WEEK 1

Phonology: Sound Patterns

The Nature of Language

Mythology and Folklore

English Class
Professor: John Michael Cultura
Language as a System of Rules
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language.
This means you are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or
interpret the sounds produced by others. But language is much more than speech. Deaf people produce
and understand sign languages just as hearing persons produce and understand spoken languages. The
languages of the deaf communities throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only
in their modality of expression.

Knowledge of the Sound System. Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or
signs) are in that language and what sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is
by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. Knowing the sound system
of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds
may start a word, end a word, and follow each other.

Knowledge of Words. Sounds and sound patterns of our language constitute only one part of our
linguistic knowledge. Beyond that we know that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or
meanings. If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly
incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is,
for the most part, an arbitrary one.
a. Miming: This conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning
(concept) of a word is also true in sign languages.
b. Onomatopoeia: There is some sound symbolism in language—that is, words whose
pronunciation suggests their meanings.

The Creativity of the Linguistic Knowledge. Knowledge of a language enables you to combine
sounds to form words, words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. Knowing a language means
being able to produce and understand new sentences never spoken before. This is the creative aspect of
language. Not every speaker can create great literature, but everybody who knows a language can create
and understand new sentences.
Knowledge of Sentence and Non-Sentence. Our knowledge of language not only allows us to
produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed (even if silly and illogical) sentences. It also
permits us to distinguish well-formed (grammatical) from ill-formed (ungrammatical*) sentences.

a. What he did was climb a tree.

b. *What he thought was want a sports car.
c. Drink your beer and go home!
d. *What are drinking and go home?
e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.
f. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.
g. Linus lost his security blanket.
h. *Lost Linus security blanket his.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE STUDY

A. DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR. When linguists wish to describe a language, they make explicit the
rules of the grammar of the language that exist in the minds of its speakers. There will be some
differences among speakers, but there must be shared knowledge too. The shared knowledge—
the common parts of the grammar—makes it possible to communicate through language. To the
extent that the linguist’s description is a true model of the speakers’ linguistic capacity, it is a
successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. It does not tell you how you
should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to
speak and understand and make judgments about well-formedness, and it tells what you know
about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.

B. PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR. Not all grammarians, past or present, share the view that all
grammars are equal. Language “purists” of all ages believe that some versions of a language are
better than others, that there are certain “correct” forms that all educated people should use in
speaking and writing, and that language change is corruption. Prescriptive grammars such as
Lowth’s are different from the descriptive grammars we have been discussing. Their goal is not to
describe the rules people know, but to tell them what rules they should follow.

French: Je ne veux parler avec personne. (I not want speak with no-
one.)

Italian: Non voglio parlare con nessuno. (not I-want speak with no-
one.)

English translation: “I don’t want to speak with anyone.”

C. THEORETICAL GRAMMAR. Teaching grammars can be helpful to people who do not speak the
standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous socially and economically to do so.
They are used in schools in foreign language classes. This kind of grammar gives the words and
their pronunciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially where they differ
from the language of instruction.
What is Phonology?

Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more formally,
phonology is the study of the categorical organisation of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds
are organised in the mind and used to convey meaning. In this section of the website, we will describe the
most common phonological processes and introduce the concepts of underlying representations for sounds
versus what is actually produced, the surface form.

Phonology can be related to many linguistic disciplines, including psycholinguistics, cognitive science,
sociolinguistics and language acquisition. Principles of phonology can also be applied to treatments of
speech pathologies and innovations in technology. In terms of speech recognition, systems can be
designed to translate spoken data into text. In this way, computers process the language like our brains do.
The same processes that occur in the mind of a human when producing and receiving language occur in
machines. One example of machines decoding language is the popular intelligence system, Siri.
Phonology originated with the insight that much observable phonetic detail is irrelevant or predictable within
the system of a given language. This led to the positing of phonemes as minimal contrastive sound units in
language, each composed (according to many writers) of a collection of distinctive features of contrast.
Later work showed that a focus on surface contrast ultimately was misguided, and generative
phonology replaced this with a conception of phonology as an aspect of speakers' knowledge of linguistic
structure. Important research problems have involved the relation between phonological and phonetic form;
the mutual interaction of phonological regularities; the relation of phonological structure to other
components of grammar; and the appropriateness of rules vs. constraints as formulations of phonological
regularities.

Try saying the word 'helps' out loud, paying close attention to the final sound of the word. After that, say the
word 'crabs' out loud, again paying attention to the final sound. After getting over the embarrassment of
talking to yourself (especially if you're in a crowded place!), what did you notice about the final sounds of
these words?
If you said that they are different, you're absolutely correct! Inaatu 'helps', the final sound is pronounced like
you would expect the letter 's' to sound. However, in 'crabs', the ending should have sounded more like a
'z'. The reasoning for this change can be found through the use of phonology, which is the study of speech
sounds and how they change depending on certain situations or placements in syllables, words, and
sentences.

