Phonemic functions

The phoneme serves to perform tree main functions.

1. The first function is constitutive one. Phonemes serve like bricks to build the meaning for units of the language (morphemes, words, sentences, phonemes, etc.). The most important function is the constitutive one.

2. The second function is the recognative function. This function is closely connected with the constitutive one, but very important from the point of view of perception.

3. The third function is the distinctive one.

So, the phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit used in a language for the formation of meaningful units and for their differentiation and it’s exists in speech in its allophones. Phonemic mistakes appear when you pronounce one phoneme instead of another

2. NOTATION (transcription)

We are to consider the system of phonetic notations which is generally termed as "transcription". Transcription is a set of symbols representing speech sounds. The symbolization of sounds naturally differs according to whether the aim is to indicate the phoneme, i.e. a functional unit as a whole, or to reflect the modifications of its allophones as well.

The International Phonetic Association (IPA) has given accepted values to an inventory of symbols, mainly alphabetic but with additions. The first type of notation, the broad or phonemic transcription, provides special symbols for all the phonemes of a language. The second type, the narrow or allophonic transcription, suggests special symbols including some information about articulatory activity of particular allophonic features. The broad transcription is mainly used for practical experience; the narrow type serves the purposes of research work.

The first type was introduced by Daniel Jones. He realized the difference in quality as well as in quantity between the vowel sounds in the words sit and seat, pot and port, pull and pool. The other type of broad transcription, first used by V.A.Vassilyev, causes no phonological misunderstanding providing special symbols for all vowel phonemes.

3. MAIN TRENDS IN PHONEME THEORY

Most linguists have looked upon the phoneme as one of the basic language units. The "mentalistic" or "psychological" view regards the phoneme as an ideal "mental image" or a target at which the speaker aims. The so-called "functional" view regards the phoneme as the minimal sound unit by which meanings may be differentiated without much regard to actually pronounced speech sounds. A stronger form of the "functional" approach is advocated in the so-called "abstract" view of the phoneme, which regards phonemes as essentially independent of the acoustic and physiological properties associated with them, that is of speech sounds. The "physical" view regards the phoneme as a "family" of related sounds satisfying certain conditions, notably:

Topic 3: Methods of phonological analysis

1. To study the sounds of a language from the functional or phonological point of view means to study the way they function, that is, to find out which sounds a language uses as part of its pronunciation system, how sounds are grouped into functionally similar units, termed phonemes. The final aim of the phonological analysis of language is the identification of the phonemes and finding out the patterns of relationship into which they fall as the sound system of that language.

So the aim of the phonological analysis is, firstly, to determine which differences of sounds are phonemic and which are non-phonemic and, secondly, to find the inventory of the phonemes of this or that language.

A number of principles have been established for ascertaining the phonemic structure of a language. There are two most widely used methods of finding it out. They are the distributional method and the semantic method.

1. The distributional method is mainly used by phoneticians of "structuralist" trend: the fact is that the structuralist model of languages which flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s emphasized "the facts about the language" approach.

1. Allophones of different phonemes occur in the same phonetic context.

2. Allophones of the same phoneme never occur in the same phonetic context.

2. There is another method of phonological analysis widely used in Russian linguistics. It is called the semantic method. It is applied for phonological analysis of both unknown languages and languages already described. In case of the latter it is used to determine the phonemic status of sounds which are not easily identified from phonological point of view. The method is based on a phonemic rule that phonemes can distinguish words and morphemes when opposed to one another. The semantic method of identifying the phonemes of a language attaches great significance to meaning. It consists in systematic substitution of the sound for another in order to ascertain in which cases where the phonetic context remains the same such substitution leads to a change of meaning.

There are three kinds of oppositions. If members of the opposition differ in one feature the opposition is said to be single, e.g. pen - ben. Common features: occlusive - occlusive, labial - labial. Differentiating feature: fortis - lenis.

If two distinctive features are marked, the opposition is said to be double, e.g. pen - den. Common features: occlusive - occlusive. Differentiating features: labial - lingual, fortis voiceless - lenis voiced.

If three distinctive features are marked the opposition is said to be triple, e.g. pen - then. Differentiating features: occlusive - constrictive, labial - dental, fortis voiceless - lenis voiced.

It would be a mistake to assume that the use of commutation test is without its problems. The difficulty is that the theory is based on the assumption that sounds in any sequence are discrete replaceable units. In reality speech sounds are modified under the influence of context in which they are used. Semantic method of phonological analysis is now widely used in Soviet linguistics as well as by overwhelming majority of foreign analysts.

