UNDERSTANDING
OF ENGLISH PHONOLOGY
ARRANGED
BY:
Name : Ratnasari Simanjuntak 12120452
Agnes Novita Pakpahan 12120454
Ade Putri Pasaribu
Hendra Gunawan Sinaga
FACULTY
OF EDUCATION AND TEACHER TRAINING HKBP UNIVERSITY
PEMATANGSIANTAR
2013
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Praise
and gratitude we
say the presence of
almighty God upon His grace
one because we
can complete the preparation of this paper. Do not forget
we like to thank our
lecturers Yanti Kristina Sinaga,
S. Pd for the opportunity
and the time given to us to prepare
this paper.
The title that we gave our paper is the Understanding of English Phonology. The paper is organized as the final project of the semester and at the same time as a material consideration.
In preparing this paper we realize that there are many faults and shortcomings. Therefore we accept criticism and suggestions from readers for future perfection of this paper. This book would be useful for a deeper understanding of learning english phonology.
The title that we gave our paper is the Understanding of English Phonology. The paper is organized as the final project of the semester and at the same time as a material consideration.
In preparing this paper we realize that there are many faults and shortcomings. Therefore we accept criticism and suggestions from readers for future perfection of this paper. This book would be useful for a deeper understanding of learning english phonology.
Pematangsiantar, Juli 2013
Editor
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
INRODUCTION
Whereas syntax is about sentence
formation, and semantics about sentence interpretation, phonetics and phonology
cover the field of sentence utterance. Phonetics is concerned with how sounds
are produced, transmitted and perceived (we will only look at the production of
sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in relation to each
other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about sounds of language,
phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool necessary
to the study of the phonological aspects of a language.
Phonetics and phonology are worth
studying for several reasons. One is that as all study of language, the study
of phonology gives us insight into how the human mind works. Two more reasons
are that the study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a much better
ability both to hear and to correct mistakes that we make, and also to teach pronunciation
of the foreign language (in this case English) to others. As phonetics and
phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling and English
pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that you keep in
mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. For instance,
English has not 5 or 6 but 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all
written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u,
y". The orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please,
and the phonetic transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the word please
consists of three consonants, [p,l,z], and one vowel, [i:]. And sounds
considered from the phonological point of view are put between slashes.
CHAPTER
1
BACKGROUND
This paper is arranged to introductory on English
phonology of the sort taught in the first year of The English Language. The
students on such courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology ; it is
sometimes difficult to see past the new symbols and terminology, and the
apparent assumption that we can immediately become consciously aware of
movements of the vocal organs which we have been making almost automatically
for the last eighteen or more years. This paper attempts to show us why we need
to know about phonetics and phonology, if we are interested in language and our
knowledge of it, as well as introducing the main units and concepts we require
to describe speech sounds accurately. The study of language in
general is called linguistic. Which may be subdivided into phonology and
grammar.
Phonology is the
study of phones or speech sounds while grammar is the study of the meaningful units
of sound and their arrangement into phonology and grammar. The study of speech
sound may be carried out from different. When we study pitch sounds : as sound
without regard to regard to their function as signaling units of language
science is called “ phonetics”. Study speech sounds with a view to finding out
the significant units of sounds in a given language. The science is called
“phonemics”. the significant units of sounds distinguish utterances and are
called phonemes. Phonetics is druid into two kinds namely Articulator phonetics
and acoustics. Articulator phonetics stress speech sounds from the point of
view of their ways of production by the speech organs. Acoustics on the other
hand, studies speech sound from the point of view of their physical attributes
and deal among other with measuring the loudness, pitches and natural
characteristics of sounds.
CHAPTER
2
DISCUSSION
1.
Phonetic
and Phonology
Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it has often been
suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have
soundbased signalling systems, and can communicate with other members of the
same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching danger or
where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leaving aside for now native
users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signalling; but the structure
of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be
used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.
There are two subdisciplines in linguistics
which deal with sound, namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of
this book, which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English
accents and how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will need aspects
of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing and analysing the
range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically, articulatory
phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in
producing the different sounds of the world’s languages. Those sounds are then
transmitted from the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics
focus on the physics of speech as it travels through the air in the form of
sound waves, and the effect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It
follows that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology,
physics and neurology. However, although knowing what sounds we can in
principle make and use is part of understanding what makes us human, each
person grows up learning and speaking only a particular human language or languages,
and each language only makes use of a subset of the full range of possible,
producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of
the English sound system that make it specifically English, and different from
French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain of phonology, which is the
language-specific selection and organisation of sounds to signal meanings.
Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and
in what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be
speakers of those languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology. Our
phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarily access and talk
about in detail: we often have intuitions about language without knowing where
they come from, or exactly how to express them. But the knowledge is certainly
there. For instance, speakers of English will tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word, whereas
*fnil is not possible (as the asterisk
conventionally shows). In the usual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while
*fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the
rules of the English sound system.
However,
English speakers are not consciously aware of those rules, and are highly
unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those words that the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initial consonant
sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likely answer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your
informant will produce similar words like sniff or
snip to back up her argument), but that *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the
phonologist to express generalisations of this sort in precise terms: after
all, just because knowledge is not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal,
unimportant or not worth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t
consciously think ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus
maximus, right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely
to make any conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go
downstairs in the first place; and relatively few people will know the names of
the muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individual activities
involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process: think about what
you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. All of this is very
reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. We decide to speak, and
what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech production are beyond our
conscious reach; and thinking deliberately about what we are saying, and how we
are saying it, is likely to cause selfconsciousness and hesitation,
interrupting the flow of fluent speech rather than improving matters. Both
language and mobility (crawling, walking, running downstairs) emerge in
developing children by similar combinations of mental and physical maturation,
internal abilities, and input from the outside world. As we go along, what we
have learned becomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of what
complexity lies behind our actions when we realise we have made a speech error,
or see and hear a child struggling to say a word or take a step. Phonologists,
like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help us understand the nature of that
underlying complexity, and to describe fully and formally what we know in a
particular domain, but don’t know we know. The relationship between phonetics
and phonology is a complex one, but we might initially approach phonology as
narrowed-down phonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the
whole range of possible human sounds, including some which they never hear from
parents or siblings: a baby in an English-speaking environment will spontaneously
make consonants which are not found in any European language, but are to be
found closest to home in an African language, say, or one from the Caucasus.
However,
that child will then narrow down her range of sounds from the full human
complement to only those found in the language(s) she is hearing and learning,
and will claim, when later trying to learn at school another language with a
different sound inventory, that she cannot possibly produce unfamiliar sounds she
made perfectly naturally when only a few months old. Or within a language,
subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utterance of the same
word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fraction different from every
other; yet hearers who share that language will effortlessly identify the same
word in each case. In this sense, phonetics supplies an embarrassment of
riches, providing much more information than speakers seem to use or need: all
those speakers, and every utterance different! Phonology, on the other hand,
involves a reduction to the essential information, to what speakers and hearers
think they are saying and hearing. The perspective shifts from more units to
fewer, from huge variety to relative invariance, from absolutely concrete to
relatively abstract; like comparing the particular rose I can see from my
window, or roses generally in all their variety (old-fashioned, bushy, briar; scented
or not; red, yellow, shocking pink), to The Rose, an almost ideal and abstract
category to which we can assign the many different actual variants. A white
dog-rose, a huge overblown pink cabbage rose, and a new, genetically engineered
variety can all be roses with no contradiction involved. In linguistic terms,
it’s not just that I say tomahto
and you say tomayto;
it’s that I say tomahto
and tomahto and
tomahto, and the three utterances are subtly
different, but we both think I said the same thing three times.
2.
The
phoneme
Children do not learn the rules of spoken
language by explicit instruction,but rather by a combination of copying what
they hear, and building up mental generalisations based on their experiences.
How much they are helped in this by some internal structure in the brain
dedicated to language acquisition, which linguists call a Language Acquisition Device
or Language Faculty, is still a matter of debate. Nonetheless, aspects of
spoken language show very strong similarities to the types of patterns outlined
above for writing. Again, some differences between units matter, because
replacing one with another will cause a different meaning to be conveyed in the
language in question: replace the initial sound [k] in call with [t], and you have tall, an entirely different English word. Correspondingly, English
speakers perceive [k] and [t] as entirely separate sounds, and find them rather
easy to distinguish. In other cases, two sounds which phoneticians can equally
easily tell apart will be regarded as the same by native speakers. For
instance, say the phrase kitchen
cupboard to yourself, and think
about the first sounds of the two words. Despite the difference in spelling
(another case where orthography, as we saw also in the last chapter, is not an
entirely reliable guide to the sounds of a language), native speakers will tend
to think of those initial consonants as the same – both are [k]s. However, if
you say the phrase several times, slowly, and think uncharacteristically
carefully about whether your articulators are doing the same at the beginning
of both words, you will find that there is a discernible difference. For the first
sound in kitchen, your tongue will be raised towards the roof
of your mouth, further forward than for the beginning of cupboard; and for kitchen, your
lips will be spread apart a little more too, while for cupboard your mouth will be more open. Unless you are
from Australia or New Zealand, this difference is even clearer from the phrase car keys, this time with the first word having the initial
sound produced further back in the mouth, and the second further forward.
