UNIT 4- Phonetics and Phonology

Features in phonology
Features: Mental representation of things (abstract)
• [consonantal features] [+ consonantal] [- consonantal (vowels)]
o Rats can’t distinguish between the (+) and (-) consonantal differences
• [Voiced, +voice] and [voiceless, -voice] features
• [± strident]
o Brush (*brushs – brushes/𝜕 /) insert shra /𝜕 / to make it plural
The number of sounds across languages are finite but the combination of them is
infinite.

Two domains of grammar that linguistics reference when talking about sounds in
language:

• Phenetics is the study of the physical aspect of speech events

• Phonology is the ‘grammar of sound’

Are phoneticians and phonologists uninterested in sign language?

• Signed languages do have units that function like sounds do in spoken languages
o Hand shape, orientation, location...
o Doing a gesture once or twice can change the grammatical class
• Research begins in the 1960s has shown that sign languages have phonology too

Statistical analysis, how much are sounds put together to form a word

• The word baby: can be –ty –by or ba- by or by-is

o Because 100% of the time the word is pronounced as baby, that is the word
• At 8 months babies can do this (blabbering), but monkeys can also do this.
o The difference between humans and babies is

You either change the vowels or the consonants but u can’t change either.

11-month babies can see the difference between vowels and consonants. They can
extract a simple syntactic rule from speech signals and generalize it, but only when it
occurs between vocals, not when it occurs between consonants.

Rats were sensitive to patterns that involved either vowels or consonants, they did not
discriminate.

Ixóõ (language): has 164 consonants, 31 vowels and 4 tones

• /kleiks/ sounds
 Phonetics (sounds we can produce as humans)
1.1Articulatory phonetics (sender)
Articulatory phonetics: how we make, categorize, and represent speech sounds.

• The parts of the body involved are:

o Lips
o Tong
o Teeth

The articulators

o Lips
o Teeth
o Alveolar
o Post alveolar
o Hard palate
o Velar
o (Uvular, not use in english, french ‘r’)

Sound is called after what part they touch when you speak

• When your tong touches the palate, you are making a palate sound /l/

However, modern studies have shown that other animals including chimpanzees have
similar larynx development to human infants.
Voice changing in puberty is a consequence of the larynx getting lower and lower

Speech involves the production of an airflow typically from the lungs but not
necessarily, which gets obstructed in various ways in the vocal tract.

• WHERE in the vocal tract can the flow of air get obstructed and HOW?

1.2.1 IPA
International Phonetics Alphabet

Writing systems found in different languages of the world:

Problems with orthography:

• Pronunciation may change after orthography is standardized

• All orthographies violate the one-sound/one-symbol principle

Solution: use IPA

IPA attempts to provide a symbol for all possible sounds of the world’s languages. It
represents speech in the form of segments, or individual speech sounds rather in the
form of syllables.

Places of articulation:

• Bilabial (both lips)

o /p/ - paint
o /b/ - bath
o /m/- make
o /w/ - wipe
o /𝛽 / - Avion
• Labiodental (top teeth and lower lip)
o /f/ - face
o /th/ - this
o /v/ - vanish
 ▪ Incur about 30% less muscular effort in the overbite and overjet
configuration than in the edge-to-edge bite configuration. Which
accidental production of labiodentals.
▪ Societies described as hunter-gatherers have, on average, only
about one-fourth the number of labiodentals exibhited by food-
producing societies.

• Interdental (tongue between teeth)

o /𝜃 /Bath
o /𝛿 /this
• Alveolar (tongue tip against the alveolar ridge, just behind top teeth)
o /t/ teeth
o /d/ duck
o /l/ love
o /n/ nail
o /r/ raro
o /s/ snail
o /z/ zoom
• Postalveolar (tongue blade or front slightly behind the alveolar bridge)
o / ∫ / sheep
o / 𝜁 / azure
• Retroflex (curling the tongue tip backward behind the alveolar ridge)
o Shi
o / 𝜆 /ren
• Palatal (even further behind the alveolar ridge, against the hard plate)
o /j/ year
• Glottal (the glottis)
o /?/ uh uh ‘ meaning no’
o /h/ help
• Velar (tongue body against the velum)
o /k/ kite, caught
 o /g/ gone
o /𝜂 / sing

Vocal cords can either vibrate or not:

• The difference between [s] and [z], [t] and [d] are if the vocal cords vibrate or not.
o [s], [z] and [t] and alveolar but [s] and [t] are voiceless, and [z] and [d] are
voiced
▪ Voiced: vocal cords move [+voice]
▪ Voiceless: vocal cords don’t move [-voice]
o In English all vowels are voiced
▪ a= [-consonantal] [+voice]
▪ f= [+consonantal] [-voiced]
• Example: polish plurals
o The last letters go from voiced too voiceless -> final devoicing

Manners of articulation (how is the sound pronounced): If [s] and [t] are both
voiceless and alveolars, what distinguishes them?

