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17
CHAPTER 3
English Phonology
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Students often find the material in this chapter the most challenging of the
entire course, given its unfamiliarity and high level of technicality. The
key to teaching this material successfully is motivating students to learn
it—showing students how knowledge of English phonology helps them
understand better the structure of language and linguistic phenomena that
they see and hear around them every day. We have included these hooks
throughout the chapter (e.g., the question of whether larynx is undergoing
metathesis; maps of the cot-caught merger) and provide in-class activities
below that exploit this material.
The chapter focuses on English phonology and provides only a minimal
discussion of phonetics, given the goals of most introductory English
linguistics courses. Experienced instructors may want to supplement the
section on phonetics with additional material on soundwaves, formants,
spectrograms, and non-English sounds.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Distinguish between phonetics and phonology.
• Justify, with specific examples, the assertion that the English sound
system is rule-governed.
• Explain the relationship of a phoneme to its allophones, using specific
examples and the concept of minimal pairs.
• Describe the difference between consonants and vowels phonetically.
18
• Identify the distinctive features of consonants and vowels and how
these relate to standard consonant and vowel charts.
• Define a natural class and provide specific examples of both
consonants and vowels.
• Explain the motivation for the IPA and the relationship of the IPA to
English spelling.
• Transcribe English words using the IPA and read IPA transcriptions of
English words.
• Provide examples of specific phonological rules, including
assimilation, insertion, deletion, and metathesis.
• Identify the basic structure of an English syllable and the effects of
phonotactic constraints.
• Describe what spectrograms measure in their images of waveforms.
• Provide examples of factors that can influence sound perception.
• Provide historical examples of how English spelling diverged from
English pronunciation.
• Defend an argument, using material from the chapter, about whether
English spelling should be reformed to conform to pronunciation.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
affricate
allophone,
alveolar ridge
approximant
assimilation
complementary distribution
consonant
deletion
diphthong
distinctive feature
epiglottis
flap
fricative
glide
glottal stop
hard palate
insertion
International Phonetic Alphabet
intonation
larynx
liquid
metathesis
minimal pair
nasals/oral sounds
natural class
obstruent
19
offglide
onglide
phoneme
phonetics (articulatory, acoustic,
auditory)
phonology
phonotactic constraint
pitch
soft palate (velum)
sonorant
spectrogram
stop
syllable onset/nucleus/coda
tone
trachea
vocal cords
voicing
vowel
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Some students must overcome a phenomenon similar to “math
anxiety” when they approach this more technical material. Some
students take delight in the systematic nature of phonology and the
activity of transcription.
• Most students need the instructor to review the entire consonant and
vowel chart as a class; it takes time for them to make the connection
between particular features of articulation and the labels on the charts.
• Students often struggle with the concept of phonemes and allophones
and the relationship of phonemes and allophones to minimal pairs and
complementary distribution.
• When they begin transcribing, students are often thrown by English
spelling and concerned if their transcription of vowels is different from
that of their peers.
• Students often need extra help understanding the usefulness of natural
classes in the description of phonological rules.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Introduction to the IPA
It works well to contrast the IPA with English spelling at the very
beginning, to stress for students that it is a system that represents sounds
20
apart from spelling. At the end of this section, we have provided the full
text of the poem “English is Tough Stuff,” which students often enjoy
reading aloud.
Review of English Sounds (with Lollipops!)
We recommend making this a participatory activity. First, ask students to
explore their mouths with their tongues, as you identify areas like the
alveolar ridge and the velum. Next, describe the articulation of each
consonant (e.g., a bilabial stop) and ask students to produce the sound
before you fill in that section of the chart on the board or on an overhead
projector. Students experience the material very differently when they are
asked to produce the physical sounds in conjunction with reviewing the
charts. To liven up vowels, try using lollipops. It can be difficult for
students to feel the differences between high and low, front and back
vowels. Ask students to put a flat lollipop on their tongue and then
produce a high vowel (e.g., /i/) followed by a low vowel (e.g., /æ/). As
they do so, they can see the lollipop stick drop. If they make a front vowel
followed by a back vowel, they can watch the stick retract; and they can
feel their lips close around the stick as they produce the back vowel,
usefully demonstrating the rounding that occurs with back vowels in
English. (Don’t forget when you’re finished with the exercise to tell
students that they can now consume their lollipops!)
Phonemes and Allophones
Many students find it difficult to figure out what linguists mean when they
say that phonemes are “in the mind” and their phonetic realizations are “in
the mouth.” We don’t say phonemes; we say phonetic versions of them.
One helpful activity is to ask students to consider the following strings of
symbols. Given their knowledge of English phonology, phonetics, and
phonotactics, can they make sense of them? Can they translate this code
into one more familiar to them?
