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4 Phonetics and Phonology
key concepts

Articulatory phonetics, phonetic symbols Consonants, approximants, vowels Syllables, feet Phonology, phonemes, allophones, phonological rules
i n t ro d u c t i o n

In this chapter we sketch the pronunciation system of English. We begin with phonetics, a system for describing and recording the sounds of language objectively. Phonetics provides avaluable way of opening our ears to facets of language that we tend to understand by reference to their written rather than their actual spoken forms. Phonology concerns itself with the ways in which languages make use of sounds to distinguish words from each other. Teachers should be knowledgeable about the phonetics and phonology of English because (1) the sound system is primary and the basis forthe spelling system; (2) they may have to teach English pronunciation to students who are not native speakers of English; (3) they may have to teach poetry, which requires that they teach about rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and other poetic devices that manipulate sound; (4) it is important to understand accents and language variation and to react appropriately to them and to teach appropriatelanguage attitudes about them to students (see our chapters on Language and Society and Usage in Book II); (5) we are so literate that we tend to “hear” the sounds of our language through its spelling system, and phonetics/phonology provides a corrective to that; and (6) phonetics and phonology provide systematic and well-founded understandings of the sound patterns of English.
articulatoryphonetics

We have three goals in this section. First, we introduce you to the ways in which the sounds of English are produced. Second, we develop a system for classifying speech sounds on the basis of how they are produced. Simultaneously we introduce an alphabet approximating that developed by the International Phonetics Association (IPA), which will allow us to refer to sounds quite precisely. Whenwe want to indicate that letters are to be interpreted as phonetic symbols, we enclose them in square brackets, [ ], and when we want to indicate that letters are to be interpreted as letters from an ordinary spelling system, we enclose them in angled brackets, < >.
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The phonetic alphabet uses many of the letters of the English alphabet, but their pronunciations arevery restricted and are not always the ones you might expect. In this system, there are no “silent” letters—every phonetic symbol represents an actual sound. Every letter always has the same pronunciation regardless of its context, no letter has more than one pronunciation, and no sounds are represented by more than one letter. To make fine distinctions, phoneticians add special symbols, calleddiacritics, to the basic letters. For some English sounds and for languages other than English, symbols not from the English alphabet have been devised. (You might visit the IPA web site for a full listing of the symbols.) In the sections to follow, we describe the sounds represented by these symbols and how these sounds are made. As we go through these sections, pay attention to the ways in whichindividual sounds are ordinarily spelled in English, as well as to the phonetic spellings. To produce speech, air must flow from the lungs through the vocal tract, which includes the vocal folds (popularly called the vocal cords, though they are more like thick elastic bands than strings), the nose or nasal cavity, and the mouth or oral cavity (See Figure 1). The vocal folds vibrate for somesounds but not for others. Air flows through the nose for certain sounds but not others. But the main creator of speech sounds is the mouth. We will describe the roles that each of these elements plays in the following paragraphs.

figure 1: vocal apparatus

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consonants

Consonants include the sounds we represent as in the ordinary alphabet. All consonants are...