WHY STUDY SOUNDS?

Speech is the conversion of language into meaningful combination of sounds.

The fact that the same linguistic information may be marked with different forms in language can be used as evidence showing the the two levels of organization in language.

Variations which do not change meaning are called allophones. Allophone is then a variation of a sound which does not cause a change in the meaning of a word.

Phonology studies how sounds are combined to form a grammatical sound sequence. Thus, how speech is organized is the concern of phonology.

Speech sounds are described in three different ways based on the three components of the speech chain: • the speaker: Speaker-based de*ion • the listener: Listener-based de*ion • the acoustic signal: Acoustic de*ion

Phonology deals with the abstract representation of sounds in the mind of the native speaker. Phonetics, however, deals with the physical de*ion of sounds. Therefore, it is more concerned with how sounds are actually produced by the native speaker.

Linguists describe this situation by saying that /s/ is the underlying representation, but [s], [z], [əz] are the phonetic or surface realization of the English plural suffix..

The underlying representation of a form may or may not be identical to the surface realization. As seen in the English example, only one of the surface realizations of the plural suffix is identical to its underlying representation.

Below are two more: • Allophones, not phonemes, are generally predictable. This means that one allophone occurs in one environment while the other occurs in a different environment. In Turkish, the occurrence of [k] and [c] is determined by the neighboring vowel. The vowels in kil, kel, köle, kül are ‘front vowels’ thus the formation of /k/ is affected and is fronted. The vowels in kıl, kal, kol, kul are called ‘back vowels’ and with the effect of the vowels /k/ is formed further back. • Phonemes are the representations at the phonological level, i.e., underlying representations, while allophones are the actual surface realizations.

The underlying representation of language is the representation in the mind of the native speaker. It is an abstract mental picture of language. The surface realization of language represents the actual physical production of speech in the mouth of the native speaker. One is what is in the mind, the other is what is in mouth of the native speaker.

Pairs such as ‘kap’ and ‘sap’ are called minimal pairs because the difference is only in one sound. This difference in one sound can be in other positions to form a minimal pair. ‘Kel’ and ‘kal’ are minimal pairs, so are‘sap’ and ‘sat’ . In each of these pairs, a change in one sound, the other sounds being the same, changes the meaning of the word.

Minimal pairs are used as a test to determine whether or not a sound is a phonem in a language. The minimal pair kel-kal shows that /e/ and /a/ are phonemes in Turkish. The minimal pair kap-sap shows that /p/ and /t/ are phonemes in Turkish. They are phonemes as they change the meaning of the sound sequence they are used in.

There are three reasons for this: • Letters are language specific. Each language may use different letters to represent the same sound. For example, the initial sounds of the Turkish word şair and the English word sheep are similar. But the two languages represent these similar sounds by using different symbols or letters; ş in Turkish, sh in English. • All the sounds that occur in the languages of the world must be represented in an alphabet. As letters are language specific, letters of a specific language cannot represent sounds that do not occur in that language. For example, the initial sound of the English word that does not exist in Turkish. Therefore, the Turkish spelling system does not have a letter corresponding to that sound, and it is not good enough to analyze the sounds of English. • Not all languages are orthographic like Turkish, a language that is written the way it is pronounced, or pronounced the way it is written. In the Turkish writing system, the letter ‘a’ always represents the same sound. But in English, the letter ‘a’ in the words, father, alive, all, fat, make, represents a different sound in each case: a, ə, ɔ, æ, and respectively. Examples from only these two languages show that the sound a letter represents is not predictable across languages as well as within a language. Therefore a notational standard is needed whereby one symbol represents one sound not only within a language but also across languages. IPA provides such a standard.

For example, a native speaker of English knows that the plural suffix of chair would be realized as [z] because in English, the plural suffix is realized as [s] after root-final voiceless consonants, as [z] after root-final voiced consonants and vowels, and as [əz] after root-final s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, and dʒ. As the root-final sound of chair is a voiced consonant, the plural suffix is realized as [z]. Similarly, a native speaker of Turkish knows that the plural suffix of, say, ‘masa’ would be realized as ‘–lar’ as in ‘masalar’, but the same suffix would be realized as ‘-ler’ in ‘sebzeler’. The choice of the appropriate realization is determined by the last vowel in the root, therefore it is systematic (not random) and predictable.

