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Unit 4:

Speech System. The Phoneme.

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(i) Speech (sound) system


Speech sounds infinite number of different modulations and
variations,
In other words, we never produce identical sounds!
Still, the listener is capable of categorizing sounds as a finite
set of speech units.
This is enabled by the existence of the system of speech
sounds: the listener pays attention to some essential elements
in the sound perceived, while disregarding other elements,
and thus perceiving even different sounding noises as one
and the same category.
For example, the different realizations [th], [?t] and [t] have
rather different auditory characteristics, but are still perceived
as one category, and that is the phoneme /t/.

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Why the term system?


The term system implies several essential
characteristics. The sound system contains
(1) a finite number of units and
(2) the rules for combining the units.
Minimal units?
phonemes, or speech sound types,
traditionally defined as the minimal
phonological units.
each phoneme can be broken into
smaller units, i.e. properties: distinctive
features.
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Rules

The rules governing the occurrence of phonemes are called


phonotactic rules.
E.g. */St-/ is not acceptable at the beginning of an English word.
Phonotactic rules govern the maximum number of consonants in
the initial, medial or final position in words.
Thus, the maximum number of consonants in English at the
beginning of a word is
THREE always /s/ + /p, t, k/ + /r, l, j, w/,
and at a word ending it is
FOUR different possibilities, but these sequencies are
lways precisely structured. E. g. /prQmpts/, /teksts/,
/sIksTs/, /twelfTs/
By applying the rules, we dramatically lower the number of
combinatory possibilities in a language.
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Phonemic inventories of languages


The number of phonemes is language specific
It varies from 13 (in Hawaiian) up to 50.
The difference in numbers does not mean that some
languages are poorer or richer than others
No language uses all its combinatory possibilities
exhaustively!
E.g. a language containing 30 phonemes can
produce over 25 million morphemes consisting of 5
phonemes no lg. needs such a high number of
morphemes.
The potential number of morphemes is dramatically
reduced by applying the phonotactic rules.
Every language has a sufficient number of sounds to
express any, even the most complex, notions.
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Speech of humans vs.


animal talk
Some animal species produce up to 40 different
recognizable sound types.
Does it mean that some animals have a richer system of
communication?
Difference the functioning of speech sound units.
Human speech sounds (phonemes) are meaningless!
used as building blocks to create morphemes, which
express meaning.
So, although a phoneme signals the difference in, for
example /k&t/ and /s&t/, there is nothing in the
phonemes /k/ or /s/ that has anything to do with the
meaning, i.e. the semantic content of the two words.
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Double articulation
In other words, phonemes are meaningless units,
but they combine into higher-rank meaningful units
MORPHEMES.
This phenomenon of human languages is referred
to as DOUBLE ARTICULATION:
Phonemes contrastive units (distinguish
meaning), but are themselves meaningless a
sort of building-blocks of languages
Morphemes the smallest meaning-bearing
units
It is the basis for the economy and creativity of
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human language.

Some other properties of sound systems

Symmetry a tendency of languages to employ differences in


a systematic way.
E.g. the number of voiced and voiceless plosives,
fricatives and affricates tends to be the same.
Vowel diagram: every language has a similar number of
front and back vowels, which are evenly distributed in the
whole of vowel space (represented as the diagram).
Redundancy is the property of speech sounds to be abundant
in many redundant signals.
Every speech sound carries the information on the other
sounds surrounding it, which greatly contributes to the
easier perception of sounds, even in the context of noise.

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(ii) The phoneme


In every language in the world some properties of speech
sounds, i.e. some differences in pronunciation, are crucially
distinctive.
these distinctions or contrasts are recognized by speakers
of the language as making different words and
acknowledged by linguists as systematically functional.
E.g. words leave, weave and reeve contain one different
phoneme each, so do the words allay, array and away, or
click, crick and quick.
the three consonants l, r and w are contrastive or
distinctive.
Speech sounds can get rather different realizations:
E. g. /r/ is articulated in different ways in red, train or through.
In addition, not all speakers of English pronounce r in the
same ways,
Still, it counts as a single sound within the system, because it
remains a contrasting unit.
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Every language has its specific set of


contrastive units, or phonemes.
Phonemes are defined as contrastive
phonological units of a language.
Another common definition: phoneme is
a minimal unit of linguistic analysis
which has no meaning of its own, but
brings about a difference in meaning.

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Some clarifications:

To say that the phonemes of a language are the sounds


used in that language is not precise enough.
E.g., /n/ and /N/ are sounds used both in English and in
Serbian, but they do not have the same phonological
status.
English: Substituting /n/ for /N/ in /sIN/ and /sIn/ changes
the meaning!
Serbian: Substituting /N/ in the word banka with /n/ does
not bring about a change in meaning, just sounds slightly
odd.
This is because [n] and [N] are two allophones of a single
distinctive unit in Serbian they never occur in the same
context.
Similarly, replacing the aspirated [th] with the unaspirated
sound [t] in the English word tea /ti;/ does not cause a
difference in meaning, but may simply sound
inappropriate.
Replacing the aspirated sound /th/ with the unaspirated /t/
in Hindi will lead to a difference in meaning, because
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these are two
significant
units
in this language.

