LECTURE 1.

Introduction to Phonetics, Pronunciation, and the IPA

Plan
1.1. The Object of Phonetics and Phonology
1.2. On Phone, Phoneme, and Allophone
1.3. The Branches of Phonetics
1.4. Pronunciation and spelling
1.5. The International Phonetic Alphabet and Transcription

1.1. The Object of Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and phonology are the branches of linguistics concerned with sounds,
thus the main object of investigation in this course is a sound. The English alphabet is
comprised of 26 letters, while the sound system of English contains 44 sounds as
phonemes (see explanation of phonemes below). Both branches investigate the sounds
from different perspectives:
Phonetics is concerned with the physical manifestation of language in sound
waves and how they are produced, transmitted, and perceived, and also “provides
methods for their description, classification, and transcription” (Crystal 2008: 363).
 Another "sound" science related to phonetics is phonology. Phonology “studies the
sound systems of languages” and how sounds function in relation to each other in a
language. Phonology is the systematic organization of speech sounds in the
production of language. The major distinction between the fields of phonetics and
phonology is that phonetics focuses on the study of speech sounds, their acoustic and
perceptual characteristics, and how they are produced by the speech organs.
Phonology focuses on the linguistic (phonological) rules that are used to specify the
manner in which speech sounds are organized and combined into meaningful units,
which are then combined to form syllables, words, and sentences.

1.2. On Phone, Phoneme, and Allophone

The term sound is often regarded as not being a precise one in the fields of
phonetics and phonology and is thus replaced by the term phone. Sound could mean
any noise or sound, while phone is restricted to the human voice (‘Phone’ comes from
a Greek word ‘phone’ [human voice] and is regarded as a speech sound which can be
cut out from the speech stream.
A phoneme is the smallest independent unit that can bring about a change in
meaning. An example of a phoneme is the sound /t/ in the words team and steam. The
slight difference in the realisation of this phoneme is that the /t/ in team is aspirated
[tʰ], while the /t/ in steam is not [t]. Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as
[t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. Allophones do not affect the
semantic meaning of the word. For example, team pronounced with any allophone of
the phoneme /t/ maintains its meaning, but if it is substituted with the phoneme /b/,
then it brings about a semantic change. These two words then (team /tiːm/ and beam
/biːm/) form a minimal pair, which is an opposition of two words showing the
existence of these two phonemes. For a set of words to form a minimal pair, they may
differ in one phoneme only.
1.3. The Branches of Phonetics

Adopting the different perspectives referred to in the description of phonetics

above, it can be viewed as investigating three distinct areas that are represented in
the following branches of phonetics:
 articulatory phonetics, which studies the ways the vocal organs are used to
produce speech sounds;
 acoustic phonetics, which investigates the physical properties of speech
sounds (duration, frequency, intensity, and quality) that are generally measured
by spectrographs to depict waveforms and spectrograms;
 auditory phonetics, which is concerned with how people perceive speech
sounds, i.e. how the sound waves activate the listener’s eardrum, and how the
message is carried to the brain in the form of nerve impulses.