We have indicated so far that the phonological analysis of the sounds of a language is based on such notions as contrastive distribution, complementary distribution, minimal pairs, free variation, and phonetic similarity. To these we must add one more concept, that is, of native speaker's knowledge. The fact is that all the rules referred to above should account for the intuitions of the native speaker and that is the real reason why we adopt them, for the aim of linguistic analysis is to explain and to take account of native speaker's feelings about his language as far as this is possible

In the final summing up we might say that the phonemic system of a language is patterned. It is the aim of phonological analysis to attempt to systematize the sounds of a language, that is, to group them into functionally similar classes.

Topic 4. The system of English phonemes: consonants

1. There are two major classes of sounds traditionally distinguished by phoneticians in any language. They are termed consonants and vowels. Consonants are known to have voice and noise combined, while vowels are sounds consisting of voice only

1. Consonants

Each sound is known to have three aspects: acoustic, articulatory and auditory and therefore can be studied on these three levels.

As to the classification of English consonants there are few ways of seeing the situation.

According to V.A.Vassilyev (79) primary importance should be given to the type of obstruction and the manner of production of noise. On this ground he distinguishes two large classes of consonants:

a) occlusive, in the production of which a complete obstruction is formed;

b) constrictive, in the production of which an incomplete obstruction is formed.

Each of the two classes is subdivided into noise consonants and sonorants. Another point of view is shared by a group of Russian phoneticians. They suggest that the first and basic principle of classification should be the degree of noise. Such consideration leads to dividing English consonants into two general kinds:

A — noise consonants

B — sonorants

Our next point should be made in connection, with another sound property, that is voiced — voiceless characteristic which depends on the work of the vocal cords. We should note that it has long been believed that from the articulatory point of view the distinction between such pairs of consonants as [p, b], [t, d], [k, g), [s, z], [f, v], [S,Z], [C,G] is based on the absence or presence of vibrations of the vocal cords, or on the absence or presence of voice or tone component. However, a considerable body of experimental work on physiological and acoustic aspects of these sounds showed that this is not the only difference between them. It is obvious now that there is also energy difference. All voiced consonants are weak (lenis) and all voiceless consonants are strong (fortis).

There are, however, other problems of a phonological character. In the English consonantal system it is the problem of affricates, that is their phonological status and their number.

The second question is with the English [C-G] sounds. We can’t be the witnesses of the existence of the morphemic junction inside these speech units. There is one more criterion which is not strictly linguistical, but we can take it into consideration. [t] and [S], [d] and [Z] are never combined in one syllable.

Summarizing what have been described we could state that with the majority of Russian specialists in English phonetics we consider relevant the following articulatory features:

1) type of obstruction,

2) place of obstruction and the active organ of speech,

3) force of articulation.

3. Modifications of Consonants in Connected Speech

The adaptive modification of a consonant by a neighbouring consonant in the speech chain is known as assimilation. Types of assimilation can be distinguished according to (1) direction, (2) degree of completeness, (3) degree of stability. (1) The influence of the neighbouring sounds in English can act in a progressive, regressive or reciprocal (double) direction. (2) According to its degree, assimilation can be complete and incomplete. (3) Many assimilotary phenomena of older stages have become obligatory in MnE. Such changes are called historical. Besides there are a lot of non-obligatory cases of assimilation which can be traced mainly at word boundaries.

The term accommodation is often used by linguists to denote the interchanges of "vowel + consonant type" or "consonant + vowel type", for instance, some slight degree of nasalization of vowels preceded or followed by nasal sonorants: never, men; or labialization of consonants preceding the vowels [o] and [y] in Russian.

Elision or complete loss of sounds, both vowels and consonants, is often observed in English.

The reduction of some consonant clusters was established long ago (write, know, listen, Wednesday, lamb). In other cases of recent formation the elided forms are typical only of rapid colloquial speech.

Topic 5: The system of English phonemes: vowels

1. Vowels unlike consonants are produced with no obstruction to the stream of air, so on the perception level their integral characteristic is naturally tone, not noise.

The quality of a vowel is known to be determined by the size, volume, and shape of the mouth resonator, which are modified by the movement of active speech organs, that is the tongue and the lips.

The criteria of classificatory description of a vowel:

a) stability of articulation;

b) tongue position;

c) lip position;

d) character of the vowel end;

e) length;

f) tenseness.

Stability of articulation specifies the actual position of the articulating organ in the process of the articulation of a vowel. There are two possible varieties: a) the tongue position is stable; b) it changes, that is the tongue moves from one position to another.

The other articulatory characteristic of vowels as to the tongue position is its vertical movement. The way British and Russian phoneticians approach this aspect is also slightly different.

Another feature of English vowels which is sometimes included into the principles of classification is lip rounding. Traditionally three lip positions are distinguished, that is spread, neutral and rounded.

Another articulatory characteristic of English vowels, that is, their length or quantity.

The problem the analysts are concerned with is whether variations in quantity or length are meaningful (relevant).

