Linguistics Theory, Foundations, and Modern Development

An Overview of Linguistics and Linguistic Applications

Linguistic Assumptions and Principles

Parts of Grammars

Phonetics and Phonology

Parts of Grammars

Semantics

Dialects and Language in Society

Phonetics and Phonology

There is a finite set of meaningful sounds which appear in human languages. Not all of these sounds appear in any given language, i.e., each language has its own finite subset of meaningful sounds. For example, clicks have no meaning in English, but they are part of Xhosa (used in South Africa; in fact "xh" represents the tsk clicking sound). Linguistic sounds (those that are meaningful, or phonemes) are, like language, deliberate in nature. Throat-clearing and sneezing, therefore, are not phonemes in any language. It is, in part, the difference in the subset of phonemes which makes it difficult for native speakers of English to understand French-born speakers of English. Even two dialects of the same language can have different phonemes for the same representational spelling (this difference is found often between American English, British English, and Scottish English) [Fromkin and Rodman, 176-179].

Alphabetic spelling (rather than pictographic representation of words) represents the pronunciation of words, although the sounds of the words in a language are unsystematically represented [Fromkin and Rodman, 181]. Because of the discrepancy between spelling and sounds, and even the variety of sound sets in languages around the world, in 1888 the International Phonetics Association developed an alphabet based on the Roman alphabet to phonetically spell words. The phonetic symbols in the IPA alphabet "have a consistent value unlike ordinary letters which may or may not represent the same sound in the same or different languages" [Fromkin and Rodman, 184]. While some differences in pronunciation are important for meaning, others are not important and are merely standard deviations from the same utterance.

The study of speech sounds, particularly articulatory phonetics, emphasizes how sounds are made by speakers. Speech sounds are distinguished by a variety of factors: the state of the vocal cords, the volume of air used in voicing a single sound (aspiration), the manner of articulation, and even the place of articulation within the mouth, the head (nasal or oral), or the throat [Fromkin and Rodman, 210].

a /p/ phone

A speaker of a language innately knows the acceptable range of sounds ("phones") within his or her language. Phones are the variants of phonemes ([p^h] and [p] are phones represented by /p/). Phonetic features exist, similar to semantic features for words, and include voicing, nasality, labiality, continuance, and aspiration. Those which are binary valued features (such as [±nasal] and [±voicing]) are considered distinctive features of phonemes. A linguist may use minimal pairs (words distinguished by a single phone occurring in the same position, such as /bat/ and /pat/) to discover the phonemes of any given language; the phones may be distinguished by a single phonemic feature, thus this may also identify distinctive features within the phonetic set. Features may vary in distinctiveness from language to language. The innate knowledge of a language informs the speaker as to what phones and what sequence of phones are legal in a language. Also, stress may be introduced to identify different words and different meanings of words based on sentence position. The emphasis on a particular word (or syllable) helps carry the context of the conversation [Fromkin and Rodman, 261-263].

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