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Sample Chapter Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Contents List of tables xi List of figures xii Preface for teachers xiii Preface for students xv Acknowledgements xvi Part I What is phonetics and why do I need it? 1 1 Sound and spelling 3 1.1 What’s wrong with English spelling? 3 1.2 Other writing systems 7 1.3 Intonation, stress and syllables 12 1.4 Why phonetic transcription? 14 Additional reading 16 Exercises 17 2 Doing phonetics 18 2.1 Collecting data 18 2.2 Doing linguistic analysis 22 2.3 Some examples of phonetic analysis 24 Additional reading 34 Exercises 34 Part II How to describe and classify sounds 37 3 Consonants 39 3.1 Articulation 39 3.2 Spelling 49 3.3 Transcription 49 3.4 Acoustics 54 Additional reading 55 Exercises 55 vii Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 viii CONTENTS 4 Vowels 57 4.1 Articulation 57 4.2 Monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs 61 4.3 Spelling vowels 63 4.4 Transcription 64 4.5 Lexical sets 69 4.6 Acoustics 69 Additional reading 72 Exercises 73 Part III Putting sounds together 75 5 Syllables 77 5.1 What is a syllable? 77 5.2 How many syllables? (And how do you know?) 78 5.3 Sonority 79 5.4 The different parts of a syllable and phonotactics 82 5.5 Syllable weight 86 5.6 Where do they begin and end? 88 5.7 Syllables and spelling 91 Additional reading 93 Exercises 93 6 Morphemes and words 95 6.1 Morphology 95 6.2 Inflectional versus derivational morphology 98 6.3 Words 101 Additional reading 103 Exercises 103 Part IV Rhythm and tune 105 7 Stress 107 7.1 What is stress? 107 7.2 Lexical stress 109 7.3 Phrasal stress 114 Additional reading 120 Exercises 120 8 Tone and Intonation 122 8.1 Pitch and tone 122 8.2 Intonation 123 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 CONTENTS ix 8.3 Linguistic tone 125 Additional reading 130 Exercises 131 9 Length and duration 132 9.1 Vowel length 134 9.2 Consonant length 135 9.3 Length versus duration 136 9.4 Representing length in transcriptions 138 9.5 Spelling 139 Additional reading 139 Exercises 139 Part V Phonology 141 10 Phonological features and classes 143 10.1 Features 145 10.2 Classes of sounds 155 Additional reading 160 Exercises 161 11 Phonemes 162 11.1 Minimal pairs and sets 164 11.2 Phonemes and spelling 165 11.3 Phones, allophones and phonemes 167 11.4 Complementary distribution 167 11.5 Phonetic similarity 169 11.6 Free variation 169 11.7 Phonemic analysis 170 11.8 Transcription 173 Additional reading 175 Exercises 175 12 Problems with phonemes 177 12.1 When phonemes don’t tell the whole story 178 12.2 Case study 1: nasals 180 12.3 Case study 2: unstressed vowels 184 12.4 Sounds with no phoneme 185 12.5 Ambiguity 186 12.6 What is the problem? 187 Additional reading 187 Exercises 188 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 x CONTENTS Part VI Phonological theory 189 13 Processes 191 13.1 Single sounds 192 13.2 Groups of sounds 200 Additional reading 205 Exercises 205 14 Theoretical approaches 207 14.1 Levels of representation 207 14.2 What versus why 208 14.3 Phonological theories 211 Additional reading 217 Answers to exercises 218 Appendix A 238 Appendix B 241 Appendix C 247 Bibliography 248 Index 250 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 1 Sound and spelling When you first went to school, you probably had a pretty good grasp of your native language. You may even have already started to learn the basics of writing, but for many children their first experience of the world of reading and writing will have come at that point. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to be able to listen and speak; you had to work out how to break down the words you had learned into their individual sounds and then work out which of those funny symbols you were being taught was the right one for the sound. Luckily, most people manage to pick that up over the course of their schooling without too much pain. Now you find you have to learn about phonetics (I’m not even going into phonology just yet), and you have to ‘unlearn’ much of what your literacy teachers taught you. Your phonetics instructor (if you have one) will try to convince you that the ‘sounds’ you think you hear in words of your language are not all what they seem. Some of them may be pronounced very differently from how you think they are, and some may not be pronounced at all. If you are a native speaker of English, you are probably already aware that there are some issues with the relationship between spelling and pronunciation, but you may not be aware just quite how serious those issues are. By the way, if you’re a native speaker of a language that uses a non-alphabetic writing system, I come to those a bit later in this chapter. So what is the point of phonetics? In this first part of the book, I try to answer that question in a number of ways. First, I look at the issues of pro- nunciation and spelling in English and other languages. In chapter 2, I go on to look at the kinds of thing you need to know about to do phonetics and what kinds of phonetic information are useful, and look at three case studies, showing you how understanding phonetics can be useful for different kinds of work in linguistics. Phonetics is a thing of beauty in its own right, but learning about glottal stops and secondary stress will also help you to study other interesting areas of linguistics like sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. 1.1 What’s wrong with English spelling? Quick quiz 1. How many sounds are there in gnaw, exit, vision, use, thick? 2. Can you think of other ways of spelling the sound often represented by ee? 3. How many different ways can you think of to pronounce ough? 3 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 4 DISCOVERING PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY English, like many other languages, has an alphabetic writing system. That means words are written by using strings of letters, each of which represents, in some sense, a sound. As a young schoolchild a large part of the process of learning to read and write is learning which sounds are represented by which letters. At various times in various education systems, the attitudes and approaches to teaching this process vary, but many use something like the phonics system currently being used in the UK state education system. This involves teaching children to sound out words and associate letters with the individual sounds. So, when teaching children how to spell the word pig, they might be asked to sound it out as P-I-G, then to write the letters that match those sounds. For simple words that may work okay, but think about another, apparently equally simple, word: cat. If children sound out the word into its three sounds, they then have to decide which letter represents the first sound. Is it c or is it k? This really simple example shows that English spelling does not reliably match the pronunciation. In particular there is not a one-to-one mapping between the sounds and the letters. In English this is true more than in some other languages, but it is generally true in all languages. The most simple situation in which the one-to-one relationship falls down is when more than one letter is used to represent one sound in a particular word, or vice versa. The first quiz question above shows this. For example, th in thick represents a single sound (it’s actually a dental fricative, and it’s written in phonetics with the symbol [θ], but don’t worry about that for now!) as does ck at the end. On the other hand, the x in exit represents two sounds, written as [ks]. Check that you can hear the two different sounds represented by that one letter. The x example is actually relatively rare – the other situation happens much more frequently. This is because there are fewer letters in the alphabet than different sounds in the language. I call this the strict one-to-one problem. The other way that the one-to-one system is upset is by having different ways of representing the same sounds in different words, or different ways of pronouncing the same letters or letter combinations. I call this the variation problem. These are the kinds of problem shown in the other two quiz ques- tions. The sound that is written ee, as in words like see, meet, feel, can also be written in a number of different ways (you might not agree that all of these have the same sound – there are variations): ea in sea ie in thief ei in receive y in happy ey in key Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 Copyrighted material – 9781137545718 SOUNd aNd SpElliNg 5 e in me i in multi-storey ee_e in squeeze i_e in suite oe in foetus You may have learned some guidelines for how to spell sounds, like ‘i before e except after c’, and you may also have realised that they rarely work for all examples. The letter combination ough in English is notorious for having different pronunciations, as in the words though, through, cough, bough, enough, thorough, bought, hiccough. There are lots of reasons why the English spelling system is quite complex and unpredictable.
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