D.Jones suggested taking into consideration the quantity of the vowel and he introduced the term chroneme. D. Jones pointed to the fact that this quantity is relative. Gimson carried out a lot of experiments and proved that the historically long vowels can be twice shorter than historically short vowels. The main difference between them is in quality. Special instrumental analysis shows that historically long vowels are tense while historically short vowels are lax.

3. Modifications of Vowels in Connected Speech

Vowel reduction is one of the factors that condition the defining of the phonemic status of vowel sounds in a stretch of speech. The modifications of vowels in a speech chain are either quantitative or qualitative or both. These changes of vowels in a speech continuum are determined by a number of factors such as the position of the vowel in the word, accentual structure, tempo of speech, rhythm, etc.

The decrease of the vowel quantity or the shortening of the vowel length is known as a quantitative modification of vowels, which may be illustrated as follows:

1. The shortening of the vowel length occurs in unstressed positions. In these cases reduction affects both the length of the unstressed vowels and their quality.

2. The length of a vowel depends on its position in a word. It varies in different phonetic environments. English vowels are said to have positional length, e.g. knee — need — near (accommodation). The vowel [i:] is the longest in the final position, it is obviously shorter before the lenis voiced consonant [d], and it is the shortest before the fortis voiceless consonant [t].

Qualitative modification of most vowels occurs in unstressed positions. Unstressed vowels lose their "colour", their quality, which is illustrated by the examples below:

1. In unstressed syllables vowels of full value are usually subjected to qualitative changes. In such cases the quality of the vowel is reduced to the neutral sound [q].

2. Slight degree of nasalization marks vowels preceded or followed by the nasal consonants.

The realization of reduction as well as assimilation and accommodation is connected with the style of speech. In rapid colloquial speech reduction may result in vowel elision, the complete omission of the unstressed vowel, which is also known as zero reduction. Zero reduction is likely to occur in a sequence of unstressed syllables, e.g. history, factory, literature, territory. It often occurs in initial unstressed syllables preceding the stressed one.

We would like to conclude that certain interrelation which we observe between the full form of a word and its reduced forms is conditioned by the tempo, rhythm and style of speech.

Topic 6: Sound alternations. Types of Alternation. Syllabic structure of English words

1. Sound variations in words, their derivatives and grammatical forms of words are known as sound alternations. It is obvious that sound alternations are caused by assimilation, accommodation and reduction in speech. Alternations of consonants are mainly due to contextual assimilations.

Historical alternations distinguish grammatical forms of words and lexical units in the process of word-building.

Sound alternations are also widely spread on the synchronical level in the present-day English and are known as contextual.

We are interested now in the sound in its weak position. Vowels are said to be in their strong position when they are in stressed syllables and in the weak position when they are in the unstressed ones. Consonants may well be said to be in their strong position before vowels and in the intervocalic position; they are in weak positions when they are word final or proceed other consonants.

The so-called morphological school represented by Soviet philologists R.I.Avanesov, V.P.Sidorov, P.S.Kuznetsov, A.A.Reformatsky supported the theory of neutralization of phonemes. The loss of one or more distinctive features of a phoneme in the weak position is called phonemic neutralization. In English, the voicing opposition is neutralized after the initial [s].

The so-called Leningrad phonological school (L.V.Shcherba and his followers L.R.Zinder, M.I.Matusevitch) assert that the phoneme is independent of the morpheme. So [A] in вода belongs to the [a] phoneme while [o] in воды to the [o] phoneme. The supporters of this conception claim that the phoneme cannot lose any of its distinctive features.

N.S.Trubetskoy (the Prague phonological school) arrived at an original solution of the phonemic status of a sound in alternations. To overcome the difficulty he introduced a broader phonological unit than a phoneme and named it an archiphoneme. An archiphoneme is defined as a combination of distinctive features common to two phonemes

2. SYLLABIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS

The syllable is a very complicated phenomenon and it can be studied on four levels: acoustic, articulatory, auditory and functional, which means that the syllable can be approached from different points of view. The severe complexity of the phenomenon gave rise to many theories. No phonetician has succeeded so far in giving an exhaustive and adequate explanation of what the syllable is. There exist two points of view:

1. Some linguists consider the syllable to be a purely articulatory unit which lacks any functional value. This point of view is defended on the grounds that the boundaries of the syllable do not always coincide with those of the morphemes.

2. However the majority of linguists treat the syllable as the smallest pronounceable unit which can reveal some linguistic function.

3. Now we shall consider two very important functions of the syllable.

The first function we should mention is known to be the constitutive function of the syllable. It lies in its ability to be a part of a word or a word itself. The syllable forms language units of greater magnitude, that is, words, morphemes and utterances. In this respect two things should be emphasized. First, the syllable is the unit within which the relations between the distinctive features of the phonemes and their acoustic correlates are revealed. Second, within a syllable (or a sequence of syllables) prosodic characteristics of speech are realized, which form the stress-pattern of a word and the rhythmic and intonation structures of an utterance. In sum, the syllable is a specific minimal structure of both segmental and suprasegmental features.

