U2语音学与音系学02.doc

Chapter 2 The Sounds of Language I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: Voicing is a phonological feature that distinguishes meaning in both Chinese and English. ? If two phonetically similar sounds occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are said to be in complementary distribution. ? A phone is a phonetic unit that distinguishes meaning. ? English is a tone language while Chinese is not. ? In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. ? In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. ? Articulatory phonetics tries to describe the physical properties of the stream of sounds which a speaker issues with the help of a machine called spectrograph. ? The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important areas: the throat, the mouth and the chest. ? Vibration of the vocal cords results in a quality of speech sounds called voicing. ? English consonants can be classified in terms of place of articulation and the part of the tongue that is raised the highest. ? According to the manner of articulation, some of the types into which the consonants can be classified are stops, fricatives, bilabial and alveolar. ? Vowel sounds can be differentiated by a number of factors: the position of tongue in the mouth, the openness of the mouth, the shape of the lips, and the length of the vowels. ? According to the shape of the lips, vowels can be classified into close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels and open vowels. ? Any sound produced by a human being is a phoneme. ? Phones are the sounds that can distinguish meaning. ? Phonology is concerned with how the sounds can be classified into different categories. ? A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of meaning. ? When two different forms are identical in e