless Sounds ⚫ Both of these sounds are formed in the same way in the mouth. The difference between them is that [ v ] is voiced and [ f ] is voiceless. You can feel the vocal fold vibrations in [ v ] if you put your fingertips against your larynx. You can also hear the buzzing of the vibrations in [ v ] more easily if you stop up your ears while contrasting [fffffvvvvv ]. 8