SULTAN MOULAY SLIMANE UNIVERSITY

ECOLE NORMALE SUPERIEURE

FILIERE: ENGLISH LANGUAGE
BENI MELLAL
Semester4
Professor Dr. BOURIMA

Phonetics and Phonology, the Study of Sounds and Phonemes

1 Phonetics
Phonetics is the science of human speech sounds. It has three subfields or branches.
• The oldest branch, also the one that is the most relevant in foreign language teaching, is
articulatory phonetics. This examines the articulatory (vocal) organs and their role in the
production of speech sounds.
• The second branch is acoustic phonetics. This deals with the physical properties of speech
sounds as they travel through the air in the form of sound waves.
• The third branch: auditory phonetics, which examines the way in which human beings
perceive speech sounds through the medium of the ear.
- When people speak, they produce physically continuous stretches of sound, which those
who know the language in which the utterance is said can analyse into strings of individual
speech sounds.
- For instance, the English word fish, when pronounced, is a continuous stretch of sound and
not [f]+[I]+[ ʃ]. Still, speakers of English know that there are three distinct sounds in that
word: [f] and [I] and [ʃ].
- The minimal distinct sounds that we distinguish one after the other in the physical
continuum of speech are called speech sounds (= phones).
- Phonetics attempts to examine all and only the speech sounds used in human languages.
For instance, the sounds we produce when we sneeze or belch are not speech sounds in any
language, so they have no place in phonetics.
1.2 The tasks of phonetics
The main task of phonetic science is twofold, it is to provide a notation and description for
each speech sound. By notation we mean a system of transcription symbols whereby we can
make an accurate and unambiguous record of what goes on in speech.
- In English there are 26 basic letters but considerably more speech sounds that we can
distinguish. The transcription system which contains symbols for the hundred or so speech
sounds that can be distinguished in human language is known as the International Phonetic
Alphabet (= IPA).
The other main aim of phonetics is the description (characterisation) of speech sounds. This
is done in terms of phonetic features. In order to understand these features, we have to get
acquainted with the articulatory organs. These are schematically shown in the diagram
below.

Factors relevant for the classification of consonants include voicing, the manner of articulation,
and the place of articulation.

Voicing: one characteristic feature of speech sounds is, for instance, the presence or absence
of vocal cord vibration during the production of the sound.
- Voiced sounds (or [+voice]), e.g. [b, d, g, v, ð , z, ʒ].
- Voiceless sounds (or [–voice]), e.g. [p, t, k, f, θ , s, ʃ ].
Nasality: another feature of speech sounds is, for example, the presence or absence of
nasality. The air, leaving the glottis, arrives at a cavity called the pharynx, from which it can
go on to two further cavities: the nose and the mouth, i.e. the nasal cavity and the oral
cavity.
These two are separated from each other by the roof of the mouth. The roof has several
parts. Just behind the upper front teeth is the alveolar ridge, then comes the hard palate or
palate, followed by the soft palate or velum.

- When the back of the velum, i.e. the uvula is raised, the passage through the nose is cut off
and the air can only escape through the mouth. Sounds produced in this way are oral
[–nasal], e.g. [b, d, g]. If, however, the back of the velum is lowered, the air can escape
through the nose and the mouth. Sounds produced this way are nasal [+nasal], e.g. [m, n, ŋ].

Consonants can be described in terms of place and manner of articulation. Here

We distinguish eight classes of these consonants according to place of articulation.

- Bilabials ([p, b, m, w]) are produced between the two lips,

- Labiodentals ([f, v]) between the upper front teeth and the lower lip,
- Dentals ([θ, ð]) between the upper front teeth and the tip of the tongue,
- Alveolars ([t, d, s, z, n, l, r]) between the alveolar ridge and the front of the tongue,
- Palatoalveolars ([ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ]) in the postalveolar region,
- Palatals in the area of the hard palate ([j]),
- Velars ([k, g, ŋ]) in the area of the soft palate or velum, and finally
- Glottals ([?], called the ‘glottal stop’, and [h]) are produced in the glottis.

With regard to the manner of articulation, English consonants can be classified into plosives,
fricatives, affricates, nasals, liquids, and semi-vowels.
- Plosives (also known as oral stops) [p, b, t, d, k, g, ?]: a complete closure is made between
two articulatory organs, behind which the air-pressure builds up and is then released
explosively. air-pressure builds up and is then released explosively.
- Fricatives (also known as spirants) [f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h]: two articulatory organs form a
narrowing so that the air stream passing through causes friction.
- Affricates [tʃ, dʒ]: complete closure is made but is released slowly, so that friction can be
heard.
- Nasals (also known as nasal stops) [m, n, ŋ]: complete closure is made somewhere in the
mouth but the air escapes continuously through the nose.
- Liquids: these are sounds of the types [l, r].
- Glides or semi-vowels [w, j]: there is a narrowing but it is not narrow enough to cause
friction.

Plosives, fricatives and affricates are produced with a stricture impeding the flow of air, and
therefore they can be called obstruents; while nasals, liquids and glides are produced with a
relatively free airflow, and can be called sonorants.
Vowels can be represented with regard to the horizontal and vertical tongue position within
the oral cavity. If you raise the front of your tongue as close to the hard palate as you can
without actually reaching it, you produce a close (high) front vowel: [i]. If you lower the front
of your tongue as far from the hard palate as possible, you get an open (low) front vowel: [a].
Now if you divide the distance between the tongue positions for [i] and [a] into three equal
parts, you get the half-close front [e], and the half-open front [ɜ]. If you do the same
movements with the back of your tongue, you will get the close back vowel [u], the half-close
back [ɒ], the half-open back [ɔ], and the open back [ɑ]. The 8 vowels so obtained are called
cardinal vowels. See the Cardinal Vowel Chart below.

