LEAD CITY UNIVERSITY

Department of Languages and Literature

English and Literary studies

300L

Introduction to Semantics ENG 301

PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE WORD

Phonology

The word phonology refers both to the linguistic knowledge that speakers have about the sound
patterns of their language and the description of that knowledge that linguists try to produce.
Phonology also deals with the study of speech sounds, how speech sounds form pattern, what sounds
are, how they behave in a language, how they are combined to form meaningful words, how they are
organized, how sounds are produced and how they are arranged.

Phonology is not complete without phonetics because the two cannot be separated. Basically,
phonetics is the branch of linguistics that deals with the speech sounds, their production and
representation by written symbols. It also deals with how human perceive or produce sound. Phonetics
are classified into three namely:

1. Articulatory phonetics
2. Auditory phonetics
3. Acoustic phonetics

The Word

A word is a combination of speech sounds or its representation in writing that symbolizes and
communicates meaning. It may consist of a simple morpheme or a combination of morphemes. A word
could also be defined as a text or spoken part of a play, opera or other performed pieces. It could be a
distinct meaningful element of speech or writing used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a
sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.

In linguistics, the word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes
that can be uttered in isolation with practical meaning.
 In many languages, words correspond to the sequence of graphemes (letters) in their standard writing
system that are delimited by spaces wider than the normal inter-letters space or by graphical
conventions.

Phonological Features of Word

The key features that would be touched on are:

1. Distinctive features
2. Segmental features
3. Suprasegmentals features

In phonology, a feature can be regarded as a property of a sound segment.

Distinctive features are used to explain that phonological rules apply to it's natural classes of sounds,
that is, sounds which share certain (phonetic) properties.

Features were introduced into phonological theory by Trubetzkoy & Jacobson.

Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they
describe:

Major class features, laryngeal features, manner features and place features.

These feature categories in turn are further specified on the basis of the phonetics of segments in
question. Since the inception of the phonological analysis of distinctive features in the 1950s, features
traditionally have been specified by binary values to signify whether a segment is described by the
feature; a positive value, [+], denotes the presence of a feature, while a negative value, [-], indicates its
absence. In addition, a phoneme may be unmarked with respect to feature.

Other phonological features of word encompass Segmental and Suprasegmental. The segmental
features involve consonant and vowels sounds or phonemes.

The suprasegmental features involve stress, rhythm, intonation, pitch etc

Segmental Features (Phoneme)

The segmental is also known as phoneme (deals with vowel and consonant sounds). We have 44 sounds
in English but they are divided into vowel and consonant sound. The consonant sounds are 24. The
vowel sounds are 20. The vowels are divided into:

1. Monophthong: it's where there is one vowel sound in syllable. We have 12 monophthongs. For
example; /I:/ etc
2. Diphthong: it's where there are two vowel sounds in a syllable. It is the combination of two
monophthongs. We have 8 diphthongs. For example; /ei/

Suprasegmental Features
Suprasegmentals features are also known as prosodic features. When we study non-segmental
aspects of sound system of languages, we are dealing with the prosodic aspects of sound
systems.
The prosodic aspects to be treated in the study are Stress and Rhythm, Intonation and Tone.

Stress:
Stress is the extra articulatory energy exerted on a particular syllable produced louder and
more prominent than others.
Types of Stress
1. Primary stress
2. Secondary stress
3. Contrastive stress/Emphatic stress
Intonation

Intonation refers to the fluctuation of pitch of voice or speech melody. Such

fluctuation is a universal facility exploited by all language to convey certain affective or
grammatical information.
English has two basic intonation pattern which may be used alone or in combination.
These are falling intonation and rising intonation.
Example
A. So,Usman is a janitor?(rising tune)
B. So, Usman is a janitor.(falling tune)
Both sentences have the same pattern of stress, but the first sentence as a rising pitch
towards the end(because it is a question,interrogative question). The second falls in
pitch with the last word because it is a declarative sentence.

Rhythm

Rhythm is the sense of movement in speech, marked by the stress,timing,and quantity

of syllable.
Rhythm is a product of proper sentence stress,stress timing and intonation.if the
content words in a sentence are properly stressed and the function words are
unstressed to maintain stress timing, with good intonation, the speech will possess a
good rhythm.
Example:
A. I came /to Ibadan/ yesterday
B. The class /started /at 12pm.

Tone

Tone refers to the use of pitch (how high or low your voice or a sound is) and other
sound qualities such as volume and tempo(speed) in language to create lexical or
grammatical meaning. This means that tone is created when people use pitch to
change the meaning of grammar and word choice they use when they speak.