What is Phonology?

…it is requisite that each word contain in it so many distinct characters as there are variations in the sound it stands for. Thus the single letter a is proper to mark one simple uniform sound; and the word adultery is accomodated to represent the sound annexed to it in the formation whereof there being eight different collisions or modifications of the air by the organs of speech, each of which produces a difference of sound, it was fit the word representing it should consists of as many distinct characters thereby to mark each particular difference or part of the whole sound.

Bishop Berkeley

Chapter 1: alternations

Phonology is the study of the sound systems in language; studies, being what they are, aim to provide us with methods of analysis -- in this case, analysis of spoken utterances which will allow us to represent them on paper in a way that provides us with a deeper insight into how our language works.

The reader who comes to this book with no knowledge of phonology has a double handicap: not only the handicap of knowing nothing of phonology (a problem that we hope to do something about quite soon), but the potential handicap of already knowing rather well an old and not very systematic method of analyzing the sounds of English and representing them on paper: standard, written English, which we call English orthography.

It would be pointless for me to ask of you to turn off your knowledge of English orthography as you enter into the arena of phonology, for we can no sooner turn off that knowledge than we could turn off our ability to maintain our balance as we walk down the sidewalk. All we can do is take our knowledge of written English and try to step back from it; we can try to open our ears and really listen to what it is that we say and what it is that we hear all around us.

I will assume that you are a speaker of English, and that you can produce various sounds out loud, and that you will do your best to hear them as you say them -- or in some cases, that you imagine as best you can how other speakers of English pronounce words. As you do that, you will find that you need to make different and often finer distinctions than the standard spelling system of English permits. That awareness will be a sign of increasing phonological sophistication. [FN: We can do better than that, actually. If you have access to a computer linked to the Internet and the World Wide Web, you can listen to the actual sounds of the pronunciations I discuss in this book. Find this information at this URL: xxxx]

I daresay we all have some recollections, dim as they may be, of being taught to read. The teacher taught us the connections between sounds and letters, and soon we came to see the connections between sequences of letters and whole words. Now we must go back and think about the sounds themselves, and not presume that our letters do a complete and an accurate job of representing what we way and what we hear.

Let's begin with a rather tricky case. I will suppose that you speak a standard and familiar dialect of American English. You notice one day that in your pronunciation of a word such as lettuce, the sound that you utter when you expect to produce a t is quite different from the t that you produce in tea or telephone. Do say these words out loud, and attend to how you pronounce them. Something is odd about the sound in lettuce, it sounds a bit like a d, and as you think about it some more and make a few observations, you notice that when you say the word potato out loud, the two t's sound quite different. The first is a real t -- whatever that might mean; at least, it's much the same as the t in tea. But the second t in potato is that odd little sound, the same as the one you make in lettuce. Why do you speak this way, you might just ask yourself?

Phonologists, the people who study phonologies, have given a name to the sound which we shall explore: they refer to it as a flap, and it differs from the sound that begins the word in tea, which is a stop, for it truly stops the flow of air through the mouth for a brief period. There is a symbol used to represent the sound of the flap: it is a capital D, and to emphasize that when we speak of the flap we are referring to the sound, we often put square brackets around the D: [D]. The stop "t" is symbolized by the letter "t", but in order to avoid unfortunate ambiguities, when we mean to refer to the sound, we will explicitly put the "t" between brackets: [t]. So: the letter that we write as t is sometimes pronounced as a stop [t] and sometimes as a flap [D]. Why is that?

It would likely occur to us rather quickly that we should at least consider the possibility that English has a poor spelling system, and inexplicably uses the same letter ("t") to represent two different sounds. This sort of thing can happen. We can find many cases where English orthography (that is, the spelling system) turn out to be confusing, certainly, and perhaps confused. The letter s often represents both the sound of the s in sink, but also the similar z-sound in zinc, as it does frequently when surrounded in the spelling by vowels (as in wise) or at the end of a word (as in lies). We refer to the difference between the s-sound and the z-sound as one of voicing: z is voiced, while s is not. English is consistent in its spelling at least to the point where all written z's in true English words are pronounced as zs (that is, as voiced sounds), but s's are an often unpredictable bunch: the written s can represent either the sound s or the sound z, depending on quite a few things.

If English had no letter z, and we used s (let's ignore c in this) both in words with the s-sound and the z-sound, then we would have a case where the language just ignored in its spelling system a distinction that is found in the sounds. Could the pronunciation of our t sometimes as a [t] and sometimes as a [D] be something like that?

It's tempting to think so, though eventually we will see that this is not the case. We'll see, in fact, that the question about the relationship between the sounds [t] and [D] has nothing to do with spelling at all. But it's important to pursue the question of orthography for a while, because as we get started in this business of phonological analysis, spelling and pronunciation is pretty much all that we have to hold on to.

