This book offers a workbook approach to linguistics and provides guidelines for the study of language. It aims to give basic information and to indicate something of the background and development of the more important trends in the subject.
Each chapter includes exercises which lead the reader outwards from the information given in the text. A list of suggested further reading and references follows each chapter so that each aspect of the subject may be followed up in greater depth if so desired.
The book will be of particular use to first-year university students and to students in polytechnics, technical colleges, colleges of education and further education, and, the authors also hope, to many sixth-formers in secondary schools. It will also be of interest to the general reader who wishes to learn about linguistics.
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The sounds created by the organs of speech as described in the previous chapter provide the medium for all spoken forms of human language. The organs of speech are capable of producing a theoretically infinite variety of sounds and the human ear is capable of distinguishing a wide range of different speech sounds. No single language, however, uses all the resources of the medium. Such is the economy of phonological systems that all known human languages use only a small fraction of all the sounds that the human ear is capable of distinguishing. In fact, most human languages function with fewer than fifty distinctive units of sound. One aspect of the study of PHONOLOGY is concerned with how languages organise this small number of units into a system which permits an infinite variety of utterances to be made. This system is called the PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM or SOUND SYSTEM of the language, and the terms APPLIED PHONETICS or FUNCTIONAL PHONETICS are used to refer to this aspect of phonology, since it is really the application of phonetics to the process of communication in a particular language or languages.
In order to understand what is meant by distinctive units of sound and their relation to the communication process, we need to consider what is involved in the transfer of information when communication takes place. The transmission of information is only possible if the communication system allows a choice of signals to be sent. This principle applies to communication in general, not just to language. A traffic light that could only show red, or could only show green, would be of little value, since its purpose is to pass on information by the appropriate choice of signal. Consider a thermometer with the mercury fixed at one particular level: it could not give any information about the surrounding temperature. If the thermometer were changed so that the mercury could be at one of two different levels, it would immediately be able to impart some information, but certainly not so much as it could if three positions of the mercury were possible, or four, or a hundred. The amount of information conveyed is related to the number of possible signals available. This is what is meant by the statement that information depends on choice. We can read a thermometer because the mercury level changes; we understand the message of traffic lights because the colours change. The simplest kind of choice is that between two possible alternatives, e.g. yes/no or positive/negative. This type of choice is called a BINARY CHOICE. Traffic lights which consist of only a red and a green light offer a binary choice, but in England, for example, most traffic lights offer more than this. By the introduction of the amber light and by permitting red and amber to shine together much more information is conveyed. The more choices there are, the more information can be conveyed, and in information technology the content of a message is measured by the number of binary choices necessary to transmit the message. The term BIT or BINIT is used to refer to the amount of information conveyed by one binary choice.
Let us now look at the question of choice from the point of view of language. If I say: I like ice cream, it conveys a certain amount of information simply because the communication system being used, i.e. the English language, permits a choice of signals. I could, for example, have said: I do not like ice cream, you like ice cream or I like oranges and so on. At each point in the sentence a choice has been made from a number of alternatives. Instead of I I could have said you, they, we, John, the Prime Minister etc., instead of like I could have said dislike, prefer, eat, throw, make etc., and instead of ice cream I could have said bananas, custard, aeroplanes, children etc. Each word in the sentence is meaningful because it constitutes a choice from a large number of possible alternatives.
In Chapter 1, we discussed some characteristic features of human language, one of which was given the name duality, referring to the double segmentation of sound sequences on which the human communication process is based (see page 11). We can now see how this is related to the conveying of information: the kind of choices that we have been discussing so far in this chapter are concerned with the first segmentation of the sound sequence into units which we usually call words. We can now take this a step further and consider the relationship between the information conveyed and the âsecondâ segmentation of these words into speech sounds.
When we looked at the alternatives in the sentence I like ice cream we said that the word like was meaningful because it was chosen from a whole range of possible alternatives such as dislike, prefer, eat etc. When we hear these words spoken we distinguish them from each other because they are different in sound. In fact, the words dislike, prefer and eat have very little in common in sound and it is not difficult to distinguish between them. We distinguish words in English on much less evidence than this. Consider the words pit and bit: all speakers of English will recognise them as being different words yet their sounds have a great deal in common. Both words begin with a bilabial closure, both contain a high front lax unrounded vowel, and both end in a voiceless alveolar stop. How then are these two words differentiated? The difference between them, of course, lies simply in the difference between the initial sounds of each word, [p] and [b] respectively. Although these two sounds are both bilabial stops they differ in that [p] is voiceless and [b] is voiced. Since the contrast between these two sounds can account for the difference between two distinct words, it is said to be DISTINCTIVE. Another way of looking at it is that if we confuse [p] and [b] at the beginning of words, then there will be a confusion in the message being communicated, e.g. pin is different from bin and pat is different from bat etc.
What was said above may seem obvious at first, but it is easy to show that not all recognisable differences in sound will affect the meaning of a word. Consider the initial sounds of kill and call. As native speakers of English we consider the two sounds to be the same. (With English words such as these we must ignore the spelling, since differences in spelling may have no bearing on whether there is a difference in sound.) However, if we try to isolate the initial [k] at the beginning of these words, we can immediately detect a difference between them. When we say kill the [k] is produced by stopping the airstream towards the front of the velum, whereas when we say call the initial sound is produced by stopping the airstream towards the rear of the velum. In phonetic transcription we can represent the difference between these two sounds by using the symbol [k] for the initial sound in call and [
] for the initial sound in kill. To test the difference between these two sounds, start to say the word call and then change your mind and say kill. You will find that having started to say call you will have to move your tongue forward to pronounce the [
] at the beginning of kill. You can try this with other words which have this same initial sound e.g. cool, cane, canned, cork, keen, and you will find that the position at which the tongue makes the closure with the velum is determined by the fact that the tongue is already anticipating the position it requires for the following vowel. When a velar stop is made before a front vowel it is made towards the front of the velum as in kill, whereas before a back vowel it is made towards the rear of the velum as in ...
