Transcript Structure in language: sounds

Structure in language: sounds
The Language Detective
Villiers Park
9-13 July 2007
Sounds and spellings
What different sounds are represented by
the letter shape <f> in English?
[f] in for; [v] in of
What letter(s) can be used to represent the
sound /f/ in English?
<f> in for; <ff> in off; <gh> in cough;
<ph> in phone
How would you spell the following nonsense
words?
Transcription activity
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What rules did you apply?
Where there exceptions to those
rules?
How much variation is there across
the group?
What kinds of generalisations can
we make about this?
Historical note
In OE, [f] and [v] were allophones of the
same phoneme
[What’s an allophone? What’s a phoneme?]
OE feoll ‘fell’; ofer ‘over’; lufian ‘to love’;
cræft ‘skill’; wulf ‘wolf’; wulfas ‘wolves’
[f] and [v] differ only in terms of voicing
[What’s voicing?]
Other voiceless/voiced pairs: [s] and [z];
[p] and [b]; [t] and [d]
Some Welsh borrowings from English
actif 'active‘; ffigur 'figure‘; ffocws 'focus‘; lefel
'level‘; proffesiwn 'profession‘; tancer 'tanker‘; cic
'kick'
What observations can you make about the
relationship between sound and spelling of certain
consonants in Welsh, based on the data above?
What are the phoneme correspondences for these
Welsh letters?
Is there a general difference between the spelling of
borrowed words in Welsh and in English?
Which language is likely to have more regular
correspondences? Why do you think that might
be?
Welsh pronunciation
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Guess how the following Welsh
names are pronounced (NB: <ch>
= /x/) and transcribe them:
Fforest Fach
Ffestiniog
Cefn
Caernarfon
Some facts about Welsh
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Welsh is one of the Celtic languages,
spoken in Wales, and a small colony in
Patagonia (in the Chubut province of
Argentina)
Related to Breton and Cornish as a PCeltic language
Establishment of Brittonic area after the
series of invasions in the 4th - 6th
centuries
Act of Union 1536 and language planning:
no Welsh monoglot speakers were able to
hold public office
1536 Act of Union
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English as language of the courts; monolingual Welsh
speakers could no longer hold public office.
Many areas of Wales were inhabited by speakers who only
spoke Welsh; this meant that there was a significant need for
people to work as interpreters and translators, in order to
facilitate the operation of government
This is an example of language planning: the English
government wanted an administrative team in Wales who
would be emblematic of the new regime (partly political,
partly concerned with projecting or enforcing an identity,
partly practical)
Increasing numbers of Welshmen wanted to learn English,
which became an H language in the diglossic community.
Its associations with working class, non-mobile speakers
served to develop and reinforce stereotypes about the
language and its speakers.
Transparent orthography
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Compared to English, Welsh
orthography is more transparent:
the phoneme-grapheme
correspondences are more regular
This has led researchers to
investigate whether it is easier to
learn to read in Welsh than it is in
English (the answer is yes!)
Variation in English indefinite articles
What is the rule that operates to determine
whether or not a or an is selected as the
indefinite article in English?
Data set: pear, apple, orange, school,
youth, uncle, hotel, university, yard,
rope, almond, euro
 Sort the set into two (those that take a
and those that take an)
 Is the rule based on letters or sounds?
Sets and the rule
Those that take a:
Pear, school, youth, university, yard, rope,
euro
Those that take an: apple, orange, uncle,
almond.
Where does hotel fit?
Rule is: select a before a (spoken)
consonant; select an before a (spoken)
vowel
Historical note
OE had no indefinite articles as such
(sense of indefinites was expressed
by just a bare noun); articles arose
from OE an ‘one’
an cyning = one (unique) king
Some reanalyses:
OE nædre ‘snake’ > ModE ‘adder’
OE ekename ‘also-name’ > ModE
‘nickname’
How do we study sounds?
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Consonant vs. vowel: phonetic properties
Phonology as the study of an abstract
system of sounds (importance of
establishing a set of contrasts that can
give rise to words of different meanings:
bit vs pit vs lit vs writ etc.)
Phonotactics and the constraints of
combinations
Phonotactic constraints
Do you have an ‘r’ sound in the following
words; if so, where in the word does the
sound appear?
Hope, rope, poor, farm, cat, roar, nurse,
square, north, force, sport, short, arrive
 All speakers of English have an /r/ in the
onset of a syllable (rope, roar, arrive)
 Only some have an /r/ in the syllable
rhyme (poor, farm, roar, nurse, square,
north, force, sport, short)
Does a word have to contain a vowel?
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Spoken vs. written language
Is <y> a consonant or a vowel?
What sounds are represented by
<y> - consider fly, youth, rugby,
hay
Some non-English data: Czech and
Welsh
Why might the following words look
odd to monolingual English
speakers?
Czech: trg 'market', vlk 'wolf', strč prst
skrv krk ‘stick the finger through the
throat’
http://members.chello.sk/ceplo/strc.mp3
 Welsh: cwm 'valley', cwt 'tail', bwlch
'gap', winc 'wink', wns 'ounce'
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Syllabic consonants
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Some consonants form the sonority peak
of a syllable
Most sonority peaks are vowels
Not all consonants can function as peaks
Letter shapes that are used to represent
spoken consonants in one language may
be used to represent vowels in another
Some speakers of English have syllabic
consonants in words like button, bottom
and little
Why structure matters
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To make generalizations about a language
or Language, we need to refer to
structures (like syllables) so we can talk
about constraints (i.e. what is possible
and what is not possible)
This issue about structure is important at
lots of levels of the grammar (e.g. in
terms of word structure and clause
structure)
Some aspects of structure hold true
across languages, some are specific to
particular language