Course contents
1. Communication by means of language; introduction to
phonetics and phonology; phonemes, allophones,
minimal pairs
2. The segmental phonemes. Principles of classifying
sounds
3. The English vowels: front/central/back vowels
4. The English diphthongs and triphthongs
5. The consonant phonemes:
plosives/fricatives/affricates/nasals/laterals/semivowels
6. Sounds in connected speech: juncture/assimilation/elision
7. The syllable: structure of the English syllable
8. The suprasegmental phonemes:
stress/rhythm/intonation
9. The pronunciation of English in the USA, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand
1
I. Introduction
1.1. Language: an introduction
1.2. The role of sound in communication
1.3. Phonemes vs. allophones
1.4. Classification of the phonemes
1.5. Phonetics vs. Phonology
2
1.1. Language: an introduction
- language - the most distinctive human
characteristic;
- language enables us to get in touch with
people/places;
- language - the link between us, our
ancestors and our descendants.
3
Properties of language
• -Productivity
• -Arbitrarity : Gm. Blume, Rom. floare, Eng. flower.
4
Types of languages
a. Sign languages
b. Kinesics
c. Spoken languages
d. Written languages
5
1.2. The role of sound in communication
The act of communication can be described in terms of 5 successive
operations:
SENDER
1. ENCODING
1.1. semantic
1.2. grammatical
1.3. phonological
MESSAGE
SEMANTICS
GRAMMAR
PHONOLOGY
2. SENDING→ Artic. phonetics
RECEIVER
5. DECODING
5.3. semantic
5.2. grammatical
5.1. phonological
Audit.phonetics← 4. RECEPTION
3. TRANSMISSION
↓
Acoustic phonetics
6
Important distinctions
1. Language vs. speech
2. Sounds vs. speech sounds
7
1.3. Phonemes vs. allophones
substance (sounds) → Phonetics [k], [s], [i]
form (phonemes) → Phonology /kis/, /sik/
EXPRESSION
Linguistic item
(word)
CONTENT
substance →Semantics
form →Syntax
Phonemes – abstract sound segments that change the meaning of words;
Allophones – actually produced speech sounds; do not change the meaning of words
8
… continued
/t/ = phoneme
[ t1]
tea
[t2]
eighth
[t3] = allophones
train
Allophones = realizations of the same phoneme in various contexts
9
… continued
Phonologically relevant properties:
- Degree of obstruction of the air-flow;
- Involvement of the vocal cords
- Degree of opening of the mouth cavity;
Phonologically irrelevant properties;
-linguistically conditioned environments, i.e. the actual wordcontext:
e.g. [t] → [t1] in tea; → [t2] in eighth; → [t3] in train
-the degree of education of the speaker and his social class:
e.g. house pronounced [haus] vs [us];
-age:
e.g. door pronounced [d] vs. [d:];
-emphatic speech vs. non-emphatic speech: marvellous vs. ma – a
– arvellous.
10
… continued
PHONEME - a family of sounds in a given language which are ‘phonetically similar, and
do not occur in the same environment’ (Crystal, 1991:258).
ALLOPHONE - the actually produced sound. It is a variation of a phoneme.
Contributors to the phoneme theory:
- Baudouin de Courtenay.
- Daniel Jones (1950), The Phoneme: its Nature and Use; main idea: members of the
same phoneme are mutually exclusive, since they do not occur in the same position:
[ph] in park [pha:k] vs. hiccough [hikp]; shortcoming: he did not consider the long
and short vowels to be independent phonemes.
Free variation
Commutation test
Minimal pair
Development of allophones into phonemes: f and v, n and ɳ, Ɵ and 
11
1.4. Classification of phonemes
-segmental phonemes, i.e. phonemes into which larger strings can be
segmented (vowels and consonants)- cat is made up of 3 phonemes [kt];
-suprasegmental phonemes
- juncture: [ənaishaus]
- word-stress: import n. [imp:t], vb. [imp:t].
- intonation: ↑yes vs. ↓yes
12
1.5. Phonetics vs. phonology
PHONETICS - the science of speech sounds; interest in this topic quite old: Sanskrit
grammarian (Panini, 5th c. BC) – rules for interpreting the Vedic hymns
- Importance for foreign language teaching and learning; identifying and correcting
speech problems (stuttering, aphasia);
-concerned with human sound-making, DESCRIPTION, CLASSIFICATION and
TRANSCRIPTION of the speech sounds of a particular language (not all the lgs.)
PHONOLOGY - concerned with the range and function of sounds in specific languages.
It examines some of the ways sounds are organized and altered in accordance with
the rules of the English grammar.
In brief:
phonetics = the production of speech sounds
phonology = the use of speech sounds
13