English Phonology: A Comprehensive Guide to Sounds and Stress

Posted on Aug 29, 2024 in English

The Phoneme

The phoneme is the basic unit of phonology. It’s the smallest contrastive unit that distinguishes meaning. Contrasting pairs like seat and sheet are called minimal pairs and are established by the commutation test: if by substituting one sound segment for another, a different word is produced, then those segments are phonemes.

The Allophone

Similar sounds which are not contrastive in a language are called allophones. They are concrete realizations of phonemes; non-contrastive and contextually dependent. They are usually in complementary distribution. Neutralization is the loss of a phonological opposition in a given context, such as flapping in American English (e.g., betting: [bɛɾɪŋ]).

English Morphophonemic Alternations

  • Simple Past/Past Participle Suffix Allomorphy:
    • [t] after a voiceless consonant
    • [d] after a voiced consonant or vowel
    • [ɪd] after [d] or [t]
  • Regular Plural/’s Genitive/3rd Person Singular Suffix Allomorphy:
    • [s] after a voiceless consonant
    • [z] after a voiced consonant or vowel
    • [ɪz] after a sibilant

Allophonic Alternations in English

1. Aspiration

Aspiration is a delay in the beginning of vocal cord vibration. When a voiceless unaspirated plosive is followed by a vowel, the time when the vocal folds begin vibrating for the vowel will coincide almost exactly with the time when the plosive is released. After a voiceless aspirated stop, however, the vocal folds will not begin vibrating until well after the plosive is released. There is a period of time when the vocal tract is producing neither the plosive nor the following vowel – this is the puff of air. The time between the release of the plosive and the beginning of vocal fold vibration is called Voice Onset Time (VOT).

  • /p, t, k/ + s = no aspiration
  • Aspiration in /p, t, k/ before vowels at the beginning of a stressed syllable and always word-initially in an unstressed syllable.

2. Devoicing

  • Obstruents (d, z, v) in final position
  • Approximants (l, r, j, w) if they belong to the same syllable

3. Velarization of /l/

  • Dark /l/ occurs in syllable codas and after a vowel (e.g., small).
  • Clear /l/ occurs in onsets and before a vowel (e.g., lake).
  • If, in the articulation of dark /l/, the tongue tip contact is lost, we have a vocalized /l/ (e.g., child).

4. Tapping of Alveolar Stops: /t/

  • Between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel (e.g., city)
  • Between two unstressed syllables (e.g., simplicity)
  • Between a stressed vowel + /r, n/ and an unstressed vowel (e.g., party)

5. Glottalization

  • To avoid hiatus: The door is open.
  • Glottal reinforcement of /p, t, k/: April
  • Allophone of /t/ between vowels (e.g., letter)
  • In coda position if it goes after a vowel

6. Linking or Intrusive /r/

To avoid hiatus.

7. Vowel Elision and Haplology

  • Vowel elision: schwa omission
  • Haplology: loss of a whole syllable that is similar to the adjacent one (e.g., library)

Length

Length is the physical duration of sounds. All segments (vowels and consonants) can be made longer or shorter.

  • Some languages have phonological vowel length (e.g., English, Swedish).
  • Some languages have phonological consonant length (e.g., Italian, Finnish).
  • Some languages have both (e.g., Finnish and Estonian).

Phonological Length Differences in English

  1. Quality vs. Quantity in the English Vowel System: Difference in vowel length is also accompanied by a difference in quality: /i:/ is closer and more peripheral than /ɪ/.
  2. Short vowels are more open and centralized than long vowels. Long vowels are tense.

Phonetic Length Differences in English

  1. Pre-fortis Clipping: Shortening of vowels and diphthongs before a voiceless fortis consonant in coda position.
  2. Other Factors Determining Phonetic Length Variation in English:
    • Vowels are longer when stressed than when unstressed.
    • Stressed vowels are longer in final syllables than in other positions (e.g., go is longer than going).
    • Vowel length for the distinction of word boundaries (e.g., I scream or ice cream)
    • Vowels are longer in open syllables and shorter in closed ones.
    • Short vowels are often found in the past tenses of irregular verbs (e.g., deal, dealt).
    • Long vowels are shortened in derivation.

The Syllable

Phonotactics studies the restrictions on the ability of segments to stand next to one another. For example, lm or rl are not possible onsets in English.

Syllable Weight

Most stressed syllables in English are heavy. In heavy syllables, the rhyme includes:

  1. A long vowel or diphthong: VV
  2. Short vowel + 2 consonants, the first of which belongs to the same syllable as the vowel.

Sonority Scale and Sonority Sequencing Generalization are important concepts related to syllable structure.

Syllabification

Syllabification is the division of words into syllables. There are different approaches to syllabification:

  1. MOP (Maximum Onset Principle) + Ambisyllabicity: Assign as many consonants to the onset as permitted by the phonological constraints. An ambisyllabic consonant is a consonant followed by a short stressed vowel.
  2. John Wells’s Approach:
    1. Suffixes can’t be split (e.g., kiss.es).
    2. Affricates can’t be split (e.g., tea.cher).
    3. Where a) and b) and phonotactic constraints allow, consonants are syllabified with the most strongly stressed adjacent vowel (e.g., hap.py).
    4. If a consonant is flanked by syllables of equal stress, it syllabifies to the left.

