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An Introduction to English Phonology introduces undergraduates to the basic tools and concepts necessary for the outline description of English phonological systems and processes. By working through the book and the various exercises included, students should come to understand the need for a dedicated system of description and transcription for speech sounds, and for a degree of phonological abstraction. They should learn to carry out elementary, broad phonetic transcription, and be able to establish contrastive vowel and consonant systems for their own varieties and to express simple generalisations reflecting the productive and predictable patterns of English sounds.designed for a one-term or one-semester introductory course in English Languagesuitable for both native and non-native speakers of Englishemphasis on varieties of modern English around the worldan essentially theory-neutral approach, with the concepts central to the practice of phonology clearly explained

Summary

The same but different again

As we saw in the last chapter, most of the features which work well in classifying and describing consonants are entirely inappropriate for vowels, while vowels vary in dimensions (such as tongue height) which are not relevant for consonants. However, when we turn to the criteria for establishing phonemes, and the exceptions to these reviewed in Chapters 2 and 5, it turns out that vowels and consonants behave very similarly indeed. The sections below therefore fulfil a dual role of providing more information about vowels, while allowing some revision of notions like complementary distribution, allophonic rules, free variation, neutralisation and phonetic similarity, which were first introduced mainly in connection with consonants.

Establishing vowel contrasts

Minimal pairs

Minimal pairs and the commutation test are the main tools available to the phonologist in ascertaining phonemic contrast among both consonants and vowels. A minimal pair list for SSBE vowels appears in (1).

The list above provides evidence for almost all phonemically contrastive vowels of SSBE, with a very small number of exceptions. Since schwa only appears in unstressed syllables, where most of the other vowels cannot appear, we must make do with near-minimal comparisons in this case, contrasting the second, unstressed syllable of sherbet with the various stressed syllables in (1). The short vowels /υ/ and /ɒ/, and the centring diphthongs, which were listed as SSBE vowels in the last chapter, do not appear in the selected context /b-t/; but the additional data in (2) shows that /υ/ and /ɒ/ on the one hand, and the three centring diphthongs on the other, contrast both with one another and with representative members of the list in (1). Phonemic contrast is a transitive relationship, meaning that if phoneme a contrasts with phoneme b, and phoneme b contrasts with phoneme c, then phonemes a and c also contrast: this means that if a contrast can be established between one of the ‘left-out’ vowels and any vowel in (1), then that vowel can be taken as contrasting with all the vowels in (1).

Sets of minimal pairs like this may work very well for one accent, but not for another.

Summary

Variation and when to ignore it

Recognising that two objects or concepts are ‘the same but different’ ought to present a major philosophical problem; the phrase itself seems self-contradictory. However, in practice we categorise elements of our world in just this way on an everyday basis. A two-year-old can grasp the fact that his right shoe and left shoe are very similar, but actually belong on different feet; and as adults, we have no difficulty in recognising that lemons and limes are different but both citrus fruits, or that misery and happiness are different but both emotions. This sort of hierarchical classification is exactly what is at issue when we turn to the notion of the phoneme.

Humans excel at ignoring perceptible differences which are not relevant for particular purposes. To illustrate this, take a piece of paper and write your normal signature six times. There will certainly be minor differences between them, but you will still easily recognise all those six signatures as yours, with the minor modifications only detectable by uncharacteristically close scrutiny. Perhaps more to the point, someone else, checking your signature against the one on your credit card, will also disregard those minor variants, and recognise the general pattern as identifying you. There are exceptions, of course: some alterations are obvious, and usually environmentally controlled, so if someone jolts your elbow, or the paper slips, you apologise and sign again. On the whole, however, the human mind seems to abstract away from irrelevant, automatic variation, and to focus on higher-level patterns; though we are typically unaware of that abstraction, and of the complex processes underlying it. This relatively high tolerance level is why mechanical systems constructed to recognise hand-written or spoken language are still elementary and highly complex, and why they require so much training from each potential user.

Conditioned variation in written language

Since we are more used to thinking explicitly about written language than about our speech, one way of approaching this issue of abstraction is through our conscious knowledge of the rules of writing. When children learn to write, they have to master the conventions governing the use of capital and lower-case letters.