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(1) VBSHFTVANHFTVBSMFTVBSHFT
(2) UBSHFLaxVANVANCVBNVBSVBunL
(3) LBTUAFUASHFLVANUBSLBLaxVBGVBunLVAF.
The trick here is to recognize the code as a string of distinctive
feature ”clusters” that identify phonemes; the repeated clusters and the
repetition of certain symbols like V are clues in that direction. Of course,
these phonemes appear only in phonotactic sequences possible in English.
The distinctive feature clusters are a type of code in the mind; phonemes
are a reduced version, a shorthand, for that more complicated code.
So, (1) VBSHFTVANHFTVBSMFTVBSHFT can be reinterpreted first as
VBS HFT VAN HFT VBS MFT VBS HFT
or, further, as
Voiced High Voiced High Voiced Mid Voiced High
Bilablial Front Alveolar Front Bilabial Front Bilabial Front
Stop Tense Nasal Tense Stop Tense Stop Tense
/b/ /i/ /n/ /i/ /b/ /e/ /b/ /i/
and thus
BEANIE BABY.
(2) UBSHFLaxVANVANCVBNVBSVBunL
or
UBS HFLax VAN VAN C VBN VBS VBunL
Unvoiced High Voiced Voiced Central Voiced Voiced Voiced
Bilabial Front Alveolar Alveolar Vowel Bilabial Bilabial Bunched
Stop Lax Nasal Nasal Nasal Stop Liquid
or PIN NUMBER, in which VBunL or /r/ functions as a syllabic
consonant
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(3) LBTUAFUASHFLVANUBSLBLaxVBGVBunLVAF
AUSTIN POWERS, in which VBunL or /r/ functions as a syllabic
consonant.
Most students find the stoat/ermine analogy helpful in understanding the
relationship of a phoneme to allophones. If you would like a second
example, try Superman and Clark Kent: they are variants of the same
person and it is predictable when Clark Kent becomes Superman (i.e.,
when there is danger present). The one flaw in the analogy: because Clark
Kent appears in all environments except where there is danger, it works
better to call Clark Kent the underlying phoneme, but some students will
try to argue, based on the story of Superman, that Superman is the “real
person” underlying both variants.
Phonemic Transcription
Before giving students their first transcription exercises for homework, go
over a few samples together as a class. We then recommend allowing class
time to review transcription exercises, because students will have
questions after having completed the exercises. To begin, you can provide
an answer key and ask students to correct each other’s answers and then
field questions about remaining concerns.
Language Variation and Change at Work
Survey the class about their pronunciation of larynx, cot-caught, pin-pen.
If numbers allow it, you can chart these pronunciations on a map based on
students’ hometowns. With students, you can also design a short survey
and ask them to collect data on these pronunciations to share with the class.
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Phonological Rules
For additional examples of the phonological rules that you can work
through with students, see Stockwell and Minkova’s English Words:
History and Structure (2001).
Syllables and Phonotactic Constraints
As practice in applying the phonotactic constraints, ask students to draw
sonority curves for words in a sentence of your choosing Then ask
students to construct syllables that follow the constraints but are not real
English syllables.
McGurk Effect
The description of this phenomenon is greatly enhanced if students can try
it themselves with a video that demonstrates the effect. A video is
available on Dr. Patricia Kuhl’s website: http://ilabs.washington.edu/
kuhl/research.html.
English Spelling
Exercise 3.6, which asks students to argue for or against particular spelling
reforms, works very well as a jumping-off point for small group or full-
class discussion of spelling reform. What is gained and what is lost if we
reform spelling? Why might we resist certain reforms?
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Homework Progression
We recommend reviewing the consonant and vowel charts with students
before asking them to complete Exercise 3.1. Exercise 3.3 is difficult for
many students, and one possible strategy is to do the first exercise in class,
with students working in pairs to solve the question, and then assigning 2
24
as homework. Exercise 3.4, #3 and #4 usefully introduce students to the
concept of allomorphs, which is discussed in Chapter 4.
In-Class Activities Based on Homework
Exercise 3.1, #4 works well with a follow-up class activity in which
students read each other’s phonemic transcriptions of a passage from a
novel and then correct each other’s transcriptions. In Exercise 3.4, #3 and
#4, ask students to specify the rules for past tense and plural allomorphs.
In class, as a way to review the answers, you can try to draw a flowchart
on the board. For example, “Does the word end in /t/ or /d/? If yes, then….
If no, then…” A flowchart can help students see how to order the rules
most efficiently. As mentioned above, Exercise 3.6 serves as a productive
jumping-off point for small-group or full-class discussion of spelling
reform.
EXTRA RESOURCES
See these two Web pages for valuable resources:
Phonetics: The Sounds of English and Spanish: http://www.uiowa.
edu/~acadtech/phonetics/.
