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Linguistics

Notes the stream-scream merger is a highly stigmatized feature and that many of the students in her study
who used it were referred to speech pathologists. She goes on to note the following about her research:
“I also found a continuum that may indicate sound change in progress. If children said skretch for
stretch, they probably have used the skr alternation in other words that contained the feature: skreet
for street, skrong for strong, shrike for strike, skranger/deskroy for stranger/destroy. There were some
who said skreet for street but did not make alteration on other words with that sound”. Also, although
Dandy does not make this point, it is important to note that the students’ use of/skr/ may have been
affected by the training they were getting from the speech pathologists.
In my paper, I will discuss the English Syllable, phoneme, ways of identifying phonemes and the
application of stress in English words. The area of linguistics that puts effort into the understanding
the sounds of a language is Phonetics, a sub-category of Phonetics, which deals specifically with the
ways sounds are organized into the individual languages and studies the subset of those sounds that
constitute language and meaning, is Phonology.
Phonologically talking the sounds are the phonemes. According to Rogers (2000) “phonemes can be
thought of as instructions for articulating speech-sounds, and so a phoneme can be described in
terms of the behavior of the vocal apparatus that occurs when a physiologically normal speaker
articulates his or her particular representation of the phoneme. Thus phonemes are the phonetic
alphabet of the mind. That is, phonemes are how we mentally represent speech; how we store the
sounds of words in our memory. The following two tables show phonemes of Modern English, the
consonants and vowels.
9.2 Syllables

The syllable is a very important unit. Most people seem to believe that, even if they cannot define
what a syllable is, they can count how many syllables there are in a given word or sentence. If they
are asked to do this they often tap their finger as they count, which illustrates the syllable’s importance
in the rhythm of speech. As a matter of fact, if one tries the expriment of asking English speakers to
count the syllables in, say, a recorded sentence, there is often a considerable amount of disagreement.
9.2.1 The Nature of the Syllable

When we looked at the nature of vowels and consonants in Previous units it was shown that one
could decide whether a particular sound was a vowel or a consonant on phonetic grounds (in relation
to how much they obstructed the airflow) or on phonological grounds (vowels and consonants having
different distributions). We find a similar situation with the syllable, in that it may be defined both
phonetically and phonologically. Phonetically (i.e., in relation to the way we produce them and the
way they sound), syllables are usually described as consisting of a centre which has little or no
obstruction to airflow and which sounds comparatively loud; before and after this centre (ie.,e at the
beginning and end of the syllable), there will be greater obstruction to airflow and/or less loud
sound. We will now look at some examples:
1. What we will call a minimum syllable is a single vowel in isolation (e.g. the words ‘are’a+, ‘or’ +,
‘err’ ε +). These are preceded and followed by silence. Isolated sounds such as m, which we
c
∫
sometimes produce to indicate agreement, or , to ask for silence, must also be regarded as
syllables.
2. Some syllables have an onset—that is, instead of silence, they have one or more consonants
preceding the centre of the syllable:
‘bar ba:’ ‘key’ ki: ‘more’ m : c
3. Syllables may have no onset but have a coda—that is, they end with one or more consonants:
‘am’ æm ‘ought’ :t ‘ease’ i:z
c
4. Some syllables have both onset and coda:
‘ran’ ræn ‘sat’ sæt ‘fill’ fil

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