Applied Phonology

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Applied Phonology

• Lecture 4

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What is Phonology?

• Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language.
• A phonetician asks questions like
• How many sounds are there?
• What is the best way to describe these sounds?
• Phonology is the study of the rules of
  individual sound systems (languages).
• A phonologist asks questions like
• What sounds are in this language?
• How does the language organize its sounds?
• How are sounds added or deleted from words?

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Why do people have accents?
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Phonology

• Every language has its inventory of consonants
  and vowels.
• Contrastive sounds
• Sounds which are considered different by a
  language (/b/ /v/)
• minimal pairssets of words that prove two sounds
  are contrastive in a language (E.g., English
  boat and vote)
• Contrastive features in English
• Voiced vs. voiceless (/b/ vs. /p/)
• Some English speakers contrast the sounds /a/ and
  /?/ others do not (e.g., caught vs. cot,
  dawn vs. Don)

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Phonology

• Allophones
• Sounds which are phonetically distinct, yet sound
  the same to native speakers (E.g., top, pot)
• Allophones may be in
• Free variation
• Complementary distribution
• Allophonic features in English
• Aspiration of stops
• Vowel length
• Nasalization of vowels

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Phonology

• Allophone or Contrastive Sound?

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Some common types of phonological rules

• Assimilationa sound becomes similar to an
  adjacent sound
• dogs /d?gs/ ? /d?gz/
• Dissimilationa sound becomes dissimilar to an
  adjacent sound
• Insertiona sound is added
• dance /dæns/ ? /dænts/
• Deletiona sound is deleted
• fifths /fif?s/ ? /fi?s/