There is another case that we might look at where one written form stands for two quite different sounds. The one I have in mind involves not a single letter, however, but the pair of letters (the term often used for that is "digraph") th. The pair of letters th rarely is used to represent the sequence of sounds represented individually by t and by h (though sometimes it does, as in the word cathouse); it usually is used to represent one of two sounds. One is the sound found in thin, thing, math, catharsis, and many other words; the other is the sound found in words such as thy, the, those, writhe, either, bother, and many others. These two sounds are quite different, and phonologists have different names for the two. The sound in thin or math is said to be voiceless, just as the sound [s] is; the symbol [ ] is often used for this sound, but for simplicity's sake I will use the digraph th in brackets [th] to refer to this sound. The sound in thy or either is voiced, and the symbol [] is generally used for that sound; but I will use the digraph [dh] to refer to this sound.

[th] and [dh] are quite different sounds, even though they are both represented in our writing system by "th". That these two sounds are quite different is supported by the observation that it is not hard to find words that we know are different that differ only by having [th] in one and [dh] in the other. Thy and thigh differ (despite what the spelling seems to suggest) solely in the voicing of the first sound: thy begins with [dh], while thigh begins with [th], and similarly, either and ether differ not in their vowels (as the orthography, again deceiving us, seems to suggest) but in their middle consonant. Either sports a [dh], but ether has a [th]. How do we know which sound to use -- [th] or [dh] -- in any given word? There are some rules of thumb that might be helpful, like verbs that end in -the all end in the sound [dh]. But when all is said and done, the spelling system that we have in English simply makes no serious effort to represent the difference between these two sounds, [th] and [dh]. And that might give us some reason to take seriously the possibility that the sounds [t] and [D] are likewise two distinct sounds not represented by our standard orthography.

But even if that were so (and it's not), it would not put an end to the question that began our account: why is there a flap in lettuce? The sounds of lettuce are no different from the sounds of the phrase let us ..., as in let us begin! If we wanted to mark the sound there, we would have to write le[D] us begin. We have another case of a [D] that's being represented orthographicallly by a t. Fine; but a sticky question arises here, for while we say the word lettuce with a flap every time (at least we Americans do -- of course the British don't, but they don't ever have a flap represented by a t), the same can't be said of the word let. If we say that word alone (phonologists say, "say the word in isolation"), we find two pronunciations used by speakers of English, but neither of them contain a flap [D]; they both end on a different sound.

The word let, when said in isolation, can end with either a glottalized [t] (that is the more common American pronunciation), or a released [t]. What are these sounds, and how do they differ? A released [t] (which is often used by speakers from New York, for example, for a [t] that comes at the end of a sentence) has a burst of air that is released after the complete closure of air flow that is created by the tongue to make the sound [t]. After that closure has been held for a brief period, the tip of the tongue comes down a bit from the top of the mouth, and a brief burst of air flows over the top of the tongue. The alternative pronunciation of the [t] is as a glottalized sound. Here too the tip of the tongue comes up to the roof of the mouth, but the flow of air up from the lungs is closed at the vocal cords -- in the throat -- and so even if the tip of the tongue comes down from the roof of the mouth, the outward flow of air has been checked down in the throat, and so there is a complete silence following the closure made by the [t].

We will need a symbol for these t-sounds. The more common glottalized t is represented thusly: [t?], while the released t is represented by the symbol [th]. For now, we will focus on the more common pronunciation of t as [t?].

We can use these terms to summarize our observations regarding the pronunciation of the word let. When the t of let comes at the end of a sentence (or more generally, a phrase), it is pronounced as a glottalized t [t?]. When let is followed by us, the t is pronounced as a flap [D].

Is the t of let pronounced as a flap regardless of what word follows let? The answer is No. Let's consider a range of words that might follow let, and observe how the t of let is pronounced in these cases.

1. glottalized [t?]

let go

let Mary go

let Paul go

let Tom go

2. Flap [D]

let a man go free

let a boy go home

let him in the house

let Amy do it

There appears to be a principle lying behind the decision to use the glottalized t and the flap (though you may object to my calling that a decision). No matter how long we extend this list, we will find that the principle at work is this: when let is followed by a word starting with a vowel, its t is pronounced as a flap, and when let is followed by a consonant (that is, anything else), the t of let is pronounced as a glottalized t. This is a correct generalization, but a few additional points must be borne in mind.

First of all, why is there a flap in let him in the house, if him starts with a consonant ("h")? It's not hard to see that the h of him is not pronounced in speech at a normal conversational style -- and this is true regardless of whether ts or flaps are at issue. In a phrase like help him do it, the h of him is not present at normal speech rates. Only if we slow down considerably, pronouncing each word as a separate mini-phrase does the h of him reappear. So when we say that the t of let becomes a flap before a vowel, we really mean in front of a vowel, regardless of whether there is a consonant in the orthography or not.

Second, it is always possible to put some emphasis on the word let (which in the cases we are looking at is the main verb of the sentence), and the result of that stress is that for the purposes at hand, let is treated as a separate phrase, with a bit of the lengthening which is the telltale sign of the word in question being treated as if it were at the end of a phrase. We will come back and talk about this at length.