Different languages: similarities and


differences
There are many similar sounds in different, even
unrelated languages of the world,
but the sets of phonemes, or phonological
systems, are rather unique, or language specific.
Every language has its own set of distinctive units,
and the number of those units is also language
specific.
The usage of phonological features, such as
aspiration, voicing, etc. is also language specific.
English may employ aspiration as a non-distinctive
feature, signaling just a difference in the
occurrence of the phoneme /t/, whereas Hindi
uses aspiration as a significant clue, signaling
phonemic difference.
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Free phonemic variation


As a rule, substituting one phoneme with
another will lead to a difference in meaning.
However, there are some cases when the
substitution is acceptable without affecting the
meaning.
For example, the word cigarette can be
pronounced as /sIg@ret/ or /sIg@r@t/,
without a change in meaning. This is called
free phonemic variation.
In English, sounds /I/ and /@/ are very
commonly in free phonemic variation in
unstressed syllables, so that the words
kitchen, beginning or longest can be
pronounced either as /kItSIn/, /bI`gInIN/,
/lQNgIst/ or as /kItS@n/, /b@`gInIN/,
/lQNg@st/.
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Positional phonemic variation


Sometimes, a phoneme may be replaced by another
phoneme without affecting the meaning, but only in
specific phonological environments.
This happens if one of the surrounding phonemes
influences the phoneme in question, so we say that it
is phonologically conditioned.
E.g., the final consonant in the word miss /mIs/ may
be changed if the following word begins with /j/, as in
the expression Ill miss you /aI l mIs ju/. The
fricative /s/ may change into /S/ in this context,
rendering the pronunciation /aI l mIS ju/.
Since this kind of change is caused by the specific
position of the phoneme in question (in this case /s/
in front of /j/), this is called positional phonemic
variation.
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Another clarification notion of


minimalness

Phoneme traditionally defined as the minimal


linguistic unit, it may be broken into smaller particles.
E.g., English fricatives /v/ and /f/ are rather similar, with
a tiny difference between them.
of course /Qv kO;s/ - voiced sound /v/ occurs in front of
the voiceless sound /k/, /v/ changes into its voiceless
counterpart, and the expression is pronounced /@f
kO;s/. In a way, we may argue, the sound has changed
under the influence of the sound /k/.
But then again, it has changed only slightly. What is it
that triggered the change?
Sound /k/ has the characteristic of being voiceless, so
it changes the voiced fricative /v/ into its voiceless
counterpart /f/.
This example shows that it is not the whole phoneme
that triggered a change, but one significant feature, lets
call it [-voice].
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Distinctive features

There are particles smaller than the phoneme, which


make up the phoneme distinctive features
Those are the characteristics that are perceived as
essential in phonemes.
E.g. what determines the phoneme /v/, is the following:
it is produced with friction,
it is articulated by the upper teeth and the lower lip,
it is produced with vocal cord vibration.
So, the phoneme /v/ can be described with the feature
matrix [+consonant], [+fricative], [labiodental], [+voiced],
Phoneme /f/ can be described with the features
[+consonant], [+fricative], [labiodental], [-voiced].
The two differ just in a single feature (voicing), which is why
they are so similar, both in their articulation and in the way
we perceive them.

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A bit more on phonemes and some


related issues
Phonemes are therefore also defined
as bundles of distinctive features, or
the characteristics which give them
the recognizable audible form.
Although the distinctive features
cannot be uttered on their own,
phonology still takes them to be the
minimal units of phonological analysis.
Another point important mentioning is
that phonemes are abstract units of
linguistic analysis.
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Abstract vs. concrete


Although we refer to them as to the sounds of
language, we still do not mean each physical sound
in an utterance.
The physical realization of a phoneme is always
different, even if produced by one and the same
speaker.
This difference in realization may be predictable, so
that we may know when /t/ will be uttered as [t], [th],
[t] or [?t] on the basis of the context in which it
occurs.
In that case, we are dealing with predictable
realizations of phonemes, called allophones,
which are more concrete realizations of the
phoneme.
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and even more concrete


What is more, regardless of the position in the word, one
and the same speaker will never produce one phoneme
in exactly the same way twice, however hard he/she
may try.
Saying, for example the vowel /A:/ will always result in
differences in tone, height, openness, loudness, etc.
Each of the different concrete modulations is called a
phone.
So the phone is the physical realization of a sound.
Each of the different above modulations, or phones, will
still be perceived as one and the same category, in this
case the category of /A:/ which is the abstract unit, or
phoneme of the language.
So, the phonological analysis of the physical sound
heard implies parsing different phones into a limited
number of phonemes, abstract units of the language.

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