UNIVERSITY SULTAN MOULAY SLIMANE

FACULTY OF ARTS & HUMANITIES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES
BENI-MELLAL

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

SEMESTER 4
Group 1

Pr. Zanzoun

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 INTRDUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

What is language?

It is a Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice
sounds, gestures, or written symbols.
More definitions Taken together, the following definitions will provide some preliminary indication
of the properties that linguists at least tend to think of as being essential to language . According to
Sapir (1921 : 8) , “language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas ,
emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols .” This definition has several defects.
However , one can not communicate with idea , ‘emotion’ and ‘desire’ ,it seems clear that there is
much that is communicated by language which is not preserved by any of them and the word ‘idea’
especially is inherently imprecise .
On the other hand , there are many systems of voluntarily produced symbols that one only count as
language in what one feels to be expanded or metaphorical sense of the word ‘language’. (Lyons ,
1981 : 1)
Bloch & Trager (1942 : 5) state that “ a language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means
of which a social group cooperates “ . This definition differs from Sapir’s in that it emphasizes the
social function of language. The Bloch & Trager definition also differs from Sapir’s in that it brings
in the property of arbitrariness and explicitly restricts language to spoken language. (ibid)
Hall (1968 : 158) states that language is “ the institution whereby humans communicate and
interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols “.
Both communication and interaction are introduced into the definition. The term ‘oral-auditory’ can
be taken to be almost equal to ‘vocal’ , differing from it only in the hearer and speaker and the receiver
as well as the sender of the vocal signals that one identifies as language-utterances). Hall , (ibid.) like
Sapir, treats language as a purely human institution. The term ‘institution’ makes explicit the view
that the language that is used by a particular society is part of that society’s culture. (ibid.) Chomsky
(1957 : 13) considers language “to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences . Each sentence is finite
in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements”. Unlike other definitions, it is meant to
cover much else besides natural languages.
However, according to Chomsky, all natural languages, in either their spoken or written form, are
languages in the sense of his definition: since (a) each natural language has a finite number of sounds
in it (and a finite number of letters in its alphabet-on presumption that it has an alphabetic writing
system); and (b) although there may be infinitely many distinct sentences in the language, each
sentences can be represented as a finite sequence of these sounds (or letters) , (ibid.)
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David Crystal (1989) states that the discussion may be summarized by referring to language as
human vocal noise (or graphic representation of this noise in writing) used systematically and
conventionally by a community for purposes of communication.

R.H Hobbins (1990) claims that language is a form of communication by means of a system of
symbols principally transmitted by vocal sounds.

The defining characteristics of human language can be easily deduced from the following definition
made by an American linguist, John B. Carrol, in his book entitled ‘The Study of Language’ (1953):
“Language is an arbitrary system of speech sounds or sequences of speech sounds which is used
or can be used in interpersonal communication by an aggregation of human being, and which
rather exhaustively catalogs things, processes, and events in the human environment.”
From the definition of language quoted above one can draw some basic characteristics of human
language, among others that language is systematic, arbitrary, spoken, social and complete.

1) It is systematic; Although the language is symbolic, yet its symbols are arranged in a particular system.
All languages have their system of arrangements. Though symbols in each human language are finite;
they can be arranged infinitely, that is to say, we can produce an infinite set of sentences t a finite set “of
symbols.

2) Language is said to be ‘arbitrary’ : By the arbitrariness of language, we mean: there is no inherent

or logical relation or similarity between given features of language and their meaning. Arbitrariness also
means that there is no direct, necessary connection between the nature of things or ideas and language.
In addition, these vary in different languages of the world and have no uniformity

3) Language is always spoken. This means that people always have a way of communicating ideas
by manipulating sounds that are produced by their vocal organs.

4) Language is said to be social, because it is only used in social group which involves at least
two people, the speaker and the hearer. Language is a special characteristic of humans or it can
also be regarded as a human criterion because only human beings speak a language. Language in
this sense is a possession of a social group, an indispensable set of rules which permits its members
to interact with each other to co-operate with each other: it is a social institution. Language exists in
society; it is a means of nourishing and developing culture and establishing human relations. It is as
a member of society that a human being acquires a language.

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 5) Language is said to be complete, not like animal’s means of communication. The use of human
language is not limited to biological needs. It is more complete in that it can always be used to
communicate about the culture of its native speakers.

George Yule’s main characteristics of human language

George Yule points out the following characteristics of human language:

1- Displacement: This is the ability to use language to talk about times, places and people other
than the ‘here and now’. It also enables us to say things which we know to be false i.e. to lie.
Bees are said to be able to convey some of this information in their ‘dance’ which they employ
to pass on information about food sources.

2- Arbitrariness: This means that there is generally no natural, inherent relationship between
the signs (i.e. sounds or letters) we produce and their meaning. For this reason different
languages can use different signs to refer to one and the same thing e.g. a flower in English is
a Blume in German or a fleur in French. The linguistic form has no natural or ‘iconic’
relationship with that beautiful plant out in the world. This aspect of the relationship between
linguistic signs and objects in the world is described as arbitrariness. However, there are
some words in language with sounds that seem to ‘echo’ the sounds of objects or activities
and hence seem to have a less arbitrary connection. English examples are cuckoo, CRASH,
slurp or squelch. However, these onomatopoeic words1, the sounds of which imitate what they
refer to, are relatively rare in human language.

3- Productivity: This is an important characteristic of human language allowing us to

continuously create new utterances, combining the ‘building bricks’ of language in ever new
ways, whether these be sounds, words or sentences. Human languages are therefore
continually evolving.

4- Cultural Transmission: While we may inherit physical features such as brown eyes and dark
hair from our parents, we do not inherit their language. We acquire a language in a culture
with other speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents in Korea,
but adopted and brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, will have
physical characteristics inherited from his or her natural parents, but will inevitably speak

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That is, their sounds “imitate” what they refer to.

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 English. This process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is
described as cultural transmission2. It is clear that humans are born with some kind of
predisposition to acquire language in a general sense. However, we are not born with the
ability to produce utterances in a specific language such as English. We acquire our first
language as children in a culture.

5- Duality: Duality (or ‘double articulation’) refers to two separate layers of language working
together to provide us with a pool of sounds which we can combine to communicate with one
another. On the one hand, we have a limited number of discrete sounds (e.g. the 44 phonemes
in English) which in isolation have no inherent meaning e.g. b, i, or n. On the other hand, we
have a virtually unlimited number of distinct meanings which we can create by combining
these sounds in certain ways e.g. bin, or nib. Various other combinations such as *bni are not
meaningful in English, but could possibly be in other languages.

Defining linguistics?

Linguistics refers to the scientific or systematic study of language. It is a science in the sense that it
scientifically studies the rules, systems and principles of human languages.
Linguistics is guided by three canons of science:
1) Exhaustiveness: it strives for thorough examination of relevant materials
2) Consistency: that is, there should be no contradiction between different parts of the total
statement.
3) Economy: a shorter statement or analysis is to be preferred to one that is longer or more complex
Linguistics has two main purposes: One is that it studies the nature of language and tries to establish
a theory of language and describes languages in the light of the theory established.
The other is that it examines all the forms of language in general and seeks a scientific understanding
of the ways in which it is organized to fulfill the needs it serves and the functions it performs in human
life.
Scope of linguistics
 Microlinguistics includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
pragmatics.

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The assumption is that there is no genetic component (although Noam Chomsky challenges this with his theory of
Universal Grammar) which would enable a child to simply start speaking e.g. English at a certain age, but rather that
children need to be exposed to a language (and culture) in order to acquire it.

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 Macrolinguistics includes sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, stylistics,
discourse analysis, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics.
Microlinguistics:
- Phonetics: The systematic study of the sounds of speech , how they are produced (articulatory
phonetics), how they are perceived (auditory or perceptual phonetics), and their physical
aspects (acoustic phonetics).
- Phonology is the study of sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that
includes the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their
combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems of all languages.
- Morphology is the study of the formation of words. It is a branch of linguistics which breaks
words into morphemes.
- Syntax: The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that
represents speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences. In other words,
syntax deals with the combination of words into phrases, clauses and sentences. It is the
grammar of sentence construction.
- Semantics: The study of the linguistic meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and
sentences. It is the study of meaning in all its formal aspects.
- Pragmatics is the study of how context and situation affect meaning; the study of language
in use. It deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from
linguistic knowledge alone, and how hearers arrive at the intended meaning of speakers.
Macrolinguistics:
- Socilinguistics studies the relations between language and society: how social factors
influence the structure and use of language.
- Psycholinguistics is the study of language and mind: the mental structures and processes
which are involved in the acquisition, comprehension and production of language.
Stylistics is the study of how literary effects can be related to linguistic features. It usually
refers to the study of written language, including literary text, but it also investigates spoken
language sometimes.
- Discourse analysis, or text linguistics is the study of the relationship between language and
the contexts in which language is used. It deals with how sentences in spoken and written
language form larger meaningful units.
- Computational linguistics is an approach to linguistics which employs mathematical
techniques, often with the help of a computer.

