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RHS 261 - 4

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RHS 261 - 4

Uploaded by

faisalalbekairi
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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RHS 261

Linguistics - l
WHAT IS PHONOLOGY?
• Phonology is one of the core fields that composes the discipline of
linguistics, which is defined as the scientific study of language structure.
• An important feature of the structure of a sentence is how it is pronounced-
its sound structure.
• Sign languages have their own phonological system.
WHAT IS PHONOLOGY
EXACTLY?
• Phonology, it is said, is an abstract cognitive system dealing with rules
in a mental grammar: principles of subconscious “thought” as they
relate to language sound.
THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE

• Different language may contain different sounds in their system.


• E.g., German vs. English
German final devoicing
• Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic
phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch,
Polish, and Russian, among others. In these languages, voiced
obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become
voiceless.
Phonology vs. Phonetics

• A common characterization of the difference between phonetics and phonology is


that phonetics deals with “actual” physical sounds as they are manifested in
human speech, and concentrates on acoustic waveforms, formant values,
measurements of duration measured in milliseconds, of amplitude and frequency,
or in the physical principles underlying the production of sounds.
PHONETICS VS. PHONOLOGY
• The basic tool behind this conversion of the continuous stream of speech
sound into units is the phonetic transcription.

• The philosophy behind a transcription is that one can adequately represent


all of the linguistically important details of an utterance by symbols whose
interpretation is predefined.
Transcription
• Cat [ kʰæt] vs. [ kæt ]
• Narrow transcription vs. broad transcription
• Phonology then can be defined as the study of higher-level patterns of language
sound, conceived in terms of discrete mental symbols, whereas phonetics can be
defined as the study of how those mental symbols are manifested as continuous
muscular contractions and acoustic waveforms.
GOAL

• The goal of phonology is to provide accurate symbolic representations of speech


to understand the linguistic rules which operate on sounds mentally represented as
symbols, and the transcription in our means of representing the data which we
discuss.

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