Linguistics An Introduction

We began section 2 by asking how many sounds there are in English, but we found there were various practical difficulties in responding to this question and never arrived at an answer. There is a further reason why the question can't be answered straightforwardly, and understanding this is our first concern in this section. In fact, speech sounds can differ from each other in a non-discrete, continuous fashion. We can see this particularly easily in the vowel system. One of the main differences between the [iː] of read [ɹiːd] and the [ɪ] of rid [ɹɪd] is length. But just how long is a long vowel? An emphatic pronunciation of read, say in a plaintive ‘Leave me alone – I'm trying to READ’, has a much longer vowel than a non-emphatic pronunciation. The precise length of any vowel will depend on the rate of speaking, degree of emphasis and so on. A similar case is presented by the aspirated plosives. In any dialect, a [ph] sound, as in the word pit, will be aspirated to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of emphasis. We see, therefore, that there is a sense in which sounds form a continuum; from this perspective, there is an infinite number of speech sounds in any language.

Phonemes

Fortunately, there is another perspective from which sounds are discrete units or segments, and we can come to terms with this by asking what is the difference between the words pit and bit?