PHONOLOGY AND PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
A. Introduction
In this chapter, we will be concerned with the phonetic transcription of careful speech—the style of speech you use to show someone how to pronounce a word. This is called the citation style of speech. Transcriptions of citation style are particularly useful in language documentation and lexicography, and also serve as the basic phonetic observations described in phonology. Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in a language. It involves studying a language to determine its distinctive sounds, that is, those sounds that convey a difference in meaning. for example, there is a difference between the consonants at the beginnings of words such as white and right. They later realize that these words begin with two distinct sounds. Eventually, they learn to distinguish all the sounds that can change the meanings of words. When two sounds can be used to differentiate words, they are said to belong to different phonemes. There must be a phonemic difference if two words (such as white and right or cat and bat) differ in only a single sound. There is a group of t sounds and a group of l sounds that occur in English. It is as if you had in your mind an ideal t or l, and the ones that are actually produced are variations that differ in small ways that do not affect the meaning. These groups of sounds—the phonemes—are abstract units that form the basis for writing down a language systematically and unambiguously. We often want to record all—and only—the variations between sounds that cause a difference in meaning. Transcriptions of this kind are called phonemic transcriptions. Languages that have been written down only comparatively recently have a fairly phonemic spelling system. There is very little difference between a written version of a Swahili sentence and a phonemic transcription of that sentence. But because English pronunciation has changed over the centuries while the spelling has remained basically the same, phonemic transcriptions of English are different from written texts.B. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF CONSONANTS
A good way is to find sets of words that rhyme. Some consonants do not occur in words rhyming with pie. If we allow using the names of the letters as words, then we can find another large set of consonants beginning words rhyming with pea. There is also a contrast between the consonants in the middles of mission and vision, although there are very few pairs of words that are distinguished by this contrast in English. One difference between spelling and phonetic usage occurs with the letter c, which is sometimes used to represent a [ k ] sound, as in cup or bacon, and sometimes to represent an [ s ] sound, as in cellar or receive. Two c’s may even represent a sequence of [ k ] and [ s ] sounds in the same word, as in accent, access. A symbol that sometimes differs from the corresponding letter is [ g ], which is used for the sound in guy and guess but never for the sound in age or the sound in the name of the letter g.
C. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS
Two reason why the transcription of the contrasting vowels is more difficult than the transcription of consonants :
- Accents of English differ more in their use of vowels than in their use of consonants.
- Authorities differ in their views of what constitutes an appropriate description of vowels.
For example, look for monosyllables that begin with [ h ] and end with [ d ] and supplement this minimal set with other lists of monosyllables that contrast only in their vowel sounds. We will consider one form of British and one form of American English. The major difference between the two is that speakers of American English pronounce [ r ] sounds after vowels, as well as before them, whereas in most forms of British English, [ r ] can occur only before a vowel. American English speakers distinguish between words such as heart and hot not by making a difference in vowel quality (as in Peter Ladefoged’s form of British English), but rather by pronouncing heart with an [ r ] and hot with the same vowel but without an[ r ] following it. In here, hair, hire, these speakers may use vowels similar to those in he, head, high respectively, but in each case with a following [ r ]. Most speakers of British English distinguish these words by using different diphthongs—movements from one vowel to another within a single syllable.
D. CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS
[ p ] is an abbreviation for voiceless bilabial stop and [ l ] is equivalent to voiced alveolar lateral approximant. The places of articulation are shown across the top of the chart, starting from the most forward articulation (bilabial) and going toward those sounds made in the back of the mouth (velar) and in the throat (glottal). The manners of articulation are shown on the vertical axis of the chart. By convention, the voiced–voiceless distinction is shown by putting the voiceless symbols to the left of the voiced symbols. The symbol [ w ] is shown in two places in the consonant chart in Tabel 3. This is because it is articulated with both a narrowing of the lip aperture, which makes it bilabial, and a raising of the back of the tongue toward the soft palate, which makes it velar. The affricate symbols [tò] and [dƷ] are not listed separately in the table even though they are contrastive sounds in English. Note that if we were to include them in the table, we would have the problem of deciding whether to put them in the palato-alveolar column (the place of the fricative element) or in the alveolar column (the place of the stop element). The international phonetic alphabet avoids the inaccuracy that is inevitable when the stop element and fricative element of the affricate have different place of articulation by listing only stop and fricative symbols in the consonant chart.
E. PHONOLOGY
In the style of transcription we have been using so far, we have used symbols that show just the contrasting sounds of English, the phonemes. some of the phoneme symbols may represent different sounds when they occur in different contexts. For example, the symbol / t / may represent a wide variety of sounds. In tap / tæp /, it represents a voiceless alveolar stop. But the / t / in eighth / eItq / may be made on the teeth, because of the influence of the following voiceless dental fricative / q /. This / t / is more accurately called a voiceless dental stop, and we will later use a special symbol for transcribing it. Small marks that can be added to a symbol to modify its value are known as diacritics. They provide a useful way of increasing the phonetic precision of a transcription. Another diacritic, [˳], a small circle beneath a symbol, can be used to indicate that the symbol represents a voiceless sound. Earlier, we noted that the / l / in play is voiceless. Accordingly, we can transcribe this word as [ pȴeI ]. Similarly, ply and try can be written [ pȴaI ] and [ tŗ aI ]. The variants of the phonemes that occur in detailed phonetic transcriptions are known as allophones. They can be described as a result of applying the phonological rules to the underlying phonemes.
We have now discussed some of the rules for different allophones of the phoneme / t /. For example, we know that in most varieties of American English, / t / has a voiced allophone when it occurs between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel. We have also illustrated rules that make / r / and / l / voiceless when they occur after / p, t, k /. (These rules need more refinement before they can be considered to be generally applicable.) The term broad transcription is often used to designate a transcription that uses the simplest possible set of symbols. Conversely, a narrow transcription is one that shows more phonetic detail, either by using more specific symbols or by representing some allophonic differences. A broad transcription of please and trip would be / pliz / and / trIp /. A narrow (but still phonemic) transcription could be / pl:z / and / trIp /. This transcription would be phonemic as long as we always used /i: / wherever we would otherwise have had / i /. In this way, we would not be showing any allophones of the phonemes. A narrow allophonic transcription would be [ pȴi:z ] and [ trIp ], in which [ ȴ ] and [ r ]. are allophones of / l / and / r /. On a few occasions, a transcription cannot be said to imply the existence of rules accounting for allophones. This is at least theoretically possible in the case of a narrow transcription so detailed that it shows all the rule-governed alternations among the sounds. A transcription that shows the allophones in this way is called a completely systematic phonetic transcription. In practice, it is difficult to make a transcription so narrow that it shows every detail of the sounds involved. On some occasions, a transcription may not imply the existence of rules accounting for allophones because, in the circumstances when the transcription was made, nothing was known about the rules. When writing down an unknown language or when transcribing the speech of a child or a patient not seen previously, one does not know what rules will apply. In these circumstances, the symbols indicate only the phonetic value of the sounds. This kind of transcription is called an impressionistic transcription. We hope this brief survey of different kinds of transcription makes plain that there is no such thing as the IPA transcription of a particular utterance. Sometimes, one wants to make a detailed phonetic transcription; at other times, it is more convenient to make a phonemic transcription. Sometimes, one wants to point out a particular phonetic feature, such as vowel length; at other times, the vowels are not of concern and details of the consonants are more important. IPA transcriptions take many forms.