INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

BACHELOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION MAJOR IN ENGLISH

ALL NATIONS COLLEGE

SCHOOL YEAR: 2023 - 2024

ANNA DOMINIQUE M. SOLON

 PHONOLOGY

Phonology is one of the core fields that compose the discipline of

linguistics, which is the scientific study of language structure. One

way to understand the subject matter of phonology is to contrast it

with other fields within linguistics. A very brief explanation is that

phonology is the study of sound structure in language, which is

different from the study of sentence structure (syntax), word

structure (morphology), or how languages change over time

(historical linguistics). But this is insufficient. An important feature

of the structure of a sentence is how it is pronounced – its sound

structure. The pronunciation of a given word is also a fundamental

part of the structure of the word. And certainly the principles of

pronunciation in a language are subject to change over time. So

phonology has a relationship to numerous domains of linguistics.

An important question is how phonology differs from the closely

related discipline of phonetics. Making a principled separation

between phonetics and phonology is difficult – just as it is difficult

to make a principled separation between physics and chemistry, or

sociology and anthropology. While phonetics and phonology both

deal with language sound, they address different aspects of sound.

Phonetics deals with “actual” physical sounds as they are

manifested in human speech, and concentrates on acoustic

waveforms, formant values, measurements of duration measured in

milliseconds, of amplitude and frequency. Phonetics also deals with

the physical principles underlying the production of sounds,

namely vocal tract resonances, and the muscles and other

articulatory structures used to produce those resonances.

Phonology, on the other hand, is an abstract cognitive system

dealing with rules in a mental grammar: principles of subconscious

“thought” as they relate to language sound. Yet once we look into

the central questions of phonology in greater depth, we will find

that the boundaries between the disciplines of phonetics and

phonology are not entirely clear-cut. As research in both of these

fields has progressed, it has become apparent that a better

understanding of many issues in phonology requires that you bring

phonetics into consideration, just as a phonological analysis is a

prerequisite for phonetic study of language.

PHONETICS- The Manifestation of language sound

Ashby and Maidment (2005) provide a detailed introduction to

the subject area of phonetics, which you should read for

greater detail on the acoustic and articulatory properties of

language sounds, and transcription using the International

Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This section provides a basic overview

of phonetics, to clarify what phonology is about. From the

phonetic perspective, “sound” refers to mechanical pressure

waves and the sensations arising when such a pressure wave

strikes your ear. In a physical sound, the wave changes

continuously, and can be

graphed as a waveform showing the amplitude on the vertical axis

and time on the horizontal axis. Figure 1 displays the waveform of

a pronunciation of the word wall, with an expanded view of the

details of the waveform at the center of the vowel between w and ll.

Figure 2 provides an analogous waveform of a pronunciation of the

word ‘will’, which differs from wall just in the choice of the vowel.

Inspection of the expanded view of the vowel part of these

waveforms shows differences in the overall shape of the time-

varying waveforms, which is what makes these words sound

different. It is difficult to characterize those physical differences

from the waveform, but an analytical tool of phonetics, the

spectrogram, provides a useful way to describe the differences, by

reducing the absolute amplitude properties of a wave at an exact

time to a set of (less precise) amplitude characteristics in different

frequency and time areas. In a spectrogram, the vertical axis

represents frequency in Hertz (Hz) and darkness represents

amplitude. Comparing the spectrograms of wall and will in figure 3,

you can see that there are especially dark bands in the lower part

of the spectrogram, and the frequency at which these bands occur

– known as formants – is essential to physically distinguishing the

vowels of these two words. Formants are numbered from the

bottom up, so the first formant is at the very bottom. In wall the

first two formants are very close together and occur at 634 Hz and

895 Hz, whereas in will they are far apart, occurring at 464 Hz and

1766 Hz. The underlying reason for the difference in these sound

qualities is that the tongue is in a different position during the

articulation of these two vowels. In the case of the vowel of wall, the
tongue is relatively low and retracted, and in the case of will, the

tongue is relatively fronted and raised. These differences in the

shape of the vocal tract result in different physical sounds coming

out of the mouth. The physical sound of a word’s pronunciation is

highly variable, as we see when we compare the spectrograms of

three pronunciations of wall in figure 4: the three spectrograms are

obviously different. The first two pronunciations are produced at

different times by the same speaker, differing slightly in where the

first two formants occur (634 Hz and 895 Hz for the first token

versus 647 Hz and 873 Hz for the second), and in numerous other

ways such as the greater amplitude of the lower formants in the

first token. In the third token, produced by a second (male) speaker

of the same dialect, the first two formants are noticeably lower and

closer together, occurring at 541 Hz and 617 Hz.

