英语语言学纲要课件要点（3）：Chapter 3 Phonology。

[center]Chapter 3 Phonology
 What is phonology?

 Phonology is the study of sound systems and patterns.
 Phonology and phonetics are two studies different in perspectives, which are concerned with the study of speech sounds.
 Phonology focuses on three fundamental questions.
 What sounds make up the list of sounds that can distinguish meaning in a particular language?
 What sounds vary in what ways in what context?
 What sounds can appear together in a sequence in a particular language?

 Phonemes and allophones

 A phoneme is a distinctive, abstract sound unit with a distinctive feature.
 The variants of a phoneme are termed allophones.
 We use allophones to realize phonemes.

 Discovering phonemes

 Contrastive distribution – phonemes
 If sounds appear in the same environment, they are said to be in contrastive distribution.
 Typical contrastive distribution of sounds is found in minimal pairs and minimal sets.
 A minimal pair consists of two words that differ by only one sound in the same position.
 Minimal sets are more than two words that are distinguished by one segment in the same position.
 The overwhelming majority of the consonants and vowels represented by the English phonetic alphabet are in contrastive distribution.
 Some sounds can hardly be found in contrastive distribution in English. However, these sounds are distinctive in terms of phonetic features. Therefore, they are separate phonemes.
 Complementary distribution – allophones
 Sounds that are not found in the same position are said to be in complementary distribution.
 If segments are in complementary distribution and share a number of features, they are allophones of the same phoneme.
 Free variation
 If segments appear in the same position but the mutual substitution does not result in change of meaning, they are said to be in free variation.

 Distinctive and non-distinctive features

 Features that distinguish meaning are called distinctive features, and features do not, non-distinctive features.
 Distinctive features in one language may be non-distinctive in another.

 Phonological rules

 Phonemes are abstract sound units stored in the mind, while allophones are the actual pronunciations in speech.
 What phoneme is realized by what allophones in what specific context is another major question in phonology.
 The regularities that what sounds vary in what ways in what context are generalized and stated in phonology as rules.
 There are many phonological rules in English. Take the following ones as examples.
 [+voiced +consonant] – [-voiced]/[-voiced +consonant]_
 [-voiced +bilabial +stop] – unaspirated/[-voiced +alveolar +fricative]_

 Syllable structure

 A syllable is a phonological unit that is composed of one or more phonemes.
 Every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel.
 The nucleus may be preceded by one or more consonants called the onset and followed by one or more consonants called the coda.

 Sequence of phonemes

 Native speakers of any language intuitively know what sounds can be put together.
 Some sequences are not possible in English. The impossible sequences are called systematic gaps.
 Sequences that are possible but do not occur yet are called accidental gaps.
 When new words are coined, they may fill some accidental gaps but they will never fill systematic gaps.

 Suprasegmental features

 Features that are found over a segment or a sequence of two or more segments are called suprasegmental features.
 These features are distinctive features.
 Stress
 Stress is the perceived prominence of one or more syllabic elements over others in a word.
 Stress is a relative notion. Only words that are composed of two or more syllables have stress.
 If a word has three or more syllables, there is a primary stress and a secondary stress.
 In some languages word stress is fixed, i.e. on a certain syllable. In English, word stress is unpredictable.
 Intonation
 When we speak, we change the pitch of our voice to express ideas.
 Intonation is the variation of pitch to distinguish utterance meaning.
 The same sentence uttered with different intonation may express different attitude of the speaker.
 In English, there are three basic intonation patterns: fall, rise, fall-rise.
 Tone
 Tone is the variation of pitch to distinguish words.
 The same sequence of segments can be different words if uttered with different tones.
 Chinese is a typical tone language.

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