4Thesoundsoflanguage..docVIP

Lecture 4 The sounds of language 4.1 The phonic medium When you know a language you know the sounds of that language, and you know how to combine those sounds into words. When you know English you know the sounds represented by the letters b, s, and u, and you are able to combine them to form the words bus or sub. Although languages may contain different sounds, the sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a class of sounds that the human vocal tract is designed to make. This chapter will discuss these speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they may be classified. Phonetics and Phonology Phonetics: the study of the inventory of sounds in languages in general, how they are produced (articulatory phonetics) and perceived (acoustic phonetics). Linguistic subdiscipline that studies the phonetic aspect of speech with regard to the following processes: (a) articulatory-genetic sound production (articulatory phonetics); (b) structure of the acoustic flow (acoustic phonetics); and (c) neurological-psychological processes involved in perception (auditory phonetics). In contrast to phonology, phonetics studies the concrete articulatory, acoustic, and auditory characteristics of all the possible sounds of all languages. Phonology: the study of how sounds are organized in a particular language, in what position they may occur, and what types of automatic variants of a sound are possible. Phonology is the science of speech sounds and sound patterns. By a sound pattern we mean (1) the set of sounds that occur in a given language, (2) the permissible arrangements of these sounds in words, and (3) the processes for adding, deleting, or changing sounds. 4.2 Phonetic and orthographic representation The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): developed by the International Phonetic Association since 1888. The basic principle of IPA is that of having a different letter for each distinguishable speech-sound. There is also a set of diacritics of vario