Phonology II
Phonology II
Phonology II
• Untaught and unconscious: Speakers apply these rules without being aware of
them, and they acquire the rules early in life without any explicit teaching.
• Intuitive: The rules give speakers intuitions about what words are "well-formed"
or "acceptable"; if a speaker hears a word that does not conform to the language's
phonological rules, the word will sound foreign or ill-formed.
• Aspiration: It occurs when the articulation of voiceless stops/plosives /p/, /t/, /k/
is accompanied by an audible breath (puff of air) (see above). e.g. [tʰeIk], [kʰau]
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placed across the phonetic symbol. The sign /˳/ is sometimes placed under the
symbol to refer to these sounds).
• Nasalization: some vowels are nasalized when they occur before nasal
consonants, compare: late /leIt/ and lame [leI˜m]. Other examples: bang, been,
hand, sin, time…. This is the result of the lowering of the soft palate because of an
adjacent nasal sound.
• Deletion rules: some sounds are written but not pronounced in some words.
- Delete /g/ when it occurs before a final nasal consonant, e.g. ‘sign’, ‘assign’,
‘design’, ‘paradigm’…
- Delete final /b/ when it occurs before /m/, e.g. ‘climb’, ‘comb’, ‘tomb’,
‘lamb’…
• Elision: A process whereby sounds within or between words are not heard in
connected speech: e.g. ‘did you see him last night’ where /h/, /t/ and /t/ may not be
heard in rapid speech.
More examples: ‘kindness’ may be pronounced as /kaInnes/, ‘softness’ as /sɒfnes/,
‘postman’ as /pəʊsmәn/, ‘textbook’ as /teksbʊk/.
Sometimes a whole syllable is elided: ‘library’ may be pronounced as /laIbrI /,
‘February’ as /febrI/, ‘temporary’ as /tempәrI/.
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• Liaison: It is the process of linking one word to the next, when an intrusive sound
is heard. This is usually the case where /r/ is inserted between two vowels in a
sequence of words as in: ‘war and peace’, pronounced as /wɔː r әn pi:s/, ‘four
eggs’, /fɔːr egz/, ‘where are you’: /weə r a:jʊ/…
Assimilation can occur within one word, e.g. /z/ in ‘news’ becomes voiceless in
‘newspaper’ because of the adjacent voiceless /p/; the word ‘handbag’, may be
pronounced in rapid speech as /hæmbæg/, where the alveolar sounds /n/ and
/d/ are influenced by the bilabial /m/. II can also happen in a sequence of two
words, as in ‘ten bikes’, where the alveolar /n/ becomes a bilabial /m/: /temba Iks/.
Assimilation may be total: the sound changes to become exactly like the
neighbouring sound, e.g. ‘good girl’, /gʊg gɜːl/, or partial: a sound takes the place
of articulation of another sound, e.g. ‘ten mice’, /tem ma Is/, ‘input’, /Impʊt/.
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Examples: ‘human’, /h/ and /uː/ are fused to sound like /j/, /juːmәn/; ‘don’t you’, /t/
and /j/ have fused to produce an affricate /ʧ/, /dәʊnʧә/.
N.B. Students are requested to do more research and try to find more examples for
practice. They are also encouraged to find examples from other languages,
especially Arabic and French.