Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.

909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
Language and Speaking

Speech is divided into two parts that are language and speaking. Language refers to the

words we use and how we use them in order to share thoughts, ideas and knowledge. The

language is constituted by different rules established by a group of people. In this way, Saussure

(1981) mentions “It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary

conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that

faculty” (p.9).

Language is a system of communication with rules and classification used by the

community of speakers. Saussure (1981) says:

Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification.

As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a

natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification. (p.9)

Language and speaking focus on different objects of studies both are complemented but

not equal. Saussure (1981) mentions different study objects:

The study of speech is then twofold: its basic part-having as its object language,

which is purely social and independent of the individual-is exclusively

psychological; its secondary part-which has as its object the individual side of

speech, i.e. speaking, including phonation-is psychophysical. (p18)

Speaking is an oral means of communication that human beings have to express

themselves. It is a human need to communicate in different ways, mainly orally. Speaking

includes: articulation, voice and fluency. In addition, language and speaking work together
 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
because both are in charge of complementing language. Saussure (1981) “Doubtless the two

objects are closely connected, each depending on the other: language is necessary if speaking is

to be intelligible and produce all its effects; but speaking is necessary for the establishment of

language” (p.18). So when it comes to language and speaking, you cannot mention it

individually.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is a system to describe and record the sounds of language. Phonetics provides a

way to develop the ear in order to study the facets of the language by means of the reference of

writings. Also, phonetics is the level that studies the smallest units of speech. Saussure mentions

that “Phonetics is a historical science; it analyses events and changes, and moves through time”

(p.33). Phonetics is responsible for studying and evaluating the constant changes of sounds.

Moreover, Hickey says “Phonetics is the study of human sounds in general without saying what

function which sounds may have in a particular language” (p.1). In this way, phonetics analyzes

the sounds of any existing language.

Phonology studies the ways in which sounds are used in different languages to form

syllables and later words by following some system. In addition, phonology is ways in which

languages make use of sounds to distinguish words from each other. Saussure (1981) says

“Phonology is outside time, for the articulatory mechanism never changes” (p. 33).

Phonetics and phonology focus on different things, but they complement each other.

Saussure (1981) says “The two studies are distinct but not opposites, Phonetics is a basic part of

the science of language; phonology-this bears repeating-is only an auxiliary discipline and
 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
belongs exclusively to speaking” (p.33). Phonetics refers to study of language and the

phonology refers to study of speaking

Phoneme, phone and allophone

The phoneme is an abstract form of a sound located in the human mind. It is the smallest

voice sound with linguistic value used for any language. Phonemes are identified with minimum

pairs of words that they are used to identify different sounds of a word. In addition, minimum

pairs are represented in separate phonemes. Delahunty, G. & Garvey, J (2010) Mention: “Pairs of

words like this are called minimal pairs, and are used to demonstrate that pairs of sounds are

used in a language to distinguish words from each other. Sound units that distinguish words from

each other are called phonemes” (p. 108).

The phone is physical realization of a voice sound in a language. It every time a voice

sound is produced it is different from the other sounds. Coxhead (2006) “A phone can be defined

as a ‘unit sound’ of a language. It is a ‘unit’ sound because the whole of the phone must be

substituted to make a different word” (p.5). Also, to write the phones are used phonetics symbols

(IPA) enclosed in square brackets. For example: [t]. the set of phones that correspond to a single

phoneme is called allophone of the same phoneme.

Denominating Allophone is when a phone is produced two different environments will

change the meaning. These two forms are connected in the same phoneme and stored in the

human mind. Delahunty, G. & Garvey, J (2010) add “Some allophones of a phoneme are in

complementary distribution, that is, they occupy different positions (contexts or environments) in

words” (p. 112). Example to allophone: /u/ = [u] [u:]

Contrastive Linguistics
 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
Contrastive Linguistics compares two or more Linguistic systems in order to study and to

describe differences and similarities of languages. The research of this linguistic model was

created in the years 40 in order to create models of teachings for students of any languages.

“Contrastive linguistics has therefore been integrated into teacher training programmers at many

universities, and course materials have been designed specifically for university level teaching”

(cf. König & Gast 2009). Contrastive analysis is performed to determine differences and

similarities between languages. It also evaluates problems that students may have in process of

learning.

