Лекции по теоретической фонетике

Т.Н.Петрашко

ЛЕКЦИИ ПО ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКОЙ ФОНЕТИКЕ

 

Английского языка

 

Lecture I. Phonetics as a Science

 

1) Phonetics as a branch of linguistics.

2) Branches of phonetics. Aspects of speech sounds.

3) Methods of Investigation.

 

Branches of Phonetics

 

Speech sounds have the following aspects, which are studied by separate branches of phonetics:

1) physiological or articulatory (biological);

2) acoustic and auditory;

3) phonological or functional (linguistic, social)

They can’t be separated from one another in the process of communication. But each of the 4 are singled out for purposes of linguists analysis. Being singled out it becomes a separate object of investigation.

1) Physiological or articulatory phonetics studies speech sounds from the point of view of their articulation and in connection with the organs of speech by which they are produced. Its oldest and most available method of investigation is the method of direct observation (visual o b s. auditory ob.).

2) Acoustic and auditory aspect. Sounds can be analysed from the acoustic point of view. Being acoustic phenomena, they share their properties with other acoustic phenomena. Thus, Lila any other sounds, speech sounds are communicated to the air in the form or sound wares. Speech sounds have pitch, intensity, tamber. Speech sounds can be investigated by the same methods as any other sounds and are subject to the same acoustic laws.

Auditory aspect. Vocal cords set in vibration by the energy of the air stream coming under pressure from the lungs produce vowels, sonorants and partly voiced noise consonants.

The vocal cords vibrate not only over their whole length but also in all their parts.

The frequency of the vibration of the vocal cords over their whole length is called the fundamental frequency. These vibrations are regular or periodic and produce musical tone or pieta. Changes in fundamental frequency produce intonation.

Vibrations of parts of vocal cords produce the so-called overtones, or harmonics. They play the main role in the formation of vowels and sonorants.

The vocal cords are not the only source of vibration in the production of speech sounds. Disturbances of very high frequencies can be set up in the air by the friction of the tightening air particles, passing through a constriction in the respiratory tract above the larynx, as in the production of fricative consonants f, θ, s,

There is another source of high-frequency air disturbance which is in fact a speech sound. It is a sudden burst of air behind a complete closure of the respiratory tract in the larynx or above it when this closure is quickly removed e.g. the production of plosives __p, t, k.

Individual bands of energy, which are characteristic of a particular sound are know as the sound’s formants. Five components of sound matter of speech sounds are the basic component of the sound matter of language. Every sound as a physical phenomenon has its spectrum, made up by formants. As a result we can speak about spectral or formant component of the sound matter of language.

Fundamental frequency, or pitch forms intonation and it forms the pitch component of the sound matter of language.

Another component of sound matter of language is voice-tamber component (only in voiced sounds). It helps to express all sorts of emotions in speech.

Other components of sound matter of language are intensity, or force component time or temporal component and which manifest themselves through and duration or length of speech sounds. The branch of phonetics with is concerned with the study of the acoustic aspect of speech sounds, or of the 5 components of the sound matter of language in particular, is called acoustic phonetics or phono-acoustics.

3) the branch of phonetics concerned with the study of the linguistic aspect of speech sounds was founded by an outstanding Polish-Russian linguist, Professor Ivan Alexandrovitch Bandowin de Courtenay (1845-1929).

This branch of phonetics is also called functional because of the role speech sounds play in the functioning of language as a medium of Luman intercommunication and social because of its communicative function.

It is also called phonology or phonemics because it is concerned with all the components of the sound matter of Language.

All components of the sound matter of language perform the following functions.

1. – constitutive

2. – distinctive

3. – recognitive

1. Speech sounds constitute the material form of morphemes, words and sentences, thus having a constitutive function.

2. Morphemes, words and sentences constituting a language differ from one another.

3. A native speaker normally recognizes different allophones in different positions and consequently, understands speech e.g. the allophone of the English phoneme t used in the word two is an alveolar aspirated voiceless plosive consonant; the allophone of the same t – consonant in word (eighth 8^th) is dental in aspirated. The native speaker would never mix them up and he will always hear if they are mixed up.

 

Sounds of Speech as Acoustic

And Articulatory Units

 

1) Acoustic aspect of speech sounds.

2) Articulatory and physiological aspect of speech sounds.

 

Acoustic aspect of speech sounds

 

Acoustically, speech sound is a physical phenomenon produced by the vibration of the vocal cords and perceived due to the vibrations of the air which occur at the rate of 16 to 20 thousand times per second.

Sounds may be periodical and non-periodical. The auditory impression of periodic wares is a musical tone or a speech tone. If the vibrations are not rhythmical we hear noises.

Sound has a number of physical properties:

- frequency (the number of vibrations per second)

- intensity Changes in intensity are perceived as variation in the Loudness of a sound.

