CL1.101 - Introduction to Linguistics - 1 | Intro to Linguistics 12

Introduction to Phonology

with guest lecturer Prof Radhika Mamidi

We start our discussion with sounds in the English language. The set of sounds is not as complete as in the IPA chart, since the IPA chart contains sounds from all of the languages.

Similar to how we describe the consonants with three features, for eg. [b] as a voiced bilabial plosive, we can also describe vowels as well in a similar manner.

Phonological Features

Roman Jakobson described a ‘universal’ set of distinctive features for all languages, which were refined by Chomsky and Halle.
While Jakobson’s features were described acoustically, Chomsky and Halle redefined the set to describe the features according articulation. We shall only look at a few of these features, the ones pertaining to our discussion of the English language.

Phonological features serve the following functions in linguistics -

• Constrastive function - to distinguish phonemes
• Descriptive function - to describe classes of sounds
• Classificatory function - to provide phonetic details

Consonantal class features

• [+/- consonantal]: distinguish consonants - plosives, liquids & nasals from vowels & glides.

• [+ consonantal]: involve oral stricture of close approximation.

• [- consonantal]: with stricture more open than close approximation.

Some consonants may be [- consonantal], i.e they have semi-vowel features.

Syllabic class features

• All vowels form the nucleus of a syllable. They are syllabic in nature.
• Some consonants are syllabic in nature, like [l] and [t] in [bʌtn], [bɔtl]

Special cases

• [+ consonantal]: all consonants except semi-vowels
• [- consonantal]: approximants (vowels, semi-vowels, liquids)
  • Glides: j, w (semi-vowels)
  • Liquids: l, r (‘l’ is the lateral approximant)
• [+ syllabic] All vowels are syllabic
• [- syllabic] All consonants except a few like t, l, n.

Sonorant and Continuant classes

• [Sonorant]: A sonorant is a sound whose phonetic content is predominantly made up by the sound waves associated with voicing - they have a continuing, resonant sound.
• [Continuant]: A continuant is a sound during whose production the air stream is not blocked in the oral cavity.

Cavity features: Anterior and Coronal