Fundamentals of Phonology

1. From phonetics to phonology Speech is a continuous process, so the vocal organs do not move from one sound segment to the next in a series of separate steps. Rather, sounds continually show the influence of their neighbors. For example, map, lamb.

1.1 Coarticulation When such simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved, we call the process coarticulation. If the sound becomes more like the following sound, as in the case of lamb, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation. If the sound shows the influence of the preceding sound, it is perseverative coarticulation, as is the case of map.

The fact that the vowel [] in lamb has some quality of the following nasal is a phenomenon we call nasalization. To indicate that a vowel has been nasalized, we add a diacritic to the top of the symbol [], as [].

[p] is aspirated in peak and unaspirated in speak. This aspirated voiceless bilabial stop is thus indicated by the diacritic h, as [ph], whereas the unaspirated counterpart is transcribed as [p].

When we use a simple set of symbols in our transcription, it is called a broad transcription. The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription. Both are phonetic transcriptions so we put both forms in square brackets [ ].