第二章Morphology形态学.pptVIP

1. The phonic medium of language Speech and writing Speech is more basic than writing. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system is always invented to record speech. Speech plays a greater role than writing in everyday communication in terms of the amount information conveyed. Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue. Linguists are not interested in all sounds; they are concerned with only those sounds that are produced by the human speech organ in so far as they have a role to play in linguistic communication. These sounds are limited in number. This limited range of sounds which are meaningful in human communication and are of interest to linguistics studies are the phonic medium of language; and the individual sounds within this range are the speech sounds. As human beings we are capable of making all kinds of sounds, but only some of these sounds have become units in the language system. We can analyze speech sounds from various perspectives and the two major areas of study are phonetics and phonology. 2. Phonetics 2.1 What is phonetics? Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s languages. Phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. Phonetics looks at speech sounds from three distinct but related points of view. The three points of view of phonetic study: The speaker’s point of view The hearer’s point of view The sound waves The three branches of phonetics: Articulatory phonetics (The production of speech sounds) Auditory phonetics (The perception of speech sounds) Acoustic phonetics (The physical properties of speech sounds) 2.2 Speech organs Three important areas: The pharyngeal cavity (throat) The oral cavity (mouth) The nasal cavity (nose) Larynx 2.3 Orthographic representation of speech sounds__ broad and narrow transcriptions Towards the end of the