The other function of the syllable is its distinctive function. In this respect the syllable is characterized by its ability to differentiate words and word-forms. To illustrate this, a set of minimal pairs should be found so that qualitative and/or quantitative peculiarities of certain allophones should indicate the beginning or the end of the syllable.

Summarizing we might say that at the functional level of description the syllable could be conceived of as a smallest pronounceable unit with potential linguistic importance. That is why it reveals its functional value only occasionally.

By way of conclusion we could enumerate the following peculiarities of the syllabic structure of English which should arrest the learner's attention:

1) syllabic boundary is inside intervocalic consonant preceded by vowels, for example: Betty, racket, money, hotter,

2) syllabic boundary is before an intervocalic consonant if it is not preceded by the above-mentioned vowels, for example: later, speaker;

3) the sonorants [1], [m], [n] are syllabic if they are preceded by noise consonants, for example: little, blossom, sudden;

4) there cannot be more than one vowel (a diphthong or a monophthong) within one syllable;

5) the typical and most fundamental syllabic structure is of (C)VC type;

6) word final consonants are normally of weak-end type.

Topic 7: Accentual structure of English words.

1. The sequence of syllables in the word is not pronounced identically. The syllable or syllables which are uttered with more prominence than the other syllables of the word are said to be stressed or accented. The correlation of varying prominences of syllables in a word is understood as the accentual structure of the word or its stress pattern.

. The dynamic stress implies greater force with which the syllable is pronounced. In other words in the articulation of the stressed syllable greater muscular energy is produced by the speaker.

The nature of word stress, the interrelation of its components is still a problem which is awaiting its solution. The term stress shouldn’t be confused with the term prominence. Prominence in speech is a broader term than stress. Languages are also differentiated according to the placement of word stress. The traditional classification of languages concerning place of stress in a word is into those with a fixed stress and those with a free stress.

The rhythm of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables gave birth to the rhythmical tendency in the present-day English which caused the appearance of the secondary stress in the multisyllabic French borrowings. It also explains the placement of primary stress on the third syllable from the end in three- and four-syllable words.

The numerous variations of English word stress are systematized in the typology of accentual structure of English words worked out by G.P.Torsuev. He classifies them according to the number of stressed syllables, their degree or character (the main and the secondary stress). The distribution of stressed syllables within the word accentual types forms accentual structures of words. Accentual types and accentual structures are closely connected with the morphological type of words, with the number of syllables, the semantic value of the root and the prefix of the word.

The typical feature of English accentual structure is its instability. There is a great number of words having variants of their accentual patterns. They may differ in:

1) number of stresses

2) the place of stress

3) the degree of stress

4. In discussing accentual structure of English words we should turn now to the functional aspect of word stress. Word stress in a language performs three functions.

I. Word stress constitutes a word, it organizes the syllables of a word into a language unit having a definite accentual structure, that is a pattern of relationship among the syllables; a word does not exist without the word stress. Thus the word stress performs the constitutive function. Sound continuum becomes a phrase when it is divided into units organized by word stress into words.

II. Word stress enables a person to identify a succession of syllables as a definite accentual pattern of a word. This function of word stress is known as identificatory (or recognitive). Correct accentuation helps the listener to make the process of communication easier, whereas the distorted accentual pattern of words, misplaced word stresses prevent normal understanding.

III. Word stress alone is capable of differentiating the meaning of words or their forms, thus performing its distinctive function. The accentual patterns of words or the degrees of word stress and their positions form oppositions, e.g. 'import— im'port, 'billow — be'low.

A.C.Gimson establishes three groups of words with identical spelling representing different parts of speech which are opposed by means of shifting of the stress.

1. A small group of words where the noun is differentiated from a verb by the opposition of the accentual pattern of the word alone.

2. The second group where the shifting of the stress which means the change of the accentual pattern of the word may be or may not be accompanied by the reduction of the vowel in the unstressed syllable of the verbs.

3. The largest group of such pairs of words manifests the change of their accentual pattern together with the qualitative reduction of the unstressed vowel.

There is also a group of accentuation oppositions where compound nouns are opposed to free word combinations.

The accentual structure of words is actually very closely interrelated with their semantic value. By way of illustration we shall now analyze a fairly large class of words in English which are marked by two primary stresses (Accentual Type II). They are either compounds consisting of two semantically important stems or words with semantically relevant separable prefixes or the suffix -teen. The accentual pattern of this group of words is regulated by the meaningful weight of the elements of the compounds. Most of compound adjectives have two equal stresses as both elements in them are semantically important, e.g. 'absent-'minded, 'left-'handed, 'good-looking.