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 - Applied linguistics is primarily concerned with the application of linguistic theories,
methods and findings to the elucidation of language problems which have arisen in other areas
of experience.
Ferdinand De Saussure and the Beginnings of Modern Linguistics in Europe
Modern linguistics appeared both in Europe and the USA in beginning of the 20th century. In Europe
the study of language was characterised that time by two main features: the inheritance of a long
period of Traditional Grammar, and the predominantly historical interest of 19th century
Comparative Philology. Modern linguistics emerged as a kind of reaction against this background.
Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss scholar, was a comparative philologist himself (a professor of
Sanskrit at the University of Geneva), but his ideas about language and language study went far
beyond the limitations of Comparative Philology.
• He was the first to emphasise the difference between (a) language as an abstract system,
residing in the collective consciousness of the community (which he called la langue) and (b)
language as the realisation of that system (which he called la parole).
• He made a clear distinction between the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language
study, and argued for the primacy of the former by saying that the synchronic aspect of language
deals with language as a collection of simultaneous facts, existing as a state at a particular point of
time, whereas the diachronic regards language as a succession of states, so it is the states that have to
described first.
• Saussure, also made salient that linguistic signs enter into two kinds of relationship:
syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The syntagmatic relationship is a linear (horizontal, chain)
relationship, which exists between the signs that follow one another in a complex unit. For example,
the four words in ‘This coffee is strong’ are in a syntagmatic relationship: they are placed one after
the other along the syntagmatic axis, and each of the words has a particular environment or context
which consists of the other words on its left and right.
The paradigmatic relationship is a vertical (choice) relationship, which exists between a sign
present in a particular environment and all the other signs that could replace it while still yielding a
well-formed complex unit. For instance, coffee in the above sentence is in a paradigmatic relationship
with tea, student, girl, wall, light, whisky, cigar, etc., see (2).
(2) This (coffee, tea, student) is strong
Since Saussure’s time the notion of these two relationships has been extended to phonemes as well,
see (3).
(3) Bete, but, beat, bit, bought

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Synthesis of American Structuralist Linguistics

Leonard Bloomfield, and his followers, the Bloomfieldians, thought that a linguist should collect
observable data, i.e. real utterances, and analyse these data, i.e. segment and classify the physical
features of the utterances collected. A body of such data is a corpus. Using a corpus for linguistic
investigation is called the “corpus-based” or inductive procedure.
- In Chomsky’s terminology this means that American structuralism was preoccupied with
discovering and describing the E-language aspect of natural languages.
- The Bloomfieldians dealt with phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, but rejected
semantics.
- They used a strictly formal analysis. This was an analysis without reference to meaning,
and it was based on an examination of distribution and constituency.
- The distribution of a language element (i.e. of a phoneme or morpheme or word) is the sum
of all the environments in which it occurs. If two language elements always occur in different
environments, i.e. they occur in mutually exclusive environments, then there is not even one
environment in which one could replace the other. In this case we say that the two language elements
have totally different distributions: they are in complementary distribution. This means that where
one of them can occur, the other cannot occur, and vice versa.
- For instance, the English phoneme /l/ has two variants, and they are in complementary
distribution. The “clear” variant [l] occurs before vowels, e.g. [‘helin] Helen, and the “dark” variant
[ɫ] occurs elsewhere, i.e. before consonants, e.g. [heɫp] help and in word- final position, e.g. [heɫ] hell.
By contrast, if the distributions of two language elements are not entirely different, i.e. there is at least
one common environment in which one could replace the other, the two elements are not in
complementary distribution. In this case they are either in contrast or in free variation.
-Two language-elements are in contrast in a particular unit if replacing one by the other
changes the meaning of the unit. For example, English /e/ and /i:/ in the environment /m—t/ are in
contrast because /met/ does not mean the same as /mi:t/.
-If however replacing one language element by another in a particular unit does not change
the meaning of the unit, they are in free variation in that unit. For instance, the same two phonemes
/e/ and /i:/ are in free variation in the environment /—kә’nƿmiks/, because /i:kә’nƿmiks / means the
same as /ekә’nƿmiks /.
- The other important method of formal analysis which the Bloomfieldians introduced was
constituent analysis. (or “immediate constituent analysis” or “IC analysis”.) This means cutting
syntactic units (or words) into their constituents, then the constituents into their constituents, and so
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on until we reach the individual words (or morphemes). Cutting a unit into its constituents is based
on the test of substitution (replacement).
E.g., the sentence My friend ran home. can be divided into two: [My friend] and [ran home]
because My friend can be replaced by a simpler constituent, e.g. Peter; and because ran home can
also be replaced by a simpler constituent, e.g. slept. So we divide the sentence into [My friend] and
[ran home], and then, through further applications of the substitution test, these parts can be divided
into even smaller constituents. Constituent analysis can be visualised in essentially two ways, viz. by
bracketings, as in (1), or by tree diagrams, as in (2).
(1) [S[NP[Det My][N friend]] [VP[V ran] [Adv home]]].
(2) S
NP VP

Det N V Adv
My friend ran home.

- Constituent analysis was suitable for resolving certain ambiguities, by showing different
constituent structures, e.g.: (old (men and women)) vs. ((old men) and women).
Generative Linguistics:
However, there were lots of ambiguities which constituent analysis could not resolve. For instance,
“The lamb is ready to eat.” has two distinct meanings (is ambiguous), but the American structuralists
could give it only one analysis.
The growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of structuralist linguistics led to the emergence of a
radically new type of linguistic analysis towards the end of the 1950s. This has become known as
transformational-generative linguistics, or just generative linguistics (= generative grammar), for
short.
This kind of analysis distinguishes two levels of syntactic analysis: a surface structure or Sstructure
(which was recognised by the structuralists, too) and an underlying abstract deep structure or D-
structure (which was not recognised by the structuralists).
- Transformational-Generative grammar is transformational because it explains surface
structure as being derived from deep structure by a series of changes: transformations.
- For instance, the S-structure in (3b) is derived from the D-structure in (3a).

(3) a) He can study what (b) What 2 can1 he t1 study t2

- The S-structure in (3b) is an ordinary wh-question, whose more abstract, underlying
representation is the D-structure in (3a). But the latter can come to the surface unchanged, too, as

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He can study what?, and then it is an echo wh- question, which can be used e.g. as a surprised
response to He can study chiromancy.
- The founder and most influential representative to this day of generative linguistics has been
the American linguist Noam Chomsky, whose works have found a great many followers all over the
world.
- As we saw above, the Bloomfieldians were uninterested in general theoretical questions,
emphasised the differences between individual languages, and thought that the main purpose of
linguistics was to describe individual languages. In contrast, Chomsky holds that linguistics should
be primarily concerned with Universal Grammar, i.e. with the principles that are the properties of
all human languages.
- One of these principles is structure-dependence, which means that operations in a sentence
apply to phrases and not just words, i.e. these operations require a knowledge of the structural
relationships of words rather than just their linear sequence. For instance, when English speakers
transform a declarative sentence into a yes-or-no interrogative, the auxiliary they move is not simply
“the second word” of the declarative sentence, as a superficial observer might think on the basis of
(4a), but rather the word after the entire Noun Phrase that occupies the subject-slot of the declarative
sentence, as is shown in (4b).
(4) a. [NP John] will buy a car.
Will [NP John] — buy a car?
b. [NP The man who has sold his house] will buy a car. _
Will [NP the man who has sold his house] — buy a car?
According to Chomsky, generative grammar is a model for the native speaker’s intuitive
knowledge of the language (i.e. his internal grammar), a decisive part of which is Universal
Grammar and is genetically inherited. Chomsky calls the native speaker’s language-knowledge
competence (or I-language). But the knowledge of language, competence, has to be distinguished
from the actual use of that knowledge in real-life situations, i.e. from performance.
- Performance is the actual use of competence and it involves individual and situational
features, imperfections, errors, memory limitations, time limitations on the length of sentences, life-
span limitations on the number of sentences actually produced by the individual, etc. Chomsky’s
distinction between competence and performance reminds us of Saussure’s distinction between
langue and parole.
- But while Chomsky uses the term performance in very much the same sense as Saussure
used the term parole, there is considerable difference between competence and langue. Saussure’s
langue was static: it was the system of linguistic signs. Chomsky’s competence is dynamic: it puts
the generation of sentences in the centre of attention.
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 - Another difference is that Saussure thought of langue as being in the collective
consciousness of a community. Chomsky thinks of competence as knowledge whose basis is given
to every normal human being by birth, in the sense that its structure is related to the structure of
the human mind and so the basis of competence is a universal characteristic of the human species.
- On the basis of their competence, native speakers can do several things:
1)They can produce and understand an infinite number of new grammatical sentences in their
language.
2)They can distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical formations (She went to
Parisvs. *Went Paris she to).
3)They can interpret elliptical sentences, i.e. sentences with missing elements (John is lazy but Ann
isn’t).
4) They can perceive ambiguity (The lamb is ready to eat).
5) They can perceive synonymy (The child ate the apple vs. The apple was eaten by the child).
6) They can idealise utterances, i.e. they can disregard the imperfections and idiosyncratic features
of performance and reconstruct the grammatical sentences which the utterances realise (*? The
thought of those poor children were really … WAS really ... bothering me.).