- duration – it is the length of the sound or quantity of time during which the same pattern of vibration is maintained.

Other acoustic characteristics of speech sounds are fundamental frequences or musical tones and overtones or harmonics.

 

Articulatory and physiological classification of English vowels

 

The most general classification of vowels is according to:

I. Position of the lips

II. Position of the tongue

III. Degree of tenseness and the character of the end of a vowel

IV. Length

V. Stability of articulation

 

I. a) rounded u – u: É - É:

b) unrounded

 

II. Most scientists divide vowels according to the

a) horizontal

b) vertical movements of the tongue

 

a) When the bulk of the tongue moves backwards, it is usually the back part of the tongue which is raised highest towards the soft palate. Vowels produced with the tongue in this position are called back. They are subdivided into: - fully back [É É: u: É I ]

- back – advanced [Ù u a:] ou u¶

 

When the bulk of the tongue moves forward, it is usually the front part of the tongue which is raised highest toward the hard palate. Vowels produced with this position of the tongue are called front. They are subdivided into:

- fully front [I: e æ eI з æ∂ aI]

- front – retracted [I au]

 

Vowels [∂ ∂:] are considered by British phoneticians to be central. Daniel Johes says that the central part of the tongue is raised highest and it is pronounced at the junction between “front” and “back”. Russian phoneticians consider it as mixed

b) According to the vertical movements of the tongue vowels are subdivided into:

high i: I u u:

mid, half open e ∂: Î(∂) É(u)

low, open Λ É: æ a: É É(I) a(I,u)

Each of the subclasses is subdivided into vowels of narrow variation and vowels of broad variation:

narrow variation I: u:

high

broad I u

narrow variation e ∂: o (u)

mid

broad Î(∂) ∂

narrow Λ É:

low

broad a: É æ a (I, u)

 

 

III. According to the degree of tenseness traditionally long vowels are defined as tense and short are lax. But there are different opinions this problem.

 

IV. According to the length vowels are subdivided into (historically) long and short. Vowel length depends on a number of linguistic factors:

(1) position of the vowel in a word,

(2) word accent

(3) the number of syllables in a word,

(4) the character of the syllabic structure,

(5) sonority.

 

(1) In the terminal position a vowel is the longest, it shortens before a voiced consonant, it is the shortest before a voiceless consonant

be – bead – beat

(2) A vowel is longer in an accented (stressed) syllable, than in an unaccented one

‘Forecast (прогноз) - fore’cast (предсказывать погоду)

(3) In polysyllabic words similar vowels are shorter than in one – syllable words

verse - university

∂: (longer) ∂: (shorter)

(4) In words with V, CV, CCV type of syllable the vowel length is greater than in words with VC, CVC, CCVC type of syllable

e.g. [u:] is longer in dew (CV type) than in duly (CV type)

(5) Vowels of low sonority are longer than vowels of greater sonority. It is so, because the speaker unconsciously males more effort to produce greater auditory effect while pronounciry vowels of lower sonority, thus making them longer.

e.g. I is longer than É:

I: is longer than a:

D. Jones treats quantity independently of the vowel sounds themselves. Thus he treats I: and I as positional allophones of one phonemes.

 

V. Stability of articulation can be treated conventionally. We can speak only of relative stability of the organs of speech, because pronunciation of a sound is a process.

According to this principle vowels are subdivided into:

(a) monophtongs or simple vowels

(b) diphtongoids

(c) diphtongs or complex vowels

(a) English monophtongs are pronounced with more or less stable lip, tongue and the mouth walls position. I e

(b) A diphthongoid is a vowel which ends in a different element. There are 2 d – ids in English I: u:

(c) Scientists define diphthongs as one simple sound.

 

D. Jones defines diphthongs as an unisyllabic gliding sound in the articulation of which the organs of speech start from one position and then glide to the other position. The 1^st element of a diphthong is the nucleus, the second is the glide.

 

Definition of Phoneme

 

There are different opinions on the nature of the phoneme and its definition among swlars. Russian linguist I.A. Baudonin de Courtenay viewed phonemes as fictitious units and considered them to be only perceptions. Ferdinand de Saussure (France) viewed phonemes as the sum of acoustic impressions and articulatory movements. Trubetskoy (the Prague Linguistic School) defined the phoneme as a unity of phonologically relevant features. D. Jones head of the London School of phonology, defined phonemes as a family of sounds.

The phoneme theory in America was elaborated by the so called structuralists L. Bloomficld, E. Sapir and others who define the phoneme as a minimum unit of distinctive sound-features, an “abstractional fiction”.

Academician Shckerba’s definition of the phoneme: it is a real independent distinctive unit which manifests itself in the form of its allophones.