The underlying representation of a form is notated between slashes (/ /). Thus /s/ would indicate that that is the underlying representation of the English plural suffix. The surface realization, on the other hand, is notated between square brackets ([ ]).

The tradition within linguistics is to use sound symbols instead of letters to represent speech.

The differences can be described as follows: • Speaker-based descriiption of sounds describes sounds in terms of the role of the speaker in the speech chain. It refers to the muscles involved in speech production, the airflow through the vocal tract, and the movement of organs in the vocal tract. • Acoustic descriiption is concerned with the sound waves that are transmitted in the air. Within acoustic de*ion the acoustic properties of speech sounds such as the waveforms, duration, spectrographic representations of different sounds are described. • Listener-based descriiption involves the reception of sound waves in the ear, the neurons responsible for receiving these waves, then translation of the nerve pulses into linguistic message.

Phonetics is the study of individual sounds. It is concerned with how sounds are produced, the physical properties of sounds, and how they are perceived.

Which pronunciations to occur, say in English, is determined by the final sound of the word. Thus, the plural suffix is represented as /s/ in the phonological component, but is realized as [s] or [z] or [əz] in the phonetic component.

Some properties are idiosyncratic in that they are not predictable. The fact that the initial sound of ‘sap’, for example, is an idiosyncratic property of that word as there is no way of predicting that particular word should have ‘s’ as the initial sound. The same word could have been ‘rap’, ‘tap’, ‘map’, etc. and a native speaker would have no way of knowing which sound would occur in the initial position for that particular word.

The speech process is comprised of a speaker and a listener between which an acoustic signal is transmitted. To produce speech sounds: • neural commands are sent to muscles • muscles contract • air is pushed out of the lungs • it passes through the vocal tract • it gains different qualities as a result of different shapes of the vocal tract. • the sounds are transmitted through air to produce an acoustic signal • that signal reaches the listener’s ear • the nerves in the ear are put into motion • those nerve pulses are translated into a linguistic message • the linguistic mesage ends up in the brain

This is not uncommon in human language. For example, the plural suffix in English has three different pronunciations: • [s] as in cats • [z] as in dogs • [əz] as in buses Likewise, the Turkish plural suffix has two different surface realization: • -ler as in ev-ler • –lar as in dolap-lar The linguistic information is the same in both cases: PLURAL. To convey this abstract underlying linguistic information, English and Turkish use three and two different surface forms respectively.

Speech sounds which cause a change in the meaning are called phonemes. If we take ‘sap’ as an example again, changing the initial sound to ‘k’ would result in a different word ‘kap’. ‘Kap’ and ‘sap’ are two separate words with different meanings. The difference between the two words is the difference in the initial sound. These sounds are, therefore, described as phonemes.

Yes, they are predictable because they appear as a result of systematic regularities which are rule governed in language.

There are the two levels of representation in language: • underlying representation • surface realization.

There are sound changes which do not change the meaning of words. Consider the Turkish words: kil – kıl, kel - kal, köle - kol, kül – kul. In the first word in each pair, /k/ is produced towards the back of the mouth. Produced this way, it is a palatal sound indicated as [c]. In the second word in each pair, however, /k/ is produced even further back in the mouth and is, thefore, defined as a velar sound indicated as [k]. We could then say that /k/ in Turkish has two different surface realizations or two variations, [c] and [k]. Although the surface realization of /k/ are different, using one for the other does not cause a change in the meaning in Turkish. Therefore, they are not phonemes.

Linguists claim that regular alphabets are not good enough to represent speech. Therefore, they are not reliable means to use in linguistic analyses.

IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is an alphabet developed by phoneticians. Symbols in IPA represent sounds used in human language.