Physical variation in sound also arises because of differences in

surrounding context. Figure 5 gives spectrograms of the words wall,

tall, and lawn, with grid lines to identify the portion of each

spectrogram in the middle which corresponds to the vowel. In wall,

the frequency of the first two formants rapidly rises at the

beginning and falls at the end; in tall, the formant frequencies start

higher and fall slowly; in lawn, the formants rise slowly and do not
fall at the end. A further important fact about physical sound is

that it is continuous, so while wall, tall, and lawn are composed of

three sounds where the middle sound in each word is the same one,

there are no actual physical boundaries between the vowel and the

surrounding consonants. The tools of phonetic analysis can provide

very detailed and precise information about the amplitude,

frequency and time characteristics of an utterance – a typical

spectrogram of a single-syllable word in English could contain

around 100,000 bits of information. The problem is that this is too

much information – a lot of information needs to be discarded to

get at something more general and useful.

PHONOLOGY: The symbolic perspective on sound

Physical sound is too variable and contains too much information

to allow us to make meaningful and general statements about the

grammar of language sound. We require a way to represent just the

essentials of language sounds, as mental objects which grammars

can manipulate. A phonological representation of an utterance

reduces this great mass of phonetic information to a cognitive

minimum, namely a sequence of discrete segments.

The basic tool for converting the continuous stream of speech

sound into discrete units is the phonetic transcription. The idea

behind a transcription is that the variability and continuity of

speech can be reduced to sequences of abstract symbols whose

interpretation is predefined, a symbol standing for all of the

concrete variants of the sound. Phonology then is the study of

higher-level patterns of language sound, conceived in

terms of discrete mental symbols, whereas phonetics is the study of

how those mental symbols are manifested as continuous muscular

contractions and acoustic waveforms, or how such waveforms are

perceived as the discrete symbols that the grammar acts on. The

idea of reducing an information-rich structure such as an acoustic

waveform to a small repertoire of discrete symbols is based on a

very important assumption, one which has proven to have

immeasurable utility in phonological research, namely that there

are systematic limits on possible speech sounds in human

language. At a practical level, this assumption is embodied in

systems of symbols and associated phonetic properties such as the

International Phonetic Alphabet of figure 6. Ashby and Maidment

(2005) give an extensive introduction to phonetic properties and

corresponding IPA symbols, which you should consult for more

information on phonetic characteristics of language sound. The IPA

chart is arranged to suit the needs of phonetic analysis. Standard

phonological terminology and classification differ somewhat from

this usage. Phonetic terminology describes [p] as a “plosive,” where

that sound is phonologically termed a “stop”; the vowel [i] is called

a “close” vowel in phonetics, but a “high” vowel in phonology.

Figure 7 gives the important IPA vowel letters with their

phonological descriptions, which are used to stand for the mental

symbols of phonological analysis. The three most important

properties for defining vowels are height, backness, and roundness.

The height of a vowel refers to the fact that the tongue is higher

when producing [i] than it is when producing [e] (which is higher

than when producing [æ]), and the same holds for the relation

between [u], [o], and [a]. Three primary heights are generally

recognized, namely high, mid, and low, augmented with the

secondary distinction tense/lax for nonlow vowels which

distinguishes vowel pairs such as [i] (seed) vs. [ɪ] (Sid), [e] (late) vs.

[ε] (let), or [u] (food) vs. [ʊ] (foot), where [i, e, u] are tense and [ɪ, ε, ʊ]

are lax. Tense vowels are higher and articulated further from the

center of the vocal tract compared to their lax counterparts. It is

not clear whether the tense/lax distinction extends to low vowels.