George Dillon’s Resources for Studying Spoken English: http://faculty.
washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/.
Melinda J. Menzer has created a website where students can see and hear
the Great Vowel Shift: http://eweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/.
Following, we have provided the full text for the poem “English is Tough
Stuff,” which has been circulating widely on the Internet for several years.
25
English is Tough Stuff
(Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization
headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ... until they
tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses
below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six
months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.)
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
26
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sleeve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
27
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
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Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation − think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough −
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
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CHAPTER 4
English Morphology
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
The progression of chapters in How English Works is fairly traditional.
Beginning with Chapter 3, we start progressing from smallest to largest
speech units from chapter to chapter. Phonology comes first, as sounds are
a language’s elemental units. Morphology comes next, because
morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of a language, the units from
which words are formed according to the language’s syntactic
requirements. Thus, a chapter on morphology is essential preparation for
the study of syntax and semantics—you will find that much of the material
in Chapter 4 overlaps with Chapter 5 and Chapter 7. Of course, a firm
grasp of morphology is necessary to the study of dialects and language
history as well. Like the chapters on phonology, syntax, and semantics, the
chapter on morphology must appear on any syllabus devoted to English
linguistics.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Explain and illustrate the difference between analytic and synthetic
languages.
• Define morpheme and explain and illustrate the difference between
bound and free morphemes.
• Explain and illustrate the differences between closed and open
morphological classes.
• Explain and illustrate the differences between inflectional and
derivational morphology.
30
• Explain and illustrate the various processes relevant to the formation
of English words.
• Analyze a variety of English words, from simple (e.g., deer) to
complex (e.g., antidisestablishmentarianism) by means of morphology
trees.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
acronymy
affix
affixation
agglutinative language
allomorph
alphabetism
analytic language
backformation
blend
blending
borrowing
bound morpheme
calque
case
clipping
clitic
closed morphological class
combining
combining form
compounding
derivational morpheme
eggcorn
folk etymology
foreclipping
free morpheme
functional shift
generalization
hindclipping
inflectional morpheme
lexical gap
loan translation
matrix
morpheme
morphology
morphology tree
nonce word
open morphological class
prefix
reanalysis
reduplication
semantic shift
shifting
specialization
suffix
synthetic language
31
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• In general, students resist the notion that language is systematic and
hierarchical; talking about how words are formed can be a lot of fun,
but analyzing words by means of trees is not always as much fun for
all students. Be prepared.
• English words are formed by a relatively small group of processes—
students often appreciate that this aspect of English morphology is
manageable, whereas for many of them, syntax and semantics are less
so.
• Students generally enjoy word history and find new words, especially
slang and jargon, fun to discuss in class. Certainly, they know a lot
about current slang and the jargons of service occupations and of
popular teen avocations—so you can build a lot of good will before
moving into syntax if students come out of this chapter feeling like the
language authorities that they are.
• The distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology is
difficult for some students to grasp; the allomorph is even more
difficult than the allophone for some. Students have probably never
encountered either before unless they have taken an introduction to
linguistics or a history of English course before taking your course.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Morphology Trees
As suggested above, many students may resist morphology trees, so if you
can make trees fun, you’ll get a lot further with them and save yourself a
measure of frustration. We recommend a “morphology tree bee,” in which
you test students’ grasp of morphological structure by providing each
student with a relatively straightforward word that he or she then “trees.”
In small classes (35 or fewer students), students can tree on the board; in
large classes, this first round may be conducted on paper, judged, and then,
after the first cut, students can tree publicly, with increasingly difficult
32
words at each stage, until only two students remain to battle it out with
übertrees of apparently intractable words. The morphology tree bee is a
great opportunity to invite other members of your department to
participate in your class: they can simply observe, or they can judge the
event, if they come with the necessary expertise.
This activity can be extended easily into a “syntax tree bee” in the context
of Chapter 6. The structure of the activity remains the same, but sentences
are subjects of the trees, and the process of elimination moves faster.
Warning: there is no easy way to make tree analysis fun. We recommend
these activities, but you will have to put in a fair amount of time to bring
them off. We believe that the results warrant the extra time, but we don’t
want to represent these as easy exercises to plan and conduct.
Word-Formation Processes
In a reasonably high-tech classroom, it is easy to set students the task of
finding English examples of each word-formation process on the Web.
Some of what they come up with will be interesting and amusing, and it
will inform a very interesting discussion among the class members. Web
access allows students to query corpora about historical morphological
patterns; it also allows them to attach forms with particular texts and
contexts and offers a great opportunity to discuss the constraints and
conditions of certain processes. For example, in what contexts does über-
generate new words, or the suffix -age? Is compounding more likely in
some text types than in others? Such issues bear on material in Chapters 8,
9, 13, and 14, and it’s very productive to raise them for the first time with
Chapter 4.
