LJ - Chapter 2 - Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

CHAPTER 2

PHONOLOGY AND PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION

"Phonetics is concerned with describing speech."

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What can a phonetician do?

• Describe speech.
• Understand the mechanism of speech production and speech perception.
• Knows how language use these mechanisms.
  

What is a phonetic transcription?

•  No more than a useful tool that phoneticians use in the description of speech.

What is a phonemic transcription?

• Recording all the variations between sounds that can cause a difference in meaning.
• Transcribing a word in a way that shows none of the details of the the pronunciation that are predictable by phonological rules.

What is a phoneme?

• Two sounds that can be used to differentiate words.
• We cannot rely in the spelling to tell us whether two sounds are members of different phonemes.
• A phoneme is not a single sound, but a name for a group of sounds.
• They are abstract units that form the basis for writing down a language systematically and unambiguously.

What is the citation style of speech?

• The style of speech you use to show someone how to pronounce a word. 
• Transcriptions of citation style are particularly useful in language documentation and lexicography.
• It serves as the basic phonetic transcription of connected speech.

What is connected speech?

• The style that is used in normal conversation.

What do phoneticians transcribe?

• When they transcribe a citation speech utterance, they are concerned with how the sounds convey differences in meaning.
• Describe the significant articulations rather than the details of the sounds (i.e., Broad transcription).

What is phonology?

• The description of the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in a language.
• Involves studying a language to determine its distinctive sounds, that is, those sounds that convey a difference in meaning.
• The set of rules or constraints that describe the relation between the underlying sounds.
• Its abstract units are called phonemes.
• Its observable units are called phonetic form.

 1. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF CONSONANTS 

•  Begin by searching for phonemes, consider contrasting consonants that differ by only one sound (i.e., minimal pairs/sets).

What is a minimal set?

• A set of words in which each differs from all the others by only one sound.

What are the symbols used for transcribing English consonants?

• Ascenders
• [θ] "theta"
• [ð] "eth"
• [ʒ] "ezh" or "long z"
• May also be written as [ž].
• Affricates & Digraphs
• [tʃ]
• May also be written as [č].
• [dʒ] 
• May also be written as [ǰ].
• [ ͡   ] Ligature symbol
• Used to make explicit that we are writing an affricate and not a consonant cluster.
• [tʃ] (e.g., white shoes)
• [t͡ʃ] (e.g., why choose)
• [ʔ]
• The glottal stop that begins words that are spelled with an initial vowel.
• Dialectal difference
• In American English, [ʔ] may only occurs word initially before vowels.
• In London Cockney or other dialects that have a variant of [t], [ʔ] may appear between vowels in words and is usually pronounced with simultaneous glottal stop [t͡ʔ].
• [w]
• Some speakers contrast which and witch. These words are transcribed with [hw].

2. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS

What are the challenges in English vowel transcription?

• Accents differ more in their use of vowels than in consonants.
• Authorities differ in their views of what constitutes an appropriate description of vowels.

What is a diphthong?

• Movements from one vowel to another within a single syllable.

What are the symbols used to transcribe English vowels?

Vowels

• [ə] "schwa"
• Most common unstressed vowel.
• [ʌ] "wedge"
• [ks]
• Often represents x.
• [ɹ]
• Often represents the unusual English r sound.

Diacritics

• [ː]
• Add this diacritic to distinguish sounds that differ in length.
• Never used when making phonemic transcriptions.
• [˞]
• Add this diacritic to indicate the r-coloring of a vowel.
• Rhotacized.
• [ˈ]
• A stress mark that has been placed before the syllable carrying the main stress.
• Stress must always be marked in words of more than one syllable.
• [  ̪  ]
• Added under a symbol to indicate that it represents a dental articulation.
• [  ̥  ]
• Used to indicate that the symbol representing a voiceless sound.

3. CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS (in English)

4. PHONOLOGY

What is the difference between slashes and square brackets?

• /phonemes/ = /phonemic transcriptions/ = /underlying form/
• [allophones] = [phonetic transcriptions] = [surface form]
  

What are diacritics?

• Small marks that can be added to a symbol to modify its value. 
• Increases the phonetic precision of a transcription.

What are allophones?

• The variants of the phonemes that occur in detailed phonetic transcriptions.
• They can be described as a result of applying the phonological rules to the underlying phonemes. 

What is broad transcription?

•  Often used to designate a transcription that uses the simplest possible set of symbols.

What is narrow transcription? 

• Often used to designate a transcription that shows more phonetic detail, either by using more specific symbols or by representing some allophonic differences.

What are the types of transcriptions?

1. Systematic phonetic transcription
•  A narrow transcription so detailed that is shoes the allophones with all the rule-governed alternations among the sounds.
• In practice, this is difficult.
2. Impressionistic transcription 
• A transcription that may not imply the existence of rules accounting for allophones.
• In these circumstances, the symbols indicate only the phonetic value of sounds.