The Reverend W.A. Spooner (1844-1930) was a don (or university lecturer) at New College, Oxford. He became famous for transposing the initial sounds of pairs of words with humorous effect. For example, when repri­ manding a student for unacceptable behaviour, he accused him of‘fighcing a liar’ in the courtyard of his college, whereas the student was really guilty of ‘lighting a fire’. He went on co say: ‘You have hissed all my mystery lec­ tures. You will leave by the next town drain’.

Such slips of the tongue are now called spoonerisms, although Spooner was not the first to play with the sounds of language deliberately, or to mix up sounds unintentionally. This chapter looks at changes of sound chat have an influence on meaning.

Chapter Two was concerned with phonetics, which is the study of all the possible human speech sounds, and ways of describing them. This chapter looks at the ways in which particular languages make use of a selection of these sounds, in particular patterns. This is the domain of phonology.

Crystal (1987: 160) explains the difference between these two fields of study: ‘Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds; phonology studies the way in which a language's speakers systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning’.

In studying phonology, one is always studying a particular language or par­ ticular languages. In this chapter, the study of phonology will be related to English. The term utterance will be used to indicate the actual words, phrases or sentences that are uttered or realised (produced in physical form) by an actual speaker at a particular time. It is similar in meaning to Saussure's term parole introduced in Chapter One.

Although the study of phonology is related to a particular language, it is really a theoretical study, concerned with the abstract system that underlies that language (similar to Saussure's concept of langue introduced earlier).

When individual speakers utter the sounds of a particular language, they are making use of their knowledge of that system. Phonology is not concerned with the actual sounds uttered. It is concerned with the patterns of sounds that speakers use systematically to convey meaning whenever they use the language.