Phonology: The Function and Patterning of Sounds: Three
Phonology: The Function and Patterning of Sounds: Three
PHONOLOGY:
THE FUNCTION
AND PATTERNING
OF SOUNDS
Michael Dobrovolsky
We saw in Chapter 2 that there are a large number of speech sounds that human
beings can produce and perceive. No human language exploits all of these possibil-
ities. Furthermore, the sounds of all languages are patterned and organized in such
ways that linguists can discover some system that underlies their appearance.
Linguists generally assume that speakers have (at least) some subconscious knowl-
edge of this system. For example, we saw in Chapter 1 that English speakers recog-
nize that forms like slish and screnk are acceptable, while forms like srish and screpk
are not. But speakers can do more than note that certain forms are unnatural in their
system; they can also correct such forms to make them acceptable in their own lan-
guage. Without knowing exactly why, most English speakers would pronounce a
form like srish as [sari/] rather than saying [nj] or [si/]. It is this largely subconscious
knowledge of sound patterns that phonologists are interested in uncovering.
This chapter is about phonology, the component of a grammar made up of the
elements and principles that determine how sounds vary and pattern in a language.
Phonologists attempt to make explicit formal statements about the sound patterns
of individual languages in order to discover something about the linguistic knowl-
edge that people must have in order to use these patterns. Even more broadly, the
study of phonology attempts to discover general principles that underlie the pat-
terning of sounds in human language.
The existence of patterns in language depends on the organization of certain
basic elements or units that combine to make up these patterns. Three major units
of analysis will be presented in this chapter. We are already acquainted with the idea
that the flow of speech can be divided into segments. In this chapter, we investigate
64 CHAPTER THREE
Wd Word level
Syllable level
Segment level
E:,
1 SEGMENTS IN CONTRAST
All speakers know which segments of their language contrast. Segments are said to Ill:
contrast (or to be distinctive or be in opposition) when their presence alone may dis-
tinguish forms with different meanings from each other. The segments [s] and [z]
contrast in the words sip and zip, as do the vowels of hit, hate, and hot.
lit::
PHONOLOGY: THE FUNCTION AND PATTERNING OF SOUNDS 65
Continuants
The phonetic context in which a sound occurs is called its environment. Pairs that
show segments in nearly identical environments, such as azure/assure or
author/either, are called near-minimal pairs. They help to establish contrasts
where no minimal pairs can be found.
You may assume that two segments contrast once a minimal pair or a near-
minimal pair has been established. It is in fact rare to find minimal pairs for all dis-
tinctive sounds in all environments in a language, since the historical evolution of
every language has led to some sounds being utilized more frequently than others,
or being eliminated from some environments. For example, you will find no mini-
mal pairs involving [h] and [n] in word-initial or word-final position in English,
because there are no words that begin with [rj] or end in [h]. It is also difficult to find
66 CHAPTER THREE
minimal pairs in English that have the phone [3], which occurs for the most part in
words borrowed from French such as azure and mirage.
Conversely, sounds that do not contrast in English, such as long and short vowels,
may be distinctive in another language. There are no minimal pairs of the type
[haet]:[hae:t] or [luws]:[lu:ws] in English. But in Japanese and Finnish, short and long
vowels contrast, as the next examples show.
PHONOLOGY: THE FUNCTION AND PATTERNING OF SOUNDS 67
Finnish
PHONETICALLY CONDITIONED
VARIATION: PHONEMES AND
ALLOPHONES
Everyday speech contains a great deal of phonetic variation that speakers pay little or
no attention to. Some of this variation arises from nonlinguistic factors such as
fatigue, excitement, orthodontic work, gum chewing, and the like. This kind of vari-
ation is not part of the domain of phonology. But much phonetic variation is sys-
tematic. It occurs most often among phonetically similar segments and is conditioned
by the phonetic context or environment in which the segments are found. This vari-
ation occurs because segments are affected and altered by the phonetic characteristics
of neighboring elements or the larger phonological context in which they occur. We
rarely notice this kind of variation because every speaker has the ability to factor it
out in order to focus attention on only the relevant contrasts of the language.
can represent this. Some speakers may even coarticulate a glottal closure (repre-
sented here with the raised symbol for a glottal stop following the consonant in
question) and produce the word as [stap?]. Thus we can find at least three pronun-
ciations of stop: [stap!], [stop"1], and [stap7]. Since there is no difference in the mean-
ing of these forms and since the final consonants are phonetically similar, we say
that these sounds are in free variation, and that they are all allophones of the
phoneme /p/. The same pattern holds for the other voiceless stops of English.
