PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

PROBLEMS IN PHONEMIC ANALYSIS

Pramod l Suraya l Laily l Hafizah l Syafiqa

AFFRICATES
The affricates t and d are phonetically composed of a plosive followed by a fricative. It is possible to threat each of pair t and d as a single consonant phoneme. We call this as one phoneme analysis.

 It is also possible to say they are composed of two phonemes each , t plus and d plus . This is called two phoneme analysis. If we use two phoneme analysis, the word church and judge would be composed as : t - - : - t - d--- d- But if we use one phoneme analysis , it would be like the usual. tt dd

So, how can we decide that which analysis is preferable ?

 The two phoneme analysis has one main advantage , that if there is no separate of t and d , then the total set of English consonants is smaller. Many phonologists have claimed that one should choose which analysis is more economical and easier to practice. However, it is the one phoneme analysis that is generally chosen by phonologists. There are several arguments, but none of them is conclusive.

1) One argument could be called "phonetic" or "allophonic". Allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds. If it could be shown that the phonetic quality of the t and ( or d and ), in t and d , is clearly different from the realisations of t, , d, , this would support the analysis of t and d , as separate phonemes.

Example :
It might be claimed that in 'hutch' /ht/ was different from in 'hush' / h / . Or it might be claimed that the place of articulation of t in 'watch apes' / wt eps / was different than 'what shapes' / wt ep /. This argument was a weak one, there is no evidence that such phonetic differences exist.

2) It could be argued that the phonemes t and d have different distributions similar to other consonants. It can easily be shown that t and d are found initially, medially or finally. And there's no other combination (eg: pf, dz or t) has such wide distributions.

 However, there are several consonants are accepted despite not being free to occur in all positions (eg: r, w, j , h , and ) . So this argument although supporting the one phoneme analysis, does not actually prove that t and d must be classed with other single consonant phonemes.

3) If t and d were able to combine with other consonants to form consonant clusters, this would support the one phoneme analysis. In initial position , t and d can never occur clusters with other consonants. In final positions, we find that t can be followed by t. Eg: 'watched' / wtt /

or d by d , 'wedged' / wedd / . Final t and d can be preceded by l. Eg : 'squelch' / skwelt / But is never preceded by l , and is preceded by l only in few words which is Welsh , / wel /.

 It is also the same if we ask whether n can precede t and d or not. Some BBC speaker have nt in 'lunch' and never pronounce the n , while other speaker pronounce nt . It seems that there are no possibilties for final consonant clusters containing t and d except that pre final l or n and post final t, d.

4) Finally, it has been suggested that if native speakers of English who have not been taught phonetics feel that t and d are each one sound. The problem with this is that discovering what untrained native speaker feel about their own language is not as easy as it might sound.

 There would be question that need to ask like "Would you say the word 'chip' begins with one sound like 'tip' or with two sounds , like 'trip' ?

THE ENGLISH VOWEL SYSYTEM

The analysis of the English vowel system presented contains a large number of phonemes. There are different ways of treating all long vowels and diphthongs.

1.Treating all long vowels and diphthongs as composed of two vowel phonemes. Starting with a set of basic or simple vowel phonemes (I, e, , ) long vowels can be seen as containing short vowels twice.

 In this approach, diphthongs would be composed of a basic vowel phoneme followed by one of i, u, . Triphthongs would be made from a basic vowel plus one of i, followed by and would therefore be composed of three phonemes.

2. Treating long vowels and diphthongs as composed of a vowel plus a consonant Long vowels and diphthongs are composed of a basic vowel phoneme followed by one of (j, w, h, r) Thus, diphthongs would be made up like this. Examples:

ej w h

 Long vowels:

j uw ah

i: u: a:

Thus, inequality of distribution is corrected for consonants that do not otherwise occur finally in a syllable.

 NEUTRALISATION Neutralisation of /i:/ and // to /i/ i.e. Cases where contrasts between phonemes which exist in other places disappear in certain contexts

SYLLABIC CONSONANTS
Syllabic consonants are a problem whereby they are phonologically different from their non-syllabic counterparts. For below, how do we account for the following minimal pairs?
SYLLABIC
Coddling /kdl/

NON-SYLLABIC
Codling /kdl/

Hungary /hgri/

Hungry /hgri/

 One possibility is to add new consonants phonemes to the existing list where we could invent the phonemes l, r, n, etc. For a word like button /btn/ or bottle /btl/, it would be necessary to add n, l to the first post-final set; the argument would be extended to include r in Hungary

 Syllabicity is a phoneme that is set up to account if the consonants form part of a syllable-final consonant cluster and to allow the English speakers hear the consonants as extra syllables. Then the word Codling would consists of six phonemes: k--d-l-- while the word Coddling would consists of seven phonemes: k--d-l and simultaneously l-.

 Another possibility to overcome the problem in syllabic consonants is by saying that the new phonemes are to be classed as vowels. Let us take for example that the vowel is . We could then say for eg, Hungary is phonemically /hgri/ while hungry is /hgri/. The vowel phoneme in the phonemic representation is not pronounced as vowel, instead causes the following consonant to become syllabic.

CLUSTERS OF S PLOSIVES
Words like spill, still, skill are usually represented with the phonemes p, t, k following s. However, many writers argue they can still be transcribed as b, d, g instead. For example, phoneme b,d,g are unaspirated while p,t,k in syllable-initial position are usually aspirated

 However, in sp, st, sk we find an unaspirated plosive, and that could be an argument for transcribing them as sb, sd, sg. We usually do not do this due to the spelling, but it is good for us to remember that the contrasts between p and b, t and d and k and g are neutralized in this context. This means that no matter whether it is p,t,k or b,d,g all of these phonemes will remain unaspirated if they follow with s in a word or sentence.

SCHWA ()
There is not really a contrast between and , since only occurs in weak syllables. This has resulted in a proposal that the phoneme symbol should be used for representing any occurrence of or For eg, cup (which is usually stressed) would be transcribed as /kp/ and upper (with stress on initial syllable) as /p/. This new phoneme would thus have 2 allophones, one being and the other ; where the stress mark would indicate the allophone and in weak syllables with no stress it would be more likely that the allophone would be pronounced

 Other phonologists have suggested that is an allophone of several other vowels; for eg compare the middle two syllable in the words economy /'knmi/ and economic /ik'nmk/- it appears that when the stress moves away from the syllable containing the vowel becomes Similarly, when the stress moves away from the syllable containing , the vowel becomes eventually

 Other eg is through the word Germanic where the stress is on mn /mnk/ , and when the word is substituted with German the stress is taken away from mn and weakens to /mn/ The conclusion that can be drawn is that is not a phoneme of English, but is an allophone of several different vowel phoneme when those phonemes occur in an unstressed syllable

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
It is based on the principle that phonemes should be regarded not as independent and indivisible units, but instead as combinations of different features. For example, if we consider the English d phoneme, it is easy to show that it differs from the plosives b, g, in its place of articulation (alveolar), from t in being lenis, from s, z in not being fricative, from n in not being nasal, and so on. If we study back all these consonants and see which features they possess, we will com out with a table where if the sign is + means that a phoneme does possess that feature and if the sign is means that the phoneme does not possess the feature

d Alveolar Bilabial Velar Lenis Plosive Fricative Nasal + + + -

b + + + -

g + + + -

t + + -

s + + -

z + + + -

n + (+)* +

THE END