ENGLISH LINGUISTICS
REVIEW
PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
1.Phonetics and Phonology
a.What is phonetics?
*Phonetics and articulators/organs of speech
*Articulatory Phonetics:
*Auditory Phonetics:
*Acoustic Phonetics
*3 aspects of the study of phones/sounds:
-physical: articulation, height, length, quality, loudness, pitch,
melody
-accent: regional characteristics
-social: phonetically distinctive features, social effect
Phoneme - Phone - Allophone
1.Speech sounds are the movements of the air through human articulators (organs
of speech). The air moves through
* the nasal cavity (the nose), nasal sounds /m, n, …/ appear;
* the oral cavity (the mouth), oral sounds /p, b, f, v, t, d, …/ appear;
* the two lips, bi-labial sounds /p, b, m,…/ appear…
2.Unit of Phonetics and Phonology: Phoneme, phone, and allophone:
* A phonetic unit or segment is called a phone.
* A phoneme is a more abstract unit. It is defined as the smallest unit of language
existing as such a speech - sound which is capable of distinguishing one word from
another or one grammatical form of a word from another form of the same word.
* An allophone can be defined as a predictable phonetic variant of a phoneme. An
actually pronounced speech sound is always a variant ( allophone) of a phoneme.
Different allophones of one and the same phonemes are speech sounds which have one
or more articulatory features and, therefore, acoustic features in common and at the
same time differ from each other in some (usually slight) degree because of the
influence of their position, of the neighboring speech sounds and of other purely
phonetic factors upon them.
* An allophone is a variant of a phoneme. The allophones of a phoneme form
a set of sounds that
(a) do not change the meaning of a word,
(b) are all very similar to one another, and
(c) occur in phonetic contexts different from one another and
(d) have non -distinctive differences.
* In other words,
+ Phoneme is the minimal meaningless unit of language. It contains a
bundle of phonetic distinctive features,
e.g. / i: / [vocalic] [front] [long] [unrounded] [close] [high];
/ k / [consonantal] [velar] [stop/plosive] [voiceless]