In IPA
terms, these can be transcribed as [k], the cupboard sound,
and [c], the kitchen
one. However, in English [k] and [c] do not
signal different meanings as [k] and [t] do in call versus tall;
instead, we can always predict that [k] will appear before one set of vowels,
which we call back vowels, like the [_] of cupboard or the [ɑ_] a
Southern British English speaker has in car, while
[c] appears before front vowels, like the [] of kitchen or the [i_] in
Southern British English keys. Typically, speakers control predictable
differences of this type automatically and subconsciously, and sometimes resist
any suggestion that the sounds involved, like [k] and [c] in English, are
different at all, requiring uncharacteristically close and persistent listening
to tell the two apart. The difference between [k] and [c] in English is
redundant; in phonological terms, this means the difference arises
automatically in different contexts, but does not convey any new information. Returning
to our orthographic analogy, recall that every instance of a hand-written a or A
will be different from every other instance,
even produced by the same person. In just the same way, the same speaker producing
the same words (say, multiple repetitions of kitchen cupboard ) will produce minutely different instances of [k] and [c]. However,
a hierarchical organisation of these variants can be made: in terms of spelling,
we can characterise variants as belonging to the lower-case or capital set, and
those in turn as realisations of the abstract grapheme <a>. The
subclasses have a consistent and predictable distribution, with upper-case at
the beginnings of proper nouns and sentences, and lower case everywhere else:
we can say that this distribution is rule-governed.
Similarly
again, we can classify all the variants we hear as belonging to either fronter
[c] or backer [k], although we are not, at least without a little phonetic
consciousness-raising, aware of that difference in the way we are with a and A; presumably the fact that we learn writing
later, and with more explicit instruction, accounts for our higher level of
awareness here. In turn, [c] and [k], which native speakers regard as the same,
are realizations of an abstract unit we call the phoneme (where the ending -eme, as in grapheme, means ‘some abstract unit’). Phonemes
appear between slash brackets, and are conventionally represented by IPA
symbols, in this case /k/. As with graphemes, we could in principle use an
abstract symbol for this abstract unit, say /§/, or /❂/, or give it a number or a name: but again,
it is convenient and clear to use the same symbol as one of its realisations.
Those realisations, here [k] and [c], are allophones of the phoneme /k/. To
qualify as allophones of the same phoneme, two (or more) phones, that is
sounds, must meet two criteria. First, their distribution must be predictable:
we must be able to specify where one will turn up, and where the other; and
those sets of contexts must not overlap. If this is true, the two phones are
said to be in complementary distribution. Second, if one phone is exceptionally
substituted for the other in the same context, that substitution must not
correspond to a meaning difference. Even if you say kitchen cupboard with the [k] first and the [c] second (and
that won’t be easy, because you have been doing the opposite as long as you
have been speaking English – it will be even harder than trying to write at
your normal speed while substituting small a for
capital A and vice versa), another English speaker will
only notice that there is something vaguely odd about your speech, if that. She
may think you have an unfamiliar accent; but crucially, she will understand
that you mean ‘kitchen cupboard’, and not something else. This would not be so where
a realisation of one phoneme is replaced by a realisation of another: if the
[k] allophone of /k/ is replaced by the [t] allophone of /t/, then tall will be understood instead of call. Finally, just as the orthographic rules can vary between languages
and across time, so no two languages or periods will have exactly the same phonology.
Although in English [k] and [c] are allophones of the same phoneme, and are
regarded as the same sound, in Hungarian they are different phonemes. We can
test for this by looking for minimal pairs: that is, pairs of words differing
in meaning, where the only difference in sound is that one has one of the two
phones at issue where the other has the other (think of tall and call). In
Hungarian, we find minimal pairs like kuka [kuka]
‘dustbin’ and kutya
[kuca] ‘dog’. It follows that [k] and [c] are
not in complementary but in contrastive distribution; that interchanging them
does make a meaning difference between words; and hence that [k] and [c] belong
to different phonemes, /k/ and /c/ respectively, in Hungarian. Unsurprisingly,
speakers of Hungarian find the difference between [k] and [c] glaringly
obvious, and would be extremely surprised to find that English speakers
typically lump them together as the same sound. As for differences between periods
of the same language, it is straightforward to demonstrate that Modern English
[f ] and [v] contrast, or are in complementary distribution, since minimal
pairs like fat [f ] versus vat [v], leaf versus leave,
or safer versus saver are
easy to come by. The phoneme system of Modern English therefore contains both
/f/ and /v/. However, the situation was very different in Old English, as the examples
in (3) show.
