5. Some (not so happy) assumptions
generally made to do transcriptions
• There is a (1-dimensional) sequence of units that
define or characterize the utterance – rather than 2
or more parallel streams. We think of the
articulators as being a single instrument rather
than as an orchestra.
• We can slice the utterances into pieces vertically,
in time, and ignore most differences in duration.
• Sounds follow one another, and that’s it: there is no
packing of them into groups.
6. Sounds of English
Consonants: first, the stops:
• b as in bat, sob, cubby
• d as in date, hid, ado
• g as in gas, lag, ragged
• p as in pet, tap, repeat
• t as in tap, pet, attack
• k as in king, pick, picking
When we need to emphasize
that we are using a phonetic
transcription, we put square
brackets [b] around the symbols.
7. More consonants: fricatives
• f as in fail, life
• v as in veil, live
• Ɵ as in thin, wrath
• ð as in this, bathe
• s as in soft, miss
• z as in zoo, as
• š (American) or ʃ (IPA) as in shame, mash
• ž (American) or ǯ (IPA)as in triage, garage, azure,
• h as in help, vehicular
13. Short vowels
Front:
I as in bit
Ɛ as in bet
æ as in bat
Back
as in put
ʌ as in putt
as in bought
a or ɑ as in Mott, ma, spot
ǝ “schwa” as in about
14. Long vowels
• iy or i as in beet
• ey or ej as in bait
• ay as in bite
• oy as in boy
• uw or u as in boot
• ow as in boat
• aw as how
15. Review where we’ve been
• We’ve listened to the sounds of “our” English,
and assigned a set of symbols to them.
• We abstracted away from pitch, loudness, and
duration.
• We hope to better understanding our
language’s sounds by analyzing them as being
composed of a sequence of identifiable
sounds, each of which occurs frequently in
words of the language.
16. • Frequently? If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3
words, we don’t take it seriously (glottal stop,
velar fricative)
• We do this against the background knowledge
that the inventory of sounds in English is not
necessary as human languages go: they are
what they are against a much wider backdrop
of possible linguistic sounds.
17. • We also attempt to physically characterize
these sounds: acoustically and articulatorily.
Consonants are easier to characterize
articulatorily, vowels acoustically.
• We are particularly interested in those ways
in which the English of Speaker 1 is different
from the English of Speaker 2: again, working
against the background knowledge of
variation.
18. • We also characterize differences of sounds
across sound contexts: we say, notice the
different sound that occurs in front of a
voiceless consonant in height.
• Looking ahead to phonology, we will attempt
to get a handle on variation in sounds in two
ways:
– Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can
characterize one of them as a variant of the other
used in a particular context (“under the influence
of that context,” so to speak)
– Two sounds are distinct (hence, different) if two
distinct words differ only with regard to these
two sounds, in otherwise identical positions
19. • We try to characterize the inventory of
sounds in a language, knowing that that
language chose one set of sounds when a vast
range of other possibilities might have been
chosen.
20. Symbols
• We assign symbols to these sounds; in
addition, we want to characterize them as
best we can articulatorily and acoustically.
Sounds can be divided into two major
groups, consonants and vowels; or set
along a continuum known as the sonority
hierarchy:
23. Consonants have a point of
articulation
The crucial points of articulation for English
consonants are:
• Labial
• Labio-dental
• Dental
• Alveolar: at the alveolar ridge, behind the teeth
• Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal:
multiple names for the same thing
• Retroflex (r only)
• Palatal (y, ñ)
• Velar
• Laryngeal
26. Vowels
• Vowels are harder to characterize
articulatorily, but we try!
• The fact that it’s harder is reflected in the
fact that there is more than one way in
which it’s done. IPA is one way; American
is another.
