DiSUm, a.a. 2019–20, Scienze e lingue per la comunicazione (L20) Lingua e comunicazione inglese 1, prof. Iain Halliday Lezione martedì 7 gennaio 2020 (26 di 27), aula A1, ore 08:00–10:00

Phonetics and phonology Chapters 2 and 3 of English Language, respectively titled “Phonetics” (by Kevin Watson) and “Phonology” (by Sam Kirkham and Claire Nance) are very detailed in their descriptions of the structures and mechanisms that work together in the production of speech – phonetics regarding the production of speech sounds, phonology regarding the organization of those speech sounds within the language.

In your reading of these chapters, I don’t want you to be daunted by the amount of technical information made available and discussed by the authors. Those of you who feel inspired by the topics may wish to absorb the information profoundly, perhaps with a view to future study in this field of linguistics. What I am more interested in is that you should have a general awareness of how speech is created and perceived and how speech is organized.

Watson early on introduces the components of the vocal tract, asking his readers to imagine instructions from the dentist to “say aahh” (ə) and “say eeee” (e) vowel sounds – the position of the tongue is very different in the two cases and can facilitate the dentist’s access to certain areas of the mouth. Apart from the obvious “tongue” – synonym both in English and in Italian for “language” – and which together with the receives particular attention in the chapter, the component parts are the lips, the teeth, the alveolar ridge, the roof of the mouth (hard palate), the velum (the soft palate), the uvula, the pharynx (the throat), the larynx containing the two (vocal folds), with the glottis separating them.

With regard to the articulation and description of speech sounds, an important instrument that is used universally is the IPA (not a type of beer [International Pale Ale], but the International Phonetic Alphabet, first devised in the late nineteenth century by the IPA (International Phonetics Association). I’ve already introduced the IPA briefly back in November in class 13 (“With a plum in your mouth”) in a reduced form that covers the majority of articulated sounds in English speech. In that same class I also gave you details of one smartphone app – LearnEnglish Sounds Right from the British Council, which will be very useful in helping you to learn the IPA symbols and will also help you with your pronunciation of those more difficult English sounds, such as the voiced dental fricative ð, which can prove tricky for Italian speakers.

In the section dedicated to “voicing” (2.2.1 – 2.2.2) Watson asks a question that is useful in describing the phenomenon:

Imagine the tune of your favourite song, and then try to hum along to it while whispering. Can you do it? Not really. It is impossible to hum a tune while whispering because the different levels of pitch required to create the tune are produced as a result of the different speed of vibration in the vocal folds. During a whisper, the vocal folds do not vibrate and, as a consequence, no pitch can be generated.

Place and are important elements in describing sound production – where and how the component parts (articulators) of the vocal tract are used in producing particular sounds. The first sounds to be described in the book are consonants. Articulators are divided into two basic groups – active and passive, the former being mobile elements, the latter fixed elements. It’s obvious that the tongue is the most active articulator in speech production. Watson provides a series of examples to help illustrate this, in his “illustration” and “advances” boxes. One of the simplest and most interesting is the invitation to readers to make a prolonged “s” sound followed by a prolonged “f” sound. Do this and try to be aware of the movement of your tongue (and your teeth) from an alveolar to a post- or palate-alveolar position.

Obstruction is key in the creation of consonant sounds, but there are many different types:

This obstruction is referred to as stricture, and can be of three types, as Ladefoged succinctly summarizes: ‘[t]he articulators may close off the oral tract for an instant or a relatively long period; they may narrow the space considerably; or they may simply modify the shape of the tract by approaching each other’ (2001: 8). Put another way, there can be (i) a complete stricture, if there is a full blockage, or (ii) a partial stricture, if a sound is made with what is called close approximation, or (iii) not much stricture at all, if a sound is made with open approximation. We will take each one of these categories in turn below and, at the same time, make connections to the places of articulation introduced earlier in order to start building up a full picture of English consonants.

The different types of complete stricture include: plosives (stops) with their closure, hold and release (bilabial – “p” and “b”, alveolar – “t” and “d”, glottal – the “t” in the word “ate” often becomes glottal; affricates, which have a more gradual release phase – the sounds at the beginnings and ends of the words “church” and “judge”; and nasal sounds – the beginning and the end of “man”. Partial stricture or close approximation leads us to fricative sounds such as the labiodental “f” in “leaf” and the “v” in “leave”, or the voiced dental fricative as above. Let us not forget alveolar fricatives such as the “z” in “zoo”, and don’t forget that

post-alveolar fricatives are produced, as in wash [ʃ] and measure [ʒ]. Finally, a constriction can be made by narrowing the glottis, producing the glottal fricative in house, [h].