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

1- PHONETICS
Language is one of the distinctive characteristics of human beings. Without formal instruction, we
learn from infanthood the skills that we need to be successful users of a language. For most of us, this
will be spoken language, though for some it will be a signed language. In acquiring language, we
learn words, and how to put them together; we learn to link words and sentences to meaning; we
learn how to use these structures to get what we want, to say how we feel, and to form social bonds
with others; and we also learn how to sound like members of the community around us – or perhaps
choose to sound different from them.
Linguistics is the formal study of language. Its main sub-disciplines are: syntax, the study of sentence
structure; semantics, the study of meaning; pragmatics, the study of meaning in context; morphology,
the study of word structure; sociolinguistics, the study of language in its social context; phonology,
the study of sound systems; and phonetics, the study of the sounds of speech. In this book, we will be
mindful that linguistically significant aspects of the sounds of a language have to do with meaning
on some level, whether it is to distinguish words from each other, to join together words of particular
kinds, to mark (or do) something social, such as where the speaker comes from, or to handle the flow
of talk in a conversation.
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Language and speech are often distinguished in linguistics. For many, linguistics constitutes a set of
claims about human beings’ universal cognitive or biological capacities. Most of the constructs of
linguistics are attempts at explaining commonalities between members of communities which use
language, and they are abstract.
Phonetics on the other hand is the systematic study of the sounds of speech, which is physical and
directly observable. Phonetics is sometimes seen as not properly linguistic, because it is the outward,
physical manifestation of the main object of linguistic research, which is language (not speech): and
language is abstract. By contrast, with the exception of Deaf signing communities, speech remains
the most common and primarily important orm of language. In a similar vein, Ogden observes that
« most of our interactions, with family members, colleagues, people we buy things from or
whom we ask for help, are done through the medium of speech » (2009 :2). It should be noted
that the spoken spoken form of language helps us primarily to understand questions like “what is the
possible form of a word?”, “how do you ask questions in this language?”, “why does this speaker use
that particular pronunciation, and not some other?”,(Ibid) . Thus a thorough understanding of
phonetics is of paramount importance to language users in addition to knowing how speech is
produced. This movement controlled by throwing air through the throat, mouth and nose (known as
the vocal tract). This controlled movement of air can be studied in a number of different manners :
• articulatory phonetics (how speech sounds are made in the body)
• acoustic phonetics (the physical properties of the sounds that are made)
• perception (what happens to the speech signal once the sound wave reaches the listener’s ear).
It should be stressed that the « linguistic phonetic study of a language » involves working out how
the sounds of language (i.e the ‘phonetic’ part) are used to form meaning (which is what makes it
‘linguistic’, and not just the study of the sounds we can make with our bodies):
The way we we shape and put together words, how similar (but different) strings of sounds can be
distinguished (for instance ‘I scream’ and ‘ice cream’), how certain shades of meaning are made
and conveyed, and the details of speech all relate in a systematic way to language’s inherently social
context. (Qouted in Ogden, 2009)
Among the key « paradoxes » of phonetics is that we make observations of individuals as a central
requirement to understand something about the way groups of people actually behave. This might
seem of great help to us in the sense that we can take ourselves and the people around us as
representatives of groups. However, this might seem a bad thing as « we cannot always be sure how
representative someone is, and there is always the possibility that what we observe is just an
idiosyncratic habit. » (Ibid : 2).
When we speak, we produce physically continuous stretches of sound, which those who know the
language in which the utterance was made, can analyse into strings of individual speech sounds.
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- 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.
The phoneme
Many theories of phonology use the concept of the phoneme. The phoneme is the smallest unit of
sound which can differentiate one word from another: in other words, phonemes make lexical
distinctions. So if we take a word like ‘cat’, [kat], and swap the [k] sound for a [p] sound, we
get ‘pat’ instead of ‘cat’. This is enough to establish that [k] and [p] are linguistically meaningful
units of sound, i.e. phonemes. Phonemes are written between slashes, so the phonemes corresponding
to the sounds [p] and [k] are represented as /p/ and /k/ respectively. Phonemes are
phonological (not phonetic) units, because they relate to linguistic structure and organisation; so
they are abstract units. On the other hand, [p] and [k] are sounds of speech, which have a physical
dimension and can be described in acoustic, auditory or articulatory terms; what is more, there are
many different ways to pronounce /p/ and /k/, and transcribing them as [p] and [k] captures only
some of the phonetic details we can observe about these sounds. Phoneme theory originated in the
early twentieth century, and was influential in many theories of phonology; however, in recent
decades, many phonologists and phoneticians have seen phonemes as little more than a convenient
fiction. One reason for this is that phonemic representations imply that speech consists of units strung
together like beads on a string. This is a very unsatisfactory model of speech, because at any one point
in time, we can usually hear cues for two or more speech sounds. For example, if you say the words
‘cat’, ‘kit’, ‘coot’ and isolate the [k] sounds, you will notice that they are different from one another.
The tongue makes contact with the roof of the mouth at slightly different places (further forward for
‘kit’, further back for ‘coot’ and somewhere in between for ‘cat’), and the lips also have different
shapes. These things make the [k] sounds sound different from one another. Now, we have the feeling,
as native speakers of English, that these sounds are at some level
‘the same’; and this is what phoneme theory attempts to explain. These different sounds are
allophones of the phoneme /k/: they have some things in common, and the differences between them
arise from the context they are in. The differences are not seen as linguistically im -
portant, because they are predictable.

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Another way to look at this is to think of the consonant as telling us something about the vowel that
is coming: if you hear the kind of [k] which goes in the word ‘kit’, then before you even hear the
vowel sound for real, you can tell what kind of vowel sound is coming. So in a way, the consonant
and the vowel are being produced at the same time. The question for us as phoneticians is what we
make of this, and how we explain it. In this book, we will use the word ‘sound’ as an essentially
neutral word which does not take one stance or another towards what we hear. It is a term chosen so
as to allow us to be as descriptively rich as we would like, without committing us one way or another
to whether the best account is a phonemic one or something else. Sounds will be written enclosed in
square brackets, such as [k], [a], [t] or [kat]. Phonemes, where we refer to them, will be enclosed in
slash brackets such as /k/, /a/, /t/. And letters will from now on be enclosed between angled brackets
like this: <c> <a> <t>; but when referring to words, the convention will be: ‘cat’.

The larynx and voicing :

The larynx (Figure 2.1) is a structure built of cartilage. Its main purpose is as a kind of valve to stop
things going down into the lungs. You should be able to locate your larynx quite easily. You probably
know it as your ‘Adam’s apple’ or voice box. It is often visible as a notch at the front of the neck.
The larynx contains the vocal folds (also known as the vocal cords, but this suggests that they are
like strings on a stringed instrument, which they are not). When we breathe, they are kept wide apart,
which allows air to pass freely across the glottis, the space between the folds; but during speaking,
the vocal folds play an important role because they can be made to vibrate. This vibration is called
voicing. It should be highlighted that Sounds which are accompanied by voicing are called voiced
sounds, while those which are not are called voiceless sounds. You can sense voicing by a simple
experiment. Say the sound [m] but put your hands over your ears. You will hear quite a loud buzzing
which is conducted through your bones to your ears. Now repeat this saying a [s] sound, and you will
notice that the buzzing stops. Instead, you will hear a (much quieter) hissing sound, which is due to
the turbulent airflow near the back of the teeth. If you now say a [z] sound, you will notice that
everything is the same as for [s], except that there is the buzzing sound because [z] is voiced. Voicing
is caused by the very rapid vibration of the vocal folds. Voicing is one of the most important features
of speech sounds.