Summary

Phonemes revisited

As we saw in Chapter 3, the two major criteria for establishing phonemic contrast are predictability of occurrence, and invariance of meaning. That is to say, if we are dealing with two allophones of the same phoneme, the two must occur in non-overlapping sets of environments. Furthermore, there cannot be any minimal pairs, where substituting one of our focus sounds for the other in exactly the same context creates a difference in meaning. These two criteria establish conclusively that English [ɹ] and [l] belong to distinct phonemes: there are many minimal pairs, like rip and lip, rot and lot, marrow and mallow, so clearly the two phones occur in the same contexts; and substituting one for the other does create a meaning difference. On the other hand, clear, alveolar [l] and dark, velar [l] occur in predictably different environments: in Standard Southern British English, the clear, more front one appears word-initially or between vowels, as in lip, lot, mallow, and the dark, more back one word-finally or before a consonant, as in pill, tall, halt. Since there are no minimal pairs, and substituting one variant for the other will not make a meaning difference, [l] and [l] are necessarily allophones of a single phoneme, /l/.

Equipped with the articulatory descriptions from the last chapter, we can now progress to a more detailed account of the distribution of allophones. In doing so, we will also discover that certain phonemes form groups, in that they have similar allophones in similar environments. We must try to identify what members of such groups have in common, and what makes certain phonemes work together.

Making generalisations

In Chapter 2, several examples of allophonic variation were considered. In one case, we found that /k/ has two variant pronunciations, namely velar [k] in cupboard and palatal [c] in kitchen. Another involved /p/, /t/ and /k/, which have aspirated allophones, with a perceptible release of air, in pill, till and kill, but unaspirated allophones in spill, still and skill, or sip, sit and sick.

However, providing a list of words where the relevant allophone appears is only our starting point.

Summary

Chapter 2

1. Explaining these pronunciations involves two steps: first, figure out what the relevant environments are; and second, try to work out why the learner is producing these pronunciations in those environments. In terms of environments, [d] appears word-initially and word-finally, and [d] medially, between vowels; [ʃ] appears before or after an [Ι] vowel, and [s] next to other vowels. Since we know the speaker in this case is a learner of English, our first attempt at explanation might involve the patterns of her native language: we can hypothesise that in that language, [d] and [d] are allophones of a single phoneme, and likewise [ʃ] and [s] are allophones of a single phoneme, with a distribution like the one our learner imposes on English.

Predicted pronunciations would be: Daddy [dæði]; either [ð]; loathe [d]; ship [ʃ]; pass [s]; dish [ʃ]; usher [s].

2. One list of minimal pairs for initial position would be my – nigh – pie – buy – tie – die – guy – lie – rye. You can add me – key in a slightly different context. You should be able to produce similar lists medially and finally; what you won't find are cases of initial [ŋ], final [h], or for some speakers at least, final [r].

3. The main point here is that some pairs of sounds are in complementary distribution in this language: notably, voiced and voiceless pairs of sounds ([g] – [k], [b] – [p], [z] – [s]) do not contrast, since the voiced one appears initially and medially, and the voiceless one finally. Linguist A has noticed this, and uses a single symbol for each pair; Linguist B uses different graphs. Linguist A also uses a single symbol for [ŋ], which is a single consonant in this language, and represents [h] with each time it is pronounced. Linguist B uses for [ŋ], making it look like two consonants, and has no symbol for [h] word-finally. In short, A is using a system designed for this particular language; B is following English patterns, and is probably a native speaker of English.

Chapter 3

Summary

Phonological units above the syllable

Native speakers who are not linguists may be slightly surprised by the discovery, discussed in the last chapter, that they can count syllables and determine the boundaries between them. However, they will typically be much more consciously aware of the word as a linguistic unit, probably because words are meaningful units; moreover, in a highly literate society, we are familiar with orthographic words, which conveniently appear with white space on each side. Individual spoken or written words can also appear in isolation: three of the four conversational turns in (1) consist, entirely appropriately and comprehensibly, of single words.

(1) A: Did you find a babysitter?

B: Yes.

A: Who?

B: Denise.

