Chapter 2

Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in a language. It involves studying a language to determine its distinctive sounds, that is, those sounds that convey a difference in meaning. They later realize that these words begin with two distinct sounds. After the final consonant, there may be a puff of air, but it is not necessary. In fact, you could say pop and not open your lips for hours, if it happened to be the last word you said before going to sleep. The sound at the end would still be a p. Transcriptions of this kind are called phonemic ranscriptions. Languages that have been written down only comparatively recently (such as Swahili and most of the other languages of Africa) have a fairly phonemic spelling system

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THE TRANSCRIPTION OF CONSONANTS

We can begin searching for phonemes by considering the contrasting consonant sounds in English. A good way is to find sets of words that rhyme. Take, for example, all the words that rhyme with pie and have only a single consonant at the beginning. A set of words in which each differs from all the others by only one sound is called a minimal set.

Some consonants do not occur in words rhyming with pie. If we allow using the names of the letters as words, then we can find another large set of consonants beginning words rhyming with pea. There is also a contrast between the consonants in the middles of mission and vision, although there are very few pairs of words that are distinguished by this contrast in English.

The symbol for the voiceless palato-alveolar (post-alveolar) fricative [ S ] (long s) in shy, sheep, rash is both an ascender and a descender. It is like a long, straightened s going both above and below the line of writing. The corresponding voiced symbol [ Z ] is like a long z descending below the line. This sound occurs in the middle of words such as vision, measure, leisure and at the beginning of foreign words such as the French Jean, gendarme, and foreign names such as Zsa Zsa. It is unfortunate that different books on phonetics use different forms of phonetic transcription. Some other books on phonetics transcribe [ tS ] and [ dZ ] (as in church and judge) with single symbols, such as [ c# ] and [ K #]. These transcriptions highlight the fact that affricates are single units by using a single letter to transcribe them.

The glottal stop that begins words that are spelled with an initial vowel (recall the example from

Chapter 1 of the difference between flee east and fleeced ) is written phonetically with [ / ], a symbol based on the question mark. In American casual speech, the final [ t ] in words like cat and bat can be “glottalized”—replaced by glottal stop, or more usually pronounced with simultaneous glottal stop (e.g., [ boet/ ° ] and [ koet/ ° ]). some speakers of English contrast

pairs of words such as which, witch; why, wye; whether, weather.

THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS

The transcription of the contrasting vowels (the vowel phonemes) in English is more difficult than the transcription of consonants for two reasons. First, accents of English differ more in their use of vowels than in their use of consonants. Second, authorities differ in their views of what constitutes an appropriate description of vowels.

One of the principal problems in transcribing English phonetically is that there are more vowel sounds than there are vowel letters in the alphabet. In a transcription of the English word sea as [si ], the [ i ] represents a similar (but not identical) sound to that in the Spanish or Italian si. But unlike Spanish and Italian, English differentiates between vowels such as those in seat, sit, and

heed, hid. The vowels in seat, heed differ from those in sit, hid in two ways:

They have a slightly different quality and they are longer. Because the vowels in sit, hid are somewhat like those in seat, heed, they are represented by the symbol [ I ], a small capital I.

In British English, [ E ] is usually the sole component of the -er part of words such as brother, brotherhood, simpler [ "brODE, "brODEhAd, "sImplE ]. In forms of American English with r-colored vowels, these words are usually [ "brODE}, "brODE}hAd, "sImplE} ]. As with the symbol [ Ё} ], the small hook on [ E} ] symbolizes the r-coloring. Both [ E ] and [ E} ] are very common vowels, [ E ] occurring very frequently in unstressed monosyllables such as the grammatical function words the, a, to, and, but. In connected speech, these words are usually [ DE, E, tE, End, bEt ].

CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS

So far, we have been using the consonant and vowel symbols mainly as ways of representing the contrasts that occur among words in English. But they can also be thought of in a completely different way. This is because it is articulated with both a narrowing of the lip aperture, which makes it bilabial, and a raising of the back of the tongue toward the soft palate, which makes it velar. The affricate symbols [otSo] and [odZo] are not listed separately in the table even though they are contrastive sounds in English. The consonant chart has twentythree different symbols, but only eleven basic gestures of the tongue and lips are needed to make these different sounds. The sounds [op, b, mo] are all made with the same lip gesture, and [ot, d, no] and [ok, g, No] with the same tongue gestures. The airstream process involves pushing air out of the lungs for all the sounds of English. The phonation process is responsible for the gestures of the vocal folds that distinguish voiced and voiceless sounds, and the oro-nasal process will be active in raising and lowering the velum so as to distinguish nasal and oral sounds.

PHONOLOGY

As we have noted, some of the phoneme symbols may represent different sounds when they occur in different contexts. For example, the symbol / t / may represent a wide variety of sounds. In tap / toep /, it represents a voiceless alveolar stop. But the / t / in eighth / eItT / may be made on the teeth, because of the influence of the following voiceless dental fricative /oT /. This / t / is more accurately called a voiceless dental stop, and we will later use a special symbol for transcribing it. In most forms of both British and American English, the / t / in bitten is accompanied by a glottal stop, and we will also be using a special symbol for this sound.

Each of them occurs in a specific place: / t / before / T / is a dental stop, / t / before a word final / n / is a glottal stop, and / t / after a vowel and before an unstressed vowel is a voiced stop. None of these variations is different enough to change the meaning of a word in English. Note also that all of these variations occur in citation speech and are not simply the result of failing to “hit the target” when speaking quickly. Similarly, other symbols represent different sounds in different contexts. The symbols / l / and / r / normally stand for voiced approximants. But in words such

as ply / plaI / and try / traI /, the influence of the preceding stops makes them voiceless. Vowel sounds also vary. The / i / in heed / hid / is usually very different from the / i / in heel / hil /, and much longer than the / i / in heat. The term broad transcription is often used to designate a transcription that uses the simplest possible set of symbols. Conversely, a narrow transcription is one that shows more phonetic detail, either by using more specific symbols or by representing some allophonic differences. A narrow (but still phonemic) transcription could be / pli…z / and / trIp /. This transcription would be phonemic as long as we always used /oi… / wherever we would otherwise have had / i /. In this way, we would not be showing any allophones of the phonemes. A narrow allophonic transcription would be [ pli9 …z ] and [ trI9 p ], in which [ l 9] and [ r 9]. are allophones of / l / and / r /.