III. Phonetics and Phonology

According to the conceptions of the Prague School of Linguistics, phonetics and phonology are two independent branches of science. Phonetics is a biological science, and is concerned with the physical and physiological characteristics of speech sounds. Phonology is a linguistic science and is concerned with the social functions of different phonetic phenomena.

Т Е М А

«Система фонем современного английского языка» The Aspects of Speech Sounds

I. Articulatory and Physiological Aspect of Speech Sounds

Speech is impossible without speech organs. Some of them are very important in producing speech sounds, some are less important.

The vocal cords are 2 horizontal bends in the larynx. The vocal cords are very important in producing voiced and voiceless sounds. They may have different positions:

1. they are closed (no sounds are produced, because the air can’t pass through them);

2. they are opened (voiceless sounds are produced, because the air can pass out freely between them, there is no vibration of vocal cords);

3. glottal stop ( vocal cords are opened by the air force, the vibration is made. The noise which is produced by this vibration is called the voice).

The palate makes the roof of the mouth. It consists of the hard palate and the soft palate. The hard palate is the fixed part, but the soft palate can move. When it is raised it stops the breath from going up into the nasal cavity, so the breath comes through the mouth cavity. When it is lowered, it allows the breath to pass behind itself and up into the nasal cavity.

The tongue is the most important speech organ, because it has the greatest variety of movement. Most of the sounds are produced with the help of it. The tongue can have different positions while producing speech sounds:

1. it can be raised vertically to touch the soft palate;

2. It can be flat in the mouth;

3. It can be curved upwards to meet the sides of the palate.

The teeth are not very important in making speech sounds. The tongue is in contact with the upper front teeth for producing some speech sounds.

The lips. The positions of the lips are very important in producing speech sounds:

1. they can be rounded;

2. they can be spread;

3. they can be neutral.

All the speech organs can be divided into active and passive.

Active speech organs can move and make contact with other speech organs (tongue, soft palate, vocal cords, lower lip, lower jaw).

Passive speech organs are called so because they can’t move (upper teeth, hard palate, upper jaw, nasal cavity, mouth cavity).

II. Functional Aspect of Speech Sounds

Phonetics and phonology are closely connected. Phonetics studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, phonology investigates sounds as units, which serve communicative purposes. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound; the unit of phonology is a phoneme.

The phonemes of a language form s system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position. If the substitution of one sound for another results in the change of meaning they are phonologically significant.

The founder of the phoneme theory was I. A. Baudouin de Courtenet, the Russian scientist of Polish origin. His theory of phoneme was developed and perfected by L.V. Shcherba – the head of the Leningrad linguistic school, who stated that in actual speech we pronounce a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of.

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 features have much in common; at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words.

Phonemic variants or allophones are very important for language teaching because they are pronounced in actual speech and though their mispronunciation does not always influence the meaning of the words, their misuse makes a person’s speech sound as “foreign”.

To distinguish the sound types from their allophones in writing, two types of brackets are used:

slant-like /l/ for the phonemes proper and square-like [l] for their allophones, e.g. the phoneme /l/ has two positional allophones: clear [l] and dark [l]. In practical teaching the most important allophones should be mentioned to teach the pupils correct pronunciation.