English Phonology

(NGL 422)

1st Semester 2021

Dr. Eman Alhusaiyan

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Sound Example
ɪ big, busy , England, been, myth
e egg, head , any, friend, said
æ apple
ɒ dog, watch, because, cough
ʊ full, look, woman
ʌ sun, money, does, touch, flood

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The phoneme
• When we speak, we produce a continuous stream of sounds.
• In studying speech we divide this stream into small pieces
that we call segments.
• The word ‘man’ is pronounced with a first segment m, a
second segment æ and a third segment n.
• It is not always easy to decide on the number of segments.
• For example, in the two words ‘man’ and ‘mine’
man mæn
mine maɪn
Should we regard the aɪ in the middle as one segment or
two?

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The phoneme
• Another question has to do with how many different
sounds (or segment types) there are in English.

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The phoneme
• Let us think about English alphabets:
• We have 26 letters in English, some of them are vowels,
others are consonants.
• These letters help us differentiate between words.
• For example, in the alphabet we have five letters that
are called vowels: a, e, i, o, u.
• substituting one letter for another we get the five words
spelt ‘pat’, ‘pet’, ‘pit’, ‘pot’, ‘put’, each of which has a
different meaning.

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The phoneme
• We can do the same with sounds. If we look at the short
vowels ɪ, e, æ, ʌ, ɒ, ʊ for example, we can see how
substituting one for another in between the plosives p
and t gives us six different words as follows:
• ‘pit’ pɪt
• ‘put’ pʊt
• ‘pet’ pet
• ‘pot’ pɒt
• ‘pat’ pæt
• ‘putt’ pʌt
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The phoneme
• Let us return to the example of letters of the alphabet.
• If someone who knew nothing about the alphabet saw these
four characters: ‘A’ ‘a’ ‘a’ ‘u’
they would not know that to users of the alphabet three of
these characters all represent the same letter, while the
fourth is a different letter.
• It is known that, for example, ‘A’ occurs in names, not ‘a’
• It is also known that ‘a’ occurs most often in printed and
typed writing while ‘a’ is more common in handwriting.
• It is also known that substituting ‘A’ for ‘a’ or ‘a’ does not
change the meaning of the word.

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The phoneme
• We find similar situations in speech sounds.
• We can divide speech up into segments, and we can find
great variety in the way these segments are made.
• These units are called phonemes, and the complete set
of these units is called the phonemic system of the
language.
• The Phoneme is the smallest (basic) sound unit in
phonology which can distinguish between two meaning
words.

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The phoneme
• Segmentation: is the process of cutting speech into
smaller segment. e.g. man ( /m/ is a segment, /æ/ is a
segment, /n/ is a segment )

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The phoneme
• We also find cases in speech similar to the writing
example of capital ‘A’ and little ‘a’ (one can only occur
where the other cannot).
• For example, we find that /t/ in the word ‘tea’ is
aspirated. In the word ‘eat’, /t/ is unaspirated
• The aspirated and unaspirated realizations are both
recognized as /t/ by English speakers despite their
differences.
• When we talk about different realizations of phonemes,
we sometimes call these realizations allophones.
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The phoneme
• Allophone is the different pronunciation of the same
phoneme.
• Examples: the words part and sport
/pɑːt/ [pʰɑːt] /p/ is aspirated
/spͻ:t/ [spͻ:t] /p/ not aspirated
Complementary distribution: is a relationship between two
phonetically similar segments; it exists when one segment
occurs in an environment where the other segment never
occurs.
Example:
tea /ti:/ [tʰi:] [tʰ] occurs in this environment
eat /i:t/ [i:t] [tʰ] never occur

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Symbols and transcription
• There are two ways in which we can transcribe
speech.
• Phonemic transcription, also sometimes known as
‘broad’ transcription, involves representing speech
using just a unique symbol for each phoneme of the
language.
• Example:
• ‘tenth’/tenθ/‘clean’/kliːn/

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 Symbols and transcription
• The other way we can transcribe speech is using
phonetic transcription, also sometimes
known as ‘narrow’ transcription.
• This involves representing additional details
about the contextual variations in pronunciation
that occur in normal speech.
• W might transcribe the same three words
phonetically like this:
‘strewn’[stru:n]
‘tenth’[tʰɛñ ̪θ ]
‘clean’[kl̥i:n]

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 Symbols and transcription
‘strewn’[stru:n]
‘tenth’[tʰẽn̪θ]
‘clean’[kl̥i:n]
• ‘strewn’ has a long vowel, represented by the colon diacritic
[:].
• ‘tenth’ has an aspirated initial [tʰ] shown by the superscript
[ʰ]; and the vowel is nasalized, represented by the tilde
diacritic above the vowel [ẽ], because it immediately
precedes a nasal; and the nasal is actually articulated at the
interdental place of articulation, represented by the diacritic
[n̪], because it immediately precedes an interdental fricative.
• ‘clean’ has a long vowel, represented by the diacritic [:]; and a
voiceless [l̥], represented by the small subscript circle diacritic,
because the normal voiced quality of [l] is suppressed by the
aspiration of the [k] before it.

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Symbols and transcription
• Diacritics: Are small marks used to give more
details about the transcription.

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End of Lecture

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