Introduction to Phonology

Introduction to Phonetics

Human listeners can hear speech as a sequence of sounds, and each sound can be represented by a written mark.

How this idea can be based on a comprehensive system of phonetic symbols, and how this is different from the many existing writing systems for particular languages.

continuous vs. abstract

Symbols for particular languages

IPA provides a stock of symbols, and principles and conventions for using them.

Segments: vowels and consonants

Segments are of two kinds: vowels and consonants. Using V to stand for any vowels and C for any consonants .

A sequence of one consonant followed by one vowel which in turn is followed by one consonant. The representation is called a CV-skeleton.

Supra-segmentals

Suprasegmentals are features that are not themselves segments, and spread across several successive segments.

Stress and tone are in this category. English: IMport (N); imPORT (V)

Chinese: Ma…

Qs

Why almost all languages have consonant sounds, such as /p,t,k,s,f,m/?

Why /i,a,u/?

UPSIDData on the phonological systems of 451 languages, with programs to access it, by Ian Maddieson and Kristin Precoda.

Phonetics

發音語音學 / 生理語音學 (articulatory phonetics) ：研究發音的生理機制。音響語音學 / 聲學語音學 (acoustic phonetics) ：研究語音的物理性質。聽辨語音學 (auditory phonetics) ：研究理解語音的心理機制。

Speech

Speech is really a matter of movement, where you are making with your lips, tongue and jaw.

Vocal tract

發音器官

Articulators

Passive articulator: It does not move, usually refers to some part of the upper surface of the vocal tract.

Active articulator: It moves toward the passive articulator, usually refers to some part of the tongue.

Place

The location in the vocal tract where an articulation occurs is called the place of articulation. For most articulations the term used to describe the place of articulation is based on the name of the passive articulator concerned.

子音 (consonants)

發音方式 (Manner of articulation)

發音位置 (Place of articulation)

聲帶震動 (voicing)

母音 (vowels)

舌位高低 : i-a

舌位前後 : y-u

唇形展圓 : i-y

Practice

IPA全

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Acoustic phonetics

Auditory phonetics

Phonology is one of the core fields that composes the discipline of linguistics, which is defined as the scientific study of language structure.

An important feature of the structure of a sentence is how it is pronounced- its sound structure.

Sign languages have their own phonological system.

Phonology, it is said, is an abstract cognitive system dealing with rules in a mental grammar: principles of subconscious “thought” as they relate to language sound.

心理詞彙（ mental lexicon ）

Morphology:English:

「 electric 」（電的）和「 electricity 」（電力）。「 electric 」最後子音是 [k] ，可是在「 electricity 」變成 [s]

k s / _ i

Different language may contain different sounds in their system.

E.g., German vs. English

German final devoicing

Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, among others. In these languages, voiced obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become voiceless.

Phonology vs. Phonetics

A common characterization of the difference between phonetics and phonology is that phonetics deals with “actual” physical sounds as they are manifested in human speech, and concentrates on acoustic waveforms, formant values, measurements of duration measured in milliseconds, of amplitude and frequency, or in the physical principles underlying the production of sounds.

The basic tool behind this conversion of the continuous stream of speech sound into units is the phonetic transcription.

The philosophy behind a transcription is that one can adequately represent all of the linguistically important details of an utterance by symbols whose interpretation is predefined.

Transcription

Cat [ kæt] vs. [ kæt ]Narrow transcription vs. broad transcription

Phonology then can be defined as the study of higher-level patterns of language sound, conceived in terms of discrete ( 分離的；互不相連的；各別的 ) mental symbols, whereas phonetics can be defined as the study of how those mental symbols are manifested ( 顯現 ) as continuous muscular contractions and acoustic waveforms.

Why those features?

音韻徵性（ feature ） []=[+nasal,+back] ;

[k]=[-nasal, +back] ;

//=[-back, -nasal] ;

{king} vs. {kick}

The goal of phonology is not to provide accurate symbolic representations of speech to understand the linguistic rules which operate on sounds mentally represented as symbols, and the transcription in our means of representing the data which we discuss.

Why Learning Linguistics?

語音 ( 音韻 ) 學觀察 規律 理論 ( 應用 )

對自己母語多些認識對其他語言學習的優勢

語言學的其它面向 （句法，語意等）跟其它科學的合作與對話

電腦 ( 語音合成、辨識等 )

醫學 ( 失語症等 )