14
 Figure 2.1 Cross-section of the vocal tract.

Airflow
Air passes out of the vocal tract through the mouth or the nose. The way that it comes out affects the
sound generated, so a framework is needed to describe this aspect of speech.
*Central and lateral airflow
- Central airflow is when the air flows down the middle of the vocal tract. If you say the sound
[s], hold the articulation and then suck air in, you should feel that it goes cold and dry down
the middle of your tongue and the middle of the roof of your mouth. The cold and dry patches
will be more or less symmetrical on each side of your mouth. All languages have sounds with
central airflow.
- Lateral airflow is when the air flows down one or both sides of the vocal tract. If you say the
sound [l], hold the articulation and then suck air in, you should feel this time that it goes cold
and dry down one or both sides of the mouth, but not down the middle. The sides of the tongue
are lowered, and the air passes out between the back teeth. In theory, lateral airflow can be
produced at the lips too: to do this, keep the sides of the lips together and try saying something
like ‘Pepé bought a pencil’. It will both sound and look strange. It is probably not a surprise
that no language has lateral airflow caused by constricting the lips at one side, and this
combination is blocked out in the chart of the International Phonetic Association (IPA).

*Oral and nasal airflow

Air can exit the vocal tract through the nose or the mouth. This is controlled by the position of the
velum. The velum is a sort of valve that controls airflow through the nose. If the velum is raised, then
15
the nasal cavities are blocked off. Consequently, air cannot pass through them, and it must exit the
vocal tract through the mouth. Sounds with airflow exiting through the mouth only are said to have
oral airflow. If the velum is lowered, air flows through the nasal cavities, and out through the nostrils.
If the air flows through the nose, the airflow is nasal. If you say a [s] sound and pinch your nose, you
will notice that you can easily continue the [s] sound. This is because [s] is oral: the velum is raised
and makes a tight seal, preventing escape of air through the nose.
On the other hand, if you say a [m] sound and pinch your nose, you will notice that you can only
continue the [m] sound for a very short time.
This is because the lips are closed, making oral escape impossible, but the velum is lowered, so that
the airflow is nasal. By pinching your nose, you effectively seal off the only remaining means of
escape for the air.
A third possibility exists, where air escapes through the nose and the mouth. For these sounds, the
velum is lowered, but there is no complete closure in the oral tract, as we had for [m] (where the
complete closure is at the lips). A good example would be a nasalised vowel, as in the
French word ‘pain’, [pã], ‘bread’. You might try making a nasalised [s] sound, [s˜], but you will
notice that it is much quieter and less hissy than it should be, with as much noise caused by air coming
through the nostrils as through the mouth.
PLACE OF ARTICULATION
The vocal tract contains some discrete physical landmarks which are used primarily in producing and
describing consonants. In describing the place of articulation, we are describing where in the vocal
tract a sound is made.
Articulators are the parts of the oral tract that are used in producing speech sounds. They are often
grouped into two kinds, active and passive. Active articulators are ones that move: the tongue tip is
an active articulator in sounds like [s t n], since it moves up to behind the teeth. Passive articulators
are articulators that cannot move, but are the target for active articulators. In the case of sounds like
[s t n], the passive articulator is the bony ridge behind the upper teeth, known as the alveolar ridge.
Most places of articulation are described by reference to the passive articulator. We start our
description of them with the lips, working our way down the vocal tract.

- Bilabial
Bilabial sounds are sounds made at the lips. ‘Bi-’ means ‘two’, and ‘labial’ is an adjective based on
the Latin word for ‘lips’. In English, the sounds [p b m] are bilabial. If you say [apa aba ama] and
look in the mirror, you will see that they look identical. If you say the sounds silently to yourself and
concentrate on your lips, you will feel that the two lips touch one another for a short period, and the
action is basically the same for all three sounds.
16
 - Labiodental
Labiodental sounds are made with the upper teeth (‘dental’) against the lower lip (‘labio’). In English
the labiodental sounds [f v] occur. Logically speaking, labiodental sounds could involve the lower
teeth and the upper lip, but this is difficult for most people to do: it involves protruding the
jaw, and most people have upper teeth that sit in front of the lower teeth. Labiodental sounds can be
made with the teeth against either the inside surface of the lip (endolabial) or the outside edge of the
lip (exolabial).
- Dental
Dental sounds involve an articulation made against the back of the upper teeth. [θ d] in English (as in
the initial sounds of ‘think’ and ‘then’) are often dental; they can also be interdental, that is, produced
with the tongue between (‘inter’ in Latin) the teeth, especially in North America.
Dental forms of [l] and [n] are used in words like ‘health’ and ‘tenth’, where they are followed by a
dental; and dental forms of [t] and [d] are regularly used in many varieties of English (e.g. some forms
of Irish or New York English, and in Nigeria) as forms of [θ d].
- Alveolar
Alveolar sounds are made at the alveolar ridge. This is a bony ridge behind the upper teeth. If you
rest your tongue on the upper teeth then gradually move it backwards, you will feel a change in texture
from the smooth enamel to the bumpier gum. Just behind the teeth you should be able to feel the
alveolar ridge. This sticks out a bit just behind the teeth. People’s alveolar ridges are very variable:
some are very prominent, others hardly noticeable. Alternatively, try isolating the consonant sounds
in the word ‘dent’, and you should feel that the tongue tip is making contact with the alveolar ridge.
Sounds with an alveolar place of articulation in most varieties of English are [t d n l r s z].
- Postalveolar
Postalveolar sounds are made just behind (‘post’) the alveolar ridge. There are four of these in
English, [ʃ] and [_], the sounds spelt <sh> in ‘ship’, [ʃip], and <si> in ‘invasion’, [i_vei_әn], and the
sounds [tʃ d_] as in ‘church’ and ‘judge’. It can be hard to feel the difference in place of articulation
between alveolar and postalveolar sounds, but if you produce a [s] sound, then a [ʃ] sound, and suck
air in immediately after each sound, you should feel that part of the roof of the mouth which goes
cold and dry is further back for [ʃ] than for [s]. Special symbols for dentals and postalveolars only
exist for the fricatives. If dental or postalveolar articulations need to be distinguished, this can be
done using diacritics – characters which modify the basic value of letters, and are placed over or
under simple letters. For [t], we use [t t t_] respectively, where [] marks ‘dental’, and [_] marks
‘retracted’ (i.e. further back), i.e. postalveolar.

17
Postalveolars are reported occasionally in dialects which are on their way to losing distinct [r]
sounds. Hedevind (1967) reports a contrast between dentals/alveolars and postalveolars (transcribed
[n_, z_ , t_] in pairs such as those below in a dialect from Dent (Cumbria, Northern England).
- Retroflex
Retroflex sounds are made with the tongue curled (‘flex’) back (‘retro’) to the hard palate. (This is
one case where the ‘place of articulation’ refers to the active articulator.) The symbols for retroflex
sounds are easy to remember: they all have a rightward-facing hook on the bottom: [ _ _ _ _ _ _].
The retroflex fricative sound [_] also occurs in some varieties of English, notably some Scottish and
North American varieties, as a combination of [r] + [s], as in ‘of course’, [әv kɔ__]. And many
varieties of American English use [_] for the r-sound; this is also known as ‘curled-r’.
- ‘Coronal’
On the IPA chart, sounds are described according to where in the mouth they are made; but it is
equally important to think about which part of the tongue is used to make them. Dental, alveolar,
postalveolar and retroflex sounds are all made with the front part of the tongue, the tip (the very
frontmost part of the tongue) or the blade (the part just behind the tip). There is a lot of variability
among English speakers as to which part of the tongue they use to articulate dental, alveolar and
postalveolar sounds, so usually this factor is ignored, since it seems to play no linguistic role for
English. In the phonology literature, sounds made with the front part of the tongue are often called
coronal, a term which does not appear on the IPA chart. (The Latin word ‘corona’ means ‘crown’;
this is the term used to refer to the front part of the tongue.)
- Palatal
Palatal sounds are made with the tongue body, the massive part of the middle of the tongue, raised
up to the hard palate, or the roof of the mouth. Palatal sounds aren’t common in English, except for
the sound [j], which is usually spelt <y>, as in ‘yes’, ‘yacht’, ‘yawn’; or as part of the sequence [ju]
represented by the letter <u> in words like ‘usual’, ‘computer’.
- Velar
Velar sounds are made with the tongue back (or dorsum) raised towards the soft palate. The soft
palate is at the back of the roof of the mouth, and is also known as the velum. The sounds [k _] are
velars, as is the sound [ŋ], represented by <ng> in words like ‘king’, ‘wrong’, ‘hang’; there are in
fact many variations in the precise
place of articulation in English.
The velum also acts as a kind of valve, because it can be raised and lowered. When it is lowered, air
can pass into the nasal cavities and escape through the nose. When it is raised, the nasal cavities are
sealed off, and air can only escape through the mouth.

