Phonetics Unit 1

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Vowel phonemes

Consonant phonemes

Sonorant phonemes