Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

Reading, Clark, Yallop, and Fletcher

 1. Introduction

In a simple form of a conversation such as a short greeting;

A: Hi.
B: Hi, how are you?
the ability to communicate in
this way depends in turn on
proper bodily functioning (of
brain, lungs, larynx, ears, etc.),
on recognizing each other’s
pronunciation and on
interpreting the sound waves
that travel through the air

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 In linguistics, speech, rather than
written form, is regarded as more
central to human language, for
several reasons.

Humans have probably used spoken

languages for 100,000 years, perhaps longer.
Writing is a recent development.

Around more than 5,000 languages today do

not have any writing.

Children learn to speak long before they

learn to read and write; indeed, learning of
spoken language takes place without formal
instruction.

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 speech is a matter of physiology
speech is transmitted as sound waves
speech is intended to be heard or perceived

PHONETICS
The branch of linguistics that deals with
the sounds of speech and their production,
combination, description, and
representation by written symbols.

A: Hi.
B: Hi, how are you?

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 Articulatory Phonetics Auditory Phonetics
deals with the ways in deals with how speech
which speech sounds are sounds are perceived by
produced the listener

Acoustic Phonetics
deals with the
transmission of
speech sounds
through the air

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 PHONOLOGY
it is concerned with the organization
of speech within specific languages,
or with the systems and patterns of
sounds that occur in particular
languages

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 a general description of how vowel sounds
can be made and perceived might be the
province of PHONETICS while the analysis
and description of the vowels of English might
be assigned to PHONOLOGY

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 the precise measurement of vowel
phoneticians are length, or the behaviour of the larynx
likely to draw on during voicing, or the acoustic
methods and consequences of voicing, has generally
techniques used in been considered phonetic research
natural sciences –
rather than phonological
precise
measurement, phonologists may
identifying and characterizing the
sampling and profess to be more
averaging total number of distinctive vowels in
English, or classifying the sounds of concerned with the
mental organization of
English according to distinctive
language – with the
properties has been considered systematization of
phonological distinctions within a
rather than phonetic language – modelling
of a speaker’s
knowledge as a set of
rules

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 A: Hi.
B: Hi, how are you?

SPEECH
PHONOLOGY may be said to tackle the true
mental reality behind speech, while PHONETICS handles
merely the concrete outworkings of this reality
phonological
organization of
concrete nature of
various languages
sounds, speech, how it is
in the minds of
produced, observation
speakers in frame
and understanding of
of universality
aspects of speech

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 two observations

rhotacism *word[____b]
inability to pronounce Turkish bans the sound
or difficulty in b in word final position
pronouncing r sounds

the sound r can sounds can

be described as: occur in;
alveolar word-initial
approximant word-medial
voiced word-final
positions

PRODUCTION RULE

performance competence

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 Phoneticians ask questions such as:
1. How are speech sounds made?
2. How many different sounds do languages use?
3. How does sound travel through the air?
4. How is it registered by the ears?
5. How can we measure speech?

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 Phonologists ask questions such as:
1. How do languages organize sounds to distinguish
different words?
2. What sort of restrictions, or constraints, do language
put on sequences of sounds?
3. What sort of changes (alternations) do sounds undergo
if illicit sequences arise?
4. How are sounds organized into larger constituents
(e.g., syllables, stress feet, words, phrases)?

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 Together, they ask the following questions:
1. How do languages change over time?
2. Why are there different dialects?
3. How do children learn to speak?
4. Why is it hard to learn a second language as an adult?

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 an observation

a child intends to produce “pul” but

his/her output is “mul”

#1
The child has problems
with producing the
sounds “m” and “p”
<physically>
#2
The child did not
acquire the sound
distinction “m vs. p”
<mentally>

to test the to test whether

production of the child is
“m” and “p” aware of the
separately meaning
distinction
between “m”
and “p”
e.g., ham vs.
hap
İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2
İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2
 Applications of Phonetics and Phonology
• to record dialect pronunciations
• recording unwritten languages
• language teaching
• audiology
• speech pathology and therapy
• physics
• electronics
• software engineering
• behavioural sciences
• physiology

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2

 Which of the following branches of phonetics is
more closely related to Linguistics?

İDB164 – Phonetics & Phonology I – Week 2