Linguistic Skills

A consonant is a sound in which the movement of air from the lungs is obstructed when passes through the air passage. Most consonants are called pulmonic consonants because they use air from the lungs. Plosives Or Stops: There are six plosive consonants in English language.These are the sounds formed by means of a complete closure of the air passage,which is afterwards released suddenly. Bilabial Plosives /p/,/b/ These are the sounds used,for example,at the beginning of 'pet' and 'bet' respectively.   The air passage in the mouth is closed by two lips,and the soft plate is raised to shut off the nasal passage.   When the lips are opened,the air suddenly escapes from the mouth making an explosive sound.  The vocal cords vibrate for /b/ but not for /p/. Alveolar Plosive /t/,/d/ These are the sounds used,for example,at the beginning of 'to' and 'do' respectively. The air passage is completely closed by raising the tip ...

Phonetics is the discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech. There are three major sub-fields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication. Auditory phonetics:  Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sound they hear. Acoustic phonetics: Acoustic phonetics looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear. Articulatory phonetics: Articulatory phonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. The International Phonetics Association has special alphabets for describing all of the different sounds or phones, currently thought to to be used in human speech. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has more than 100 distinct phones listed and given distinct notation. Sounds can be separated into a number of different groups, based on whether they use air from the lungs or not, whether they are voiced or...

Morphology focuses on the various morphemes that make up a word. A morpheme is the smallest unit of a word that has meaning. A morph is the phonetic realization of that morpheme, or in plain English, the way it is formed. An allomorph is the way or ways a morph can potentially sound. A morph is simply the phonetic representation of a morpheme-how morpheme is said. This distinction occurs because the morpheme can remain the same, but the pronunciation changes. The best example of this is the plural morpheme in English '-s'. '-s' is the morpheme, but the morph changes in different words.           Cats     '-s'     morpheme is pronounced   /s/           Dogs   '-s'     morpheme is pronounced   /z/           Houses '-s'   morpheme is pronounces   / ɪz/ These various pronunciations are the morphs of the morpheme '-s'. This leads onto what an allomorph is....

There are three types of distribution: Contrastive distribution Complementary distribution Free variation Contrastive Distribution: In phonology, two sounds of a language are said to be in contrastive distribution if replaciing one with the other in the same phonological environment results in a change in meaning. If a sound is in contrastive distribution, it is considered a phoneme in that language. For example, in English, the sounds [p] and [b] can both occur word-initially, as in the words pat and bat ( minimal pairs ), which are distinct morphemes. Therefore, [p] and [b] are contrastive distribution and so are phonemes of English. Complementary Distribution: Variants of a phoneme that never occur in the same phonetic environment. e.g. voiced [l] as in slip [slIp] and voiceless [l] as in clap [klæp ]. Environment is the phonetic context in which a sound occurs. Complementary distribution is the distribution of phones in their respective phonetic environment in whic...

A minimal pair is, two words, that differ only in one sound. In Phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language that differ in only one phonological element. Such as a phoneme, phone and have distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones are two separate phonemes in the language. Minimal Set: A set of distinct words in a language which differ in only one or a limited number of phonological elements. If there are two words in the set, it is a minimal pair . A minimal set is used to demonstrate that the phonological element under consideration is phonemic, that it has contrastive function in determining meaning. Vowel sounds: Minimal pairs /I/ and /i:/     s i t        s ea t Minimal pairs /e/ and /I/    d e sk     d i sk  Minimal pairs /e/ and /eI/    we t      w ai t Minimal pairs /æ/ and / ʌ/     ba t   ...

A syllable must contain a sound or vowel like sound.The most common type of syllable in language also has a consonant (C) before a vowel (V) and is typically represented as CV. Technically, the basic elements of the syllable are onset(one or more consonants) and the rhyme . The rhyme (sometimes written as a ' rime ') consists of a vowel , which is treated as the nucleus, plus any following consonants, described as the coda . Syllables like me,to or no have an onset and a nucleus but no coda. They are known as the open syllable . When a coda is present, as in the syllable up,cup,at or hat , they are called ' closed ' syllables. The basic structure of the kind of syllable found in English words like green(CCVC), eggs(VCC), do(CV) and like(CVC) is shown in the following dialgram: Consonant cluster: Both the onset and the coda can consists of more than one consonant also known as a consonant cluster. In English, for example, the groups / spl / and / ts / are conson...

Phonetics and phonology both can generally be described as the study of speech sounds. Phonetics: Specifically the study of how speech sounds are produced, what their physical properties are and how they're produced. Phonology: The description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds, based on a theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. The study of the structure and systematic patterns of sounds in human language. Three major units of phonological analysis are: Segments:  Individual speech sounds. Syllables: Units of linguistic structure that consists of a syllabic element and any segments associated with it. Features: Units of phonological structure that make up segments. The Phonological system of a language includes: an inventory of sounds and their features rules which specify how sounds interact with each other.  Phonology is just one of several aspects of language. It is related...