Linguistic Terms

e α eı ӕ ԑ ɪ
Idi50 English Phonetics
Lic.Jorge López
/ɔ/ /u / /Ʊ/
 SYNTAX
meaning The Syntagm
Semantics

LINGUISTICS
comunication Pragmatics The morpheme
MORPHOLOGYY

PHONOLOGY
The Branches of
PHONETICS
PHONEMICS Linguistics
PRONUNCIATION Suprasegmental Phonemes
Prosodic Aspects

PHONEMES

Allophones Intonation Stress

Consonants Vowels

Voiceless Voiced Single Vowels Diphthongs Word Stress Sentence stress

Short Long
 Linguistics

 It is the general science which studies the nature of

the human language.
 Phonetics

❖It is the study which deals with the

anatomical, neurological and
physiological production, perception,
and description, represented by written
symbols, of speech sounds.
 Areas of Phonetics
❖Physiological phonetics: the anatomical, neurological,
and physiological bases of speech.
❖Articulatory phonetics: the actions and acoustics of
the speech organs in producing sounds.
❖Acoustic phonetics: the nature and acoustics of the
sound waves which transmit speech.
❖Auditory phonetics: how speech is received by the
ears.
❖Perceptual phonetics: how speech si perceived by the
brain.
 Phonology
 Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the
systematic organization of sounds in languages.
 It has traditionally focused largely on the study of the
systems of phonemes in particular languages (and
therefore used to be also called phonemics, or
phonematics).
 It is a branch of linguistics which is primarily concerned
with how speech sounds are interpreted and
systematized. It deals with the system and pattern of the
sounds which exist within particular languages and its
study includes vowels, consonants and suprasegmental
features of the language.
 Phonetics & Phonology

❖Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics.

While phonetics concerns the physical production,
acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of
speech, phonology describes the way sounds function
within a given language or across languages to encode
meaning.

❖For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive

linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics,
although establishing the phonological system of a
language is necessarily an application of theoretical
principles to analysis of phonetic evidence.
 Morphology



 Syntax
 It is the top level of language structure which studies the
ways in which words are arranged to form sentences.

 In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and

processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given
language, specifically word order. The term syntax is also
used to refer to the study of such principles and processes.

 The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic

rules common to all languages.

 The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek: σύνταξις

"coordination", which consists of σύν syn, "together," and
τάξις táxis, "an ordering".
 Semantics
 Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός
sēmantikos, "significant") is primarily the linguistic, and
also philosophical study of meaning—in language,
programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.

 It focuses on the relationship between signifiers—like

words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they
stand for, their denotation.
 Pragmatics

 A subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the

ways in which context contributes to meaning.

 Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is

conventional or "coded" in a given language,
pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning
depends not only on structural and linguistic
knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the
speaker and listener, but also on the context of the
utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those
involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other
factors.
 Phoneme

 It is a functional speech unit sound which

contrasts in the same environment with
another opposite sound, e.g., the /f/ in fine
and the /v/ in vine and this opposition is the
principle from which results the total
number of systematized speech sounds of
a language.
 The Allophone

❖Any of the variant pronunciation a phoneme.

For e.g., the [p] sound in pin, spin, tip are
allophones of the phoneme /p/.

❖The phonemes are enclosed in slashes / / and

the allophones in square brackets [ a ] [ a: ]
 Minimal Pairs

❖Two words which are pronounced the same except for a
single sound, the two sounds in contrast are separate
phonemes because they significantly distinctive and this
technique helps to identify and systematize the different
speech sounds (phonemes) of a language.
Examples:
hut hot
get got
wick week
lie die
 Suprasegmental Phonemes

 This term refers to important features of the English

language such as stress, intonation, juncture and how
sounds change in connected speech.
 Utterance

 When discussing speech, this phonetic term is used

rather than ‘sentence’ that refers to anything a
speaker says including grammatically incomplete
sentences, and to different ways of saying the same
sentence.
 Articulation of vowels
 Speech sounds produced when the airstream is voiced
through the vibration of the vocal cords in the larynx, and
then shaped using the tongue and the lips to modify the
overall shape of the mouth, the tenseness of the tongue
muscles, and the changes in movement during
articulation. They are always voiced.
 Vowel phonemes are classified according to the following
phonetic features: 1) SIMPLE or COMPLEX; 2) TENSE or
LAX; 3) HIGH, MID, or LOW; 4) FRONT, CENTRAL, or BACK;
5) ROUNDED OR UNROUNDED
The articulation of Consonants

