Phonology (continued)

Phonological rules and processes in English:

Hayes (2009) lists the following characteristics that all phonological
rules/processes have in common:

• Language specificity: A phonological rule that is present in one language may

not be present in other languages, or even in all dialects of a given language.

• Productivity: Phonological rules apply even to new words. For example, if

English speakers are asked to pronounce the plural of the word "wig" (i.e. "wigs"),
they pronounce the final s as [z], not [s], even though they have never used the
word before.

• Untaught and unconscious: Speakers apply these rules without being aware of
them, and they acquire the rules early in life without any explicit teaching.

• Intuitive: The rules give speakers intuitions about what words are "well-formed"
or "acceptable"; if a speaker hears a word that does not conform to the language's
phonological rules, the word will sound foreign or ill-formed.

Some phonological rules:

Phonological rules describe how phonemes are realized as their allophones in a
given environment. Environment in phonology typically refers to neighbouring
phonemes.

• Aspiration: It occurs when the articulation of voiceless stops/plosives /p/, /t/, /k/
is accompanied by an audible breath (puff of air) (see above). e.g. [tʰeIk], [kʰau]

• Velarisation: It refers to a secondary articulation which accompanies some

sounds, as in the production of a dark [ƚ ]. This happens when the back of the
tongue moves towards the velum. Compare velarised and non-velarised consonants
in Arabic, considered as different phonemes: /sˉ /, as in /fasˉ i:h/ (eloquent) and
/s/, as in /fasi:h/ (vast). See also /t/ and /tˉ/, /d/ and /d ˉ/ (the diacritic is normally

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placed across the phonetic symbol. The sign /˳/ is sometimes placed under the
symbol to refer to these sounds).

• Nasalization: some vowels are nasalized when they occur before nasal
consonants, compare: late /leIt/ and lame [leI˜m]. Other examples: bang, been,
hand, sin, time…. This is the result of the lowering of the soft palate because of an
adjacent nasal sound.

• Deletion rules: some sounds are written but not pronounced in some words.

- Delete /g/ when it occurs before a final nasal consonant, e.g. ‘sign’, ‘assign’,
‘design’, ‘paradigm’…

- Delete final /b/ when it occurs before /m/, e.g. ‘climb’, ‘comb’, ‘tomb’,
‘lamb’…

- Delete vowel sounds or reduce them into a schwa / ә/ if unstressed, e.g.

‘general’, ‘memory’, ‘catholic’, ‘comfortable’…

Some phonological processes:

Some phonological rules are applied to look like processes which involve
systematic changes in the phonetic value of some sounds when they are in contact,
especially in rapid speech. In other words, they are changes that occur when we
produce and combine sounds into words or larger linguistic forms in the chain of
speech. This is the kind of rule that occurs in the pronunciation of English plural,
when the s becomes voiced or voiceless depending on whether or not the preceding
consonant is voiced. The most common phonological processes in English are:

• Elision: A process whereby sounds within or between words are not heard in
connected speech: e.g. ‘did you see him last night’ where /h/, /t/ and /t/ may not be
heard in rapid speech.
More examples: ‘kindness’ may be pronounced as /kaInnes/, ‘softness’ as /sɒfnes/,
‘postman’ as /pəʊsmәn/, ‘textbook’ as /teksbʊk/.
Sometimes a whole syllable is elided: ‘library’ may be pronounced as /laIbrI /,
‘February’ as /febrI/, ‘temporary’ as /tempәrI/.

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• Liaison: It is the process of linking one word to the next, when an intrusive sound
is heard. This is usually the case where /r/ is inserted between two vowels in a
sequence of words as in: ‘war and peace’, pronounced as /wɔː r әn pi:s/, ‘four
eggs’, /fɔːr egz/, ‘where are you’: /weə r a:jʊ/…

Another case of liaison, also referred to as “linking”, occurs in the following

sequences, where either /w/ or /j/ is heard between two vowels: ‘blue angel’,
/bluː w eInʤәl/, ‘pay up’, /peI j ʌp/…

• Assimilation: It is the result of two sounds becoming similar or identical because

of the influence of one upon the other. In other words, a phoneme picks up one or
more features from another phoneme.

Assimilation can occur within one word, e.g. /z/ in ‘news’ becomes voiceless in
‘newspaper’ because of the adjacent voiceless /p/; the word ‘handbag’, may be
pronounced in rapid speech as /hæmbæg/, where the alveolar sounds /n/ and
/d/ are influenced by the bilabial /m/. II can also happen in a sequence of two
words, as in ‘ten bikes’, where the alveolar /n/ becomes a bilabial /m/: /temba Iks/.

Assimilation may be total: the sound changes to become exactly like the
neighbouring sound, e.g. ‘good girl’, /gʊg gɜːl/, or partial: a sound takes the place
of articulation of another sound, e.g. ‘ten mice’, /tem ma Is/, ‘input’, /Impʊt/.

We can identify three types of assimilation:

- Regressive (also called anticipatory) assimilation: a sound influences

another sound which precedes it.
Examples: ‘horse shoe’, pronounced as /h ɔːʃʃuː/, ‘five pence’ as /faIfpens/, ‘good
boy’ as /gʊb bɔI/, ‘good morning’ as /gʊb m ɔːniŋ/, ‘this year’ as / ðIʃ jɜː/. Notice
the changes in the last sound of the first word.

- Progressive assimilation: a sound changes because of the influence of a

preceding sound.
Examples: ‘sick guy’, pronounced as /sIk kaI/, ‘match score’ as /mætʃ ʃkɔː/.

- Coalescent (or reciprocal) assimilation: there is a mutual influence (fusion)

of the sounds upon each other.

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Examples: ‘human’, /h/ and /uː/ are fused to sound like /j/, /juːmәn/; ‘don’t you’, /t/
and /j/ have fused to produce an affricate /ʧ/, /dәʊnʧә/.

• Dissimilation: This happens 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 processes is often seen among people speaking a
language that is not their native language, or among people using different accents.
For example, the word ‘writer’ is sometimes pronounced as ‘rider’, in American
English.
More examples of dissimilation: the pronunciation of ‘chimney’ as ‘chimley’, by
some native speakers, with the second of two nasals changed to an [l]. The ultimate
dissimilation is the complete loss of one sound because of its proximity to another
similar sound. A frequent example in present-day standard English is the omission
of one of two [r] sounds from words like ‘cate(r)pillar’, ‘Cante(r)bury’,
‘rese(r)voir’, ‘terrest(r)ial’, ‘southe(r)ner’, ‘gove(r)nor’,
‘co(lo)nel’ and ‘su(r)prised’.

N.B. Students are requested to do more research and try to find more examples for
practice. They are also encouraged to find examples from other languages,
especially Arabic and French.

Some useful references:

• Bale, A.& Reiss, C. (2018) Phonology: A formal introduction. MIT Press.

• Goldsmith, John A. (1995). "Phonological Theory". In John A. Goldsmith

(ed.). The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics.
Blackwell Publishers.

• Hayes, B. (2009). Introductory Phonology. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics.

Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-8411-3.---