An Introduction To English Phonology
An Introduction toEnglish PhonologyApril McMahonEdinburgh University Press
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01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage iiEdinburgh Textbooks on the English LanguageGeneral EditorHeinz Giegerich, Professor of English Linguistics (University of Edinburgh)Editorial BoardLaurie Bauer (University of Wellington)Derek Britton (University of Edinburgh)Olga Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Norman Macleod (University of Edinburgh)Donka Minkova (UCLA)Katie Wales (University of Leeds)Anthony Warner (University of York) An Introduction to English SyntaxJim MillerAn Introduction to English PhonologyApril McMahonAn Introduction to English MorphologyAndrew Carstairs-McCarthy
01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage iiiAn Introduction toEnglish PhonologyApril McMahonEdinburgh University Press
01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage iv April McMahon, 2002Edinburgh University Press Ltd22 George Square, EdinburghTypeset in Jansonby Norman Tilley Graphics andprinted and bound in Great Britainby MPG Books Ltd, BodminA CIP Record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 0 7486 1252 1 (hardback)ISBN 0 7486 1251 3 (paperback)The right of April McMahonto be identified as author of this workhas been asserted in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.Disclaimer:Some images in the original version of this book are notavailable for inclusion in the eBook.
01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage vContentsTo colleaguesix1 Sounds, spellings and symbols1.1 Phonetics and phonology1.2 Variation1.3 The International Phonetic AlphabetRecommendations for reading1145112 The phoneme: the same but different2.1 Variation and when to ignore it2.2 Conditioned variation in written language2.3 The phoneme2.4 Some further examples2.5 The reality of the phonemeExercisesRecommendations for reading12121314171921223 Describing English consonants3.1 What’s inside a phonetic symbol?3.2 Consonant classification3.3 The anatomy of a consonantExercisesRecommendations for reading2323232434354 Defining distributions: consonant allophones4.1 Phonemes revisited4.2 Making generalisations4.3 Making statements more precise4.4 A more economical feature system4.5 Natural classes4.6 A warning note on phonological rules36363638404647
01 pages i-x prelimsvi18/10/011:14 pmPage viAN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PHONOLOGYExercisesRecommendations for reading50515 Criteria for contrast: the phoneme system5.1 Minimal pairs and beyond5.2 Phonetic similarity and defective distributions5.3 Free variation5.4 Neutralisation5.5 Phonology and morphology5.6 Rules and constraints5.7 The phoneme systemExercisesRecommendations for reading525253565860626365666 Describing vowels6.1 Vowels versus consonants6.2 The anatomy of a vowel6.3 Vowel classificationExercisesRecommendations for reading6767697477787 Vowel phonemes7.1 The same but different again7.2 Establishing vowel contrasts7.3 Vowel features and allophonic rules7.4 Phonetic similarity and defective distribution7.5 Free variation, neutralisation and morphophonemicsExercisesRecommendations for reading79797985878891918 Variation between accents8.1 The importance of accent8.2 Systemic differences8.3 Realisational differences8.4 Distributional differencesExercisesRecommendations for reading929294991011021039 Syllables9.1 Phonology above the segment9.2 The syllable9.3 Constituents of the syllable104104104105
01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage viiCONTENTS9.4 The grammar of syllables: patterns of acceptability9.5 Justifying the constituentsExercisesRecommendations for readingvii10610911511610 The word and above10.1 Phonological units above the syllable10.2 Stress10.3 The foot10.4 Segmental phonology of the phrase and wordExercisesRecommendations for reading117117118124128131132Discussion of the exercisesReferencesIndex133143145
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01 pages i-x prelims18/10/011:14 pmPage ixTo colleaguesThis textbook is designed for use on ten- or twelve-week introductorycourses on English phonology of the sort taught in the first year of manyEnglish Language and Linguistics degrees, in British and Americanuniversities. Students on such courses can struggle with phonetics andphonology; it is sometimes difficult to see past the new symbols andterminology, and the apparent assumption that we can immediatelybecome consciously aware of movements of the vocal organs which wehave been making almost automatically for the last eighteen or moreyears. This book attempts to show students why we need to know aboutphonetics and phonology, if we are interested in language and ourknowledge of it, as well as introducing the main units and concepts werequire to describe speech sounds accurately.The structure of the book is slightly unusual: most textbooks forbeginning students, even if they focus on English, tend to begin with anoutline of elementary universal phonetics, and introduce phonologicalconcepts later. I have started the other way round: in a book which isprimarily intended as an introduction to phonology, it seems appropriate to begin with one of the major units of phonology, the phoneme.The idea of phonological contrast is a complex but necessary one, andstudents do seem, at least in my experience, to cope well with an introduction of this more abstract idea before they become embroiled in thedetails of phonetic consonant and vowel classification. When it comesto presenting those details, I have also chosen to use verbal descriptionsrather than diagrams and pictures in most cases. There are two reasonsfor this. First, students need to learn to use their own intuitions, and thisis helped by encouraging them to introspect and think about their ownvocal organs, rather than seeing disembodied pictures of structureswhich don’t seem to belong to them at all. Secondly, I know from meeting fellow-sufferers that I am not the only person to find supposedlyhelpful cartoons and diagrams almost impossible to decipher, and to feelthat the right word can be worth a thousand pictures. If students orix
01 pages i-x prelimsx18/10/011:14 pmPage xAN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PHONOLOGYteachers feel the visual centres of their brains are being insufficientlystimulated, many diagrams and photographs are available in the additional reading recommended at the end of each chapter.In a textbook of this length, choices are also inevitable: mine are toconcentrate on segmental phonology, with some discussion of stressand syllables, but a brief mention only of intonation. The theoreticalmachinery introduced extends only to segments, features, basic syllabification and elementary realisation rules: issues of morphophonemicsand rules versus constraints are again mentioned only briefly. My hopeis that a thorough grounding in the basics will help students approachmore abstract theoretical and metatheoretical issues in more advancedcourses with greater understanding of what the theories intend to doand to achieve, and with more chance of evaluating competing modelsrealistically.My warmest thanks for help and advice on this book go to my studentsin Sheffield (who were not necessarily aware that I was just as interestedin their attitude to exercises and examples as in their answers), and toHeinz Giegerich and Andrew Linn (who were all too aware that theirinput was required, and have withstood pestering with typical patience).Particular thanks also to my son Aidan, who, following our recent moveto Yorkshire, replaced / / with /υ/ in words, quite consciouslyand systematically, during the writing of this book. If a six-year-old canwork this out, first-year undergraduates have no excuse.
