Teaching Phonetics

My student and I used sticky notes to make this big schwa sign on my window.

Phonetics versus Phonology

I've been asked several times already to explain shortly the difference between phonetics and phonology. If you think of it, it's easy. Pronounciation can be always studied and analysed from two different points of view: the phonetic and phonological. Phonetics concerns the way we produce (articulate), transmit and receive speech sounds while phonology concentrates on the general properties displayed by systems of languages. In other words, phonetics studies all possible sounds humans can make and phonology studies only those phonemes (I explain the term phoneme in one of my previous posts "Phones, phonemes and allophones") that bring about the differences of meaning within language.It's a bit as if (and this is a big simplification) you had a girl and first were concerned about her appearance only - this would be phonology but as soon as you find out more about her and her personality, it's phonetics.

To seperate the two approaches, phonetic and phonological, linguists use different kind of brackets when using their written representations - transcriptions. Square brackets [ ] indicate a phonetic point of view (only as sounds articulated in a particular way without taking their role into consideration), whereas slant brackets / / indicate phonological point of view (only as parts of the sound system). Generally, phonetic transcriptions are much more detailed and used when, for instance, describing the regional differences in pronounciation. However, phonemes are often satisfactory enough when presenting transcriptions.

Phones, phonemes and allophones.

The terminology we will be dealing with today may strike you as really complicated. This is always the case with abstract units that you cannot see or touch. I've made every effort for the text to be simple so don't give up before you even try understanding it.

To get down to basics: A phonological analysis involve two levels of representation - a concrete/phonetic representation (on the concrete level we describe what speech sounds there are) and an abstract/underlying one (on the abstract level we recognise the differences between elements - the contrastive function).

Phone is a speech sound as it is without taking into consideration it's function in a given language. It's a representation on the phonetic level and is a phonetic unit.

Phoneme, however, is a representation of a speech sound and it's an abstractive unit. It is the smallest contrastive linguistic unit that is capable of bringing about a change of meaning. In a word ''rat'' - we have 3 phonemes (remember: representations of speech sounds): /r/, /a/, /t/. In a word ''sat' we also have 3 phonemes: /s/, /a/, /t/. There is only one phoneme difference in the words above (/r/ - /s/). This phoneme brings about the change of meaning because surely the meaning changes depending on whether we pronounce /r/ or /s/ as the first speech sound of the given word. Pairs such as 'rat' - 'sat', 'pot' - 'tot', 'car' - 'far' and many others are pairs differing in terms of only one phoneme are called 'minimal pairs' and the contrast between the two words in each pair is called 'minimal contrast'. I'm sure you can think of many examples of minimal pairs and the process of finding them is refered to as 'commutation process'.

Sometimes we find various realisations of the same phoneme and these are called allophones. For example there are two types of /l/ in English. One is the dark 'l' and the other is the light /l/. The light /l/ always occurs at the begining of a word and the dark /l/ can be found in the middle or at the end of the word. They differ slightly in terms the way we pronounce them so we are surely dealing here with the different values of consonants but they are not different phonemes because they do never bring a change of meaning. In the word 'lull' for instance we have both - the light /l/ is first and the dark /l/ is second. If we pronounce them the other way round, the word may sound odd to a native English speaker, but will be still understood as 'lull' - no change of meaning takes place. Allophones occur consistently in different words or in different positions in a word. They are in 'complementary distribution' - they don't contrast with each other. In the case of phonemes we are dealing with 'parallel distribution' - they may contrast in one place in a word.

To sum up: If we concentrate on the underlying representation of a speech sound - it is a phoneme, but on the phonetic level - a phone. When a speech sound has been classified as realisation of a given phoneme we refer to it as an allophone of this phoneme.