If you stop to think about it, the complexity and variety of these descriptions is inevitable given the complexity and variety of the sounds we make in producing language and the uses we put language too.

While a crucial element in the description of English consonant sounds is the place of articulation, description of vowel sounds in English is, understandably, more concerned with “the vowel space” – the space within which the tongue will not make contact with other parts of the vocal tract, which would otherwise cause a constriction and create a consonant. The position of the tongue is crucial in these descriptions, hence front, central and back vowels.

Obviously Watson’s chapter is mostly concerned with standard English pronunciation, but he does acknowledge more “exotic” English sounds, including Liverpool’s famous “fricatives” – “We speak with an accent exceedingly rare.” The truth is, however, that English, worldwide, perhaps has more “exotic” than it has standard sounds. Phonology also received some attention in class 13 of the course, with a long quotation from Kirkham and Nance’s chapter, a quotation that stresses the great variety in the way we use and perceive sound in language. Phonology leads us into the territory of (smallest unit of sound in speech) and allophones (the variations, often minimal, in the pronunciation of a when it is used in combination with other phonemes). If you thought phonetics was complex, even a cursory consideration of phonology will make you realize that the organization of speech sounds together is even more complex. Here is another quotation from the chapter that provides some useful definitions of key terms in the field of segmental phonology:

Some useful terminology

•A phoneme is a minimal contrastive unit in phonology. In contrast with other phonemes, we can tell one word from another. •Allophones are phonetically similar ways of producing a phoneme. The realisation of an allophone is predictable from its phonetic environment. •Phones are minimal sound units. This word is useful as it does not require a phonological distinction between what is a phoneme and what is an allophone. We can use this as a technical term for ‘one sound’. •Another term for a minimal chunk of speech is a segment. This term is slightly more common than phone, but can technically refer to morphs in morphology as well as phones. Some textbooks use the words ‘phone’ and ‘segment’ interchangeably. •A minimal pair is a pair of words contrasted by only one phoneme, e.g. ‘tap’ and ‘top’. The existence of a minimal pair proves the contrasting sounds are phonemes.

Suprasegmental phonology (aka prosody), on the other hand, is concerned with syllables, , stress and intonation. The concept of syllable is one that initially appears very simple, but on closer inspection (as Kirkham and Nance show), these small units of language with their “syllable trees” (diagrams showing the component parts – onset, rhyme, nucleus and coda) are actually extremely complex. The tone, the pitch (a musical term) at which a given utterance is uttered, is not actually used commonly in English as an instrument in communication. (Some languages, Cantonese for example, have very sophisticated tone systems in which the same sound emitted at different pitches has different meanings.) Stress, however, the shortening and lengthening of particular phonemes, certainly exists in English, even though in English stress tends to be on the first syllable of a word, and can be important in conveying meaning:

Table 3.3 English diatone pairs

Noun Verb project project import import export export reject reject produce produce

Intonation can have a very significant influence in meaning and understanding. There are many different ways, and different contexts, in which we can say, “Thank you.”

The chapter on phonology closes with a very complex consideration of the phenomenon of “laterals”: “3.3 Case study: laterals in British English”. “Laterals”:

The final approximant, [l], is also produced at the alveolar ridge, but it is its particularly distinctive tongue shape which proves the label for its manner of articulation. For /l/, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the alveolar ridge, but the sides of the tongue bend downwards, allowing air to escape. Sounds with this tongue shape are called lateral sounds, so /l/ is a lateral approximant.

The above quotation actually appears much earlier in the chapter, but I provide it here simply as an aid to understanding what “lateral” means for phoneticians and phonologists. The case study that closes the chapter actually concludes that there is a difference between “categorical” and “gradient” interpretations of the “lateral” phenomenon – those who seek to be categorical will be categorical, while those who seek to be less categorical will adopt a “gradient” view, i.e. a view in which there is simply no need to be so categorical.

Personally, I hate to be categorical.