(3) Old
English
hla[v]ord
<hlaford> ‘lord’ heo[v]on <heofon> ‘heaven’
a[f
]ter <after> ‘after’ [f ]isc <fisc> ‘fish’
o[v]er
<ofer> ‘over’
heal[f
] <healf> ‘half ’
3.
The Speech Organs
All the organs shown
on figure (2) contribute to the production of speech. All the sounds of English
are made using air on its way out from the lungs. The lungs pull in and push
out air, helped by the diaphragm. The air goes out via the trachea, where the
first obstruction it meets is the larynx, which it has to pass through. Inside
the larynx the air passes by the vocal folds, which, if they vibrate, make the
sound voiced. Afterwards the air goes up through the pharynx, and escapes via
either the oral or the nasal cavity.
Figure (3) :
production of oral and nasal sounds. (Thomas 1976: 32)
Circle the parts that are modified in B to
produce nasal sounds.
Almost
all the organs involved in speech production also have other functions. The
lungs and the diaphragm are obviously involved in breathing, as is the nasal
cavity, which cleans, heats and humidifies the air that is breathed in. The
teeth and the tongue play a part in digestion, and in a way, so do the vocal
folds, as they have to be closed when swallowing, to keep the food from going
down the wrong way. There are 4 places in which a sound can be modified. You
have to add to this the fact that the vocal folds can vibrate.
Figure (4): sound
modification places. (Thomas 1976:33)
4. Consonants
On the way out the
air flow can be more or less obstructed, producing a consonant, or is simply modified,
giving a vowel. If you pronounce the first sound of the word paper you close your mouth
completely and that is the utmost obstruction, whereas if you pronounce the first sound of
the word after the mouth is more open than normal, the air flows as freely as it possibly can. Consonants are often
classified by being given a so-called VPM-label. VPM stands for Voicing, Place
and Manner:
-
voicing means that the vocal folds are used; if they are not, the sound is
voiceless (note that vowels always imply the use of vocal folds).
- place of articulation is the place where
the air flow will be more or less obstructed.
- manner is concerned with the nature of the
obstruction.
5.
Voicing
The larynx is in the
neck, at a point commonly called Adam's apple. It is like a box, inside which
are the vocal folds, two thick flaps of muscle. In a normal position, the vocal
folds are apart and we say that the glottis is open (figure a). When the edges
of the vocal folds touch each other, air passing through the glottis will
usually cause vibration (figure b). This opening and closing is repeated
regularly and gives what is called voicing.
Figure (5): voicing. (Roach
1983:23,25)
The
only distinction between the first sounds of sue
and zoo
for example is that [s] is voiceless, [z] is
voiced. The same goes for few and view, [f] is voiceless, [v] is voiced. If you now say
[ssssszzzzzsssss] or [fffffvvvvvfffff] you can either hear the vibrations of
the [zzzzz] or [vvvvv] by sticking your fingers into your ears, or you can feel
them by touching the front of your larynx (the Adam's Apple).
This distinction is quite important in English, as there are many
pairs of sounds that differ only in voicing. In the examples below the first
sound is voiceless, the other is voiced: pie/buy, try/dry, clue/glue, chew/Jew, thigh/thy. This distinction can also be made in between two vowels: rapid/rabid, metal/medal, or at the end
of a word: pick/pig, leaf/leave, rich/ridge. In English the following consonants are voiced: b, d, g, v,
ð ,
z, ʒ, l,
r, j, w, dʒ, m, n, ŋ
. The following ones are unvoiced: p, t, k, f, θ ,
s, ʃ
, h, tʃ
6.
Place of articulation
As we saw above
[p,t,k] are all voiceless, so there must be another way to distinguish between
them, otherwise we would not be able to tell try
apart from pry
or cry, or pick from tick or kick . Apart from the behaviour of the vocal folds, sounds can also be
distinguished as to where in the oral cavity they are articulated (i.e. where
in the mouth there is most obstruction when they are pronounced).