18
 - Uvular
Uvular sounds are made with the uvula (which is Latin for ‘little egg’, the shape of the uvula). The
uvula is the little fleshy appendage that hangs down in the middle of your mouth at the back. If you
gargle, the uvula vibrates. French, German, Dutch and Danish all use uvular articulations for
orthographic <r>; and in fact, one variety of English (around the north east of England) has, in its
more archaic forms, a uvular sound too in this position.
- Pharyngeal
The pharynx is the cavity behind the tongue root and just above the larynx. Pharyngeal sounds are
made by constricting the muscles of the neck and contracting the pharynx; this kind of articulation
occurs rarely in English.
- Glottal
Glottal sounds are made at the glottis, the space between the vocal folds, which are located at the
larynx. English uses a number of such sounds: [h] as in ‘head’ and its voiced equivalent between two
vowels, [_], as in ‘ahead’; and the glottal stop [ʔ], which is often used alongside or in place
of [t] (as in many Anglo-English – that is, the English of England – pronunciations of words like
‘water’, [wɔ_tә, wɔ_ʔә]), and in words that begin with vowels (as in many American and Australian
pronunciations of phrases like ‘the [ʔ]apple’).

MANNER OF ARTICULATION

As well as knowing where a sound is made, we need to know how it is made. Consonants involve at
least two articulators. When the articu - lators are brought closer together, the flow of air between
them changes: for instance, it can be stopped or made turbulent. The channels between any two
articulators govern the pressure and flow of air through the vocal tract, and in turn this affects the
kinds of sound that come out. The way a sound is made (rather than where it is made) is called manner
of articulation. Most manners of articulation are combinable with most places of articulation.
Stop articulations :

- Stop articulations are those sounds where a complete closure is made in the oral tract
between two articulators; this stops the air moving out of the oral tract. Stop articulations
include a whole range of sound types, which vary according to the kind of airflow (oral vs.
nasal) and whether the closure can be maintained for a long time or not.

- Plosives are made with a complete closure in the oral tract, and with the velum raised, which
prevents air escaping through the nose. English plosives include the sounds [p t k b d _].
19
 Plosives are ‘maintainable’ stops because they can be held for a long time, and the closure
portion arisesfrom a deliberate articulation. The term ‘plosive’ relates to the way the stop is
released – with what is sometimes called an ‘explosion’. It is worth mentioning that many
phoneticians use the word ‘stop’ to mean ‘plosive’. (Quoted in Catford’s (2001).

- Nasals are made with a complete closure in the oral tract, but with the velum lowered so that
air escapes through the nose. For English there are three main nasal sounds, [m n ŋ], bilabial,
alveolar and velar respectively. Nasals are usually voiced in English. The other kinds of
stopped articulations are trills and taps. In these sounds, a closure is made only for a very short
time, and the closure arises because of aerodynamics or the movement of articulators from
one position to another.

- Trills are rare in English, but they are one form of ‘rolled r’: they involve the tongue tip
striking the alveolar ridge repeatedly (usually three to four times). They have a very restricted
occurrence in English, primarily among a very particular kind of theatrical performer, though
they are often thought of as typically Scottish.

- Taps on the other hand are quite common in English. These consist of just one short
percussive movement of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge. They occur in many varieties
of English, but are especially well known as kinds of [t] or [d] sound in many North American
varieties in words like ‘bu[ɾ]er’, ‘wri[ɾ]er’, ‘a[ɾ]om’.

Fricative articulations :

- Fricative articulations are the result of two articulators being in close approximation with
each other. This is a degree of stricture whereby the articulators are held close enough together
for air to pass between them, but because the gap between them is small, the airflow becomes
turbulent and creates friction noise. (In lay terms, we might talk about a ‘hissing’ sound.)
Fricatives in English include [f v θ d s z ʃ _], the sounds represented orthographically by the
underlined portion: fish, vow, think, then, loose, lose, wish, vision. Notice that there are not
very consistent representations particularly for the sounds [ʃ _] in English spelling.

- Fricative articulations can be held for as long as there is sufficient air to expel. The amount
of friction generated depends on the amount of air being forced through the stricture and on
the degree of stricture. If you produce a [s] sound and then push more air out, you will notice
20
 an increase in the loudness (intensity) of the friction. If you do this and at the same time make
the tongue tenser, the intensity of the friction will increase and the friction will sound
‘sharper’. On the other hand, if you relax the articulators in producing a [s] sound, you will
notice that the friction gets quieter and that it changes quality, becoming ‘flatter’.

- Affricates are plosives which are released into fricatives. English has two of these: [tʃ d_],
both postalveolar, as in ‘church’ and ‘judge’. The sounds [h _] as in ‘heart’ and ‘ahead’ are
voiceless and voiced glottal fricatives respectively. These sounds are produced with friction
at the glottis. Tongue shape plays a determining role in the overall sound of fricatives.

Resonant articulations If articulators are held so as not to generate friction, but to allow air
to pass between them smoothly, then we get articulations known as resonant. The degree of
stricture is known as open approximation, and consonant sounds generated this way are
called approximants. Vowels are another kind of resonant articulation. Approximants in
English include the sounds [j w l r]. (Note: [j] stands for the sound usually written <y> in
English, as in ‘yes’. The phonetic symbol [y] stands for a vowel.) [j w] are often called glides,
because they are closely related in phonetic terms to the vowels [i] and [u], and can be thought
of as non-syllabic versions of these vowels. [l r] are often called liquids, and they have certain
similarities in the places where they occur in consonant clusters. We will use the symbol [r]
for now to represent any kind of [r]-sound, though for the majority of English varieties, a
more accurate symbol would be [ɹ]. The English approximants [w j r] are central and [l] is
lateral.Approximants are among the phonetically most complex of sounds in English because
they typically involve more than one articulation; so we shall leave further discussion of
English approximants to a later chapter.

Summary and Practice exercises :

There are three main aspects of the production of speech sounds in English: voicing, place of
articulation and manner of articulation. We have introduced much terminology for describing speech
sounds. In later chapters, we will look at place, manner and voicing in much more
detail. We will focus on those aspects of the sound of English which relate to meaning in its broadest
sense: word meaning, utterance meaning and social meaning. To do this, we will make extensive use
of the categories of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

21
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.

22
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.

23
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.

24
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).
Exercises
1. What is the place and manner of articulation of the consonants in the following words?
Remember to refer to the sounds you make in pronunciation, which do not always straightforwardly
correspond with the letters in the spelling!
a. club f. Dutch k. psychology
b. heavy g. contact l. hearing
c. deaf h. community m. perform
d. kiss i. industry n. translate
e. raised j. night
2. Divide each of the following groups of symbols into two sets of three, each of which has something
in common phonetically. The first one is done for you.
Symbols Set 1 Set 2
a. p m t n k ŋ p t k (oral plosives) m n ŋ (nasals)
b. s l p m v ʃ
c. f j w l z θ
d. s v h d _ θ
e. r k n l w _
f. t m b _ s _
g. ʃ _ t θ d t_
h. h z _ l ʔ s
i. n a p k j w
j. j w b d _ r

25
 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 can be grouped
into a small number of allophones.
Allophones are the positional alternants 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].
26
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 allophones of a phoneme are conditioned by the environment 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.
Phonemic and allophonic changes can be described by rules. In generative linguistics these rules
typically have the following form:
(6) Rule Format
A → B / X ____Y

