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The sound system
The layman who thinks that the stream of speech is merely a
sequence of isolatable sounds, which, once learned, merely
have to be strung together, is making the same mistake as the
person who conceives of language in general as merely
strings of words. The truth is that in the area of sounds, as in
all other areas of language, structure is all-important.
Although separate sounds can be isolated, the characteristics
they show in isolation will not be the same as the
characteristics they have in the context of neighbouring
sounds and the overall structure of the utterance. An
oversimplified view of English phonology so frequently leads
to a teacher’s and his pupil’s sense of failure. Having
practised all the sounds with considerable effort, the pupils
are dismayed to find that they still cannot understand some
English speakers, let alone speak like them.
The teacher must understand the way the sounds of
English are systematically used within the sound structure of
English, not in order to explain this to the students, but
rather so that he can clarify his own objectives in
pronunciation teaching. Phonology, the study of the sound
system, is as vital to him as phonetics, the study of the
physical properties of sounds and their place and manner of
articulation in the vocal tract.
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51
The speech process consists of conveying a message
through the medium of sound. The message is given shape by
the vocabulary and grammar of the language, presented in a
train of sounds. These sounds are organised in every
language so that it is possible to distinguish one message, i.e.
one bit of meaning, from another. Sounds used in a language
are therefore distinctive so that words can be distinguished
from each other when heard just as they can be distinguished
when written. The word cat is distinguished from the word
sat and from the word cot and from the word cad. In each
case the difference of sound which makes the distinction in
English is a phonemic difference, and the phonemes involved
can be listed: /k/, /s/, /ae/, /o/, /t/, /d/. In English there are 23
consonant phonemes and 21 vowel phonemes (including
diphthongs).
Most descriptions of the sound system of English show
how it uses patterns of phonemic contrasts to distinguish
words.
The following pairs of messages illustrate, in each case,
one phonemic contrast:
‘Pull!’
‘Bull!’
‘It’s a pin.’
‘It’s a bin.’
There are pears in the
There are bears in the
garden.’
garden.’
In every pair, the interpretation of the whole message
depends on the distinction between the two phonemes /p/
and /b/ which are similar in being produced by the release of
air giving a slight explosion between the two lips, but are
different in that the former does not involve the use of voice
which characterises the latter. Whole procedures of
pronunciation teaching have been based on ‘minimal pair’
contrasts like these. Useful as they are, however, they often
oversimplify matters and ignore further aspects of patterning
determined by the context in which the phonemes occur in
various utterances.
Although the phonemes /p/, /b/, spoken in isolation differ in
respect of voicing and can most readily be distinguished thus,
the feature of voicing is not always the most crucial aspect. The
features of aspiration and associated vowel length are
sometimes of greater weight. For many speakers the /b/ may be
Pronunciation
52
hardly if at all voiced, but will not have aspiration—an audible
puff of air after it—which the /p/ always has in an initial
position. Saying pear may suffice to blow out a candle. Not so
with bear, no matter how loudly or forcefully it is said. Further,
at the end of a word like cap the /p/ is often not released; the lips
simply remain closed. The same is true of /b/ in cab. The two
words are distinguished, therefore, not by a difference in the
articulation of /p/ and /b/, but by a difference in the length of
the preceding vowel, which is longer before /b/ than before /p/.
Within any one dialect of English, such facts about the
use of the phonemes form a system which is generally
referred to as the allophonic sub-system of the general
phonemic system of English. Allophonic variations such as
those described above, together with facts like the non-
aspiration of /p/ after /s/ (spin will not blow out a candle),
are true for all dialects of English. But allophonic variations
like the substitutions of the glottal stop for /p/ varies
according to the dialect, and may be found in words like
hopeful (frequent in RP) or Wapping (in Cockney), which
sound as if the /p/ has been left out.
Native speakers are not aware of the way in which they
vary the phonemes, and may emphatically deny that they do
so. They are to a large extent influenced by the spelling.
Teachers in English schools frequently try to exact a
pronunciation which is based on the written forms and is
quite unrealistic in fact. Such matters as the use of /r/
between idea and of in the idea of it, or the dropping of the /
h/ in I don’t like him, are observed as standard by
phoneticians but denied by the layman. The teacher of
English to foreign students must be careful to base his
pronunciation teaching, especially the recognition practice,
on real speech with its allophonic variations. He will be
hindered by the spelling system, and this is one strong
argument not only against reading aloud for pronunciation
practice, but also against the use of a phonic alphabet. The
latter does give a more consistent picture of the phonemes of
the language, but it ignores allophonic variations just as
much as the ordinary spelling system does.
The structure of the sound system involves not only the
vowels and consonants, the segmental features, but also
stress and intonation, the supra-segmental features.
Pronunciation
53
Stress—or emphasis, or loudness, or force—functions
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