Phonetics

1. Phonetics October 8, 2010

2. Housekeeping • Morphology homeworks are due! • Also: I will be gone next week… • Danica will be taking over the reins.

3. Allomorphy • What’s going on here? • /in-/ + probable = improbable • /in-/ + mobile = immobile • /in-/ + possible = impossible • /in-/ changes to /im-/ before both /p/ and /m/. • /p/ and /m/ are both produced with the lips. • To explain patterns like this, we’re going to need to know something about how we actually produce the sounds of English. • We have to study Phonetics!

4. What is phonetics? Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. It consists of three main sub-fields: • Articulatory phonetics • = how speech sounds are produced • Acoustic phonetics • = how speech sounds are transmitted from producer to perceiver • Perceptual phonetics • = how speech sounds are perceived

5. Phonetic Transcription • The primary tool of phonetic science is phonetic transcription. • The basic idea: • represent speech as a sequence of segments. • i.e., with an alphabet. • Segments = individual consonants and vowels. • Deep thought questions: • What kind of alphabet should we use? • How about the English alphabet?

6. The Trouble with English • Some letters represent more than one different sound • c: recall vs. receive g: gear vs. siege • Some letters represent no sounds at all • receive use high knee • Sometimes two letters represent just one sound • recall phonetics • Some letters represent two or more sounds at once • tax use • The same sound can be represented by many different letters (or letter combinations). • sh: shy, mission, machine, special, caution

7. Phonetic Alphabet • Solution: use a phonetic alphabet • In a phonetic alphabet, sounds and symbols have a one-to-one relationship to each other • Each symbol represents one sound • Each sound is represented by one symbol • The use of a phonetic alphabet to represent speech is called phonetic transcription. • Our phonetic alphabet of choice: • The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

8. The IPA • Presided over by the International Phonetic Association • Created in 1886 • Still active and evolving today.

9. IPA Principles 1. The use of a symbol in a transcription is essentially a claim that the speaker produced a certain combination of articulatory gestures. 2. “There should be a separate letter for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of the word.” • one letter  one sound • Sound contrasts can be shown to exist in a language by finding minimal pairs.

10. Minimal Pairs • A minimal pair consists of: • two words that have different meanings • which differ from each other in only one sound. • Some minimal pairs in English: pit vs. bit ~ /p/ vs. /b/ beet vs. bead ~ /t/ vs. /d/ boat vs. boot ~ /o/ vs. /u/ • A series of minimal pairs is called a minimal set. • tee ~ bee ~ key ~ sea ~ fee …

11. More IPA Principles • 3.The alphabet should consist as much as possible of the ordinary letters of the Roman alphabet. • 4. In assigning values to the Roman letters, international usage should decide. • ex: vowel in English “bee” is transcribed with [i] • 5. When any sound is found in several languages, the same sign should be used in all. This applies to very similar shades of sound. • ex: French [u] = English [u] = Korean [u]

12. Caveats • The IPA is not perfect. • It is a useful tool for representing speech as a sequence of segments. • Phonetic transcription is an inexact science. • Impressionistic • “I think the speaker said this” • Important: speech perception is molded by your native language background. • Production, too! •  Mechanical analysis can come in handy

13. Phonetic Reality • Here is an acoustic waveform of a sample of speech: Where were you a year ago? • In the physical world, speech lacks the discreteness and strict sequentiality of alphabetic representations. •  Phonetic transcriptions of speech are always abstract

14. The Problem of Abstractness • How abstract should a phonetic transcription be? • The IPA solution: only capture contrastive differences between sounds. • Contrast: bit vs. pit • Non-contrast: vs. • How about “Don” and “Dawn”? • Here’s the catch: • The IPA must be able to represent all the contrasts between sounds that are found in language. • …including some which we cannot easily hear.

15. Technical Terms • • A phone is any sound that is used in speech. • (may or may not be contrastive) • A phoneme is a contrastive sound in a language • It may be used to distinguish between words in minimal pairs. • • An allophone is a phonetic variant of a phoneme • Different allophones often occur in specific contexts. • Note: analogy with allomorphs.

16. Phonemic Analysis • Phoneme: /t/ (aspirated) (unaspirated) “flap” “glottal stop” (unreleased) Allophone 5: ‘bit’ • In our native language, we tend to hear the phonemes that the allophones belong to… • Rather than the allophones themselves.

17. Broad and Narrow •  Broad transcriptions • Represent only contrastive sounds (phonemes) • Enclosed in slashes: / / • Generally use only alphabetic symbols • Narrow transcriptions • Represent phones • Capture as much phonetic detail as possible • Enclosed in brackets: [ ] • Can require use of diacritics

18. English Phonemes Familiar IPA symbols, same sound: [p] ‘pot’ 7. [r] ‘rot’ 12. [m] ‘ma’ [b] ‘bought’ 8. [f] ‘fought’ 13. [n] ‘not’ [t] ‘tot’ 9. [v] ‘vote’ 14. [l] ‘lot’ [d] ‘dot’ 10. [s] ‘sot’ 15. [w] ‘walk’ [k] ‘kit’ 11. [z] ‘zit’ 16. [h] ‘hot’ [g] ‘got’

19. English Phonemes Familiar IPA symbols, different sounds: 17. [j] ‘yacht’ “yod” 18. [i] ‘heed’ 19. [e] ([ej]) ‘hayed’ ([ej] = a “diphthong”) 20. ‘hod’ 21. [o] ([ow]) ‘bode’ ([ow] = a “diphthong”) 22. [u] ‘who’d’ • A diphthong is a phoneme that combines two phones.

20. English Phonemes Unfamiliar IPA symbols, for consonants: 23. ‘thought’ “theta” 28. ‘chop’ 24. ‘though’ “edh” 29. ‘jot’ 25. ‘shot’ “esh” 26. ‘vision’ “ezh” 27. ‘ring’ “engma”