Introducing English Linguistics

row transcription
. A broad transcription is focused on individual
phonemes. For instance, the words pat and  spat would be transcribed,
respectively, as /pæt/ and /spæt/. A narrow transcription, in contrast,
would capture the phonetic differences between the sounds in these
words, specifically that in pat the /p/ is aspirated, as indicated by a super-
script h following /p/: [p
h
æt]. There are two conventions for transcribing
phonemes and allophones. Transcriptions of phonemes are placed with-
in slashes: //. Transcriptions of allophones of a phoneme are included
within brackets: [ ].
To provide a more detailed description of the IPA, the next two sections
describe the symbols used in the IPA as they apply to consonants and vow-
els in the English language. For all consonant and vowel sounds described
in these sections, simple English words containing the sounds will be pro-
vided to aid in matching symbols with the sounds that they describe.