Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology A:

Lecture 1

Florian Breit

October 3, 2019

1 General Goals of the Course

Although we all speak a language and might feel we have an intuitive understanding
of how language works, this is not the same as studying the underlying structures of
language.
Analogy to how professional tennis players might have some physicsy explanation of how
they predict the movement or rebound of the ball; but if you ask an actual physicist, the
tennis explanation will invariably have been wrong.
Demonstration: TOP vs STOP vs TREE – labelled the same in our language, but the
pronunciations are keenly dissimlar. This is an example of unconscious knowledge: we
don’t know what we know.
Demonstration: the McGurk effect – we don’t just use acoustic information to inter-
pret speech, but context also plays a role in recovering the underlying spoken content.
Knowing this consciously doesn’t change the mishearing. Our brains do a lot of linguistic
processing without us even realizing it!
Demonstration: we parse running speech with ease even though it may be incredibly fast.
Infants are able to do this even without any prior explicit instruction in the language,
before they can tie their shoes.
The focus of this module is specifically on sounds – their production, acoustics, and
perception. This term we will study phonetics: the physical properties of speech sounds.
Next term we will study phonology: the abstract representations of sounds in our minds.
In the brain, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology occur in the brain =⇒
articulatory phonetics in the mouth region.
Linguists do not judge which languages/dialects are better or worse, because we are striv-
ing to be objective scientists. We do study how society views different dialects/languages,
which is the field of sociophonetics. We also do not say how people should talk, we de-
scribe how they actually talk.

1
2 Phonology
2.1 Vocal Anatomy
Parts of the vocal tract: lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, (hard) palate, velum / soft palate,
uvula, pharynx, epigottis, larynx and corresponding vocal folds (vocal cords, but they’re
really nothing like cords) with space between called the glottis. The tongue lives in the
oral cavity, above which is the nasal cavity.
Parts of the tongue: the tip/apex, above which lies the blade of the tongue, the front
part which can be extruded, the dorsum/back which always remains in the mouth, the
root at the very bottom.

2.2 Consonants
Consonants are classified according to three properties: 1. Voicing: when the vocal folds
are vibrating (fingers on cartilage to feel), otherwise unvoiced or voiceless 2. Place of
articulation:
• Bilabial: both lips come together [p,b,m]
• Labiodental: lower lip rises to upper teeth [f,v]
• Dental: tongue tip/blade rises to teeth (sometimes interdental, apparently I am)
[T,]
• Alveolar: tongue tip rises to alveolar ridge [t,d,s,z,n,l]
• Postalveolar: tongue blade rises to just behind alveolar ridge (sometimes palato-
alveolar) [S,Z,Ù,Ã,ô]
• Palatal: tongue front rises to hard palate [j]
• Velar: tongue back rises to the velum [k,g,]
• Glottal: constriction between the vocal folds [h]
Stops/plosives: Full closure - complete stoppage of airflow through oral cavity. Bilabial
stops [p,b], alveolar stops [t,d], and velar stops [k,g]. Fricatives: Air continuously flows
through a narrow passage - resulting in a ”hissing” sound called frication. [f,v,T,,s,z,S,Z,h].
Affricates: A sequence of a stop followed by a fricative, functioning as a single sound [Ù,Ã].
Nasal stops (nasals): Full closure in the oral cavity. The velum lowers so that air flows
through the nasal cavity [m,n,]. Approximants: Small degree of constriction (thus a
large amount of airflow). Comes in two varieties: - Central approximant: [ô,j] - Lateral
approximant: [l]
Overall, we classify consonants by listing these properties, e.g. [p] = voiceless bilabial
stop. (this order is traditional)