In Contrastive analysis “Certain differences between two languages are connected with or

even a consequence of other differences” (König 1971: 13–14 “).When analyzing two languages

have similarities en grammatical relationship, syntactic and others. Otherwise, one of main

theorists in the method of contrastive linguistics was John A. Hawking; he is Professor of

Linguistics at UC Davis. He is also the Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge and

he has held permanent positions at the University of Southern California, the Max-Planck-

Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the University of Essex. “Hawkins study has had a great

impact on the field of contrastive linguistics up to the present day. One reason is that many of the

individual generalizations made by Hawkins are still valid”. (Volker Gast p. 4)

Research centers have been created to analyze research of contrastive linguistics for

years. It has been done in order to look for new possibilities of teaching. Volker Gast mentions:

Given that contrastive linguistics has increasingly focused on matters of

performance, thus requiring attested and, ideally, quantitative data, the use of

multilingual corpora has become an integral part of this discipline in the past two
 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
decades. Two major types of multilingual corpora can be distinguished (cf. Granger

2003a, Aijmer 2008): (i) corpora consisting of original texts and their translations,

and (ii) corpora containing original texts from different languages representing

similar registers. (p.4)

Contrastive linguistics over years has deepened their research in translation area of texts

and records of original texts.

Structuralism and Generativism

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that began in France in the 1950s and 1960s.

Structuralism is a response to modern literature, which had intentionally investigated the limits

of meaning and looked for stylistic effects in the deviations from all types of conventions of

language, literature, and social practices. Also, structuralism was born of Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). His course of general linguistics influenced to study a

structure to form a text.

Structuralism rejects the notion of literature as simulation of the world and, analyses its

experimentation with the language and codes of a culture. Saussure’s approach to language looks

at the changes which take place over time in specific languages, Saussure pursed a synchronic

linguistics. Saussure’s lectures:

Psychologically, what are our ideas, apart from our language? They probably do not

exist. Or in a form that may be described as amorphous. We should probably be

unable according to philosophers and linguists to distinguish two ideas clearly

without the help of a language. (Class note on 4 July, 1911)

 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras

The fundamental ideology of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether

language or media, are not comprehensible except through their association of relationships,

producing the sign and the system in which the sign is embedded. A sign for instance, a word

finds its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs.

Generativism had its origins in the 1950s with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s 1957

book Syntactic structures. Also, Chomsky’s approach was a reaction to the behaviorist theory of

language prevalent at the time (structuralism), championed by the psychologist Skinner.

Therefore, generativism is a property for which human beings are biologically prewired.

Chomsky rejected structuralism’s approach to language analysis like taxonomic approach

which aimed to describe languages rather than explain them, surface forms rather than the

underlying cognitive system and the use of discovery procedures to ensure that linguistics was an

objective, empirical science. Chomsky (1957):

A language is an enormously involved system, and it is quite "obvious that any

attempt to present directly the set of grammatical phoneme sequences would lead to

a grammar so complex that it would be practically useless. For this reason (among

others), linguistic description proceeds in terms of a system of levels of

representations. (p. 18)

 Name: Angie Michelle Paucar Sierra 27.087.909
Phonetic and phonology English II
Teacher: Carmen Contreras
References

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Coxhead, P, (2006). Natural Language Processing & Applications Phones and

Phonemes. Retrieved: https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pxc/nlp/NLPA-Phon1.pdf

Delahunty, G. & Garvey, J. (2010). The English Language From Sound to Sense. West
Lafayette, Indiana .Series Editor, Mike Palmquist

Ferdinand de Saussure (1981). Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin, Suffolk.

McGraw-Hill Book Company. New York Toronto London.

König, E. & V. Gast (2009). Understanding English-German Contrasts. 2nd ed. Berlin:

Erich Schmidt Verlag.

König, E. (1971). Adjectival Constructions in English and German. A Contrastive

Analysis. Heidelberg: Julius Groos.

Raymond Hickey. Phonetics and phonology a brief introduction. University of Duisburg

and Essen. Retrieved: https://www.uni-due.de/SHE/Phonetics_Brief_Introduction.pdf

Saussure’s Lectures (Classnote 4th July, 1911), Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade

Baskin, Suffolk, 1981.