Prof. Vassilyev in his book “English Phonetics. A Theoretical Course” writes that a phoneme is a unity of 3 aspects: (1) material, real and objective,

(2) abstractional and generalized,

(3) functional.

In speech the phoneme serves to perform 3 functions:

(a) constitutive

(b) distinctive

(c) recognitive (see Lecture 1 – (previous)

The phoneme is material because it really exists in the form of speech sounds, allophones.

The phoneme is an abstraction – it is not any definite d – sound, for example, but an abstractional language unit, which exists in the form of its allophones.

The phoneme is functional, because it functions to make one word or its grammatical form distinct from the other, it functions because it constitutes words and because due to the fact that it really functions we recognize words (even though they are not pronounced properly).

Each phoneme manifests itself in a certain pattern of distribution. The patterns of distribution may be different. The simplest is free variation.

That is the variation of one and the same phoneme pronounced by the same or different speakers, e.g. the pronunciation of the phoneme k with different degrees of aspiration which doesn’t affect the differentiatory properties of this phoneme.

Complementary distribution is another pattern of phoneme environment, when one and the same phoneme occurs in a definite set of contexts in which no other phoneme ever occurs. In other words, if the same sound occurs in different environments, it is supposed to be one phoneme which manifests itself in the form of different allophones. Different phonemes can occur in identical context which is not the case with allophones.

Sounds are in contrastive distribution when we find them in contrasted pairs: said – sad, pit – peat, bed – bad, take – cake.

Here we can observe contexts which are the same but for one sound phoneme.

Phonemes are discovered by the method of minimal pairs, or by distinctive oppositions. This method consists in finding as many pairs of words as possible which differ in one phoneme.

The substitution of one sound for another is called commutation test (коммутационная проверка). If such substitution results in the change of meaning, the commuted sounds are different phonemes.

The method of distinctive opposition enables one to prove whether the phonemic difference is relevant or not.

e.g. t – is a forelingual plosive occlusive voiceless for this phoneme:

d – is also a forelingual plosive occlusive, but a voiced lenis phoneme.

So, for t-d the only relevant distinctive features are: voiceless fortis vs. voiced lenis. Other features are irrelevant.

Depending on the number of relevant distinctive features oppositions can be:

1) single

2) double

3) multiple

Example of double opposition: in the pairs pie – die, pail – dale, pry – dry.

There are 2 distinctively relevant features:

1) voiceless fortis vs. voiced lenis

2) labial bilabial vs. lingual forelingual alveolar

The /b – h/ phonemes in the pairs be – he, bit – hit, bait – hate

Are characterized by 3 distinctively relevant features and only one distinctively irrelevan feature.

 

b h

voiced lenis ^{___________________________________________________} voiced fortic

labial bilabial ^{___________________________________________________} pharyngal

occlusive noise unicentral ^{___________________________________} constrictive noise unicentral

This is an example of a multiple opposition.

 

 

Phonological System

 

Sounds can function as units of language only if they differ from one another. Mutually distinctive sounds are called phonemes. As has been pointed out the main method of establishing phonemes of a given language is the commutation test or discovery of minimal pairs through which the phonetic status of each sound is established.

When in a contrastive pair one consonant phoneme is opposed to any other consonant phoneme in at least one position, this pair is called minimal. For example, in the minimal pair “pen – Ben” the phoneme /p/ is opposed to the phoneme /b/ due to the presence and absence of voice; it is the only distinctive feature of this minimal pair. All the other features of the pair pen – Ben are irrelevant. If there are more than one distinctive features in a pair, it is called sub – minimal.

For example, the pair treasure – pressure is sub – minimal, because the opposition is due to:

(1) the presence and absence of voice in the - ∫ phoneme, (2) forelingual articulation of the /t/ phoneme and bilabial articulation of the /p/ phoneme. All the other features are irrelevant. Minimal pairs occur in identical environments, sub – minimal – in similar environments.

Distinctively irrelevant features can be of 2 types:

- incidental, which may or may not be present in a phoneme;

- and such without which the phoneme can’t exist.

e.g. Palatalisation is phonemically irrelevant incidental in English and relevant in Russian: мат – мать.

Classificatory principles (listen in Lecture 3) provide the basis for the establishment of the following distinctive oppositions in the system of consonants of the English language.

 

Work of the Vocal Cords

 

Voiceless vs. voiced

Pen-Ben ten-den coat-goat

Position of the Soft Palate

This principle of consonant classification provides the basis for the following distinctive oppositions.

Oral vs. nasal

pit-pin seek-seen thieves-theme

 

The method of minimal pairs helps to identify 24 consonants phonemes in the English language.

 

Т.Н.Петрашко

ЛЕКЦИИ ПО ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКОЙ ФОНЕТИКЕ

 

Английского языка