PHONOLOGY

Definition
 Phonology is the study of the sound system of a language.
 Phonology studies how sounds are organized and used in natural
languages.
PHONETICS PHONOLOGY
 Deals with the production,  Deals with the way the sounds
transmission and reception of are organized in a particular
human speech language
 Basis for phonological analysis  Basis for further work in
 Concerns with how you make morphology, syntax, discourse
sounds and orthography
 Concerns with how you use
sounds

PHONE PHONEME ALLOPHONE

 any distinct speech  any of the  one of a set of
sound or gesture, perceptually multiple possible
regardless of distinct units of spoken sounds, or
whether the exact sound in a phones, or signs
sound is critical to specified language used to pronounce
the meanings of that distinguish a single phoneme
words one word from  a specific
 Concrete physical another the mental realization of a
realization of a representation, and phoneme!
speech sound abstraction over
all
 the various
allophones of
what we
consider one
sound

EXAMPLE
 The sound the sound we hear when we say “pan” referring to a
cooking utensil is phone.
 The sounds that compose the word “pan” which are /p/, /æ/, /n/
are phonemes. Therefore the word pan is composed of three
phonemes.
The phoneme /p/ has different realizations in the following
words: pan, span, spin, stamps. These varied ways of
articulating /p/ are called allophones
 Phonological Processes

1. Assimilation - occurs when one speech segment is

transformed into another owing to the influence of a
neighbouring segment.
/t/ changes to /p/ before /m/, /b/, or /p/
Examples:
hotpot [hɒppɒt] good
night [gənnaɪt]
2. Dissimilation – similar elements become less similar in
certain features Examples:
fifth [fɪft]
sixth [sɪkst]
3. Deletion – a segment is deleted
Examples:
family [fam’li]
crumb [kram]
4. Insertion (Epenthesis) – a segment is inserted.
Examples:
film [filəm]
family [family]
5. Metathesis - occurs when two consonants within a syllable are
placed in a different order.
Examples:
bird [brid]
cast [cats]