UNIVERSIDADE DE BRASÍLIA

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS – IL
DEPARTAMENTO DE LÍNGUAS ESTRANGEIRAS E TRADUÇÃO – LET
LET 0311 – Fonética e Fonologia do Inglês
Professora: Rachel Lourenço

DEFINING BASIC TERMS1

1. Phonetics
In a sentence, phonetics can be defined as the scientific study of all aspects of the spoken form
of language. There are several important terms in this definition.

Scientific: Phonetics is scientific in the sense that it is objective rather than subjective. That is,
phoneticians describe the sounds of languages in an unbiased, dispassionate way. In contrast,
many lay people speak in a prejudiced way about the sounds of their language. Very often, this
takes the form of preferring aspects of their own pronunciation over those of anyone else’s accent,
and of trying to impose their own thoughts on others. Thus, they tell people how they think a
language ought to be pronounced, rather than describing how it actually is pronounced. Such
people are prescriptive, while phonetics is a descriptive subject.

Language: Notice that language is used here, rather than a language. By language, we mean
the human ability to communicate, which underlies all human languages. Although much of
phonetics has historically been concerned with English, the study of the sounds of an ‘exotic’
language spoken by only a few speakers is no less valid.

Spoken form: Language, the human ability to communicate, may be manifested in different
ways (or mediums). By far the most common are the spoken medium and the written medium.
Others exist, such as Braille, a tactile medium. Both the spoken and written mediums have a
productive and perceptive form. This gives us the categories of writing, reading, speaking and
listening, often referred to by language teachers as the four skills.

All aspects: When we speak to someone, there are three distinguishable phases of the
communication process:
1st: The speaker uses his/her vocal organs (lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, etc.) to produce
sounds. This aspect is known as articulatory phonetics.
2nd: The sounds are vibrations of air particles (sound waves), that travel from the speaker’s mouth
to the listener’s ear. The technical study of these vibrations is known as acoustic phonetics.
3rd: The sound waves reach the listener’s ear, travel along his/her ear canal and cause the ear
drum to vibrate. This movement is transmitted to the brain and ultimately interpreted. This aspect
is known as auditory phonetics.

2. Phonology
Articulatory phonetics describes the way humans use their vocal organs to produce speech
sounds. Phonology, on the other hand, describes the way these sounds function in particular
languages. For instance, we can describe two sounds as follows:

• For the [ ph ] sound, the two lips come together blocking air from escaping through the mouth.
Air does not escape through the nose either. The vocal cords are not vibrating. When the lips are
opened again at the end of the sound, there is a burst of air (known as aspiration) before the
vocal cords start vibrating for the vowel sound that usually follows.
• The same thing happens for the [ p = ] sound, except that, when the lips are opened, the vocal
cords start vibrating immediately for the following sound (usually a vowel). While [ p = ] is not

1
Adapted from Brown, A. (2014) Pronunciation and Phonetics. New York: Routledge.
an official symbol of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), it is a useful way of explicitly
showing lack of aspiration, and is used by writers such as Wells and Colson (1971).

Notice that there is no mention of any particular language in the above descriptions. We are
simply saying that if you make those movements with your vocal organs, we can use that symbol
to represent the sound. Now let us think about the different ways these two sounds are used in
actual languages.

In some languages such as Arabic, there is no problem, in that neither of these sounds occurs in
the language. For example, the English word Pepsi borrowed into Arabic is not pronounced with
[ p ] sounds, because they do not occur in Arabic. Instead [ b ] sounds are used: [ b i: b s i:]. In
some languages such as English, the two sounds occur, but never contrast. The [ p = ] sound
only occurs after [ s ], as in spit . The [ph] sound occurs where it is not preceded by [ s ], as in
pit . For this reason, many English speakers may not realize that they have both these distinct
sounds. For much the same reason, they are both represented by a p letter in spelling. In some
languages such as Thai, the two sounds occur and contrast. For instance, in Thai, [ph a ] means
‘cloth,’ while [ p = a ] means ‘aunt.’ For this reason, Thai speakers consider these to be very
different sounds. As a result, they are represented by different letters in Thai spelling.

Phonology is thus language- specific, and describes how sounds occur, function and combine in
particular languages.

