The Phonemes of English

1. The Phonemes of English September 12, 2007

2. Oh yeah. • Powerpoint presentations

3. The Problem of Abstractness • IPA symbols cannot capture all of the variability in speech. • between-talker • within-talker • The IPA solution: only capture contrastive variability • Contrast: bit vs. pit • Non-contrast: vs. • However, it has to capture all relevant contrasts in all languages…

4. Broad and Narrow •  Broad transcriptions • Represent only contrastive sounds (phonemes) • Enclosed in slashes: / / • Generally use only alphabetic symbols • Narrow transcriptions • Capture as much phonetic detail as possible • Enclosed in brackets: [ ] • Generally require use of diacritics • · Sliding scale between narrow and broad transcriptions

5. Phonemic Analysis • • A phoneme is a contrastive sound in a language • It may be used to distinguish between words in minimal pairs. • • Allophones are phonetic variants of a phoneme • Different allophones often occur in specific contexts. • Phoneme: /t/ “flap” “glottal stop”

6. Morals of the Story • There can be more than one “right” way to transcribe an utterance. • The IPA enables us to record all the possibly meaningful phonetic detail in an utterance. • It is also useful because: • it is portable • it does not require electricity • it is universal • it is traditional • it is (relatively) simple

7. English Phonemes Familiar IPA symbols, same sound: [p] ‘pot’ 6. [g] ‘got’ 11. [m] ‘ma’ [b] ‘bought’ 7. [f] ‘fought’ 12. [n] ‘not’ [t] ‘tot’ 8. [v] ‘vote’ 13. [l] ‘lot’ [d] ‘dot’ 9. [s] ‘sot’ 14. [w] ‘walk’ [k] ‘kit’ 10. [z] ‘zit’ 15. [h] ‘hot’

8. English Phonemes Familiar IPA symbols, different sounds: 16. [j] ‘yacht’ “yod” 17. [a] ‘park’ (Bostonian) “script a” 18. [i] ‘heed’ 19. [e] ‘hayed’ ( = a “diphthong”) 20. ‘hod’ 21. [o] ‘bode’ ( = a “diphthong”) 22. [u] ‘whoed’

9. English Phonemes Unfamiliar IPA symbols, for consonants: 23. ‘thought’ “theta” 28. ‘rot’ 24. ‘though’ “edh” 29. ‘chop’ 25. ‘shot’ “esh” 30. ‘jot’ 26. ‘vision’ “ezh” 27. ‘ring’ “engma”

10. English Phonemes Unfamiliar IPA symbols, for vowels: 31. ‘bid’ “cap-I” 32. ‘bed’ “epsilon” 33. ‘bad’ “ash” 34. ‘bud’ “wedge” 35. ‘bawd’ “open O” 36. ‘foot’ “upsilon”

11. More Diphthongs 37. ‘bide’ 38. ‘bowed’ 39. ‘Boyd’ • And one more: • 40. ‘about’ “schwa” • only appears in unstressed syllables. • Also--the following alphabetic symbols do not represent any English sound: • c q r x y • However, they are used for sounds in other languages.

12. Stress • A stressed syllable may be denoted by a vertical dash immediately preceding the stressed syllable. • Examples of “contrast”: • (N) • (V) • “Insult” • (N)

13. A Useful Diacritic • Some English syllables consist solely of consonants. • This can only happen with /n/, /m/, /l/ and /r/. • When this happens, the consonant is said to be syllabic and is denoted with a small vertical dash underneath. • Examples: ‘chasm’ ‘ribbon’ ‘eagle’ ‘feature’

14. A Word of Caution • The vowel system in English can vary greatly from one dialect to another. • In the Great Lakes area--including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and most places in between--some of the vowel pronunciations have shifted: • GeneralGreat Lakes

15. What’s Going On? • Vowel articulations can be characterized along four dimensions: • Height (of tongue body) • high, mid, low • Front-back (of tongue body) • front, central, back • Roundedness (of lips) • rounded vs. unrounded • “Tenseness” • tense/lax

16. Corner Vowels

17. X-Ray Videos

18. The (American) Vowel Space

19. Exercises for Friday • Please take a stab at the following exercises from Chapter 2 of the textbook before Friday: • A 1-10 • B 11-20 • D 31, 33, 35, 37, 39 (American speaker) • We will go over the answers together in class. • Also: figure out how to write your own name in (broad) phonetic transcription! • We will learn how to pronounce everyone’s name at the beginning of class on Friday.