English Phonology

In Chapter 2, several examples of allophonic variation were considered.In one case, we found that /k/ has two variant pronunciations, namely velar [k] in cupboard and palatal [c] in kitchen. Another involved /p/, /t/and /k/, which have aspirated allophones, with a perceptible release ofair, in pill, till and kill, but unaspirated allophones in spill, still and skill, orsip, sit and sick.

 

However, providing a list of words where the relevant allophoneappears is only our starting point. Phonologists are interested in generalisationsabout the language they are working on, and indeed ingeneralisations about language in general; and generalisations are notbest expressed simply as lists, as these do not reveal the factors which theforms in the lists have in common. Identifying these factors will help usto understand why the particular allophone appears in that context andnot elsewhere, and to predict what will happen in other words with asimilar context.

The next question is how we should express these generalisations.Having established that certain sounds are allophones of the samephoneme, and that they are in complementary distribution, we mightwrite a statement like (2) to say what happens to the phoneme orphonemes in question, and where.

 

(2) a. /k/ and /g/ become [c] and [f] when they are followed by a frontvowel. They are pronounced as [k] and [g] in all other contexts.

b. /p/, /t/ and /k/ become [ph], [th] and [kh] at the very beginningof a word. In other contexts (i.e. after another consonant or at theend of a word), they are pronounced as [p], [t] and [k].

 

 

Some requirements of a phonological feature system are as follows:

• the system should be relatively economical

• it should enlighten us about which combinations of features can gotogether universally, and therefore which segments and segmenttypesare universally possible. That is, many universal redundancyrules of the sort in (5) should not have to be written explicitly, as theywill follow from the feature system.

• it should allow us to group together those segments and segmenttypeswhich characteristically behave similarly in the world’slanguages.

 

Certain elementary phonetic features can be adopted without furtherquestion into our revised system: for instance, [±oral], [±lateral] and[±voice] do correspond to binary oppositions, and help us to distinguishclasses of consonants in English and other languages. The main problemsinvolve place and manner of articulation.