? This refers to the vibrating of the vocal cords when sounds are
produced.
? Voiced sounds ? Voiceless sounds
? Description of English vowels
? General feature: without obstruction ? Criteria of vowel description
? Part of the tongue that is raised
? Front ? Central ? Back
? Extent to which the tongue rises in the direction of the palate
? High ? Mid ? Low
? Kind of opening made at the lips ? Position of the soft palate
? Single vowels (monophthongs) and diphthongs
? Phonetic features and natural classes
? Classes of sounds that share a feature or features are called natural classes. ? Major class features can specify segments across the consonant-vowel
boundary.
? Classification of segments by features is the basis on which variations of
sounds can be analyzed.
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Chapter 3 Phonology
? What is phonology?
? Phonology is the study of sound systems and patterns.
? Phonology and phonetics are two studies different in perspectives, which are
concerned with the study of speech sounds.
? Phonology focuses on three fundamental questions.
? What sounds make up the list of sounds that can distinguish meaning in
a particular language?
? What sounds vary in what ways in what context?
? What sounds can appear together in a sequence in a particular language?
? Phonemes and allophones
? A phoneme is a distinctive, abstract sound unit with a distinctive feature. - 7 -
? The variants of a phoneme are termed allophones. ? We use allophones to realize phonemes.
? Discovering phonemes
? Contrastive distribution – phonemes
? If sounds appear in the same environment, they are said to be in
contrastive distribution. ? Typical contrastive distribution of sounds is found in minimal pairs and
minimal sets.
? A minimal pair consists of two words that differ by only one sound
in the same position.
? Minimal sets are more than two words that are distinguished by one
segment in the same position.
? The overwhelming majority of the consonants and vowels represented
by the English phonetic alphabet are in contrastive distribution. ? Some sounds can hardly be found in contrastive distribution in English.
However, these sounds are distinctive in terms of phonetic features. Therefore, they are separate phonemes.
? Complementary distribution – allophones
? Sounds that are not found in the same position are said to be in
complementary distribution. ? If segments are in complementary distribution and share a number of
features, they are allophones of the same phoneme.
? Free variation
? If segments appear in the same position but the mutual substitution does
not result in change of meaning, they are said to be in free variation.
? Distinctive and non-distinctive features
? Features that distinguish meaning are called distinctive features, and features do not, non-distinctive features. ? Distinctive features in one language may be non-distinctive in another.
? Phonological rules
? Phonemes are abstract sound units stored in the mind, while allophones are
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the actual pronunciations in speech.
? What phoneme is realized by what allophones in what specific context is
another major question in phonology.
? The regularities that what sounds vary in what ways in what context are
generalized and stated in phonology as rules.
? There are many phonological rules in English. Take the following ones as
examples.
? [+voiced +consonant] – [-voiced]/[-voiced +consonant]_
? [-voiced +bilabial +stop] – unaspirated/[-voiced +alveolar +fricative]_
? Syllable structure
? A syllable is a phonological unit that is composed of one or more phonemes. ? Every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel.
? The nucleus may be preceded by one or more consonants called the onset
and followed by one or more consonants called the coda.
? Sequence of phonemes
? Native speakers of any language intuitively know what sounds can be put
together.
? Some sequences are not possible in English. The impossible sequences are
called systematic gaps.
? Sequences that are possible but do not occur yet are called accidental gaps. ? When new words are coined, they may fill some accidental gaps but they
will never fill systematic gaps.
? Suprasegmental features
? Features that are found over a segment or a sequence of two or more
segments are called suprasegmental features. ? These features are distinctive features. ? Stress
? Stress is the perceived prominence of one or more syllabic elements over
others in a word.
? Stress is a relative notion. Only words that are composed of two or more
syllables have stress.
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? If a word has three or more syllables, there is a primary stress and a
secondary stress.
? In some languages word stress is fixed, i.e. on a certain syllable. In
English, word stress is unpredictable.
? Intonation
? When we speak, we change the pitch of our voice to express ideas. ? Intonation is the variation of pitch to distinguish utterance meaning.
? The same sentence uttered with different intonation may express
different attitude of the speaker.
? In English, there are three basic intonation patterns: fall, rise, fall-rise. ? Tone
? Tone is the variation of pitch to distinguish words.
? The same sequence of segments can be different words if uttered with
different tones.
? Chinese is a typical tone language.
Chapter 4 Morphology
? What is morphology?
? The total number of words stored in the brain is called the lexicon.
? Words are the smallest free units of language that unite sounds with
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