LINGUISITICS REVIEW- FALL 2013
PHONETICS
Study of speech sounds, phones
History of English: European influences, changes in pronunciations and symbols for orthography (great vowel shift- started pronouncing vowels differently).
Diphthongs- two vowel sounds that morph into one; mouth starts in one position and shifts.
Primary stress- strongest stress in a word; raised tick mark; louder, longer
Vocal tract anatomy
1. Larynx- vocal folds (voiced sounds when vocal folds are vibrating and closed, voiceless sounds when there is no vibration and there is more space between the folds).
2. Oral cavity- resonator; amplifies sounds, differentiates sounds by changing shape.
3. Active articulators (move): lower lip, tongue tip, blade, body, root, vocal folds
(to make sound, raise or lower active articulator to a passive articulator).
4. Passive articulators (active articulators move towards): alveolar ridge, upper lip, teeth, hard palate (roof), velum (soft palate), glottis
Consonants: voicing, place of articulation, oral or nasal, manner of articulation (VPNM)
1. Voicing: vibrating- voiced, no vibration- voiceless
2. Place of articulation (where a constriction of vocal tract is made): bilabial (both lips), labiodental (lower lip to upper teeth), inter-dental (tongue tip between teeth), alveolar (tongue tip/blade on/near alveolar ridge), post-alveolar (tongue blade behind alveolar ridge), palatal (front of tongue body near hard palate), velar (back of tongue body on or near soft palate), glottal
3. Nasality- if velum is lowered so that air can flow into the nasal cavity, the sound is nasal [m], [n], [ɳ]
Oral (velum lowered) - all other consonants of English
4. Manner of articulation
Stops- full constriction, fully stop air flow
Fricatives- narrow constriction, air rushes through to make hissing noise
Affricates- stop with a fricative release
Approximants- wide construction, air flows freely Liquids Glides
Vowels
Height: high, mid, low
Backness: back, central, front
Rounding: rounded or unrounded
Tenseness: tense or lax
PHONOLOGY
Phonotactics- restrictions of a language concerning combinations of phonemes
Phonotactic constraints- restrictions on possible combinations of sounds; language specific
(Syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences).
What sequences of sounds are possible in what positions (beginning, end) in words of language
Phonotactic constraints apply to all words of a language, native or not. When a word is borrowed from another language and violates the native language’s phonotactic rules, speakers alter it by inserting and/or dropping sounds (delete consonant or add vowel between consonants).
Applying phonotactic constraints of one language while speaking another is a source for foreign accents (ex. Spanish speaker speaking English make say [εstudεnt] because in Spanish consonant clusters such as [st] cannot occur at the beginning of a word without a vowel).
Another source of foreign accents is differences in sound systems (some languages use sounds that are not included in other languages; substitution).
If two sounds belong to the same phoneme, they are allophones of the same phoneme and appear in different contexts (complementary, predictable).
We use phonemes and not phonetic representations because they exaggerate the differences between words, make them easier to articulate and make sounds easier to distinguish.
To find out if two sounds belong to the same phoneme, determine whether they are in complementary distribution (appear in different contexts) by making a chart of their contexts from the data provided and look for minimal or near-minimal pairs (two words that differ only in a single sound in the same position, changes meaning). If two sounds appear in the same environments (overlapping distribution) they are allophones of different phonemes. If two phonetically similar sounds appear in different contexts (complementary) they are allophones