Figure
(6): places of articulation.(Roach 1983:8)
Bilabial sounds are produced
when the lips are brought together. Examples are [p], which is voiceless, as in
pay or
[b] and [m] which are voiced, as in bay, may.
Labiodental
sounds are made when the lower lip is raised
towards the upper front teeth. Examples are [f] safe (voiceless) and [v] save (voiced).
Dental
sounds are produced by touching the upper
front teeth withthe tip of the tongue. Examples are [θ] oath (voiceless) and [ð] clothe (voiced).
Alveolar
sounds are made by raising the tip of the
tongue towards the ridge that is right behind the upper front teeth, called the
alveolar ridge.
Examples
are [ t,s ] too,sue, both voiceless, and [d,z,n,l,r ] do, zoo, nook, look, rook,
all voiced.
Palatoalveolar sounds are made by raising the blade of the tongue towardsthe part of the palate just behind the alveolar ridge. Examples [ʃ, tʃ] pressure,batch (voiceless) and [ʒ, dʒ] pleasure, badge (voiced).
Palatal
sounds are very similar to palatoalveolar
ones, they are just produced further back towards the velum. The only palatal
sound in English is [ j ] as in yes, yellow, beauty, new and it is voiced.
Velar sounds are made by raising the back of the tongue towards the soft
palate, called the velum. Examples [k] back, voiceless, and [g, ŋ ] both voiced bag, bang. [w] is a velar
which is accompanied with lip rounding.
Glottal
sounds are produced when the air passes
through the glottis as it is narrowed: [h] as in high. (Figure(14):Roach
1983:25)
7. Manners of Articulation.
We can now
distinguish between English consonants from two points of view, that of
voicing, and that of place. We can see that [b] and [t] are different in both
respects, [b] is voiced and bilabial, and [t] is voiceless and alveolar. [p]
differs from [b] only in being voiceless, as both are bilabial, and [p] differs
from [t] only in being bilabial, as both are voiceless.
There are still pairs
of sounds where we cannot yet describe the difference of one from the other,
e.g. [b,m] bend, mend as both are voiced and bilabial, and [t,s] ton, son which both are
voiceless and alveolar. As the examples show, we can however tell the words
apart, and this is because the sounds are different in a way we have not yet
discussed, and that is with respect to their manner of articulation. The manner
of articulation has to do with the kind of obstruction the air meets on its way
out, after it has passed the vocal folds. It may meet a complete closure
(plosives), an almost complete closure (fricatives), or a smaller degree of
closure (approximants), or the air might escape in more exceptional ways,
around the sides of the tongue (laterals), or through the nasal cavity
(nasals).
Plosives are sounds in which there is a complete closure in the mouth, so
that the air is blocked for a fraction of a second and then released with a
small burst of sound, called a plosion (it sounds like a very small explosion).
Plosives may be bilabial [p,b] park, bark, alveolar [t,d] tar, dark or velar [k,g] car, guard. There is a fourth kind of plosive, the glottal stop. The word football can be
pronounced without interruption in the middle as in [fTtbN:l] or with a complete closure of the glottis instead of [t]: [fT>bN:l]. In English a voiceless plosive that occurs at the begining of
a word and is followed by a vowel, is rather special in the sense that at the
release of a plosion one can hear a slight puff of air (called aspiration)
before the vowel is articulated. Hence in “pen “we hear [pçen]. These aspirated voiceless plosives are not considered to be
different sounds from unaspirated voiceless plosives from the point of view of
how they function in the sound system. This difference, which can be clearly
heard, is said to be phonetic.
Fricatives have
a closure which is not quite complete. This means that the air is not blocked
at any point, and therefore there is no plosion. On the other hand the
obstruction is big enough for the air to make a noise when it passes through
it, because of the friction. This effect is similar to the wind whistling around
the corner of a house. Fricatives may be labiodentals [f,v] wife, wives, dental [θ , ð ] breath, breathe, alveolar [s,z] sink, zinc, palato-alveolar [ʃ , ʒ ] nation, evasion, or glottal [h] help. [h] is a glottal
fricative. As it has no closure anywhere else, and as all air passes between
the vocal folds, this means that [h] is like aspiration unaccompanied by any
obstruction. A distinction may be made
between sibilant and non-sibilant fricatives. Sibilant sounds are the fricatives with a clear
"hissing" noise, [_s,z,
ʃ, ʒ
] and the two affricates [tʃ, dʒ] choke, joke.
