Linguistics/Phonetics

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Contents 1 Contents 2 Introduction 3 Articulatory phonetics 4 The International Phonetic Alphabet 5 Acoustic phonetics

[edit] Contents

Linguistics

1. Introduction
2. The sounds of speech
3. Speech sounds go to work
4. How we make words
5. How words fit together
6. How languages got the way they are
7. The role of meaning
8. How languages differ
9. Verbal Behavior

[edit] Introduction

If you have ever heard a Korean say "I want to go to the bitch" (meaning "I want to go to the beach"), you should understand the importance of mastering phonetics when learning new languages. To their credit, the Korean is entirely unaware of how they sound in English. If fact, if you tried to correct them but saying "It's pronounced 'beach'". They will probably respond with "That's what I said, bitch."

The human brain is an amazing piece of work. Every time you utter a sound, or hear one, there are dozens of things that happen subconsciously and take the sound and reduce it to one of several distinct sounds that we use in our language. The problem is that these distinct sounds are different in different languages. When you come into a new language and you hear a sound you're not used to, you automatically try to fit it into one of your previous categories of sounds. This can cause interesting problems.

Let's illustrate this with a (slightly-hypothetical) analogy. There are one group of people from the Land of Men, and another from the Land of Women. In the Land of Men there are only a few colors: red, blue, brown, yellow, pink, green, and a few more. In the Land of Women, however, there are many more: chartreuse, magenta, terra cotta, viridian, lavender rose, etc. Whole books could be written about the colours in the land of women, and indeed, some have.

When the men visit the Land of Women, the have no end of trouble. You see their road signs are colour-coded. The women have no problem with this. Their stop signs are rust-coloured and their yield signs are painted in auburn. Now the men, they look at both of these colours and see brown. So as far as they can tell, all stop signs are brown in the Land of Women; however, sometimes women will stop at the stop signs and sometimes they drive right through. Obviously the women must be terrible drivers. Likewise, the women notice the men have an annoying habit of always stopping at yield signs.

Learning language can be very similar to this, and if you don't know what is going on it can be very frustrating. The study of speech sound is a branch of linguistics called phonetics. The study of how our brains treat these sounds is called phonology (covered later).

One of the most important tools of phonetics is a special alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. In this chapter, you will learn what sounds humans use in their languages, and how linguists represent those sounds in IPA. Reading and writing IPA will help you understand what's really happening when people speak.

[edit] Articulatory phonetics

Phonetics is the systematic study of the human ability to make sounds using the vocal organs of speech, especially for producing oral language. It is usually divided into the three branches of (1) articulatory, (2) acoustic and (3) auditory phonetics. It is also traditionally differentiated from (though overlaps with) the field of phonology, which is the formal study of the sound systems (phonologies) of languages, especially the universal properties displayed in ALL languages, such as the psycholinguistic aspects of phonological processing and acquisition.

Speaking in terms of articulation, the sounds that we utter to make language can be split into two different types: consonants and vowels. For the purposes of articulatory phonetics, consonant sounds are typically characterized as sounds that have constricted or closed configurations of the vocal tract. Vowels, on the other hand, are characterized in articulatory terms as having relatively little constriction; that is, an open configuration of the vocal tract. Vowels carry much of the pitch of speech and can be held (different durations, such as a half a beat, one beat, two beats, three beats, etc. of speech rhythm). Consonants, on the other hand, do not carry the prosodic pitch (especially if devoiced and not nasalized) and do not display the potential for the durations that vowels can have. Linguists may also speak of 'semi-vowels' or 'semi-consonants' (often used as synonymous terms). For example, a sound such as [w] phonetically seems more like a vowel (with relative lack of constriction or closure of the vocal tract) but, phonologically speaking, behaves as a consonant in that it always appears before a vowel sound at the beginning (onset) of a syllable.

In some theoretical frameworks of speech (such as phonetics and phonology for applied linguistics and language teaching or speech therapy), it is convenient to break up a language's sounds into categorical sounds—that is, sound types called 'phonemes'. The construct of the phoneme, however, is largely a phonological concern in that it is supposed to model and refer to a transcendental entity that superstructurally and/or psychologically sits over the phonetic realizations and common variations of a sound in a language.

For example, if the English phoneme /l/ is posited to subsist, it might be said to do so because the /l/ of 'light' creates a clear contrast with a phonetically similar sounding word, such as 'right' or 'write' (both of which have a distinct /r/ at the beginning instead of a distinct /l/). Thus, 'light' and 'write' are a 'minimal pair' illustrating that, in English at least, phonemic /l/ and phonemic /r/ are distinct sound categories, and that such a distinction holds for realized speech.

Such a model has the profound weakness of circular logic: phonemes are used to delimit the semantic realm of language (lexical or higher level meaning), but semantic means (minimal pairs of words, such as 'light' vs. 'right' or 'pay' vs. 'bay') are then used to define the phonological realm. Moreover, if phonemes and minimal pairs were such a precise tool, why would they result in such large variations of the sound inventories of languages (such as anywhere from 38–50 phonemes for counts of English)? Also, it is the case that most words (regardless of homophones like 'right' and 'write', or minimal pairs like 'right' and 'light') differentiate meaning on much more information than a contrast between two sounds.

The phoneme is really a structuralist and/or psycholinguistic category belonging to phonology that is supposed to subsist ideally over common variations (called 'allophones') but be realized in such ways as the so-called 'clear' [l] at the beginning of a word like 'like' but also as the so-called 'dark' [l] at the end of a word like 'feel'.

Such concerns are really largely outside of the realm of phonetics because structuralist and/or psycholinguistic categories are really about cognitive and mentalist aspects of language processing and acquisition. In other words, the phoneme may (or may not) be a reality of phonology; it is in no way an actual physical part of realized speech in the vocal tract. Realized speech is highly co-articulated, displays movement and spreads aspects of sounds over entire syllables and words. It is convenient to think of speech as a succession of segments (which may or may not coincide closely with phonemes, ideal segments) in order to capture it for discussion in written discourse, but actual phonetic analysis of speech confounds such a model. It should be pointed out, however, that if we wish to set down a representation of dynamic, complex speech into static writing, constructs like phonemes are very convenient fictions to indicate what we are trying to set down (alternative units in order to capture language in written form, though, include the syllable and the word).

[edit] The International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a chart which contains all of the discrete consonant sounds that are known to be used in at least one language of the world.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Epiglottal	Glottal
Plosive	p b		t d			ʈ ɖ	c ɟ	k g	q ɢ		ʡ	ʔ
Nasal	m	ɱ	n			ɳ	ɲ	ŋ	ɴ
Trill	ʙ		r						ʀ
Tap or Flap			ɾ			ɽ
Fricative	ɸ ß	f v	θ ð	s z	ʃ ʒ	ʂ ʐ	ç ʝ	x ɣ	χ ʁ	ħ ʕ	ʜ ʢ	h ɦ
Lateral fricative			ɬ ɮ
Approximant		ʋ	ɹ			ɻ	j	ɰ			ʢ
Lateral approximant			l			ɭ	ʎ	ʟ

Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Shaded areas denote articulations judged as impossible.

[edit] Acoustic phonetics