Chapter II phonology II

Classification of English speech sounds

Vowels and Consonants

The basic difference between these two classes is that in the production of the former the airstream meets with no obstruction of any kind in the throat, the nose, or the mouth, while in that of the latter it is somehow obstructed.

Consonants

Manners of articulation Manners of articulation refer to the ways

of articulation which result in different degrees of obstruction against the airstream, such as complete, partial, or a mere narrowing of the oral tract. According to their manners of articulation, English consonants can be classified into the following groups:

Stops: [p] [b] [t] [d] [k] [g] Fricatives: [f] [v] [s] [z] [ſ] [ʒ] [Ө] [δ] [h] Affricates: [t ſ] [d ʒ] Liquids: [l] [r] Nasals: [m] [n] [ŋ] Glides: [w] [j]

Places of articulation

Places of articulation refer to the different parts of the vocal organs, which are involved in causing the obstruction of the airstream in the production of consonants. According to their places of articulation, English consonants can be classified into the following categories:

Bilabial: [p] [b] [m] [w] Labiodental: [f] [v] dental: [Ө][δ] Alveolar: [t] [d] [s] [z] [n] [l] [r] Palatal: [ſ] [ ] ʒ [t ſ] [dʒ] [j] Velar: [k] [g] [ŋ] Glottal: [h]

Classification of English vowels

Generally, according to their componential elements, English vowels can be classified into three categories: single vowels, diphthongs.

Single vowels

Single vowels contain a single element. They can be further classified according to different factors.

According to the position of the highest part of tongue in producing the sound, there are:

front vowels----[ i:], [i], [e] / [ε], [æ], [a ]central vowels----[ə:], [ə], [۸] back vowels—[u:], [u], [D:],[D],[a:]According to the degree of lip rounding, there are:unrounded vowelsrounded vowels According to the openness of the mouth:close vowelsSemi-close vowels Semi-open vowelsOpen vowels

Phonology Phonetics and phonology Both phonetics and phonology are concerned with the same

aspect of language, the speech sounds. But they approach the subject from two different points of view.

Phonetics studies the production and characteristics of all possible speech sounds, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. It is general, descriptive and classificatory.

Phonology is the study of sound systems of languages, which is concerned with the linguistic patterning of sounds in human languages, with its primary aim being to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur. It studies the way in which speakers of a language systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning.

Phone, phoneme and allophone

2.1 Phone（音素） Phone is a term used in phonetics to

refer to the smallest perceptible discrete segment of sound in a stream of speech. Phones do not necessarily distinguish words from each other.

Phoneme (音位 )

A phoneme is the minimal unit in the sound system of a language, according to traditional phonological theories; it is a unit that is of distinctive value, i.e. it can distinguish words. A phoneme is an abstract unit. It is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. For example, the phoneme /p/ is represented differently in [phit] and [sp=it]. The notion of the phoneme allowed linguists to group together sets of phonetically similar phones as variants or members of the same underlying unit. (To follow the convention, square brackets are used to indicate phones, and obliques phonemes.)

Allophones: the different phones which are

derived from one same phoneme are called allophones, or different phones which can represent a phoneme in a different phonetic environments are called allophones. Allophones are the variants of the same phoneme.

Phonemic contract; complementary distribution; minimal pair

Phonemic contrast

If two sounds sharing phonetic similarities are two distinctive phonemes, i. e. if they distinguish words, they are said to form a phonemic contrast, like /p/ and /b/, which are in contrastive distribution.

Complementary distribution The allophones of a phoneme do not

distinguish meaning or words, but complement each other in distribution, i.e. they occur in different phonetic environments. So they are said to be in complementary distribution.

Minimal pair(最小对立体 ) When two different words are identical in every

way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to have formed a minimal pair, like pill-bill, pill-till, and kill-bill.

All the words that are identical in form except for one sound segment occurring in the same place in the strings together constitute a minimal set.

The minimal pairs test is one of the early discovery procedures used in phonology to identify phonemes, sound units that are of distinctive value.

Distinctive features A distinctive feature is a phonetic

property which can distinguish one phoneme from another or one group of phonemes from another group. For example, voicing is a distinctive feature for English obstruents ( 阻塞音 ), including stops, fricatives and affricates.