• What is Phonology and Phonetics?
• Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonology
What is Phonology?
Phonology is the branch of linguistics, which investigates the way in which speech sounds are used
systematically to form words and utterances. In order to understand Phonology, one must have a basic
concept of Phonetics. Phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds by the speaker, their
perceptions by the hearer and their acoustic properties. Written language is often inadequate
representation of the spoken language. A language is a system of conventional signals used for
communication by a whole community. An utterance, which is an act of speech, is a single concrete
manifestation of the system at work.
Phonetics is a science involving the production, transmission and reception of speech between a
speaker and a listener. The speaker and the listener both need to be in normal physiological and
psychological conditions. For production, the mechanism involved are the organs of speech
comprising lips, teeth, tongue, the hard palate, the soft palate, alveolar ridge and the uvula. The
facilitators are the trachea, lungs, vocal cords, glottis and the air stream mechanism which is pulmonic
and velaric.
The transmission of speech can be classified into three ways – Articulatory, Auditory and Acoustics.
To study phonetics, one has to know the movement of the air stream and the movement of the speech
organs and their coordination in the production of a single sound or the sequence of sounds. This is
Articulatory phonetics. On the other hand, Acoustic phonetics deals with how the sound travels
through the medium of air between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener. Once the
sound reaches the ear of the listener Auditory phonetics becomes the area of study. The ability to
distinguish sounds, pitch, length, loudness are all brain activities which influences the hearer’s
reaction to the stimuli.
Spoken language is totally dependent on the production of sound in order to make meaning of what
is being said. A word must have a particular recognizable sound shape when it is pronounced. For
example: the word ‘sip’ has a /s/ sound at the beginning, followed by /i/ and ends with /p/ sound. If
the first sound is replaced by a /l/ then the entire meaning of the word changes-‘lip’. If the end sound
/p/ is replaced by /t/ again the entire meaning changes – ‘sit’ and the same happens if we change the
middle sound.
Furthermore, for speakers of English it is essential to be aware of the stress in spoken language. English
is a stress-timed language and the way a particular word is stressed alters its contextual use or
function. For example: for the word ‘progress’ when the stress is on the first syllable it is used as a
noun but when the stress is on the second syllable it is used as a verb.
Variations is pitch also plays a vital role in certain tonal languages like Chinese or Thai however in
English a rising or falling pitch does not alter the meaning of a word but may add overtones to the
context in which it is used. For example: ‘why’ if said with a rising or falling tone still remains a question
but adds overtones of anger, frustration, confusion etc. when the pitch changes.
Phonetics also helps us to distinguish between dialects as each language has a distinctive accent or
pronunciation. So, the study of phonetics includes description, classification, pronunciation and the
use of sounds of a language.
Speech sounds are classified according to the state and direction of the airstream and the degree of
stricture of air passage. If the airstream is pushed outside, explosives are produced. On the basis
further subdivided according to the part of the vocal apparatus involved in the articulation.
The active articulators are: the upper front teeth, the various parts of the roof of the mouth (e.g., hard
palate, soft palate, etc). The soft palate also functions as an active articulator against the back wall of
the throat or pharynx.
Considerations as to which active and which passive articulators are involved lead to the
establishment of a set of categories of articulation like bilabial, labio-dental, dental, alveolar, palatal,
velar, uvular, and glottal.
While vowels are characterized acoustically by the absence of audible friction and, from the
articulatory point of view, by a free passage of air, consonants are noises that are pronounced with a
stricture of the airstream.
A distinction is made between momentary consonants (a complete if a consonant is characterized by
an exhalation of breath, an unvoiced noise, which is heard after the abrupt opening or explosion, it is
aspirated, otherwise, it is unaspirated. The following chart shows the distinction.
Aspirated unaspirated
Voiceless Ph P
Voiced bh b
The tongue is divided into three parts: the extreme front (called the tip), the next half inch (called the
blade), and the back or dorsum. The tip and the blade together are called the apex.
Vowels and Consonants
POINTS TO CONSIDER
• A vowel is a sound produced by the unobstructed passage the air steam without the cavity
being constricted enough to cause audible friction. Vowels are generally voiced but there is
also voiceless voice less vowels (e.g. Hindi [rena], if the oral exit is closed, a nasal vowel results;
if the oral exit is party closed, a nasalized vowel results (e.g. Hindi [kehi].