1.4. Pronunciation and spelling

One of the central distinctions that are made in the study of language is that
between letters and sounds. In English, more than in other languages, it is obvious
that the spelling and pronunciation of words do not match. Take the words bone, done
and gone, which are spelled with the same vowel letter but are actually pronounced
with three different vowels. Bone rhymes with tone, done rhymes with fun and gone
has the same vowel as rock.
Although pronunciation is a feature of speech and spelling a feature of writing,
spelling will often have an influence on the learning of pronunciation as the majority
of learners use written texts in their studies. The relationship between them in English
is often thought to be complex and chaotic. A single written letter might have a
number of different pronunciations in different words, a single sound might be
represented by a number of letters or letter combinations in different words, and
written letters may not have a directly corresponding pronunciation. For example, the
letter f can be pronounced /v/in ‘of’ but /f/ in ‘roof, the sound /ʃ/ can be represented
by a variety of letters and letter combinations including s (sure), sh (shop), ch
(machine) and sch in the usual British pronunciation of (schedule); and the letter e is
not sounded in the word showed.
However, we can also highlight certain regularities in spelling to sound
correspondences that are reasonably easy to remember and have few exceptions. For
example:
• the addition of the letter ‘e’ after a consonant lengthens the preceding
vowel, so that it 'says its alphabet name, in pairs such as at/ate, rid/ride, not/note and
cut/cute
• the letters ‘c’ and ‘g’ are pronounced /s/and/dʒ/ respectively before e, i and y
(e.g .gem, city, cycle), and elsewhere they are pronounced/k/and /g/ respectively (e.g.
cold, gap)
• certain suffixes control where stress is placed in a word; for example, the
suffixes -ic and -ity cause the stress to be placed on the syllable before the suffix
(compare ‘history’ [ˈhɪs.tər.i] with stress on the first syllable, and ‘historic’ [hɪˈstɒr.ɪk]
with stress on the second).
1.5. The International Phonetic Alphabet and Transcription

Articulatory phonetics deals not only with the organs of speech but also with the
categorisation and classification of the production features of phones. An extensive
knowledge of how concrete vowels and consonants are articulated by particular
organs of speech is essential for successful articulation.
There are 44 phonemes in English. The English Phonemic Chart, as presented by
Underhill (1994) and given in Table 1, exhibits clear sets of vowels (monophthongs
and diphthongs), consonants, and sonorants.

Table 1. The English Phonemic Chart

The symbols for the English phonemic chart have been compiled from the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) devised by International Phonetic
Association (also abbreviated IPA). The association was established in 1886, and
since then, it has been functioning as the major as well as the oldest representative
organisation for world phoneticians. The association’s mission is to promote the
scientific study of phonetics by providing phoneticians worldwide with a notational
standard for the phonetic representation of all languages, i.e. the IPA.
The term transcription refers to the process and “the methods of writing down
speech sounds in a systematic and consistent way” (Crystal 2008: 490). Each sound
must be identified and written in an appropriate symbol. Principally, there are two
kinds of transcription: phonemic and phonetic transcription. Phonemic transcription
gives only a basic idea of the sounds, and is thus often termed as broad
transcription. It uses the 44 English phonemic symbols and does not show any
phonetic details of the sounds. The symbols are enclosed in slashes / /, e.g. /t/; /taɪp/.
Phonetic transcription has a high degree of accuracy and shows a lot of
articulatory and auditory details. It is often termed as the narrow transcription. The
symbols are therefore enclosed in square brackets [ ]. For example, [tʰ] means that /t/
is aspirated, and [spiːd̥] means that /d/ is a bit devoiced at final position.

Terminology check:
phonetics, phonology, phone, phoneme, allophone, minimal pair, articulatory
phonetics, acoustic phonetics, auditory phonetics, International Phonetic Alphabet,
phonetic transcription, broad transcription, narrow transcription
Exercises:

1. Write the number of letters and the number of sounds in these words:

Word Number of letters Number of sounds

enough
philosophy
answer
furniture
Chinese
picturesque
delicious
Wednesday
colonel
honour
thorough
naughty
scene
business

2. Create minimal pairs substituting the sounds in bold in the following words:

Word Minimal pairs with that word

let /let/
let /let/
kid /kɪd/
got /gɒt/
keen /kiːn/
book /bʊk/
come /kʌm/

Study questions:
1. What is the difference between phonetics and phonology?
2. What is the difference between a letter and a sound?
3. How many sounds are there in the English sound system?
4. What is the number of sounds and letters in your native language?
5. Why is phone a more appropriate term than sound?
6. What is the difference between phoneme and allophone?
7. What is a minimal pair?
8. What branches of phonetics are distinguished, and what does each branch
investigate?
9. What are some examples that show how spelling and pronunciation in English are different
from each other?
10. What are the key differences between phonemic and phonetic transcription, and how are
they represented in terms of symbols?