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This means that “A becomes B between X and Y”, where A, B, X, Y indicate the variables, the
arrow indicates the change, the slash indicates the environment, and the horizontal dash indicates the
exact place of the change. For instance, nasal assimilation, which is an allophonic change turning
[bɪn] into [bǐn], can be described as (7). (V stands for vowel, C for consonant.) The rule expresses
that a vowel becomes nasal before a nasal consonant.
(7) Nasal Assimilation
V → [+nasal] / _____ C
[+nasal]
The term word can be used in different senses. In morphology we use the following terms: lexeme,
syntactic word, and orthographic word.
- A lexeme is a unit of the lexicon (an entry in the dictionary, a vocabulary item), which is an
uninflected abstract form that underlies all its inflected variants. To distinguish lexemes from their
inflected variants it is customary to use capital letters to indicate lexemes. For instance, the lexeme
TAKE underlies the inflected variants take, takes, taking, took, taken.
-A syntactic word is an inflected variant of a lexeme (including the zero-inflection), so take, takes,
taking, took, taken are syntactic words. Inflection means varying the shape of a lexeme in such a
way that its grammatical relation to other lexemes within the phrase or sentence becomes clear.
Consider e.g. the sentence in (1): (1) He takes them.
The whole set of inflected variants of a lexeme is called a paradigm. The forms take, takes, taking,
took, taken constitute the paradigm of TAKE. The members of such a paradigm are syntactic words.
- Orthographic word: it is a stretch of graphic symbols with a space on either side and no space
within. For example, the lexeme LIFE INSURANCE is two orthographic words, but the two lexemes
in I’m are just one orthographic word.
- Morphemes
*Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, which cannot be subdivided without
losing their meaning. They are abstract units, indicated between braces: { }. Lexemes and syntactic
words are composed of one or more than one morpheme. For instance, the lexeme TEACHER
consists of two morphemes: {teach} {-er}, the lexeme ALBATROSS consists of one: {albatross}.
When we realise morphemes, we produce morphs.
*Morphs are the physical realisations of morphemes. The billions of actual morphs realising an
abstract morpheme by actual speakers in actual situations can be grouped into a few phonologically
different shapes, so called allomorphs.
*Allomorphs are the positional alternants of a morpheme: they have the same meaning and are in
complementary distribution.

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The phonological differences between the allomorphs of a morpheme are often due to the
phonological conditioning.
For instance, {-s}, the abstract plural morpheme in English has three regular allomorphs. When the
last sound of the noun is a sibilant (i.e. /s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ), the allomorph will be /ɪz/, as in e.g. boxes,
bushes. When the last sound of the noun is a voiceless non-sibilant, the allomorph will be /s/, as in
books, plates. And elsewhere, i.e. where the last sound of the noun is a voiced non-sibilant, the plural
morpheme will be realised as /z/, as in bags, apples, potatoes.
In other cases the phonological differences of the allomorphs can be due to lexical conditioning. For
instance, the plural morpheme is realised as /әn/ when it is attached to the noun ox. Here it is not the
last sound of the noun that is responsible for the alternation but the entire lexeme OX.
The phonological difference of the allomorphs can also be caused by morphological conditioning.
This happens e.g. in the plural noun houses, i.e.{house}{-s}, where the first morpheme is realised as
/haʊz/ before the plural morpheme, although it is realised as /haʊs/ when it stands alone as a singular
noun. Here one morpheme affects the realisation of another.
Types of morphemes: Morphemes can be grouped into two types on the basis of whether or not they
can form monomorphemic words.
- Free morphemes: If they can occur by themselves as whole words, (i.e. if they can form
monomorphemic words), then we call them free morphemes. For instance, {house}, {albatross},
{kangaroo}, {lullaby}, {table}, etc. are free morphemes.
- Bound morphemes: There are also morphemes which must be attached to other morphemes within
words, these are called bound morphemes. For example, the plural morpheme {-s}, or the adverb-
forming morpheme {-ly} are bound morphemes. Most bound morphemes are affixes. In English, these
are either suffixes (following stems) or prefixes (preceding stems).
Types of Suffixes: Suffixes in English are either inflectional or derivational.

Inflectional morphemes:

If you add an inflectional suffix to a stem, you do not create a new lexeme, you only produce another
inflected variant (i.e. another syntactic word) of the same lexeme. There are 8 types of inflectional
morphemes in English: -s of the plural (boys), -’s of the possessive (John’s), -er of the comparative
(taller), -est of the superlative (the tallest), -s of the 3rd person singular present tense (he plays), -ed
of the past tense (he played), -ing of the progressive (he is playing), and –en of the past participle (he
has taken). Inflectional morphemes never change the grammatical category (part of speech) of a word.
For example, boy and boys are both nouns; tall and taller are both adjectives.

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Derivational morphemes:
if you add a derivational suffix to a stem, you create another lexeme. For example, {-hood} is a
derivational suffix, because by adding it to the stem {boy}, you produce a new lexeme BOYHOOD,
which is the starting point of a new paradigm. Prefixes in Present-Day English are always
derivational, e.g. {en-}, added to the stem {joy} gives rise to a new lexeme ENJOY. Some suffixes
are also derivational. For example: the verb teach becomes the noun teacher when we add the
derivational morpheme –er.
However, some derivational morphemes do not change the grammatical category of a word. For
example, such derivational prefixes as re- and un- in English generally do not change the category
of the word to which they are attached. Thus, both happy and unhappy are adjectives, and both fill
and refill are verbs, for example. The derivational suffixes -hood and -dom, as in neighborhood and
kingdom, are also the typical examples of derivational morphemes that do not change the
grammatical category of a word to which they are attached.
A stem is that part of a word which remains if we remove the suffix or prefix that has entered the
word last. The stem is not necessarily a single morpheme, e.g. the stem of unfriendliness is
unfriendly, the stem of unfriendly is friendly, and the stem of friendly is friend. If we remove all
affixes, we arrive at the absolute stem, called root (also known as base), which is always a single
morpheme. Thus, the root of unfriendliness is {friend}, underlined in (2).

Aff N Aff Aff

Un friend li ness

The root is usually a free morpheme (as in e.g. unfriendliness), but there are also roots which are
bound. For example, in words like include, conclude, preclude, exclude, etc. the prefix {in-}, {con},
{pre-}, {ex-}, etc. is followed by the root {-clude}, which is not a free form since it never occurs alone
as a monomorphemic word. Moreover, the meaning of {-clude} is unclear, in fact it is dubious
whether it has any meaning at all. Although we do not know if {-clude} has a meaning or what that
meaning is, we still regard it as a morpheme, because its pronunciation /klu:d/ systematically varies
with /klu:s/ when it is followed by the suffix {-ive}, as in inclusive or conclusive, and with /klu:ʒ/
when followed by the suffix {-ion}, as in inclusion, conclusion. To put it in another way, {-clude}
has allomorphic variants: /klu:d/, /klu:s/ and /klu:ʒ /, which shows that it is a morpheme.
- Segmentability of words into morphemes

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There are words which are easy to segment into morphemes, e.g {un-}{friend}{-li}{-ness}, {girl}{-
s}, {smoke}{-ed}, etc. Languages in which most words are of this kind (i.e. in which most words are
sequences of separable morphemes) are called agglutinating languages.
Languages in which most words consist of single morphemes are called isolating languages.
Classical Chinese is one of them.
Finally, there are words in which the constituent abstract morphemes are fused together in an
inseparable way, e.g. the English words took and mice consist of {take}{-ed} and {mouse}{-s},
respectively. ALanguages in which the fusion of morphemes is typical are called fusional (=
inflecting) languages. Latin is a typical fusional language.
English is a mixture of all three language types, but it is predominantly (statistically) isolating because
a large part of its words are monomorphemic. By contrast, Hungarian is predominantly agglutinating.
- Word formation
In addition to the borrowing of loanwords from other languges, e.g. ALCOHOL from Arabic) or
the introduction of coinages (lexemes artificially invented, e.g. XEROX), there are also ways in
which we can produce new lexemes, making use of old ones. These ways are called word formation
processes. We shall now briefly discuss the most common word formation processes.
- Derivation is one of the major word-forming processes (= affixation), i.e. creating a new
lexeme by means of adding a derivational prefix or suffix to an old lexeme. For instance, the lexeme
KINGDOM is derived from the stem {king}, to which the derivational suffix {-dom} has been added,
or the lexeme IMPOLITE is derived from the stem {polite}, with the derivational prefix {in-}, or
the lexeme UNHAPPINESS is derived from the stem UNHAPPY (itself derived from HAPPY), by
adding the derivational suffix {-ness}. The lexemes produced by affixation can be called derivative
words, or simply just derivatives.
- Conversion: it happens when a lexeme is assigned to another word class (part of speech)
without changing its form. This is called (also known as zero affixation), which is extremely common
in English, see e.g. BOTTLEN _BOTTLEV, DAILYA _ DAILYN, MILKN _ MILKV. A special
subtype of conversion is called approximate conversion, in which lexemes undergo a small but
systematic change in pronunciation and are thereby assigned to a different word class. Sometimes
this “small change” is a stress shift (with some concomitant changes in vowel quality), as in e.g.
SUSˈPECTV and ˈSUSPECTN, PERˈMITV and ˈPERMITN, CONˈVICTV and ˈCONVICTN,
ˈENVELOPEN and ENˈVELOPV, etc. Another kind of approximate conversion is changing thevoice
value of the final fricative in some lexemes, having a voiceless finalfricative in nouns and a voiced
one in verbs, e.g. HALFN /ha:f/ _ HALVEV /ha:v/, USEN /ju:s/_ USEV /ju:z/.