Word Stress

Word stress is”the degree of force with which a sound or syllable is uttered” (Daniel Jones). It gives prominence to some syllables; it helps to avoid monotony and makes speech more interesting. There are two main kinds of stress:

  1. Static Stress: There is no pitch change.
  2. Kinetic Stress (Accent): There is a pitch change.

Languages can be classified into two major groups based on lexical stress:

  1. Fixed Stress Languages: Most words bear stress on the same syllable (e.g., Turkish, French).
  2. Free Stress Languages: There is no fixed place for the stress in words (e.g., Czech, Spanish, English, German).

English Lexical Stress

The main reason for the complexity of the placement of stress in English words is that English is a mixture of Romance and Germanic.

Three Main Factors Help to Predict Stress Placement in English:

  1. Syntactic Category
    1. Nouns vs. Verbs: Nouns tend to be stressed towards the beginning of the word (e.g., récord). Verbs tend to be stressed towards the end (e.g., recórd).
  2. Syllable Weight
    1. Words of Two Syllables: Stress is placed on heavy syllables (e.g., afféct).
    2. Words of Three Syllables:
      • Verbs: If the final syllable is heavy (not -ize or -ate), it is stressed, otherwise the penultimate is stressed (e.g., comprehénd, intérvene).
      • Nouns and (Suffixed) Adjectives: Latin Stress Rule: If the penultimate syllable is heavy, it is stressed (the final syllable is always extrametrical), otherwise the antepenultimate is stressed (e.g., lúdicrous, allówance). Many exceptions exist (e.g., Wéllington, Vanilla).
    3. Secondary Stress: If the primary stress is on the third syllable or later, the secondary stress is two syllables before it.
  3. Affixation
    1. Prefixes: Sometimes have secondary stress (e.g., re-, pre-, post-, ex-, anti-, half-). Prefixes also acquire secondary stress if the word they are attached to is not stressed on the first syllable (e.g., disillúsion).
    2. Suffixation
      1. Germanic Principle: Don’t have stress (e.g., -ful, -ness, -ism).
      2. Romance Principle:
        • French origin: primary stress
        • Latin origin (-ical, -ity, -iar, -graphy, -ic, -ion, -ial): shift of stress to the left (e.g., polítical)

Compound Nouns vs. Syntactic Units

When a compound has acquired a meaning in the history of the language that goes beyond that of its components used separately, we say that it is a lexicalized form. Compound nouns usually have only one strong stress because the one which was on the second element has been lost in the history of English. However, there are some cases in which this second stress has not been deleted – double-stressed compounds. The interruptability test can be used to distinguish between compound nouns and syntactic units: compound nouns do not admit insertion of other words between their components.

Rhythm

Rhythm is the perceived regularity of prominent units in speech (Crystal, 1980). There are two main types of rhythm:

  1. Syllable-Timed Rhythm: (Romance languages) Each syllable has the same duration, whether it is stressed or not. They are isochronous. The time between stresses is not isochronous; it depends on the number of syllables.
  2. Stress-Timed Rhythm: (Germanic languages, Arabic, Russian) The time taken from one strong stress to the next is about the same. Some syllables will be much shorter than others.

Both kinds of rhythm are characterized by the recurrence of a given element at regular intervals – isochrony.

English Sentence Stress

When words are put together to form phrases and sentences, they are subject to rhythmical variations. English favors a binary, alternating rhythm – we tend to pronounce every other strong stress to achieve eurhythmicity (e.g., Óne two thrée four). The most important words are lexical words (e.g., Lóok at the pícture).

  • Verb + adverb = both stressed
  • Verb + preposition = only verb stressed

Exceptions:

  • Emphasis
  • Word used before
  • Exclamatory what
  • Street names
  • Verb”to b” stressed only in final position

Focus

Focus refers to the parts of utterances which are highlighted because they express important information, and therefore they receive the stress. A sentence in which no particular element is more important than the others because all the information is new is called a broad focus sentence.

Shifting the sentence stress back onto either of the other two words puts the focus on one of them specifically – narrow focus sentence.

The Nuclear Stress Rule

The most important word in a word group receives the nuclear stress or accent – the most prominent pitch movement in a word group. In broad-focus sentences, the accent falls on the stressed syllable of the last important word (e.g., You’ll néver sée her agáin).

Exceptions to the Nuclear Stress Rule:

  1. Event Sentences: Describe a “coming on the scene” or “sudden happening” (e.g., The kítchen’s on fire!)
  2. Structures Containing Nouns Followed by Common Verbs: (e.g., I have a póint to make.)
  3. Unaccented Final Adverbials: (e.g., I’m going to Majórca in May.)
  4. In Wh- Sentences in Which the Wh- Word is Adjectival: The accent is on the noun instead of the verb (e.g., Whát quéstions did you ask? Cf. Whát did you ásk? (what is not adjectival)).