Introduction to Linguistics

•Applied linguistics identifies relevant communication-based problems in society, analyses them and offers solutions

•Typical areas: translation, interpreting, language testing,

•Communication problems based on mutual misunderstandings, ambiguities etc.

•Aviation: what exactly causes misunderstanding?

• Production of sounds
• Acoustic properties of sounds
• Syntactic ambiguities (e.g. flying planes can be dangerous)

Phonetics: study of the sounds of speech

•Phonology deals with the sound systems languages

•Phonetics deals with the physical realisation of the elements of the sound system, e.g. how the sound is physically produced (articulatory phonetics), or the acoustic characteristics of the speech sound (acoustic phonetics)

•Phonology: study of sound systems in particular languages

The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures.

Key concepts: the phone

•Each time a speech sound is produced it is different

•Each time you produce a /t/ it will be ever so slightly different

•The actual realisation of a sound is influenced by its environment

•(tea, too, try, bat, later)

•Hence the concept of the phone: a physical realisation of a speech sound

Key Concepts: the phoneme

•The smallest speech sound that has linguistic value

•When a series of phones are similar in terms of articulation and can be distinguished from another group in terms of meaning and collocation, the group is given a name e.g. /t/. This is a phoneme.

•The phoneme is an abstract term, specific to a particular language.

•A phoneme has a range of realisations as phones, called allophones

•The phoneme /t/ can be physically realised as (i.e. has the following allophones):

• [th] take, ten
• [t] in steal, store
• [?] butter, rat, (glottal stop)

Phonotactic Constraints

= Language specific combinations of sounds

Examples:

1  In some Romance languages, the  [st-] consonant cluster

     is not possible >> strait/straight pronounced as [estreit]

2  In English, the sounds  [kn-]  and  [gn-]

     are not permitted at the beginning

     of a new word – however, they do

     exist in both German and Dutch; e.g. know ,but acknowledge

3  psycho, psychology, psalm, pseudo

A speaker is said to have an accent in Lx if at some level their pronunciation of Lx is not identical with that of native speakers of Lx.

i.Individual sounds (e.g. Spanish [X] replaces [h] in “hundred”)

ii.Sound combinations (phonotactic constraints)

iii.Suprasegmentals (melody, intonation etc)