Affricates are
a combination of a plosive and a fricative (sometimes they are called
"affricated plosives"). They begin like a plosive, with a complete
closure, but instead of a plosion, they have a very slow release, moving
backwards to a place where a friction can be heard (palatoalveolar). The two
English affricates are both palatoalveolar, [tʃ ] which is voiceless,
chin, rich, and [dʒ ]
which is voiced, gin, ridge. The way an affricate resembles a plosive followed by a fricative
is mirrored in the symbols. Both consist of a plosive symbol followed by a
fricative one: [ t+ʃ], [d+ʒ].
Nasals
resemble plosives, except that there is a
complete closure in the mouth, but as the velum is lowered the air can escape
through the nasal cavity. Though most sounds are produced with the velum
raised, the normal position for the velum is lowered, as this is the position
for breathing (your velum is probably lowered right now when you are reading
this). The three English nasals are all voiced, and [m] is bilabial, ram, [n] is alveolar, ran, and [M] velar, rang. In the section on places, the dotted line on the pictures of
bilabial, alveolar, and velar articulations illustrate the three nasals.
Laterals
are sounds where the air escapes around the
sides of the tongue. There is only one lateral in English, [l], a voiced
alveolar lateral. It occurs in two versions, the socalled "clear l"
before vowels, light, long, and the "dark l" in other cases, milk, ball. Words like little, lateral have one of each
type. "Dark l" may be written with the symbol [4]. "Clear l" is pronounced with the top of the tongue
raised, whereas for "dark l " it is the back of the tongue which is
raised. Here again, as with aspirated and unaspirated voiceless plosives, even
though "clear l" and "dark l" are phonetically different,
they cannot be said to be different sounds from the point of view of how they
function in the sound system. If you produce a "dark l" where usually
you have a "clear l", for example at the beginning of the word long, your pronunciation
will sound odd but nobody will understand a different word.
Figure 15: clear and
dark “l”.(Thomas 1976:44)
Approximants are sounds where the tongue only approaches the roof of the mouth,
so that there is not enough obstruction to create any friction. English has
three approximants, which are all voiced. [r] is alveolar, right, brown, sometimes called
post-alveolar, because it is slightly further back that the other alveolar
sounds [t,d,s,l]. [j] is a palatal approximant, use, youth, and [w] is a velar
approximant, why, twin, square. [w] always has lip-rounding as well, and therefore it is
sometimes called labio-velar. [r] only occurs before vowels in southern British
English, whereas other accents, e.g. Scottish, Irish, and most American ones,
also can have it after vowels. Therefore those accents can make a distinction
between e.g. saw and sore, which are pronounced exactly a like in southern British English.
The manners of
articulation can be put into two major groups, obtruents and sonorants. The
obstruents are plosives, fricatives and affricates, all sounds with a high
degree of obstruction. Obstruents usually come in pairs, one voiceless, one
voiced, e.g. [p/b, t/d]. Sonorants have much less obstruction and are all
voiced and therefore more sonorous. They include nasals, the lateral, and
approximants. The manners can be illustrated as in the following diagram:
Consonants
Obstruents
sonorants
Plosives
fricatives affricates nasals
lateral approximants
Table of the
Consonants
The discussion on
consonants above can be summarised in the table below (Roach
1983:52). A sound on
the left side of a column is voiceless, one on the right side is voiced.
|
Bilabial
|
Labiodental
|
Dental
|
Alveolar
|
Palato-alveolar
|
Palatal
|
Velar
|
Glottal
|
Plosive
|
p b
|
|
|
t d
|
|
|
k g
|
|
Fricative
|
|
f v
|
θ ð
|
|
ʃ ʒ
|
|
|
h
|
Affricate
|
|
|
|
s z
|
tʃ dʒ
|
|
|
|
Nasal
|
m
|
|
|
|
|
|
ŋ
|
|
Lateral
|
|
|
|
n
|
|
|
|
|
Approximant
|
w
|
|
|
l
|
r
|
j
|
|
|
Vowels
We shall first have a closer look at the way
in which vowels differ from consonants. Then we shall analyze vowels
phonetically, i.e. according to:
-
tongue position: how high in the mouth is the tongue, and which part of the
tongue is the highest?
- length: are the vowels long or short?
- rounding: are the lips rounded or not?
- nasality: is there free passage of air
through the nose?
- diphthongs: are they steady, or do they
somehow change in character?
The last section is a table of the vowels.
(There are other points of view which we shall not deal with here, since they
are irrelevant for our study).