• A consonant is a sound characterized by constriction accompanied by some measure of
friction or closure followed by release. Consonants are classified according to the point of
articulation (bilabials, lobio-dentals, inter-dentals, alvolars, palate-alveolars, palatals, velars,
glottal, etc) and the manner of articulation (stops or plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals,
laterals, trills, flaps, retroflex sounds, etc). They may be aspirated or unaspirated. In some
South African languages like Xhosa, Clicks are found whose articulation involves making a velar
closure which causes a partial vacuum when the back of the tongue is lowered and abruptly
releasing a closure further forward in the mouth. Clicks occur in other languages as signs of
disapproval (tut tut) or to encourage animals.
• The term continuant is used for those sounds which may be prolonged for some time.
• For a description of a vowel we need to set up four dimensions: the height of the jaw: high
(close position), low (open position), lowerhigh and lower-mind; the position of the tongue:
front, central, back; lop position; rounded and unrounded; and length: long, short. Example
[i:] as in “seat” is a high front, unrounded, long vowel. [ i, e,o,u] are tense
• Cardinal vowels are intended to be points defied on a scale like cardinal points of a compass.
• A consonant can be described in terms of points: voiced or voiceless, name of the articulator,
the point of articulation, the manner of articulation, and the nature of the release, if any.
Example: [f] as in ‘fine’ is a voiceless labio-dental fricative.
• Sounds that are produced at the some point of articulation are called homorganic [homo-
organic] sounds. [p] and [m] are homorganic stops.
• Symbols used to represent sound are placed between square brackets.
Non-segmental Phonemes
English phonemes are chunks or segments of sound, such as /b/or/t/or/e. these are known as
segmental phonemes. However, it is important to realize that a number of languages have not only
segmental phonemes, Ut non-segmental phonemes also.
In North Mandarin Chinese, for example, there are numerous words which are distinguished by
differences in the rise and fall of tone, as in the following minimal pairs.
Ma [level tone] Mother
Ma (rising tone) hemp
Segmental and Supra-segmental Phonology
Two major divisions in Phonology are Segmental and Supra-segmental or Non-segmental Phonology.
Segmental Phonology analyses speech into distinctive units or phonemes that have a fairly direct
correspondence with phonetic segments. It roughly refers to “what we say”. It is concerned with the
fundamental building blocks of sound structure – the phoneme.
In English the phonemes are distinctive structural elements, that is, two words that differ in only one
phoneme have different meanings.
For example: ‘sun’ and ‘pun’. The initial phoneme /s/ and /p/ differ thereby altering the meaning
altogether. Word pair like these are called minimal pairs. However, the pronunciation of the phoneme
is not specified and depends on its environment. The actual realization of a phoneme in a given
environment is called a ‘phone’ and a set of phones that realize the same phoneme is called its
‘allophone’. For example: the initial consonant in ‘keep’, ‘cap’ and ‘cup’ are all allophones of the
phoneme /k/ because the articulation pf /k/ depends on the following vowel.
Minimal Pair examples:
DEER GEAR
DATE GATE
MUD MUG
DUNK GUNK
DOT GOT
DIG GIG
DOWN GOWN
DYE GUY
There are 44 phonemes in British English. They are further divided into 24 consonants and20 vowels.
The consonants occur either in the syllable initial and or syllable final positions. They are also classified
based on the place of articulation, manner, presence or absence of voice and the position of the soft
palate. For example: /p/ is a bilabial voiceless plosive. Vowels on the other hand are subdivided into
12 pure or unchanging vowels as in ‘bit’, ‘bet’,, ‘bat’ and 8 diphthongs or gliding vowels in which the
voice glides form one vowel to another as in ‘boat’, ‘buy’ or ‘bay’.
Suprasegmental phonology roughly refers to “how we say, what we say”. It analyses those features of
speech which extend over more than one segment. It involves the structure of syllables, stress and
tone.
A syllable consists of an optional onset (the initial consonant) and an obligatory rhyme. The rhyme
consists of a nucleus or peak which is normally a vowel and a coda or the final consonant. For example,
the word ‘phonology’ has 4 syllables – pho/no/lo/gy.
Stress is the phonological correlate of a combination of loudness, pitch and vowel length. In each word
at least one syllable is stressed. English is a stress timed language and content words like nouns and
adjectives are
stressed in a sentence. Even a word may have stresses where one syllable is stressed more.
Tone is the phonological correlate of pitch. Pitch and tone variations can serve various purposes. It
expresses the intention of the speaker. In general, constituent carrying important in formation will be
marked by a pitch accent. It shows that a relevant syllable is prominent in the utterance.
Intonation conveys sentence-level pragmatic meaning in a linguistically structured way. Pitch refers to
what the listener hears as high or low tonal properties, to rising or falling voice patterns.