However, words, like other linguistic units, are not entirely straightforward and trouble-free for native speakers or for linguists. In particular, there are cases where it is difficult to determine how many words we are dealing with. For example, is washing-machine one word or two? Is it easier or more difficult to decide if we write it as washing machine, without the hyphen? And if we conclude that this is two words, then where does that leave teapot, where two acceptable independent words seem to make up one larger one? It seems that compounds like this take some time to become accepted in the speech community as single words: for a while, they appear as two written words, though signalling one distinct concept semantically (thus, a washing-machine washes clothes, not dishes, for which we have dishwashers, or cars, which go through a carwash). As they are encountered more commonly, they begin to be written with a hyphen, which ultimately drops to leave a single orthographic word – although speakers may think of a compound as a single word before this stage is reached. Conversely, although didn't, can't or it's appear as single written words, speakers will tend to regard these as sequences of two words, contracted by the deletion of a vowel, as signalled by the apostrophe. So, it's (in It's Saturday) is a short form of it is, and therefore in a sense two words, as distinct from its (in The cat ate its dinner), which is a single word however you look at it.

Summary

The importance of accent

Every speaker of English has a particular system of his or her own, known by linguists as that individual's idiolect. However, considering language only at the idiolectal level might produce extremely thorough and detailed descriptions, but would give rather little insight into why individuals speak in the way they do. To understand this, we must identify higher-level groupings, and investigate geographical and social accents. That is to say, individuals adopt a particular mode of speech (or more accurately, move along a continuum of modes of speech) depending on who they want to identify with, who they are talking to, and what impression they want to make. Not all these ‘decisions’ are conscious, of course. Small children learn to speak as their immediate family members do; but quite soon, the peer group at school (even nursery) becomes at least equally important; and later, older children, then television presenters, actors or sporting heroes may become role models, leading to modifications in accent. Consequently, age-related differences appear in all varieties; some will be transient, as a particular TV show falls out of fashion and the words or pronunciations borrowed from it disappear; others will become entrenched in young people's language, and may persist into adulthood, becoming entirely standard forms for the next generation.

This flexibility, and the associated facts of variation and gradual change, mean that phonologists face a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, describing idiolects will give seriously limited information, since it will not reveal the groups an individual belongs to, or the dynamics of those groups. On the other hand, we must take care that the groups are not described at too abstract a level. Any description of ‘an accent’ is necessarily an idealisation, since no two speakers will use precisely the same system in precisely the same way: our physical idiosyncracies, different backgrounds, and different preferences and aspirations will see to that. Nonetheless, two speakers of, say, Scottish Standard English, or New Zealand English, will have a common core of features, which allows them to be grouped together by speakers of the same accent, by speakers of other accents, and by phonologists. Not everyone is equally adept at making these identifications, of course.

Summary

This textbook is designed for use on ten- or twelve-week introductory courses on English phonology of the sort taught in the first year of many English Language and Linguistics degrees, in British and American universities. Students on such courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology; it is sometimes difficult to see past the new symbols and terminology, and the apparent assumption that we can immediately become consciously aware of movements of the vocal organs which we have been making almost automatically for the last eighteen or more years. This book attempts to show students why we need to know about phonetics and phonology, if we are interested in language and our knowledge of it, as well as introducing the main units and concepts we require to describe speech sounds accurately.

The structure of the book is slightly unusual: most textbooks for beginning students, even if they focus on English, tend to begin with an outline of elementary universal phonetics, and introduce phonological concepts later. I have started the other way round: in a book which is primarily intended as an introduction to phonology, it seems appropriate to begin with one of the major units of phonology, the phoneme. The idea of phonological contrast is a complex but necessary one, and students do seem, at least in my experience, to cope well with an introduction of this more abstract idea before they become embroiled in the details of phonetic consonant and vowel classification. When it comes to presenting those details, I have also chosen to use verbal descriptions rather than diagrams and pictures in most cases. There are two reasons for this. First, students need to learn to use their own intuitions, and this is helped by encouraging them to introspect and think about their own vocal organs, rather than seeing disembodied pictures of structures which don't seem to belong to them at all. Secondly, I know from meeting fellow-sufferers that I am not the only person to find supposedly helpful cartoons and diagrams almost impossible to decipher, and to feel that the right word can be worth a thousand pictures. If students or teachers feel the visual centres of their brains are being insufficiently stimulated, many diagrams and photographs are available in the additional reading recommended at the end of each chapter.

Summary

Phonology above the segment

At the end of the last chapter, we returned to the central issue, and the central task for phonologists, of assessing what speakers know about the structure of their language. In this book so far, we have concentrated on this knowledge, and the speech production that reflects it, at the level of the segment and below. That is, we have discussed vowels and consonants, the features of which they are composed and the judgements speakers make about them. However, as we shall see in this chapter and the next, speakers’ behaviour and intuitions also indicate the presence of phonological organisation at a series of higher levels, above the single segment. Vowels and consonants are not just strung together haphazardly into long, unstructured strands: instead, they form a series of larger units with their own internal structure and distribution, governed by their own rules.

