LECTURE 2 ‘The sound pattern of language’

Phonology The description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a particular language. It is based on the theory of what every speaker unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. Therefore, it is concerned with the abstract(mental) aspect of the sounds in language rather than the actual physical articulation of speech sounds.

Example; /t/ sound in tar, star, writer, and eighth seems to be the same, but actually in phonology the [t] in each word is actually one variation of the original /t/ which is called phoneme. Those different realizations of the phoneme are called ‘phones’ The phoneme is the meaning-distinguishing unit in a language such as [t], [k], and [b] in tar, car, and bar.

The phoneme is the abstract unit(in the mind). The phones are the many different versions of that sound regularly produced in actual speech (in the mouth) which are together known as allophones. For example, the phoneme /t/ has the following allophones: 1. [t] in tar is normally produced with stronger puff of air than present in the [t] sound of the word star. So, the aspiration is represented as [t  ]. That is one phone.

2. The [t] sound between vowels as in writer is a ‘flap’ which is represented as [D]. That is another phone. 3. The [t] in eighth is influenced by the dental [  ] sound and that causes a dental articulation of the /t/ sound represented as [t  ]. The [t  ], [D], and [t  ] are different realizations of the phoneme /t/. Notice that we use slashes ‘//’ when we refer to phonemes. However, we use square brackets’[]’ to indicate allophones.

Minimal pairs and sets Minimal pairs and sets We use the minimal pairs test in order to test the phonemic contrasts in a language. When two words such as pat and bat are identical in form except for one phoneme occurring in the same position, the two words are described as a minimal pair. More accurately, they would be classified as a minimal pair the phonology of English. - Examples of the minimal pairs of English: - fan_van - bet_bat - site_side The meaning changes in these pairs due to the contrast between f-v, e-a, and t-d, an evidence that a phoneme is a meaning- distinguishing unit.

So, we differentiate a group of words by changing a phoneme (always in the same position), then we have a minimal set. Thus, a minimal set based on the vowel phonemes of English would include feat, fit, fat, fate, fought, foot transcribed as [fi  t], [f  t],[f  t], [fet] and [fot].

Next class Read the rest of the chapter. Prepare chapter 14 from English Phonetics and Phonology ‘ Aspects of connected speech’