,Chapter 3 Phonology,3.1 phonology and phonetics,Phonetics and phonology are the two disciplines dealing with speech sounds. while both are related to the study of sounds, they differ in their approach and focus.,Phonetics is of general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages; it studies how speech sounds are made, transmitted and received. It aims to answer questions like: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they have, how they can be classified, etc.,Phonology, on the other hand, is essentially the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds. It aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.,Phonology is concerned with the abstract and mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual physical articulation of speech sounds. Phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterance, to recognize a foreign accent, to make up new words.,Phonologists will be interested in those aspects of sound production and perception which can be controlled by a mature native speaker in order to achieve a particular linguistic effect, and Phonologists are concerned with the abstract patterns in the sound systems of languages that have to be learned by a child acquiring the language.,This means that:,A common methodology of phonology study is to begin by analyzing an individual language, determine its phonological structure, i.e. which sound units are used and how they pattern, compare the properties of different sound systems, and develop hypotheses about the rules underlying the use of sounds in particular groups of languages, and ultimately in all languages.,3.2 phonemes, phones and allophones,Phone: the speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. Its a phonetic unit or segment (语音片断)in the mouth.,Conventionally, phones are placed within square brackets “ ”(phonetic transcription),It is a speech sound. It is the smallest identifiable unit in a stream of speech that is able to be transcribed with an IPA symbol.,Phoneme is a phonological unit; it is a unit of distinctive value; as an abstract unit, it is not a particular sound, but represented by a certain phone in certain phonetic context, e.g. the phoneme /p/ can be represented differently in pit, tip and spit.,In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. (the sound type in the mind),The phoneme is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit.,For example, the words “pan” and “ban” differ only in the initial sound: pan begins with /p/, and ban with /b/. Therefore, /p/and /b/ are phonemes in English. The number of phonemes varies from one language to another. English is often considered to have 44 phonemes.,Allophone (音位变体): when we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we refer to them as the allophones of that phoneme. They are the phones that can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments.,One phoneme may have several allophones, but the choice of an allophone is rule-governed.,Phones do not necessarily distinguish meaning, usually phones of different phonemes distinguish meaning.,For example, pat ph aspirated sport p regular cap p unaspirated The above three phones of ph p p are called the allophones of the same phoneme.,3.3 Minimal pairs & complementary distribution,Phonetically similar sounds might be related in two ways. If they are two distinctive phonemes, they might form a contrast; e.g. /p/and /b/ in pit and bit; (Phonemic contrast-different or distinctive phonemes are in phonemic contrast, e.g./b/ and /p/ in bit and pit.) If they are allophones of the same phoneme, then they dont distinguish meaning, but complement each other in distribution, i.e. they occur in different phonetic context.,3.3.1Minimal pairs (最小对立体),When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment, which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two sound combinations are said to form a minimal pair.,e.g. pat & bat pig & big nut & net, Minimal pairs are established on the basis of sound but not spelling. e.g. ship & tip,Roca & Johnson (1999): Phoneme is a “unit of explicit sound contrast”: the existence of a minimal pair automatically grants phonemic status to the sounds responsible for the contrasts.,Three requirements for a minimal pair:same number of segmentone phonetic difference in the same placedifferent meaning,3.3.2 Complementary distribution & contrastive distribution,Sounds in complementary distribution do not appear in the same context.,Pit phit p is asperatedspit spit regulartip tip p is unasperated,