Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

perspective by Fodor (1983), a very important but difficult book.

There are a number of excellent introductory sociolinguistics texts. Trudgill (2000) is a very approachable entry point to the subject, and Holmes (2008) and Mesthrie, Swann, Deumart and Leap (1999) can be recommended. Meyerhoff (2006) is an excellent more advanced textbook. More specifically on the subject of language variation and change, Chambers (2002) and Bayley and Lucas (2007)

are well-written introductions, while Chambers, Trudgill and Schilling-Estes 21

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Further reading and references

(2002) is a state-of-the-art handbook. Trudgill (2003) and Swann, Mesthrie, Deumart and Lillis (2004) are useful sociolinguistic dictionaries. The survey of Martha’s Vineyard is now a classic in sociolinguistics and more can be read about it in Labov (1963) and chapter 1 of Labov (1972). There have now been two real-time restudies of the island – Blake and Josey (2003) and Pope, Meyerhoff and Ladd (2007).

PA RT I

Sounds

1

Introduction

With the exception of the Sign Languages used by the deaf, and written languages, the languages with which most of us are familiar rely on the medium of sound.

Sign Languages are extremely interesting, exhibiting all the complexities of spoken languages, but their serious study requires the introduction of a considerable amount of specialised terminology for which we do not have space in an

introductory book of this kind. As for written languages, they too have many fascinating features, but they are regarded as secondary to spoken languages for a number of reasons. For instance, children are explicitly taught to read and write sometime after they acquire a spoken language, and many cultures have never

employed writing systems. Thus, a focus on sounds is entirely appropriate, and this part of the book is devoted to discussion of the way in which the sound systems of languages are organised and the role of such systems in the acquisition and processing of languages. We will also consider the ways in which sound

systems differ from one dialect or variety of a given language to another and the changes that we can identify in the sound system of a given language over time.

Before we can discuss any aspect of the sound system of a language, we need a systematic way of describing and transcribing speech sounds, and in section 2 we introduce a standard transcription system, while explaining how the more important speech sounds are produced. It is important to be clear that the purpose of this section is to introduce terminology that enables us to talk about speech sounds with some precision, this being a prerequisite to our discussing any of the issues raised in our main introduction. Once our transcription system is in place, the most straightforward way to put it to use is in connection with sociolinguistic issues.

Therefore, in section 3, we focus on the ways that sound systems vary across dialects, social groups, etc. We shall see that one dialect differs from another in systematic ways, i.e. that so-called ‘substandard deviations’ are quite regular and governed by social, contextual and linguistic principles. Section 4 examines how sound systems change over time to give rise to new dialects and ultimately new languages. Once more, we shall see that such changes are neither random nor due to ‘sloppiness’ on the part of speakers; rather, they are subject to coherent principles. Moreover, we shall discover that there is a close relationship between variation in a given language at any point in time and historical change.

In section 5, we begin to introduce some of the more abstract concepts that are important in understanding the phonological component of a grammar. Among

these concepts is that of the phoneme, a unit of phonological analysis, and we will 25

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sounds

also touch upon the structure of the syllable, a particularly important unit in sound systems. Phonological processes have already received a brief introduction

(pp. 4f.), and in this section we shall consider some of these in more detail, introducing the important concept of alternation, such as we can observe in

connection with the ‘a’ vowels in Japan and Japanese. The word Japanese clearly consists of Japan followed by the ending -ese, and native speakers of English will readily agree that the two ‘a’ vowels of Japan are different; the first is like the ‘a’of about whereas the second is like the ‘a’ of pan. However, in the word Japanese each of the two ‘a’ vowels has the opposite quality and we say that they alternate –

it seems as if the addition of -ese causes a change in the vowels of Japan. This difference is a systematic property of the language and, unlike the examples mentioned in the main introduction, it does not depend on whether we are speaking carefully or not; much of this section is devoted to such phenomena, and we will show how they can be described in terms of processes.

In the last two sections of this part of the book, we examine some of the

developmental and psycholinguistic issues that arise in connection with sound systems. Section 6 discusses how phonology can throw light on the acquisition of pronunciation patterns by children learning their first language. Additionally, it illustrates the interaction between approaches alluded to in the main introduction, in that we will see that aspects of child phonology require theoretical notions which also find a role in the formulation of adult grammars. Finally, in section 7, we will consider selected aspects of speech perception, along with common

everyday errors in speech production (so-called slips of the tongue). This section concludes with a brief discussion of the role of phonology in understanding

certain aspects of poetic systems and the way that writing systems have developed. Overall, the section seeks to establish the importance of some of the

theoretical notions introduced in section 5 for the understanding of phenomena with which some readers will already be familiar.

2

Sounds and suprasegmentals

How many sounds are there in English? This seems like a reasonable enough

question, but in fact it is difficult to answer, for several reasons. A major problem is that the spelling system of English (its orthography) is irregular and doesn’t represent sounds in a completely consistent way. Sometimes one sound can be

spelled in several ways as with the first sound of Kathy (or is it Cathy?), but worse, we find that some sounds just aren’t given their own symbol at all. There is a difference between the first sounds of shock and sock, but the first of these sounds is represented by two symbols s and h, each of which corresponds to a sound that is different to the first sound of shock. Moreover, although most speakers of English will distinguish the middle sounds in put ‘to place’ and putt ‘to strike a golf ball while it is on the green’, this distinction is never made in the writing system.

We also need to be careful about what we mean by ‘English’, as pronunciation differs from one dialect to another. In the North of England, for instance, both put and putt are often pronounced like put, and dialects in the United States differ as to which (if any) of the sounds in bold face in the words merry, marry and Mary they distinguish. These are systematic differences and not just caprice on the part of speakers, an issue that will be discussed in more detail in section 3. In the present context, however, such observations indicate a clear need for some way of writing down sounds which bypasses traditional orthography.

Moving away from English, as noted already, there are a great many languages which have never had a writing system of their own and which until recently have never been written down (hitherto undiscovered languages are still encountered in some parts of the world). For such cases, it is essential that linguists can rely on a system of writing which can be applied to any human language, even one which is completely unknown to the investigator.