The most important simple vowels of English are shown in chart above. They are called
simple because the particular tongue position characterising the vowel in each case is steady
throughout producing the vowel. The vowels in the triangle of the chart are central vowels,
those on the left of the triangle are front, those on the right of the triangle are back vowels.
The encircled vowels are produced with lip-rounding: they are round vowels. The vowels
whose symbols have a colon (:) attached to them are long vowels.
In English there are diphthongs as well. A diphthong is a complex vowel during the
production of which one tongue position is changed into another but no new syllable is
formed. For instance, the vowels in the words height, hate, house, hose, i.e. [aI, eI, ɑʊ, әʊ],
are diphthongs.
Consonants and vowels together can be called segments. Since phonetics primarily deals
with these, the major part of phonetics is segmental phonetics. But phonetics has to deal
with other aspects of human speech as well, viz. aspects characterising larger units than
segments. This kind of phonetics is called suprasegmental phonetics. The suprasegmental
aspects of speech include intonation (the meaningful melody of utterances) and stress (the
extra prominence of a syllable over the other syllables in a word or phrase).
2. Phonology
While phonetics deals with the articulatory, acoustic and auditory aspects of actual speech sounds,
phonology ignores all non-distinctive detail and limits its attention strictly to the really distinctive
speech sounds, i.e. the basic sounds or phonemes, which form systems in a particular language. The
key notion of phonology is that of contrast.
A phoneme is an abstract minimal sound unit of a particular language, which, when realised, is
capable of distinguishing different words in that language. Phonemes can be discovered by the
minimal pair technique. If replacing one sound by another results in a different word, the two sounds
represent different phonemes and the two words form a minimal pair.

For instance, the English consonants [k] and [s] represent two different phonemes because they
distinguish e.g. [li:k] leak and [li:s] lease, and since the two words are otherwise identical, they form a
minimal pair. The minimal pair technique is based on the notion of paradigmatic relationship.
By means of the minimal pair technique we can distinguish phonemes in Standard British English.
(The pronunciation of Standard British English is sometimes referred to as Received Pronunciation, or
just RP) Actually, the so-called “important sounds” of English which we saw so far, except for the
glottal stop [?], are all phonemes of Standard British English.
When we transcribe speech sounds from the point of view of the phonemes that they represent, we
ignore all non-phonemic (i.e. non-distinctive) detail, and use a phonemic transcription. This is
normally put between slashes: / /. In phonemic transcription we use as many symbols as there are
phonemes. Consequently there are fewer symbols in phonemic transcription than in narrow phonetic
transcription.

For example, the phonemic transcription of the word tool, /tu:l/, omits non-phonemic details such as
the aspiration of the initial [th] or the darkness of the final [ɫ]. These would be included in a narrow
phonetic transcription: [thu:ɫ].

The myriads of actual speech sounds or phones that realise a phoneme in a language are grouped
into a small number of allophones.

Allophones are the positional variants of a phoneme: they are phonetically similar and are in
complementary distribution. For instance, in Standard British English the phoneme /l/ has two
allophones: a clear [l], which occurs before vowels, and a dark [ɫ], which occurs elsewhere, cf. lip [lɪp]
and Helen [helәn] vs. film [fɪɫm] and hill [hɪɫ].
Other examples include the English phoneme /p/, which also has two allophones: an aspirated [ph] at
the beginning of a stressed syllable and an unaspirated [p] elsewhere, as in port [phɔ:t] and sport
[spɔ:t].

Another example: any English vowel gets a nasal allophone when it is adjacent to a nasal consonant
but an oral allophone elsewhere, cf. pen [phẽn] vs. pet [phet].

The environment conditions the allophones of a phoneme and so their properties are predictable or
redundant. Since allophonic variations are not reflected in phonemic transcription, the examples
given in this lesson are phonemically transcribed as /lɪp/, /ᶥhelәn/, /fɪlm/, /hɪl/, /pɔ:t/, /spɔ:t/, /pen/,
/pet/.

From the adjectives phonetic and phonemic the terms etic /ᶥetɪk/ and emic / i:mɪk/ have been
abstracted, referring to two kinds of approach which can be distinguished in various types of linguistic
studies.

The etic approach deals with all data of a given kind, while the emic approach studies the structuring
of data into systemic abstract entities on the basis of their distinctive power in a given language. In
the field of sounds the emic approach is concerned with phonemes, the etic approach with
allophones.

Structuralist phonology looked upon phonemes as the ultimate building blocks of language.
Generative phonology has claimed that phonemes should be decomposed into bundles (sets) of
binary distinctive features. (Binary here means ‘having two values’.)

For example, the English phonemes /p/, /b/, /m/. They all share the properties of being consonantal
[+consonantal] and being pronounced with the lips [+labial], but only /b/ and /m/ are voiced [+voice],
and only /m/ is [+nasal], and so on.

(5) Feature Specifications

p b m
consonantal + + +
labial + + +
voiced − + +
nasal − − +

Any feature which distinguishes one phoneme from another is a distinctive feature (DF). For instance,
/p/ and /b/ differ in voice, /b/ and /m/ differ in nasality. Each phoneme, then, can be characterised as
a bundle of DF specifications, i.e. a column of + and − marks representing the values of the features.