The first and smallest of these superordinate units, the syllable, will be the main focus of this chapter. Recognising and understanding syllables helps us state some phonological processes (for example involving English /l/ and the aspiration of voiceless plosives) more accurately and succinctly. As we shall see in Chapter 10, the syllable and the next unit, the foot, are also crucial in analysing and determining the position of stress within each word. Finally, in whole utterances consisting of a sentence or more, phonological processes may apply between words, and rhythm and intonation produce the overall melody of longer stretches of speech.

The syllable

Speakers certainly have an intuitive notion of how many syllables each word contains: for instance, speakers of English would generally agree that meadow, dangerous and antidisestablishmentarianism (allegedly the longest word in the language) have two, three and twelve syllables respectively. It is less easy for speakers to reflect consciously on the internal structure of syllables, or to decide where one stops and the next starts; but a wide variety of cross-linguistic studies have helped phonologists construct a universal template for the syllable, within which particular languages select certain options. The internal structure of the syllable, and evidence for its subparts from a range of English phonological processes, will be the topic of this chapter.

Summary

What's inside a phonetic symbol?

So far, we have considered the IPA essentially as an alternative writing system, which allows us to express a larger range of sounds than the English spelling system would. However, looking only at those symbols might suggest that we are dealing with individual, self-contained units when we consider phonemes and allophones: each is like a locked black box labelled with an IPA symbol.

In fact, each IPA symbol is shorthand for a whole range of properties, and those properties explain how the particular segment being symbolised is pronounced; unpacking the black box for each sound reveals not a jumble, but an internal structure, and understanding that structure allows us to make comparisons with other sounds. When we know that [k], for instance, is a voiceless velar plosive, we can start to see what properties it shares with other sounds which might also be voiceless, or velar, or plosives; we can also see how it differs from other sounds which are not voiceless, or velar, or plosives. Furthermore, we shall see what properties different allophones of the same phoneme share, which might allow them to be regarded as ‘the same’ by speakers of English: that is, we can work out what particular phonetic features speakers of English tend to ignore, and which they are aware of. Since this may be very different for speakers of other languages, unpacking IPA notation in this way also allows cross-linguistic comparisons to be made. In this chapter, we shall therefore consider a very basic set of phonetic features which enable us to describe the articulation of the consonants of English, and to assess their differences and similarities.

Consonant classification

A biologist looking at some particular creature wants to know various things about it, to work out where it should be placed in conventional biological classification. Some properties are visible and therefore easy to work out, such as how many legs it has or whether it has fur, feathers or scales. In other cases, closer observation will be needed: tooth shape cannot usually be checked from a distance. Still other properties are behavioural, and our biologist might need to observe her creature over a longer period of time to figure out whether it lays eggs or bears live young, or what it eats.

Summary

Phonetics and phonology

Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbased signalling systems, and can communicate with other members of the same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching danger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leaving aside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.

There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound, namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book, which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accents and how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will need aspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing and analysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of the world's languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physics of speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and the effect those waves have on a hearer's ears and brain. It follows that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics and neurology.

However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle make and use is part of understanding what makes us human, each person grows up learning and speaking only a particular human language or languages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full range of possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it specifically English, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection and organisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of those languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.

Summary

Introducing rhoticity

In first-year undergraduate courses on English phonetics and phonology, or on varieties of English, one of the first distinctions introduced is between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties. Speakers of rhotic varieties produce some realization of /r/ everywhere <r> appears in the spelling, while speakers of non-rhotic varieties will do so only when /r/ is pre-vocalic. So, a non-rhotic speaker will pronounce /r/ in contexts like red, pretty, Erica, here it is, fearing; but not in tear, certain, here we are, fearful. As for the realization of /r/, this can vary widely, from an r-coloured schwa for many speakers of American English, to a uvular fricative for some older speakers of traditional varieties in the north east of England, though it is perhaps most commonly an alveolar or retroflex approximant.