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 - Compounding: means bringing together two roots or two lexemes to produce a new lexeme,
called a compound, as in e.g. ˈBLACKMAIL, ˈGOLDFISH, ˈWHITE HOUSE, ˈHAY FEVER,
ˈCHRISTMAS-TREE, etc. Members of a compound may be compounds themselves, cf. e.g.
ˈRAILWAY-STATION ATTENDANT, etc.
Other word-formation processes include clipping, blending, backformation and the formation of
acronyms.
- Clipping means shortening a lexeme and thus producing a more informal variant, e.g.
PHOTOGRAPH _ PHOTO, INFLUENZA _ FLU, EXAMINATION _ EXAM, etc.
• Blending is putting together lexemes but at least one of these lexemes is present only in a
fragmentary form, as in e.g. FOG + SMOKE → SMOG, BREAKFAST + LUNCH → BRUNCH,
etc. The lexemes so produced are blends.
• Backformation is a kind of reverse affixation. It means establishing, on the basis of analogy with
derivatives, the apparently existing stem of a lexeme which looks like a derivative, although it is not
a real derivative. For instance, pairs like SUPERVISIONN and SUPERVISEV suggest that if there
is a word TELEVISIONN, there should also be a word TELEVISEV. We say that TELEVISE has
been backformed from TELEVISION. Similarly, DONATE has been backformed from
DONATION (by analogy with pairs such as CREATION and CREATE).
• Finally, acronym formation means forming a lexeme from the initial letters or larger parts of
words; the lexemes so created are acronyms. Many of these are pronounced as words, e.g. RADAR
for ‘radio detecting and ranging’, NATO for ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’. In many
cases, however, they are pronounced as sequences of letters, e.g. BBC, YMCA, etc.

3- SYNTAX

The term “syntax” is derived from the Greek syntassein, from syn- "together" + tassein "arrange or
put in order”. Syntax can be defined as the study of sentence structure, that is, the arrangement or
ordering of sentence elements, or constituents, to produce well formed sentences in such a way as to
reflect the native speakers’ implicit knowledge of the syntax of their language.

This implicit knowledge enables native speakers to produce sentences that are:

1. Grammatically correct: The sun also rises. VS *Arises the also sun!

2. Infinite: any normal native speaker is capable of producing an unlimited number of

grammatically correct sentences.

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The syntactic analysis of a language assumes that any sentence consists of small groups of various
kinds (morphemes) which combine with their closest neighbours (immediate constituents) to form
larger constituents, first at the phrase, clause and sentence levels. This kind of analysis is termed
Immediate constituent analysis (ICA).

Immediate constituent analysis, developed by L.Bloomfield (1933), is a specific way of determining

the constituent structure of various linguistic units. Some of the basic principles of this analysis can
be summarized in the following:

1. The component parts of a sentence, for example, are called constituents.

2. ICA is basically binary. That is, at any time of the analysis, each structure is to be divided
into two parts, called immediate constituents.

3. The binary division goes on until the level of the smallest units is reached. these units, making
the final string, are called the ultimate constituents;

4. ICA is a top-down analysis, starting from a higher structure that is broken into its smallest
component parts.

5. Peripheral elements are cut off first, either from the left- or the right-hand side.

6. ICA uses labelled bracketing to identify the morphemes of a sentence and to show how they
go together in order to obtain the final output, the sentence:

Consider:

The man wrote a letter.

Tree diagrams, more attractive and comprehensible, are also used:

NP VP

Art N V NP

Art N

The man wrote a letter

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As can be seen, the tree metaphor is rather strange since linguistic trees are drawn upside down if
compared to biological ones. Any unit in the tree is called a node. The nodes in the tree above are S,
NP, VP and NP. The branches represent the relationship of dominance.

In an attempt to analyze different grammatical constructions in terms of immediate constituent

analysis, the following principles are to be followed regarding sentences, clauses, prepositional
phrases, noun phrases and verb phrases:

1. Sentences: if a sentence has modifiers, in initial or final position, isolate them first. For example:

a) When you are ready, we can start.

b) the house was spacious, as he said.

2. Clauses:

i) cut off the subordinator from the rest of the clause.

ii) complex subordinators behave like single words: e.g as long as = if (reduction).

iii) In nominal and relative clauses, wh-elements and relative pronouns are not just subordinators but
also have a function within the clause itself.

(a) They believe that they can solve this problem.

(b) They argued about how they should pay the bill

3. Prepositional phrases: cut off the preposition first, even if it is complex.

in front of the garden

4. Noun phrases: when analysing an NP:

i) identify the head.

ii) identify pre-nominal and post-nominal modifiers

iii) identify noun complements

then:

i) start from the last post-nominal modifier and go towards the head:

Head

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ii) start with the first pre-nominal modifier and go towards the head:

Head

e.g A new detective novel with intricate plot that you will read in one go

3 Head 2 1

5. Verb phrases: when analysing a VP:

i) identify the head verb

ii) identify all the pre-verbal elements (auxiliaries, negatives, adverbials)

Head

iii) identify all the post-verbal elements (objects, complements, adverbials)

Head

e.g the book could certainly offer you a lot of suspence

1 2 Head 4 3

Finally, among the shortcomings of this type of analysis is that it provides similar descriptions to
apparently close structures, analyses differently active and passive sentences:

Compare: He was killed by a criminal and He was killed by midnight

4- SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

4-1. Semantics

Semantics describes “word- and sentence-meaning” This term was first used in the late 19th century,
but researchers have always been interested in the study of meaning. It has already been seen that the
Stoics were the first to distinguish between the signifier and the signified. According to J.Lyon (1974,
400), “a practical manifestation of this interest is seen in the innumerable dictionaries that have been
produced throughout the ages.” Besides, the categories of traditional grammar are themselves
semantically-based. In the 20th century, however, the study of meaning was neglected because it was
believed it could not be carried out in an objective fashion. In America the same attitude was justified

35
to a large extent by the necessity to study the Indian languages that did not fell within the categories
of traditional grammar. It was later recognised as an essential component of language study. It should,
nevertheless, be stated that the study of meaning does not fall exclusively within the limits of
linguistic study. It has interested sociologists, psychologists and particularly philosophers.

Leech & Thomas (1990) maintain that: “semantics has to do with meaning as a dyadic relationship between
a form and its meaning: x means y (e.g. I am feeling somewhat esurient means I am rather hungry‘). Whereas
pragmatics has to do with meaning as a triad correlation between S, meaning and form/utterance: S means y
by x (e.g. S is uttering the words “I am rather hungry” is ‘requesting something to eat).” (P:101)

The philosophical interest in meaning took the form of a controversy between realists and nominalists
as to the question whether all the things we call by the same name share common identifying
characteristics. Realists proposed that we use, for example, the term ‘house’ to name a group of
buildings having the same properties that can identify them as such. For nominalists ‘house’ is a name
that people have conventionally learnt to call different buildings that have nothing in common. For
‘houses’ are different and nobody can pretend to know them all. The same can be said about the more
abstract term ‘good’. What is something ‘good’, and do the things described as such share common
defining criteria? And we all know that value judgements of things are rather subjective!

Being concerned with semantics equally pushed philosophers at the time of Socrates and later Plato
to assume that the relationship between the form of a word and its meaning was a relationship of
naming. As it has already been mentioned, they (philosophers) also wondered whether the very
names used to describe the things of the world were of a conventional or natural origin. But it is
now generally assumed within this field that no natural relationship exists between word form and
word meaning: “we cannot assume that that there is some God-given, meaningful connection
between a word in a language and an object in the world.” (G.Yule, op cit, 91) The relationship
is arbitrary; it results out of a ‘tacit agreement’ between the speakers of a language to give objects
specific names.