Individually or in groups, students can also generate lists of new Internet
and wireless technology words and then identify the word formation
processes (and kinds of semantic change—see Chapter 7) involved in the
creation of these new words.
33
Lexicon of Campus Slang
If you assign Exercise 4.3 #5, you can then compile a class mini-
dictionary/lexicon of campus slang. You can also create a “slang quiz”
that asks students to match slang words with definitions (you can make it
trickier if you add a few made-up definitions); this exercise can usefully
generate a discussion about how much of the slang they collected is shared
across the campus and how much belongs to sub-groups on campus.
Word Scavenger Hunt
Take a word formation process of your choosing and give students a few
days to find examples (make sure they bring copies of the sources if
written). You can set the goal as collecting a certain number of examples,
or you can challenge students to see who can find the most or the most
interesting examples (the class can vote on the latter). For instance, you
can ask students to find more examples of new words derived from blog
than those provided in the opening anecdote or more examples of
eggcorns.
Words of the Year
There is no need to rely solely on the American Dialect Society to
determine the words of any year—invite students to nominate words in
categories like those described in Exercise 4.5, to debate the relative
merits of the nominees, and then to publish their choices. If they would
like to participate in the American Dialect Society’s process, they may
send their lists on to the society members responsible for organizing the
annual vote; the American Dialect Society’s Web site
(www.americandialect.org) will identify those persons in any given year.
The American Dialect Society votes on words of the previous year at its
annual January meeting.
34
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Homework Progression
Two of the exercises at the end of this chapter are essential to the course.
• We strongly recommend assigning Exercise 4.1, on derivational and
inflectional morphology. The distinction between the two is critical to
most of what follows in the book, notably (but not exclusively)
Chapters 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, and 13. Students who do not learn to
distinguish the two are lost forever: in our experience, you should
assign this exercise and then quiz and test the concept until students
are annoyed and no one loses points for their answers. When, later in
the term, you describe American dialects in terms of morphosyntactic
features, you’ll be glad that you did.
• If you think that students will resist morphology trees, wait until you
try to coax them into syntax trees while working through Chapter 6
(hyponymic trees, which come up in Chapter 7, are “cake” next to
trees of complex or elliptical sentences). Our advice is simple: students
must grasp as soon as possible that linguistic structures are systematic
and often hierarchical, and that trees are the easiest means to articulate
system and hierarchy, whether morphological, syntactic, or semantic.
The sooner they are familiar with this mode of analysis, the better.
As a result, it is wise to assign Exercises 4.1 and 4.2 early on and in that
sequence. Any or all of the exercises on word-formation can be assigned
in any sequence.
In-Class Activities Based on Homework
It is most useful to assign Exercise 4.2 as preparation for a morphology
tree bee, if you choose to hold one. Exercises 4.3 through 4.5 can be used
to frame class discussion or, in the case of 4.5 (on “Words of the Year”),
integrated into a class activity, as described above.
35
EXTRA RESOURCES
Instructors attempting to explain English derivational morphology in class
can often find themselves short of words that perfectly exemplify word-
formative processes but also catch student attention. How does one build
up a wordhoard of relevant examples? We recommend books from the
editors of the American Heritage dictionaries, titled Word Histories and
Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and More
Word Histories and Mysteries: From Aardvark to Zombie (Houghton
Mifflin, 2006) which illustrate every formal process in historical terms.
The books include borrowed words out of proportion to borrowing’s role
in the development of English vocabulary, but that is really their only fault
as instructional resources. In some teaching contexts, whether the
college/university context or the post-graduate teaching context for which
students may be preparing, Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries
(Houghton Mifflin, 2007) may also prove valuable.
Most of the words included in the Word Histories and Mysteries series are
venerable members of the lexicon. New words are often hip or humorous
or both and demonstrate an important point: our vocabulary continually
expands along the derivational lines drawn in this chapter. Students can
see derivation at work in the world, rather than preserved in dictionaries.
To this end, you can find additional examples in “Among the New
Words,” published quarterly in American Speech. For instance, the
installment in volume 81.4 (Winter 2006) includes an entry for the
combining form –sploitation (as in blacksploitation and sexsploitation),
and the entry includes many new words (e.g., fansploitation, gospel-
sploitation, and youthsploitation). Most are coined for print and some
(gospel-sploitation and youthsploitation, for example) are unlikely to enter
spoken English for prosodic or phonotactic reasons. Entries like this one
illustrate less common word-formation strategies and provide an
36
opportunity for class discussion about issues like the differences between
written and spoken English, what makes a new word last, and how
phonology intersects with morphology. “Among the New Words” of
American Speech is a treasure trove of opportunities like this one.