02 pages 1-15018/10/011:14 pmPage 11 Sounds, spellings andsymbols1.1 Phonetics and phonologyAlthough our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinkinghuman’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate namewould be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbased signalling systems, and can communicate with other members ofthe same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approachingdanger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leavingaside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put togetherin an extraordinarily sophisticated way.There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound,namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book,which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accentsand how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will needaspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing andanalysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. Morespecifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speechorgans and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of theworld’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speakerto the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physicsof speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and theeffect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows thatphonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics andneurology.However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle makeand use is part of understanding what makes us human, each persongrows up learning and speaking only a particular human language orlanguages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full rangeof possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the1
02 pages 1-150218/10/011:14 pmPage 2AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PHONOLOGYcharacteristics of the English sound system that make it specificallyEnglish, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move intothe domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection andorganisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested inthe sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers andhearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of thoselanguages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarilyaccess and talk about in detail: we often have intuitions about languagewithout knowing where they come from, or exactly how to express them.But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of Englishwill tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word,whereas *fnil is not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In theusual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while*fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English soundsystem. However, English speakers are not consciously aware of thoserules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those wordsthat the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initialconsonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likelyanswer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informantwill produce similar words like sniff or snip to back up her argument), butthat *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the phonologist to expressgeneralisations of this sort in precise terms: after all, just because knowledge is not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or notworth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciouslythink ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus,right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely to makeany conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go downstairs in the first place; and relatively few people will know the names ofthe muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individual activities involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process:think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. Allof this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. Wedecide to speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech production are beyond our conscious reach; and thinking deliberately aboutwhat we are saying, and how we are saying it, is likely to cause selfconsciousness and hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speechrather than improving matters. Both language and mobility (crawling,walking, running downstairs) emerge in developing children by similarcombinations of mental and physical maturation, internal abilities, andinput from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learnedbecomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of
02 pages 1-15018/10/011:14 pmPage 3SOUNDS , SPELLINGS AND SYMBOLS3what complexity lies behind our actions when we realise we have madea speech error, or see and hear a child struggling to say a word or takea step. Phonologists, like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help usunderstand the nature of that underlying complexity, and to describefully and formally what we know in a particular domain, but don’t knowwe know.The relationship between phonetics and phonology is a complexone, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-downphonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the wholerange of possible human sounds, including some which they never hearfrom parents or siblings: a baby in an English-speaking environment willspontaneously make consonants which are not found in any Europeanlanguage, but are to be found closest to home in an African language, say,or one from the Caucasus. However, that child will then narrow downher range of sounds from the full human complement to only thosefound in the language(s) she is hearing and learning, and will claim,when later trying to learn at school another language with a differentsoun
This textbook is designed for use on ten- or twelve-week introductory courses on English phonology of the sort taught in the first year of many English Language and Linguistics degrees, in British and American universities. Students on such courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology; it is sometimes difficult to see past the new .
A view of phonology 287 to articulate a certain point of view about phonology that arises from the application of functionalist (in the sense outlined above) principles to phonology. This perspective gives rise to the following mandates: - Consider the substance of phonology rather than just the structure. For
language phonology, and examine recent studies about the development of perception of English sounds by L1 Japanese learners. 1. Prominent Theories in Second by widespread failure" (Shouten, 2009, p.2). language Phonology Second language phonology has often been assessed through the prism of age constraints.
On this view, phonology is not the study of human speech sounds per se, although phonetics and phonology are inextricably inter-twined. The point of this chapter is to demonstrate what the differ-ence between the two is, and to begin to introduce the reader to the phonology o
IMPACT Articulation and Phonology Rating Scale Description he IMPACT Articulation and Phonology Rating Scale is a norm-referenced articulation and phonology rating scale for children and young adults ages 5 through 21 years old. It is composed of 30-35 test items, and has three separate forms to be completed by clinician, parent(s), and teacher(s).
Teaching Pronunciation: a Course Book and Reference Guide. 2. nd. ed. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-521-72976-5. English Phonetics & Phonology Workbook (Provided by the instructor) (Supplementary Readings) Rogerson-Revell, P. (2011). English Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
2. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY 2.1 Sounds of English The study of the sounds of human language is called phonetics. Phonology is concerned with the properties of sounds and the ways that they are combined into words. Important: Sounds, in the sense that we discuss them, are totally different from letters.
1st YEAR PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY, Spring 2016 Teacher Lectures in practical English Phonetics, Phonology and Pronunciation given by Kateřina Tomková (2060@mail.muni.cz) of the Dept. of English and American Studies. Office hours: Tuesdays 1100-1200, Wednesdays 1500-1600, Thursdays 1300-1400.
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