The ultimate goal underlying this collective establishment of names consists in providing the speakers
of a language with a common code that enables them to communicate effectively. This is true for
those aspects of meaning concerned with the literal meaning of words, that is, their conceptual
meaning, which constitutes the primary focus of linguistic study. The latter is to be contrasted with
the figurative or associative meaning of lexical items. The conceptual meaning of a word consists in

36
a number of components like “thin, sharp, steel, instrument’ as essential constituents of a needle.
To the same word may be associated other semantic constituents that are connotative or suggestive
in character. The term ‘needle’ may suggest for some language users ‘painful’.

The study of language from a semantic viewpoint equally enables linguists to distinguish semantically
acceptable from unacceptable or odd sentences. For even if sentences abide by the norms of word
order, they still express a kind of semantic oddness as in:

(1) *the student answered the question.

The oddness of this sentence pertains to the constituents of the conceptual meaning of the noun
phrase “question” that do not allow it to function as a subject, or doer of an action it should undergo
instead. Sentence (2) below is both syntactically and semantically correct since part of the conceptual
meaning of the noun phrase “the “carpenter” has the feature [+animate], and of course the noun
phrase “question” is [-animate].

(2) The question answered the student.

Thus, the positive or negative value of such features as [animate], [human] and [adult] distinguishes
many words of a language from each other. Consider, for example, the words child, man, lion, house.
The following feature diagram can be used to show the semantic differences existing between them:

house child Man lion

- + + +
Animate

Human - + + -

Adult - - + +

The use of these features enables us to specify the essential conceptual meaning of a word. Hence,
for a word to appear in the subject position (as an agent), it needs to be characterised at least as

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[+ animate] as in:

The answered the question.

N[+animate]

In this way, we are in a position to predict that the word “question” and other similar lexical items
will never occur as noun phrases in the subject position since they are [-human]. Hence, each word
of a language has specific semantic features. It is, however, often difficult to specify the semantic
components or features of some words. This explains why the semantic status of words can also be
identified in terms of the lexical relations they hold to one another. Some of these relations are
synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, homophony, homonymy, homonymy and polysemy which
are considered below:

Synonymy can be defined as the semantic sameness between two or more words. Not only
that, but synonyms can substitute each/one another. There are, nevertheless, contexts where a
word cannot be used instead of its synonym.
Antonymy refers to a relation of contrast between two words. The term young is, for
example, defined as the opposite of old. In addition, antonyms can be characterized as
gradable and non-gradable. The first are used in comparative constructions, and the negative
value of one word does not necessarily imply its antonym. Something which is not old is not
automatically new.Non-gradable antonyms are pairs of words which accept no comparison,
and the absence of one member of the pair presupposes the existence of the other: dead and
alive, for instance.
Hyponymy can be defined in terms of meaning-relations as a semantic inclusion between a
pair of words. The meaning of a word may include the meaning of another. Besides,
hyponymy presupposes the existence of a hierarchical relationship between a general category
and an instance of the said category.: fruit – apple; meat – beef ...
Homophony relates to the existence of two or more words with different written forms but
have the same pronunciation such as the pair meat-meet. Homonymy denotes a form with two
distinct semantic implications. Here an open question is raised as to whether the form itself is
a single word with two unrelated meanings, or it refers to two words each of which has a
distinct meaning. For example, ‘bank’ refers, according to the Oxford Dictionary, at the same
time to “ the sloping edge of land by a river”, “a financial establishment” and “a row of
similar objects esp.of keys, lights...”

38
It should be highlighted, herein, that the dictionary uses different entries for each of the above
definitions, which points out to the tendency to consider the form “bank” as a reference to three
unrelated words with the same pronunciation in spite of identical orthographic representation. This is
what distinguishes homonymy from polysemy. The latter refers to a word with a single dictionary
entry “having multiple meanings which are all related by extension.” (G.Yule, op cit, 97).
Consider, for instance, the multiple semantic interpretations of the terms “head” and “foot”.

4-2. PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics relates the study of ‘intended speaker meaning’. Fasold (1984 ) defines it as “the study
of the use of context to make inferences about meaning”. It is a field of research which is mainly
concerned with context. That is, words have in the first place a signification in isolation and within
sentences. Moreover, depending on the language user, words may convey different speaker
intentions. Crucial in this respect is the notion of context. The latter is, according to G.Yule, is of
two categories: linguistic and physical.

According to Crystal, Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social
interaction and the effect of our choices on others. Pragmatic factors always affect our selection of
sounds, grammatical constructions, and vocabularies in producing the meaning we intend to
communicate (Crystal, 1987: 62-5). Hence, pragmatics relates to the study of meaning of words used
by people in concrete social situations, that is, with words in context. In relation to situational context,
Leech (1983:6), points out that pragmatics is the study of meaning in relation to speech situation.
Aspects of speech situation further provide a criterion to refer in determining whether we deal with
pragmatic or semantic phenomenon (Leech, 1983: 13-4).

First, the linguistic context of a word pertains to its occurrence with other words to make up phrases
and sentences. Since words have different ‘synonyms’, the specific use, and interpretation, of a word
depends to a large extent on the nature of the words with which it combines to form phrases and
sentences to transmit particular speaker message. Second, the physical context of linguistic
expressions refers to the place and time of their production. In this respect, such expressions as this,
that, here, there, now, tomorrow, yesterday... are by no means possible to decode unless the physical
context of the speaker is identified. These words, along with most pronouns, are termed deictic
expressions. A sentence of the type “ I went there yesterday.” would be meaningless if the hearer
cannot identify the speaker “I”, the place and time of its production.

The use of deictic expressions presupposes the existence between two interactants of what
J.J.Gumperz calls background expectation. Put otherwise, the sender of a message presupposes that

39
 the receiver knows what the first talks about. This assumption of shared knowledge is called
presupposition. Thus, when a speaker asks “when did you sell your house?”, this question contains
two presuppositions: he had a house, and he sold that house.

Pragmatics also studies how rules underlying appropriate language use are respected or broken, and
analyses the internal structure of conversations and the extent of their success. In particular,
researchers in this domain consider the linguistic tools that speakers use to abide by (or break) their
language-specific norms of formality, politeness and intimacy. So there is much more concern with
how language works, or fails to work, from the perspective of the participants in a conversation. The
latter may, for example, be left with a feeling of dissatisfaction if their interlocuters do not respect
the turn taking conventions. Finally, the success of an interaction can be explained in the light of a
number of factors that H.P.Grice termed cooperative principles containing such maxims (D.Crystal,
op cit, 1971).

Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation

As humans we are social beings and when we talk we usually talk with or to others (unless we do a
monologue). Paul Grice, an English language philosophe, argues that speakers intend to be
cooperative when they talk. For Grice, cooperative means that the speaker knows that each utterance
is a potential interference in the personal rights, autonomy and wishes ( a potential face-threatening
act) of the other. That is why we have to shape our utterances in a certain way. Grice formulated
the principle of cooperation that underlies conversation, as follows:

« Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at wich it occurs, by the
accepted pupose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged, » (Grice 1975:45)

Grice’s cooperative principle is a set of norms that are expected in conversations. It consists of four
maxims, we have to follow in order to be cooperative and understood:

 Maxim of Quality : As speaker we have to tell the truth or something that is provable by adequate
evidence.
 Maxim of Quanity: We have to be as informative as required, we should not say more or less.
 Maxim of Relation: Our response has to be relevant to the topic of discussion.

 Maxim of Manner: We have to avoid ambiguity or obscurity; we should be direct and

straightforward.
Example
Yet, successful communication does not only depend on WHAT we are saying but also on HOW we
are saying something !

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 Flouting a Maxim – speaker intentionally breaks some of the maxims, but not to be noncooperative.
Way how to say something indirectly (e.g.sarcasm, irony, fun).

SPEECH ACT
 S.A refer to the usage of language to accomplish something. S.A are of two types direct and
indirect speech acts.
 Direct speech acts: typical sentence form (e.g. interrogative sentence for a question)

 Indirect speech acts : the form of the sentence suggest a different purpose than it actually
has.
 (4) a. Could you close the door?
You left the door open.
Please close the door.

 (4)b. There are wolves on the prowl tonight.

 I’m warning you to watch out for wolves.

References :
- László Varga(2010) Introduction to English Linguistics Eötvös Loránd University Budapest
- Richard Ogden An Introduction to English Phonetics (2009) Edingburgh University Press Ltd
- www.coursehero.com

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