Chapter 16: Syllables, stress and intonation
Resonance frequency: The bigger the room, the bigger the resonance
Speech chain: From producing speech to receiving and understanding what is said by the
receiver.
- Vocal tract
- Vocal folds: Open and close to let air through (vocal cord vibration frequency = pitch)
- Pharynx
- Oral cavity
- Nasal cavity
Glottis: Space between vocal cords
- Processing speech:
Auricles (outer ear) → external auditory canal → tympanic membrane → middle ear
(hammer, anvil, stirrup) → Stirrup conducts sound vibrations via oval window → fluid in the
cochlea (inner ear) where sounds are physically analyzed → Results conveyed via acoustic
nerve to the cortex of the brain for interpretation.
High vowels are produced in the upper part of the mouth: [i, ɩ, ɨ, u, ü, Ʊ]
Mid vowels are in the [e, ə, 0] range
Low vowels are in the range of [æ, a, ɔ]
Phonetic transcription: Tell you how you should pronounce words. (You = ju: )
Sounds system:
Vowel: Subdivided according to the place of articulation and rounding:
Place of articulation and voicing: position of tongue root along the horizontal
(front, central, back) and vertical (close, mid-close, open) dimension
Consonants: - Pulmonic
Manner of articulation and voicing: plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals,
laterals, trills, taps or flaps, and approximants.
Place of articulation and voicing: bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar,
postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal sounds.
- Non-pulmonic: Consonants produced by an airstream that does not
originate in the lungs. Subdivided into clicks, voiced implosives, and ejectives.
Voice or voiceless sounds: depends on whether the vocal folds in the larynx vibrate or not.
Monothongs: Pure vowels, provide a single sound while pronouncing the words
Diphthongs: Combinations of vowels
Diphones: Combination of two successive half phonemes
Speech synthesis: Computer-generated speech
Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion: written text convert to speech sounds
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, Distinctiveness: distinguishes one sound from another within a language
Phonemes: Sounds that distinguish meanings
→ Test to see if a speech sound is a phoneme: Take two words of the same language,
which only differ in one speech sound. Different meaning = phonemes.
Allophones: Sounds that differ but do not distinguish meanings, alternative forms of one
single morpheme.
Distinctive features: Smaller components that create phonemes, that correspond with
phonetic properties of speech sounds. They play an important role in description of the
sound adaptations that occur when morphemes are chained together.
Phonotactics: Study about how syllables can be built up from strings of phonemes
Morphophonology: Subfield of phonology
Assimilation: two adjacent sounds come to resemble each other in respect of one of their
distinctive features. (example of morphophonology)
Syllabification: Process of grouping phonemes into syllables
Syllables: small groups of phonemes which normally contain at least one vowel.
Has an internal structure and can be divided into:
Onset: everything that comes before the vowel
Rhyme: vowel and everything that follows it.
- Nucleus: vowel
- Coda: what follows after the vowel
Feet: Syllables can be subdivided into feet (unit of one/two syllables which always contains
a stress): to determine the rhythmic structure of words and sentences.
Two types of feet: the trochee (pattern: stressed-unstressed) the iamb (unstressed-stressed).
Syllabic writing system: Set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables,
which make up words. (Phonetic alphabet)
Stress (nadruk): In some languages stress placement is fixed, others variable. Variable is
often predictable. Almost all words contain one or more syllables that carry stress.
Sentence stress: At least one word in the sentence that has greater prominence than the
rest.
Intonation: Expressing multiple speech act distinctions and emotions on at least one word.
Chapter 18: Language variation
Language variety: More general term for different forms of language use
Language variation: Differences within a language (occurs in all the linguistic levels and is
not arbitrary)
Sociolinguistics: Study about language variation
Dialects: forms of language use that occur in certain areas or communities
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