❖Speech sounds that involve stoppage,

nasalization or friction of the airstream that
goes out of the vocal tract and their
articulation is classified by manner, place and
force.
 Voicing

❖It is the term referred when the edges of the vocal

cords come close together, the air which passes
between them makes them vibrate, resulting in
voicing.
 The Grapheme

 Any of the twenty six letters of the English

alphabet which represents the visual form of
speech sounds.
A b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v
wxyz
 Homograph and Heteronym
❖ A homograph: (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós, "same" and
γράφω, gráphō, "write") is a word that shares the same
written form as another word but has a different meaning.
▪ Bear= to support or carry
 Bear= the animal
❖A heteronym: one of the two homographs that differ in
pronunciation and meaning, and written identical (also
known as a heterophone)
 Tear= verb: to pull apart into pieces by force, rip
 Tear= noun a drop of fluid which flows from the eyes when
crying.
❖Homonym: a word that sounds the same or is spelled the
same as another word but has different meaning. They are
also homophones.
 Homophone
❖ Pair of words that are pronounced the same as the other one but
differ in spelling and meaning. They share the same phonemes.

❖ A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word

but differs in meaning, and may differ in spelling. The words may be
spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of
"rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and
too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both
homographs and homonyms.

❖ Homophones that are spelled differently are also called

heterographs. The term "homophone" may also apply to units longer
or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or groups of letters
that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of
letters. (dessert-desert; dear-dear; rose-rows)

 A word or unit with this property is said to be "homophonous".

"Homophone" derives from the Greek homo- (ὁμο-), "same", and
phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance"
 Spelled and
Homonyms
pronounced the
Lie lie homophones
same but
Tire tire
different
Mean mean
meaning

Homographs
Two words spelled
the same but
different meaning

Heteronyms
Differing in
Dove dove heterophones
pronunciation
Bass bass
and meaning
 The Schwa sound

 The most common speech sound in English which is

never stressed, and many unstressed vowels tend
towards this sound.
 It is represented by this phonetic symbol /ə/
Examples:
a in ago
e in over
i in sanity
o in comply
u in focus
 Fortis and Lenis

 Fortis is essentially in English this term refers to

the force involved in the production of an unvoiced
consonant sounds like /p/ while lenis refers to the
weak less force on the production of voiced
consonant sounds like /b/.
 Dipthongs

 A diphthong consists of a vowel plus a glide that occur in

the same syllable, the tongue moving smoothly from one
position to the other without hiatus, as in sigh, now, boy.
 According to Norman Stageberg’s phonological system,
there are three diphthongs in the American English
language: /ay/ as in by, /aw/ as in now, and /ɔy/ as in choice.
 According to Gerald Kelly the Received English British
accent has eight diphthongs.
 Classification of dipthongs
Received English Pronunciation (RP)
Centring Dipthongs
1. ıə beer, beard, fear, here
2. ʊə sure, moore, tour, obscure
3. eə where, wear, chair, dare
Closing Dipthons
4. eı cake, way, weigh, say
5. ͻı toy, avoid, voice, enjoy
6. aı high, tie, buy
7. əʊ go, snow, toast, know
8. aʊ house, loud, down
 Classification of dipthongs
Inland Northern English (INE)
Centring Dipthongs
4. aı high, tie, buy
5. ͻʊ go, snow, toast, know
6. aʊ house, loud, down
 Thripthong

 It’s a unión of three vowel sounds pronounced in one

syllable (as in wire).
 Sometimes in a few cases, three written vowel
characters representing the sound of a single vowel
(as in beau).
 Classification of Thripthongs
dipthong + glide
1. eıə layer, player, mayor
2. aıə liar, tire, wire, fire
3. ͻıə oil, boil, royal, lawyer
4. aʊə coward, flower, hour, power
5. əʊə lower, mower, slower
 Glides
1. It is a vowel-like sound that acts like a consonant, in
that it serves the same function in a syllable carrying
the same amount of prominence as a consonant
relative to a true vowel, the nucleus of the syllable.
2. In English, there are three glides--/y/,/w/, and /r/-- that
are signalized by a moving, not a stationary, tongue
position. They are all voiced.
Examples:
(w) in well
(y), in yell
(r) In rate
 The syntagm

 A linguistic unit consisting of a set of linguistic forms

(phonemes, words, or phrases) that are in a sequential
relationship to one another.
 The syntagm is always composed of two or more units.
 Often contrasted with paradigm
 For Saussure, syntagms are a ‘horizontal’ dimension of
language, and are the regular and typical patterns of
structure in the language system.
 Mid 17th century: via late Latin from Greek suntagma, from
suntassein arrange together.