Introducing Linguistics Theoretical and Applied Approaches

Chapter 3 first summarizes the differences between phonetics (Chapter 2), which looks at human speech sounds in general, and phonology, which examines how a subset of possible sounds is used and distributed in specific languages. It introduces the concept of the phonological unit, the phoneme, and how phonemes can be identified by minimal pairs, that is, comparing words that differ by only one sound yet have distinct meanings. It also explains the difference between phonemes and allophones that are typically the result of sound processes, as seen in Chapter 2, but may also be in free variation. We then explain how phonemes can be reduced to a limited set of distinctive features that allow us to organize them into natural classes to which phonological rules may be applied. We see how these rules can be represented easily to capture important generalizations about phonology. The chapter also examines the structure of syllables and explains how different languages may syllabify words and phrases in different ways, while at the same time obeying universal principles. The chapter ends with a section on how to discover the sound system of a language.