Phonetics, phonology and phonemes: Summary

1. INSTITUTOSUPERIORDE FORMACIÓNDOCENTE168
PROFESORADOENINGLÉS
PRIMERAÑO
LANGUAGEANDORALEXPRESSIONI
PROFESORA:Romero,MaríaCecilia
Phonetics, phonologyandphonemes

2. PHONETICS The science or study of the sounds of speech
There are two types of transcription:
Phonetic Transcription
draws on the total resources of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to mark
detailed differences in sound and which places symbols in square brackets and with
diacritics, which add to the information about the sounds (eg., if they are dental or not).
Narrow transcriptions: specificity of information, they are used to show differences
between languages, individual speakers, among others.

3. Phonemic Transcription:
‘Broad transcriptions’: the information is less exact. These transcriptions will
be made between diagonal brackets, like so / /.
‘Phoneme’ …the smallest Unit of sound in a language which can
distinguish two words: cat/cut (for example). (Longman Dictionary of Applied
Linguistics).
They give the examples of ‘pan’ and ‘ban’ that differ solely in the contrast of
the phonemic consonants /p/ and /b/ and ‘ban’ and ‘bin’ where only the
phonemic vowels contrast. English is said to have 44 phonemes: 24 consonants
and 20 vowels.

4. Allophones Sounds that a regional speaker produces, which do
not change the meaning of a word, but a sound. To describe
allophone, we would have to use diacritics. Allophones also occur in
certain word environments. For example, English /n/ is usually
alveolar, but it is dental before the dental / / in a word like ‘tenth’. The
phonemic transcription causes no difficulties here. The fact that the
/n/ is different in this environment is such a subtle sound distinction
that no phonemic contrast exists that we can point out, unlike the
minimal pairs ‘pat’ and ‘bat’, where we need to distinguish the sounds.

5. Phonology and Phonetics:
Phonetics: describes the study of sounds.
Phonology: is concerned with those sounds in real productive contexts; that is
to say, the study of phonemes, word stress, sentence stress, rhythm and aspects
of connected speech. Phonology is the study of phonemes.
So phonetics can be very specific, using diacritics to indicate the exact sounds
the speaker of any language can make (narrow transcription). We can describe a
phonological reality using a broad phonemic transcription. Eg.:
“Pass them a bottle of wine and some fish and chips.”
and our learners will comprehend-but at a deeper level of analysis, phonetic
info (narrow transcriptions) can have the exact sounds being produced in the
contexts.

6. It should be pointed out that there is some controversy surrounding this
issue of whether phonemic symbols should be used at all in class,
especially with young students, even though textbook authors assume
that is right.

7. References:
English Phonetics for Spanish speakers.
www.thesaurus.com
www.googleimages.com