The data show that the allophones of English /r/ pattern like those of English /I/.
Based on this information, we can state that there is an /r/ phoneme in English with
(at least) two allophones—one voiced, the other voiceless. But if we were to stop
there, we would overlook an important point. The phonemes /r/ and /I/ belong to
the same class of sounds: both are liquids. By taking this information into account,
we can state a general fact about English.
3)
In English, liquids show voiceless allophones after voiceless stops and voiced
allophones elsewhere.
A major goal of phonological description is the formulation of the most general
statements possible about sound patterns. Reference to classes of segments helps
accomplish this. Additional data from English illustrate this point.
These forms demonstrate that the contrasting glides / j / and /w/ each pattern like the
liquids. We can now extend our general statement even further.
4)
In English, liquids and glides have voiceless allophones after voiceless stops,
and voiced allophones elsewhere.
Clearly, allophones do not pattern piecemeal, but rather according to their mem-
bership in phonetic classes.
In Table 3.9, the vowels [aj] and [AJ] are in complementary distribution. The [aj]
occurs before the class of voiced consonants or in word-final position, and the [AJ]
occurs before the class of voiceless consonants. The two are allophones of a single
phoneme /aj/. The same relationship holds between the vowels [aw] and [AW], which
are allophones of /aw/.
/aj/ /aw/
I don't agree he was an American.... Where all other English-speaking people pro-
nounce OU as a diphthong, the Canadian .. . makes a separate sound for each letter.
The word about, for instance, he pronounces as ab-oh-oot.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Canadian Raising, since the more re-
stricted allophones [AJ] and [AW] have higher vowel components than the elsewhere
allophones [aj] and [aw].
These data show parallels with the allophonic distribution we have considered
so far: certain elements are predictable under certain systematically stateable phonetic
conditions. Here, however, instead of a number of variants of a phoneme, we have
two segments whose distribution is predictable: these glides are always found after
nonlow tense vowels in English. This predictability is analogous to the predictabil-
ity of allophonic variants—if certain sounds are predictably found in a given environ-
ment, they are not included in the phonemic representation. We can thus draw from
the data in Table 3.10 the following generalization about the English vowel system.
5)
The nonlow tense vowels of English are predictably followed by a glide that has
the same backness and roundedness as the vowel.
Given the variation in English vowels that we have examined, we are now able to
summarize what we have discovered about the English vowel system.
dictable from the phonetic context in which the allophone is found. Since the pres-
ence of the appropriate glides following the class of nonlow tense vowels is pre-
dictable, they need not be present in the phonological representation of the English
vowels either.
These generalizations enable us to represent the contrasts between words like heat
and hit, late and let, cooed and could purely as tense versus lax vowel contrasts, and
not as contrasts that also involve the presence of glides. We can also represent the
vowel found in words like code and snow without a following glide. Figure 3.4 sums
up the differences between phonetic and phonological representations for the vow-
els of English.
Scots Gaelic has oral and nasal vowel allophones. Here we can state the following.
6)
Vowels are nasal in Scots Gaelic when preceded or followed by a nasal
consonant.
Here, all vowels and glides following a nasal are predictably nasalized until an obstru-
ent, liquid, or glottal ([h], [?]) is reached. For Malay the generalization is as follows.
7)
In Malay, all vowels and glides following a nasal consonant and not separated
from it by a non-nasal consonant are nasalized.
The phonological contrasts of the two languages are different, even though the
phones are not. These distributions are the same for the other voiceless stops in both
languages.
PHONOLOGY: THE FUNCTION AND PATTERNING OF SOUNDS 75
English Khmer
The contrast between phonetic and phonemic representation is even more strik-
ing for the Malay forms given earlier, as is shown in Table 3.16.
Here, nasalization on all vowel and glide segments is predictable and is therefore
omitted from the phonological representation.