phonology

Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a huge area of language theory and it is difficult to do more on a general language course than have an outline knowledge of what it includes. In an exam, you may be asked to comment on a text that you are seeing for the first time in terms of various language descriptions, of which phonology may be one. At one extreme, phonology is concerned with anatomy and physiology - the organs of speech and how we learn to use them. At another extreme, phonology shades into socio-linguistics as we consider social attitudes to features of sound such as accent and intonation. And part of the subject is concerned with finding objective standard ways of recording speech, and representing this symbolically.

For some kinds of study - perhaps a language investigation into the phonological development of young children or regional variations in accent, you will need to use phonetic transcription to be credible. But this is not necessary in all kinds of study - in an exam, you may be concerned with stylistic effects of sound in advertising or literature, such as assonance, rhyme or onomatopoeia - and you do not need to use special phonetic symbols to do this.

Phonology, phonemes and phonetics

You may have known for some time that the suffix “-phone” is to do with sounds. Think, for instance, of telephone, microphone, gramophone and xylophone. The morpheme comes from Greek phonema, which means “a sound”.

• Telephone means “distant sound”
• Microphone means “small sound” (because it sends an input to an amplifier which in turn drives loudspeakers - so the original sound is small compared to the output sound)
• Gramophone was originally a trade name. It comes from inverting the original form, phonograph (=sound-writing) - so called because the sound caused a needle to trace a pattern on a wax cylinder. The process is reversed for playing the sound back
• Xylophone means “wood sound” (because the instrument is one of very few where the musical note is produced simply by making wood resonate)

A phoneme is a speech sound that helps us construct meaning. That is, if we replace it with another sound (where this is possible) we get a new meaning or no meaning at all. If I replace the initial consonant (/r/) from rubble, I can get double or Hubble (astronomer for whom the space telescope is named) or meaningless forms (as regards the lexicon of standard English) like fubble and wubble. The same thing happens if I change the vowel and get rabble, rebel, Ribble (an English river) and the nonsense form robble. (I have used the conventional spelling of “rebel” here, but to avoid confusion should perhaps use phonetic transcription, so that replacements would always appear in the same position as the character they replace.)

But what happens when a phoneme is adapted to the spoken context in which it occurs, in ways that do not alter the meaning either for speaker or hearer? Rather than say these are different phonemes that share the same meaning we use the model of allophones, which are variants of a phoneme. Thus if we isolate the l sound in the initial position in lick and in the final position in ball, we should be able to hear that the sound is (physically) different as is the way our speech organs produce it. Technically, in the second case, the back of the tongue is raised towards the velum or soft palate. The initial l sound is called clear l, while the terminal l sound is sometimes called a dark l. When we want to show the detail of phonetic variants or allophones we enclose the symbols in square brackets whereas in transcribing sounds from a phonological viewpoint we use slant lines. So, using the IPA transcription [l] is clear l, while [ɫ] is dark l.

The sounds of English

Vowels

Front vowels | Central vowels | Back vowels

English has twelve vowel sounds. In the table above they are divided into seven short and five long vowels. An alternative way of organizing them is according to where (in the mouth) they are produced. This method allows us to describe them as front, central and back. We can qualify them further by how high the tongue and lower jaw are when we make these vowel sounds, and by whether our lips are rounded or spread, and finally by whether they are short or long. This scheme shows the following arrangement:

Front vowels

• /i:/ - cream, seen (long high front spread vowel)
• /ɪ/ - bit, silly (short high front spread vowel)
• /ɛ/ - bet, head (short mid front spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /e/
• /æ/ - cat, dad (short low front spread vowel); this may also be shown by /a/

sumber: http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/phonology.htm