Transcript Chapter four Phonology

Phonology
Phonemes: the smallest sound unit in a particular
language that can indicate a difference in
meaning. Let’s take an example from English and
another from Arabic. In English /t/ is considered
a phoneme because the change of this sound in
the word bit/bit/ into another such as bid/bid/
changes the meaning of the word. But whether
the phoneme /t/ is pronounced as [t] in a word
like pit /pit/ or [T] as in the word but /b t/ does
not make any difference.
On the other hand, Arabic has the phoneme •
/t/as in the word /taab/ and another
phoneme [T] as in the word /Taab/ , because
substituting one for the other changes the
meaning of the word.
•
Allophones: The various pronunciations of a phoneme are
called allophones.
For example, the [t] sound in the word tar is normally
pronounced with a stronger puff of air than is present
in the [t] sound in the word star. If you put the back of
your hand in front of your mouth as you say tar, then
star, you should be able to feel some physical evidence
of aspiration (the puff of air) accompanying the [t]
sound at the beginning of tar (but not in star). This
aspirated version is represented more precisely as [tʰ].
The letter /l/ is pronounced differently in different
word positions. In the word lamb it is alveolar
(called clear l
But in the word lull both sounds are velarized
(called dark l. We have to pronounce the phoneme
differently in the two positions because of the
vowel sound that comes before or after it.
However, this does not make the two sounds two
different phonemes. They are still one phoneme
in English.
The crucial distinction between phonemes and
allophones is that substituting one
phoneme for another will result in a word with a
different meaning (as well as a
different pronunciation), but substituting
allophones only results in a different (and
perhaps unusual) pronunciation of the same
word.
In the preceding chapter, we investigated the
physical production of speech sounds in
terms of the articulatory mechanisms of the
human vocal tract…
Every individual has a physically different vocal
tract. In purely physical terms, every individual
will pronounce sounds differently.
Phonology (phonemics)is concerned with the
sound patterns of particular languages (e.g.
English or Arabic) and with the rules according
to which each language arranges its sounds to
form meaningful units.
When a child acquires his mother tongue he also •
acquires the phonological knowledge about that
language. This knowledge” permits a speaker to
produce sounds which form meaningful
utterances , to recognize a foreign accent, to
make up new words, to add the appropriate
phonetic segments, to form plurals and past
tenses,…, to know what is or is not a sound in
one’s language, and to know that different
phonetic strings may represent the same
meaningful unit.”( Fromkin,1993:216)