English Phonology

The archiphoneme is useful in signalling cases where oppositions aresuspended, but has two problems. First, a representation like /mEri/ is three ways ambiguous for a General American speaker, since it could beMary, merry or marry: this might in fact be quite appropriate, because thethree sound the same at the phonetic level, but it would be helpful tohave a way of identifying, somewhere in the phonology, just which iswhich. Secondly, in some cases that look rather like neutralisation, thearchiphoneme cannot really be invoked. For instance, the English regularplural ending on nouns is marked by an <s> spelling, which meansmore than one thing phonologically: in cats, caps, chiefs, where the finalsound of the stem is voiceless, the plural suffix is realised as voiceless [s];in dogs, heads, pans, hooves, dolls, eyes, where the final sound of the stem isvoiced, the plural suffix is also voiced [z]; and finally, in cases where thestem ends in a sibilant, namely [s z ʃ 3 tʃ d3], a vowel is inserted forreasons of ease of articulation, since sequences of two sibilants are notallowed in English, giving horses, bushes, churches with [əz] (or [iz]). Thismight, on the face of it, seem to be a purely phonetic matter, involvingassimilation of the plural ending to the last segment of the stem; butthere is more to it than that. If voicing assimilation were necessary infinal clusters, forms like hence, face, loss would not be possible words ofEnglish, since they involve final sequences of a voiced consonant orvowel, followed by voiceless [s]. What matters, in the plural cases, is whatthat final sound is doing: the cases where it is a suffix indicating pluralbehave differently from those in which it is part of the stem.

Most interactions of phonology with morphology, the part of linguisticswhich studies how words are made up of meaningful units, like stemsand suffixes, are beyond the scope of this book, although the overlapbetween the two areas, commonly known as morphophonemics, hasbeen extremely important in the development of phonological theoryover the last fifty years. Indeed, the difference between phoneticallyconditioned allophony and neutralisation, which involve only thephonetics and phonology, and cases where we also need to invokemorphological issues, is central to one of the most important currentdebates in phonology.

The introduction of features reveals phonemes, not as the ultimate,smallest unit of the phonology, but as cover-symbols for a range ofproperties. However, it also permits a higher-level perspective, exploringnatural classes, and the motivation for similar patterns of behaviourin groups of phonemes. These groupings can also be considered at thelevel of the phoneme system as a whole.

 

Just as the phoneme, although an abstract unit, seems to have somedegree of reality for native speakers and to shape their perceptions, sothe phoneme system, at an even higher level of abstraction, also reflectsspeakers’ intuitions and may shape the development of a language.