To analyse a speech sound physiologically and articulatorily some articulatory mechanism and its work should be introduced.
Speech is impossible without the following four mechanisms:
(1) the power mechanism,
(2) the vibrator mechanism,
(3) the resonator mechanism,
(4) the obstructor mechanism.
The power mechanism (Fig. 2) consists of the diaphragm (1), the lungs (2), the bronchi (3), the windpipe (or trachea) (4), the glottis (5), the larynx (6), the mouth cavity (7), and the nasal cavity (8).
The vibrator mechanism (the voice producing mechanism) consists of the vocal cords, they are jn, the larynx,, or, voice box. The vocal ■cords are two horizontal folds" off elastic tissue.'They may be opened or closed (completely or incompletely},, The pitch of the voice is controlled mostly by the ten&on of the vocal cords. Voice produced by the vocal cords ^vibration is modified by the shape and volume of the air passage.'
H. A. Gleasori mentions three sounds in the English language that are produced by the vocal cords /h, f[,?/. /h/ is the glottal voiceless fricative and /fj/ is its voiced allophone. He states that "during the pronunciation of /h, fy?/ the mouth may be in position for almost any sound."3
When both parts of the glottis are firmly closed, the sound produced at separating the glottal stop position, is called the glottal stop /?/. It sounds like a soft cough.
Thorough acoustic investigations show that besides the vocal cords there are two more sources that participate in the production
of speech sounds: (a) the turbulent noise, which results from some constriction in the flow of air and (b) the impulse wave, which is
formed when the complete obstruction to the flow of air in the mouth cavity is suddenly broken. These sources of speech sounds may work separately or simultaneously. For example: (1) the vocal cords produce vibrations in the articulation of vowel sounds, (2) the turbulent noise helps to produce voiceless constrictive consonants, such as /f, s, J7, (3) the impulse source helps to produce voiceless plosiye consonants such as /p, t, k/.
The two sourcesvocal and turbulent participate in the production of voiced constrictive consonants, such as /v, z, 5/, the vocal and impulse sources participate in the production of voiced plosive consonants, such as /b, d, g/.
III. FUNCTIONAL ASPECT OF SPEECH SOUNDS
Separate segments of speech continuum have no meaning of their own, they mean something only in combinations, which are called words.
Phonetics studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, phonology investigates sounds as units, which serve communicative purposes. Phonetics and phonology are closely connected. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound, the unit of phonology is a phoneme. Phonemes can be discovered by the method of minimal pairs. This method consists in finding pairs of words which differ in one phoneme. For example, if wereplace /b/ by /t/ in the word ban we produce a new word tan, ban tan is a pair of words distinguished in meaning by a single sound change. Two words of this kind are termed "minimal pair". It is possible to take this process further, we can also produce can, ran, man, fan it is a minimal set. The change of the vowel Izd in ban provides us with another minimal set: bun, bone, Ben, burn, boon, born. The change of the final /n/ in ban will result in a third minimal set: bad, bat, back, badge, bang. To establish the phonemes of the language the phonologist tries to find pairs that show which sounds occur or do not occur in identical positions ■ commutation test.
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The phonemes of a language form a system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position in at least one lexical or grammatical minimal or sub-minimal pair. If the substitution of one sound for another results in the change of meaning, the commuted sounds are different phonemes, speech sounds, which are phonologically significant.
The founder of the phoneme theory was I.A. Baudouin de Courte-ney, the Russian scientist of Polish origin. His theory of phoneme was developed . perfected by L.V. Shcherba the head of the Leningrad linguistic school, who stated that in actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of, and thai in every language these sounds are united in a comparatively smalt number of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words; that is they serve the purpose of social intercommunication. It is these sound types that should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as differentiatory units of the language. The actually pronounced speech sounds are variants, or allophones of phonemes. Allophones are realized in concrete words. They have phonetic similarity, that is their acoustic and articulatory feautures have much in common, at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words.
The phoneme theory
A phoneme is a basic unit of a language's phonology, which is combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units such as words or morphemes. The phoneme can be described as "The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning".[1] In this way the difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/. Two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme are called minimal pairs.
Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as anabstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme, /k/. Different speech sounds representing the same phoneme are known as allophones, and such variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may be free in which case it may vary randomly. In this way, phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or surface form.
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1. General characteristics of the phoneme
The phoneme is a dialectical unity of its three aspects:
1) material, real and objective
2) abstractional and generalized
3) functional
1) The phoneme has a material aspect, for it exists in the form of a number of articulatorily and acoustically definite speech sounds (its allophones), which constitute the material invariant of the phoneme. What is material is at the same time real. What is material is at the same time objective; for it exists independently of the will of individual persons.
2) This is reflected in the definition of the phoneme as a language unit. Each unit of language (the phoneme, morpheme ect.) is an abstraction from a generalization of actual utterances. Language is an abstraction from speech, while speech is the reality of language.
3) This 3 aspect of the phoneme is reflected in the definition of the phoneme as the smallest language unit capable of differentiating words and their grammatical forms. The distinctive function is the principal function of the phoneme as such.
For example: The vowel sounds [æ] and [e] are capable to differentiate the grammatical forms of one and the same word (man - men).
This can prove that [æ] and [e] represent different phonemes.
The actual speech sounds pronounced by the speaker are variants, or allophones of phonemes. For example, in the words [eIt] (eight - ) and [eItӨ] (eighth - ) the [t] consonants are similar, but at the same time they are slightly different: [t] in [eIt] is pronounced with the tip of the tongue pressed against the alveoli and is therefore an alveolar consonant, whereas the [t] in [eItӨ] is pronounced with the blade of the tongue pressed against the upper teeth and is therefore a dental consonant.
40! Schools in phonology( / ((()
Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on study of thesystems of phonemes in particular languages, but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset andrhyme, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages.
The word phonology (as in the phonology of English) can also refer to the phonological system (sound system) of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax and its vocabulary.
Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,[1][2] phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics, although establishing the phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence. Note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of phoneme in the mid 20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such aspsycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.
