Introduction to Linguistic Theory

We began our unit on articulatory phonetics by discussing the basic physiological and physical aspects of speech sounds.
We started by looking at the consonant sounds of English For every consonant sound we encounter, there are three dimensions that we can use to classify the sound:

Place of Articulation

• This refers to the parts of the mouth (tongue, lips, teeth, etc.) that are used in the production of the sound. Recall that these parts are called articulators. We discussed bilabial, labiodental, and interdental sounds.
  • bilabial: produced with both lips
    • examples (in IPA): [p, b]
  • labiodental: produced with upper teeth and lower lip
    • examples (in IPA): [f, v]
  • interdental: produced by placing tip of tongu between teeth
    • examples (in IPA): [ð]

Manner of Articulation

• This refers to the way in which the airstream is obstructed by the articulators during the production of the sound. We discussed three manners of articulation today: stops, fricatives, and nasals.
  • stops: airstream is completely blocked
    • examples: [p, b]
  • fricatives: airstream is obstructed by making a narrow passage, resulting in a noisy airflow
    • examples: [f, ð]
  • nasals: the velum is lowered, allowing air to travel through the nasal passage and out the nose
    • examples: [m]

Voicing

• This is the easy one. There are only two options here (in English): voiced and voiceless.
  • voiced: vocal folds are vibrating
    • examples: [b, v, m]
  • voiceless: vocal folds are open and not vibrating
    • examples: [p, f]

For each consonant that we cover in English, you should be able to figure out the its place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing simply by producing the sound yourself and paying close attention to what your body is doing (where is your tongue, is your larynxvibrating, etc.). This is why I spent so much time getting you in touch with these parts of your anatomy. The more you understand what the parts of your mouth and vocal tract are doing when you produce a sound, the easier this all will be

When I want to accurately represent sounds, I use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I I want to stress the following point:

I can’t stress this point enough. The IPA is a system of symbols that we use to represent all of the sounds of the world’s languages in a uniform way. Many of the symbols in the IPA inventory are the same as symbols that are used in the English orthography you all know and love. But this is a curse as much as a blessing. You cannot assume that just because an English word is spelled with certain letters, those letters are going to appear in the IPA transcription of the word. What this means is that you have to ignore spelling and pay attention to the sounds that are actually coming out of your mouth.

We can organize the consonant sounds of English with the following chart:

Note that when there are two symbols in a single cell, the one on the left is voiceless, while the one on the right is voiced. All other symbols in this chart represent voiced sounds.

The chart just organizes everything we learned in class about these sounds in class; be sure you understand this chart!

You can see an x-ray video of the oral tract in action here.

Here are the slides from last week’s lectures on pragmatics.

I never posted the key for assignment 1; you can find it here.

It seems that I forgot to put the second assignment up on the website – sorry! Here it is.

Last week we started our investigations into syntax. We started things off by looking at lexical categories. I told you that linguists define these categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) by their distribution. Please read the handout and make sure you understand the how to test a word for its category. Here is another handout with further tests. You need to be able to do this in order to do any syntax.

Once we’ve identified the category of each word in a sentence, we want to know what the rules our for putting them together. This is the job of syntax. It tells us what kind of phrases we have in a language, and how those phrases are constructed.

In Thursday’s class, we looked in detail at noun phrases in English. We saw a number of patterns, and saw how we can use phrase structure rules to describe these patterns.  I have made some notes that summarize the lecture.