Independent of height, vowels can differ in relative frontness of the

tongue. The vowel [i] is produced with a front tongue position,

whereas [u] is produced with a back tongue position. In addition, [u]

is produced with rounding of the lips: it is common but by no

means universal for back vowels to also be produced with lip

rounding. Three phonetic degrees of horizontal tongue positioning

are generally recognized: front, central, and back. Finally, any

vowel can be pronounced with protrusion (rounding) of the lips,

and thus [o], [u] are rounded vowels whereas [i], [æ] are unrounded

vowels. With these independently controllable phonetic parameters

– five degrees of height, three degrees of fronting, and rounding

versus non-rounding – we have the potential for up to thirty vowels,

which is

many more vowels than are found in English. Many of these vowels

are lacking in English, but can be found in other languages. This

yields a fairly symmetrical system of symbols and articulatory

classifications, but there are gaps such as the lack of tense/lax

distinctions among central high vowels. The major consonants and

their classificatory analysis are given in figure 8. Where the IPA

term for consonants like [p b] is “plosive,” these are referred to

phonologically as “stops.” Lateral and rhotic consonants are termed

“liquids,” and non-lateral “approximants” are referred to as “glides.”

Terminology referring to the symbols for implosives, ejectives,

diacritics, and suprasegmentals is generally the same in

phonological and phonetic usage. Other classificatory terminology

is used in phonological analysis to refer to the fact that certain sets

of sounds act together for grammatical purposes. Plain stops and

affricates are grouped together, by considering affricates to be a

kind of stop (one with a special fricative-type release). Fricatives

and stops commonly act as a group, and are termed obstruents,

while glides, liquids, nasals, and vowels likewise act together, being

termed sonorants.

The concerns of Phonology

As a step towards understanding what phonology is, and especially

how it differs from phonetics, we will consider some specific aspects

of sound structure that would be part of a phonological analysis.

The point which is most important to appreciate at this moment is

that the “sounds” which phonology is concerned with are symbolic

sounds – they are cognitive abstractions, which represent but are

not the same as physical sounds. The sounds of a language. One

aspect of phonology investigates what the “sounds” of a language

are. We would want to take note in a description of the phonology

of English that we lack the vowel [ø] that exists in German in words

like schön ‘beautiful,’ a vowel which is also found in French (spelled

eu, as in jeune ‘young’), or Norwegian (øl ‘beer’). Similarly, the

consonant [θ] exists in English (spelled th in thing, path), as well as

Icelandic, Modern Greek, and North Saami), but not in German or

French,and not in Latin American Spanish (but it does occur in

Continental Spanish in words such as cerveza ‘beer’). Sounds in

languages are not just isolated atoms; they are part of a system.

The systems of stops in Hindi and English are given in (1). (1) The

stop systems of these languages differ in three ways. English does

not have a series of voiced aspirated stops like Hindi [bh dh ɖh gh ],

nor does it have a series of retroflex stops [ʈ ʈh ɖ ɖh ]. Furthermore,

the phonological status of the aspirated sounds [ph t h kh ] is

different in the languages, as discussed in chapter 2, in that they

are basic lexical facts of words in Hindi, but are the result of

applying a rule in English. Rules for combining sounds. Another

aspect of language sound which a phonological analysis takes

account of is that in any language, certain combinations of sounds

are allowed, but other combinations are systematically impossible.

The fact that English has the words [bɹɪk] brick, [bɹejk] break,

[bɹɪdʒ ] bridge, [bɹɛd] bread is a clear indication that there is no

restriction against having words that begin with the consonant

sequence br; besides these words, one can think of many more

words beginning with br such as bribe, brow and so on. Similarly,

there are many words which begin with bl, such as [bluw] blue,

[bleʔn t] blatant, [blæst] blast, [blɛnd] blend, [blɪŋk] blink, showing

that there is no rule against words beginning with bl. It is also a

fact that there is no word *[blɪk]1 in English, even though the

similar words blink, brick do exist. The question is, why is there no

word *blick in English? The best explanation for the nonexistence

of this word is simply that it is an accidental gap – not every

logically possible combination of sounds which follows the rules of

English phonology is found as an actual word of the language.

Native speakers of English have the intuition that while blick is not

a word of English, it is a theoretically possible word of English, and

such a word might easily enter the language, for example via the

introduction of a new brand of detergent. Sixty years ago the

English language did not have any word pronounced [bɪk], but

based on the existence of words like big and pick, that word would

certainly have been included in the set of nonexistent but

theoretically allowed words of English. Contemporary English, of

course, actually does have that word – spelled Bic – which is the

brand name of a ballpoint pen.

References:

https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/31449/excerpt/9781107

031449_excerpt.pdf

References:

https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/31449/excerpt/9781107

031449_excerpt.pdf