Summary

Speech sounds of different languages may vary in their physical properties (phonetics) and in their ability to distinguish meanings (phonology).

Phonology is concerned with the way speech sounds of a language form a pattern of contrastive units, phonemes. Phoneme is the minimal unit, a segment capable of distinguishing the meaning of words or morphemes. Phoneme is a mental representation of that segment; its phonetic representation is called an allophone. Allophones are phonetic variants of the phoneme; they never occur in the same phonetic context, and are, therefore, in complementary distribution. Phonemes are in parallel distribution: they appear in the same phonetic context and form a semantic contrast. In pho­nology the basic method of establishing the phonemic status of a sound is the method of finding minimal pairs, which consists in finding at least one pair of words which are different in respect of that sound: pit — bit. When two words are identical except for one sound which makes a contrast in the meaning of words, they are said to form a minimal pair, and the two sounds are different phonemes. The two phonemes are distinguished by at least one feature which is called distinctive (phonemic). In English the following set of distinctive features is phonemic for the system of consonants: place of articulation, or articulators (labial, labio-dental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, glottal), manner of the production (oral stop, fricative, affricate, approximant), presence or absence of voice (fortis, lenis), position of the soft palate (oral, nasal). Quality is the only phonemic feature in the system of English vowels. Vowel quality depends on the height of the tongue and the front-back position of the tongue. Lip position also affects vowel quality but as no two vowels are contrasted by lip rounding alone (it is a characteristic feature of high and mid-open back vowels) it is non-phone­mic. All English vowels are oral; nasalized vowels appear in a certain phonetic context (before a nasal consonant), and they are in complementary distribution with their non-nasal counterparts, allophones of the same phoneme. So nasalization is not phonemic in the system of vowels, it is predictable by rule, it is allophonic.

When comparing the systems of consonant phonemes in English and Russian we find

a) systemic differences in the inventories: number of phonemes (24 vs. 34); consonants which are found only in Russian /X/, consonants which are found only in English /Э, 9, w, rj, h/, the phonemic feature of palatalization in Russian;

b) realizational differences: the place of obstruction and the articulator for English (alveolar, apical) and Russian (dental, laminal) corona! consonants; fortis-lenis oppositions in English and Russian; the time occupied by English voiceless consonants;

c) differences in distribution: consonants of restricted occurrence in English (/w, h, r, n, з/), structural constraints on the use of aspiration in English, distribution of palatalization in RP, structural constraints on Russian palatalized/non-palatalized consonants, distribution of Russian and English voiced consonants.

In the vowel systems:

a) systemic features: number of phonemes (20 vs. 5 or 6), number of front-back oppositions in low vowels system (3 vs. 1), high-low oppositions (4 vs. 3), tense/lax oppositions and the presence of diphthongs in English, the power of English front vowels oppositions;

b) distribution (structural) differences: English structural constraints on the use of short vowels, positional length in English, the role of positional length in RP, GA and Standard Scottish English, restrictions on the use of the Russian /ы/-phoneme.

c) realizational features (vowel space in English and Russian).

In contrast with the phonemic theory, which is sometimes called "static", generative phonology introduced "dynamic" models aimed at explaining how phonological forms are generated from the underlying representations and how they are related to morphology. Thus generative phonology is an alternative to the phonemic theory primarily as far as derivation of phonological forms is concerned. The new developments of the generative phonology are: autosegmental phonology, metrical phonology, and prosodic phonology. They belong to non-linear phonology.

The autosegmental approach sees phonology as comprising several "tiers", each tier consisting of a linear arrangement of segments; these are linked to each other by association lines which indicate how they are to be co-articulated. Originally devised to handle tonal phenomena, the approach has been extended to deal with other features whose scope is more than one segment, especially vowel and consonant harmony.

Metrical phonology found a solution for stress in English to be treated as a binary feature, in line with other features. The metrical trees, with binary branches, were plotted so that every node of the tree would domi­nate a strong node (s) and a weak node (w). Later research in metrical structures eliminated the feature [stress] altogether by introducing the concept foot. Metrical phonology proved to be useful to describe a few segmental phenomena as predictable in terms of foot structure. For example, a rule is formulated to account for aspiration before a stressed vowel: "voiceless stops in English are aspirated at the beginning of a foot."

In some ways, prosodic phonology can be considered an extension of metrical phonology, since the prosodic hierarchy includes the syllable and the foot, two important concepts in metrical phonology. In prosodic phonology, phonological phrases are part of a hierarchy of prosodic categories, the smallest of which is the syllable and the largest of which is the phonological utterance (which may include more than one sentence). Phonological rules can apply (a) within prosodic categories, (b) at the juncture of two categories of a given type or (c) at the end of a category.

Lexical phonology is concerned with the phonological regularities found within recurrent morphological units. The lexical phonology is confined to specifying the pronunciation of individual words, but the postlexical phonology also includes aspects of the pronunciation of phrases and longer utterances.

Generative phonology seeks to establish an underlying representation for every morpheme, from which the speaker will then derive, or "generate", the appropriate phonetic surface form in any given context. The idea is that the speaker's knowledge of the lexicon of morphs and the general rules enables him/her to create new and new forms according to the same rules. The creation of new words will also correspond to the same phonological rules.

Generative phonology and its recent developments have been called for by the computer age with its need for man-machine interaction, machine translation, text-to-speech analysis, speech synthesis and other domains of applied linguistics.

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