Introduction to Phonology

Introduction to Phonology

Speech sounds are very important for human languages, and the study of speech sounds is phonetics. The study of speech sound then include three aspects:

1.      How the sounds are produced

2.      How they are transmitted

3.      How they are perceived

The study of production of speech sounds constitutes three aspects:

1.      Articulatory phonetics = The study of the production of speech sounds

2.      Acoustic phonetics = The study of the transmission and the physical properties of speech sounds

3.      Auditory phonetics = The study of the perception of speech sounds

The study of articulatory phonetics has had the longest history among the three sub- branches of phonetics, probably due to the fact that it is relatively easy to observe articulatory processes. But acoustic phonetics has developed only in the last few decades. In contrast to articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics relies on the heavy use of sophisticated instruments in a way that is similar to the study of acoustics in physics.

The study of articulatory phonetic has three subparts:

1.      We study the articulation (production) of speech sounds

2.      We describe the sounds in a way that is understood by other linguists in the field

3.      We classify sounds according to the properties they have

Orthography is spelling system. Orthography transcription is a transcription method that employs the sound of words. As you have probably noticed, our English spelling systems often fails to represent in an unambiguous way the sound of words. Let see the example below:

Ë The italicized letters represent the same sounds: to, too, two, though, clue etc.

Ë The same spelling can represent different sounds: charter, character, though, tough, sign, resign, thin, then etc.

Ë A combination of letters may represent only one sound: character, though, tough, deal, physics etc.

Ë A combination of sounds is represented by a single letter: exit, axe, etc.

Ë The letters represent so sound at all: though, often, bomb, make, pneumonia etc.

In a phonetics alphabet, there is a one to one correspondence between sounds and symbols. Phonetic symbols are written within square brackets, “[  ]”, to distinguish them from letters or words written in an ordinary spelling system (orthography).

We saw in the previous section that phonetics is the subfield of linguistics concerned with the description of speech sounds. The subfield known as phonology is concerned with how these sounds are systematically organized in a language, how they are combined to form words, how they are categorized by, and interpreted in, the minds of speakers.

Put simply, phonology is the study of the sounds patterns of language, how speech sound are grouped by speakers to effect communication. For example it is a fact of English that the sound sequence [ ps ] never occurs at the beginning of a word – although it can occur word-medially as in [ k æ psul ] ‘capsule’ or word-finally as in [ t æ ps ] ‘taps’. Phonology also deals with the abstract, or psychological, level of sounds, the level at which speech sounds are stored in our minds. For example, the t of top is phonetically realized as the aspirated [  ], the t of stop as the unaspirated [ t ], and (in American English) the t of kitten as the glottal stop [ ? ]. Speech sounds at this abstract level are called phonemes while those at the concrete or phonetic level are known as allophones.

When the speech sound as stored in our minds like the /t/ above, differs from the physical sound as it is spoken. Like the [ t ] of kitten, it is because the /t/ has undergone an alteration. We say that the /t/ has been changed to a [ ? ] by the application of a type of rule known as a phonological process. In studying language it is important to distinguish between phonemes and allophones because this distinction is an important fact about language. The linguistic performs what is known as a phonemic analysis.

Finally, not all languages have the same sound systems or permit the same combinations of sounds in words. For example, the sound system of English does not contain the voiceless velar fricative /x/ that is found in German (in the word Bach /bax/) and while English, does not permit word-initial [ ps ] sequences, a language such as Greek does; in fact words like pseudo, psyche, and psychiatrist are borrowed from Greek.  

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