Phonological Rules
One of the main components of phonology is the study and discovery of phonological rules. Rules are the
way phonologists predict how a speech sound will change depending on its position in various speech
environments. For example, the final 's' sounds in 'helps' and 'crabs' follow a simple-to-understand
phonological rule. In these words, the 's' sound changes depending on what speech sound immediately
precedes it.

Let's take a second and speak the following words out loud, paying close attention to the final 's' sound and
the sounds immediately preceding it. (Hint: Put two fingers on your throat as you pronounce the final sound
and the sound immediately before it. See if you can notice what happens.)

 Helps
 Crabs
 Sits
 Looks
 Words
 Gloves

Noticed how your throat vibrated as you said the final sound of each of these words, right? the English
plural written -s may be pronounced as [s] (in "cats"), [z] (in "cabs", "peas"), or as [əz] (in "buses"); these
forms are all theorized to be stored mentally as the same -s, but the surface pronunciations are derived
through a series of phonological rules.

Phonological rules can be roughly divided into four types:

Assimilation: When a sound changes one of its features to be more similar to an adjacent sound. This is the
kind of rule that occurs in the English plural rule described above—the -
s becomes voiced or voiceless depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is voiced.
Dissimilation: When a sound changes one of its features to become less similar to an adjacent sound,
usually to make the two sounds more distinguishable. This type of rule is often seen among people
speaking a language that is not their native language, where the sound contrasts may be difficult.

Insertion: When an extra sound is added between two others. This also occurs in the English plural rule:
when the plural morpheme z is added to "bus," "bus-z" would be unpronounceable for most English
speakers, so a short vowel (the schwa, [ə]) is inserted between [s] and the [z].

Deletion: When a sound, such as a stress-less syllable or a weak consonant, is not pronounced; for
example, most American English speakers do not pronounce the [d] in "handbag"

What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word in a language. This
chart shows all the phonemes used when speaking English.

Children will be taught the individual sounds of each letter of the alphabet in Reception. They will then start
to put these sounds together, to make short words, such as: cat, nap, pin, tap, etc. This is called blending
sounds.

They will learn that each of these words have three distinct sounds (phonemes). For example, cat has the
three sounds: /c/ /a/ and /t/.

In phonics we learn to read the "pure sound" of a phoneme, rather than letter names. For example, the
sound /s/ is pronounced 'ssssss' and not 'suh' or 'es'. Learning to read pure sounds makes it much easier
for children to blend sounds together as they progress with their reading.

“Digraphs”
They will also move onto words containing consonant clusters (two consonants placed together) such as
trap (tr is a consonant cluster) or bump (mp is a consonant cluster). Both of these words each contain four
phonemes as although consonant clusters involve letters being 'clustered' together, you can still hear the
two separate sounds.

They will then start to learn that a word could have a sound in it that is made up of two letters, for example:

boat

is made up of three phonemes: /b/ at the start, /oa/ in the middle and /t/ at the end.

The middle sound /oa/ is made up of two letters, so this is called a digraph. A digraph is a phoneme (single
sound) that is made up of two letters. The digraph above, /oa/, is a vowel digraph, because it is made up of
two vowels. 

A digraph could be made up of consonants, for example:

chip

The /ch/ in chip is a consonant digraph, where the two letters make up one single phoneme.

A single sound can also be made up of three letters, and this is called a trigraph. For example:

light

The /igh/ in this word is one sound that is made up of three letters, so this is a trigraph.
Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in
the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.

Phoneticians—linguists who specialize in phonetics—study the physical properties of speech. 

Phonetics – investigation of the physical production of speech sounds. We looked at the articulatory
mechanisms of the human vocal tract

In physical terms, there are an infinite number of ways a word like “me” will be produced

Individuals pronounce a particular word differently on every occasion

Differences in pronouncing a word?

Bad cold, tired, angry, regional/dialectal differences, size of person, etc.

Phonetics broadly deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make
sounds—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modality of a
language describes the method by which a language produces and perceives languages.
Languages with oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and
perceive speech aurally (using the ears). 

The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented
by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same
vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. The
following poem illustrates this fact of English humorously (note the pronunciation of the bold words):

I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose - just look them up - and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
- Author Unknown

Phonetics Vs. Phonology – the key differences

Phonetics looks at the physical production of sounds, focusing on which vocal organs

are interacting with each other and how close these vocal organs are in relation to one
another. Phonetics also looks at the concept of voicing, occurring at the pair of muscles
found in your voice box, also known as the Adam’s apple. If the vocal folds are
vibrating, this creates voicing and any sound made in this way are called voiced sounds,
for example “z”. If the vocal folds are not vibrating, this does not lead to voicing and
creates a voiceless sound e.g. “s”. You can observe this yourself by placing two fingers
upon your voice box and saying “z” and “s” repeatedly. You should feel vibrations
against your finger when saying “z” but no vibrations when saying “s”.

Phonology however is associated more with the abstract properties of sounds, as it is

about how these categories are stored in the mind. Phonetics also describes certain
properties as being gradient such as voicing where we can compare the length of
voicing between two sounds. For example in French, [b] is voiced for longer than
English [b]. In Phonology, these segments are simply defined categorically as being
voiced or voiceless, regardless of these subtle differences.