3. Pronunciation
In language teaching, pronunciation is the term usually given to the process of teaching learners
to produce the sounds of a language. Phonetics and phonology, as outlined above, are rather
academic subjects that language teachers need to have some knowledge of. Pronunciation
teaching, however, is the more practical process of using phonetic and phonological knowledge
to identify (potential) problems for learners, and produce sound activities for the classroom and
outside, for learners to acquire an acceptable, intelligible accent of the language. It also assumes
an understanding of what constitutes good practice in language teaching, factors such as the
motivation and attitude of the learners, etc.

4. Phonics
A confusable fourth term also needs to be explained briefly. Phonics is a method of teaching
reading and writing that relies on phonological awareness. That is, learners are trained in dividing
spoken words into their constituent syllables, those syllables into their constituent sounds, and
then relating these constituent sounds to the letters that represent them in writing. In this way,
learners are better equipped for dealing with new words.

5. The components of pronunciation

One problem with teaching pronunciation is that the whole concept of pronunciation can be
analyzed as being composed of many components, all of which are present at the same time in
speech. The average native speaker of a language such as English may feel that they simply open
their mouth and produce sounds without thinking too much about the nature of those sounds.
However, in general, there is a large difference between knowing a language and knowing about
a language.

Suprasegmentals are features that operate over stretches of speech larger than a segment (a
consonant or vowel sound). Voice quality is the overall long-term setting of vocal organs, including
the tongue and vocal cords. The term prosody is used in slightly different ways by different
writers. Here we take it to include long- term settings and shorter- term variation in loudness, as
well as intonation. Intonation is the use of the pitch of the voice in speech. The metrical analysis
of speech concerns word stress, the stressing of syllables in multisyllabic words and rhythm,
which has been defined in many different ways. Temporal features of speech include speed and
pausing.
Segmentals (or segments) are the individual vowel and consonant sound units. These combine
one after the other to form syllables, words and utterances. Consonant segments can be divided
into those that involve vibration of the vocal cords (voiced) and those that do not (voiceless).
Books on pronunciation often divide vowel segments into those that do not involve any change
in the position of the lips and tongue in their production (monophthongs) and those that do
involve such a change (diphthongs). However, it makes more sense to divide vowels by length,
into long vowels and short vowels (all of which are monophthongs). This is because long
monophthongs and diphthongs (which are also long) tend to behave in similar ways.
There are, moreover, other important features of pronunciation that must be considered, which
lie between segment-length consonants and vowels, and utterance-length suprasegmentals.
Syllable structure describes the way consonant and vowel segments combine to form syllables.
The basic division is between any initial consonants (onset), on the one hand, and the vowel
(peak) and any final consonants (coda), together giving the rhyme, on the other.

Segments do not occur by themselves. Connected speech processes describe the way individual
segments are affected (changed, omitted, etc.) as a result of the context of surrounding sounds.

5.1. A hierarchy of components

Having briefly introduced the components of pronunciation, we can now show how the functional
units of pronunciation can be arranged in a hierarchy. The smallest unit is the feature. These are
aspects of pronunciation such as [± voice], which describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating
or not, and [± nasal], which describes whether air escapes through the nose or not. The individual
consonant and vowel sounds (phones) can be considered to be composed of combinations of
these features. Functional consonant and vowel units are called phonemes. Syllables are
composed of one or more consonant and vowel phonemes. In the rhythm of English speech, the
foot unit is composed of one or more syllables. In the intonation of English, pitch contours are
said to extend over a stretch of speech known as the tone group, which may be considered to be
composed of one or more feet. Finally, tone groups may compose what may be likened to a
paragraph in written language, sometimes known as a tonal paragraph or paratone. The paratone
is generally considered to be the largest unit in the analysis of pronunciation phenomena.

Exercise
Decide whether the following statements relate primarily to phonetics or phonology. In answering
this, you might want to ask yourself:
• Is the statement about a particular language?
• Is the statement about how sounds combine?
• Is the statement about how sounds and words are produced?

1. Your vocal cords vibrate when you say the [ m ] sound.

2. In English, the [ v ] sound is always spelt with the letter v .
3. At the beginning of English words, the [ s ] sound can be followed by [ p , t , k ] sounds, but
not [ b , d , g ].
4. You make an [ f ] sound by putting your lower lip against your upper teeth.
5. At the ends of English words, an [ m ] sound cannot be followed by a [ k ] sound.
6. Your lips are spread when you say the vowel in seek.
7. The vowel in seek is a long vowel.
8. When you produce an [ n ] sound, air escapes through your nose.
9. English has two different vowels in seek and sick, while Italian has only one vowel of this
type.