Rhoticity has been investigated historically, sociolinguistically, and phonologically; it has figured centrally in studies from Labov (2006 [1st edn. 1966]) onwards, and has even had a special issue of a journal devoted to it (van de Velde and van Hout 2001). Speakers and hearers also seem very strongly aware of it as a marker of their own and of other accents, even though they may not have the linguistic terminology to describe very precisely what they are observing: so, for example, Emma on the BBC Voices website (www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/accents_comments.shtml) notes that ‘I originally come from Leeds in West Yorkshire and speak with a West Yorkshire accent example: dropping my H’s and Vowels and not being able to pronounce my R’s properly’. More formal commentaries on accents also tend to highlight the question of rhoticity, as for example in the valuable notes provided on recordings on the British Library website, where Jim, a Lancashire speaker, is described as follows (www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/england/read):

Jim is clearly a speaker of traditional Lancashire dialect. Above all, he is a rhotic speaker – he pronounces the <r> sound after a vowel . . . In fact, this . . . remains very much a part of the English spoken in Scotland and Ireland. In present-day England, however, it is increasingly restricted to the West Country, the extreme South West and a rapidly shrinking area of Lancashire to the north of Manchester. In this part of Lancashire speakers might still differentiate between words such as paw, pour and poor, while in other parts of the country they are homophones.

How did the biological, brain and behavioural structures underlying human language evolve? When, why and where did our ancestors become linguistic animals, and what has happened since? This book provides a clear, comprehensive but lively introduction to these interdisciplinary debates. Written in an approachable style, it cuts through the complex, sometimes contradictory and often obscure technical languages used in the different scientific disciplines involved in the study of linguistic evolution. Assuming no background knowledge in these disciplines, the book outlines the physical and neurological structures underlying language systems, and the limits of our knowledge concerning their evolution. Discussion questions and further reading lists encourage students to explore the primary literature further, and the final chapter demonstrates that while many questions still remain unanswered, there is a growing consensus as to how modern human languages have arisen as systems by the interplay of evolved structures and cultural transmission.

Summary

Overview

If you were told to find out first-hand about the roots of a plant, you would be likely to go out into the garden, stand at the level of today’s topsoil, and dig downwards. In this chapter, we tackle the apparently common-sense idea that to find out about the roots, or ultimate origins of languages, we should equally start from languages we know today and work backwards to their roots; and we show that this approach cannot work. First, the good methods we have for linguistic reconstruction (notably the comparative method) appear to be time-limited and cannot take us back far enough to be of evolutionary relevance. There are less-constrained methods, but we cannot rely on their results. Second, and perhaps more important, any such method will necessarily be working at the level of behavioural, output language structures, and we have seen that if we really want to talk about evolution, we need to get behind such superficial behavioural characteristics to the underlying physical and neurological structures, and ultimately to the genetic instructions which have configured them. We turn, therefore, from linguistic reconstruction to the comparative method in biology, and consider some similarities and differences between human language and aspects of other primate communication systems.

Going backwards to move forwards

When Jespersen (1922; discussed in 1.3.2 above) has finished noting his disappointment with early ‘speculative’ theories of language origins, of the bow-wow and yo-he-ho variety, he suggests that we should instead turn to evidence from the histories of languages. On the basis of earlier stages of present-day languages, and reconstructions of languages which no longer exist, we may ‘attempt … step by step to trace the backward path. Perhaps in this way we may reach the very first beginnings of speech’ (1922: 418). Jespersen suggests, as we saw earlier, that change typically involves reductions in the phonological shapes of words, and in word length, along with a trend towards greater analysis, and division into small, individual forms, each with its own meaning. He therefore proposes that ‘Primitive linguistic units must have been much more complicated in point of meaning, as well as much longer in point of sound, than those with which we are most familiar’ (1922: 425); moreover, these long words were rather unstructured internally, with each expressing the meaning of a whole sentence today.

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An Introduction to English Phonology

7 - Vowel phonemes

Summary

References

Contents

2 - The phoneme: the same but different

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5 - Criteria for contrast: the phoneme system

4 - Defining distributions: consonant allophones

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Discussion of the exercises

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10 - The word and above

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8 - Variation between accents

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6 - Describing vowels

To colleagues

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Index

9 - Syllables

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3 - Describing English consonants

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1 - Sounds, spellings and symbols

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Frontmatter

22 - Computing linguistic distances between varieties

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Evolutionary Linguistics

3 - The comparative methods

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An Introduction to English Phonology

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Evolutionary Linguistics

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