• [s] does not stop while [t] does stop

• [t] and [d] are a stop or plosive (airflow stopped), and [s] and [z] are fricative
(airflow restricted, but not stopped)
• [n] or [m]” no flow through moth (it is a stop), but lowered velum allows air to
flow through the nose.
o Nasal sounds

Gaps:

Bilabial fricative – voiceless bilabial fricative = [𝜙 ]

(sounds as if you are blowing out a candle, ‘f’ sound in Japanese)

Bilabial fricative – voiced bilabial fricative = [𝛽 ]

(Abuela, b sound in Spanish)

Bilabial nasal – voiceless bilabial nasal= []

Interdental stop - [t] sound with teeth and not alveolar

Velar fricative voiceless= ch in German Bach [x]

Glottal nasal= as humans this sound is impossible to pronounce

Approximants: ways to articulate sounds

Tongue gestures briefly to another articular point, without making contact. Sometimes
divided into glides like [w] in away or [j] in yes, and [l] in liquids.

o Alveolar tap: like [r] in Spanish caro

o Uvular trill: like [R] in rouge
o Bilabial trill: [B] in some Western-African languages

Affricates: stop followed by a fricative

o Like [t ∫ ] in chose

Summary of articulation
• Place
o Lips
o Teeth
o Alveolar
o Post alveolar
o Hard palate
o Velar
• Voice
o Voiced
o Voiceless
• Manner
o Stop or plosive
o Fricative
o Nasal sounds

1.2.2 Consonants and vowels

Vowels
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the rigth represents a rounded vowel.

Consonants

Pulmonic

English consonant phonemes = 24

- What are phonemes? The phones are sounds, but phonology cares more about
the phonemes, the meaning. So, phonemes are the meaning of sounds.
- Same phonemes can have different phones, different ways to pronounce a letter.
(different allophone of the same phone)

• In English these are paired by voiced and voiceless

Non-pulmonic

Consonants are sounds in which a significant constriction is made somewhere in the

vocal tract, so that there is at least some reduction in the energy of the sound.
Vowels are sounds in which no such constriction is made; the air flows out of the moth
relatively freely and the sound is relatively long and strong.

• Height: the height of the tong with respect to plate, and it correlates with
aperture
• Backness: the position of the tongue relative to the back of the mouth
• Roundness: the position of the lips
• Tenseness: the advancement of the tongue root into the pharynx (only for
English)

No English monosyllables end in lax vowels that are either front or high.

• Always end with tense vowels

Monophthongs or Diphthongs

The vowels we have discussed so far are all monophthongs: vowels produced in one
part of the mouth.

Diphthongs are vowels that move from one part of the mouth to another.

Consonant inventories are systematic: they use a dew contrasting features to create
many phonemes.

Languages usually have between 15 to 30 consonants

- Some have as few as 6 (Rotokas) as some has as much as 164 (Ixoo)

A hierarchal arrangement of the features required for English

Other ways to manipulate air flow

Ejectives: languages in North and South America

Clicks: Khoisan languages (and a bunch of Bantu languages)

Implosives: languages of India and Indonesia (...and others)

Vowel inventories

Vowels are maximally distinct: they spread out to occupy extreme parts of the vowel
space.

a. Two-vowel systems use high/low contrast /a/, /@/ (Ubykh (extinct in 1992))
b. Three-vowel systems usually have /a/, /i/, /u/ (Arabic)
c. Five-vowel systems usually have /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/ (Spanish)
Dispersion theory

Turkish non-plurals
Harmonies

• Vowel:

• Navajo:

• Sibilant: The [+strident] sounds are the sibilants, such as [s, z, S, Z, Ù, Ã]

o all strident in a word are required to agree in anteriority ([+anterior] are
the (inter-)dentals and alveolars). In Taiwan Mandarin: zhi dao

1.3 Auditory phonetics (perceptual, receiver)

Auditory phonetics: is the study of hearing and perception of speech sounds.