English Phonology

So far, we have considered the IPA essentially as an alternative writingsystem, which allows us to express a larger range of sounds than theEnglish spelling system would. However, looking only at those symbolsmight suggest that we are dealing with individual, self-contained unitswhen we consider phonemes and allophones: each is like a locked blackbox labelled with an IPA symbol.

A biologist looking at some particular creature wants to know variousthings about it, to work out where it should be placed in conventional biological classification. Some properties are visible and therefore easyto work out, such as how many legs it has or whether it has fur, feathersor scales. In other cases, closer observation will be needed: tooth shapecannot usually be checked from a distance. Still other properties arebehavioural, and our biologist might need to observe her creature overa longer period of time to figure out whether it lays eggs or bears liveyoung, or what it eats.

 

The same goes for phonetic classification: some properties are straightforwardlyobservable when you look in a mirror, or can be figured outeasily from feeling what your articulators are doing. Other features areharder to spot, and need some extra training before you will becomeaware of them. Furthermore, we also need to remember that phonemesare realised as various different allophones, so we must build up a pictureof all the possible environments where that phoneme can occur and whathappens there, to sort out how it behaves.

As we saw in Chapter 3, the two major criteria for establishing phonemiccontrast are predictability of occurrence, and invariance of meaning.That is to say, if we are dealing with two allophones of the samephoneme, the two must occur in non-overlapping sets of environments.Furthermore, there cannot be any minimal pairs, where substituting oneof our focus sounds for the other in exactly the same context createsa difference in meaning. These two criteria establish conclusively thatEnglish [ɹ] and [l] belong to distinct phonemes: there are many minimalpairs, like rip and lip, rot and lot, marrow and mallow, so clearly the twophones occur in the same contexts; and substituting one for the otherdoes create a meaning difference. On the other hand, clear, alveolar[l] and dark, velar [l] occur in predictably different environments: inStandard Southern British English, the clear, more front one appearsword-initially or between vowels, as in lip, lot, mallow, and the dark, moreback one word-finally or before a consonant, as in pill, tall, halt. Sincethere are no minimal pairs, and substituting one variant for the other willnot make a meaning difference, [l] and [l] are necessarily allophones ofa single phoneme, /l/.