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Unit 10: Phonemes: Detailed Study

9. tonic/non-tonic. Notes
10. Tone: falling/rising; low fall/high fall/low rise/high rise/fall rise: or primary/secondary/
tertiary/fall-rise.
In more recent work on generative phonology, particularly by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle,
these features have been extensively modified and placed into categories such as
1. Major class features as sonorant [making a deep impression] vs. non-sonorant; vocalic vs. non-
vocalic.
2. Cavity features relating to the shape of the oral cavity and the point of articulation with such
features as coronal vs.non-coronal, anterior vs. non-anterior.
3. Manner of Articulation features such as continuant vs. non-contiuant, tense vs. lax.
4. Source Features as voiced vs. voiceless; strident vs. mellow.
5. Prosodic Features as stress, pitch, etc.
10.4.5 Generative Phonology
Modern science of speech sounds really began with the concept of the ‘phoneme’ (as developed by
Trubetzkoy and others of Prague School in 1930’s. The first significant modification occurred in 1952
with the distinctive features theory, which goes further in rejecting many concepts of the ‘traditional’
phonology).
‘Classical’ phonology was concerned with the analysis of the continum of speech into distinctive
segments, whereas the aim of Generative Phonology is to establish a series of universal rules for
relating the output of the syntactic component of a generative grammar to its phonetic realization. As
mentioned by P. Ladefoged, the aim of generative phonology is to formulate rules to express, “the
relationship between the output of a set of syntactic rules and the sounds of actual utterances.”
In the application of the generative rules two levels of representation are recognized: a systematic
‘phonetic representation’ and a ‘phonological representation’. An earlier term for the latter was
‘systematic phonemic’, but this was later rejected because of the meaning of ‘phonemic’ in structural
theories. Generative grammar rejects the notion of a phonemic level and the concept of ‘phoneme’.
On the phonetic level the phones are bundles of distinctive features and phonological rules relate
these phones directly to ‘lexical’ level.
10.5 Phonemes of English

Trager and Smith-set up the following forty-five phonemes for English:
9 simple vowels
3 semi-vowels
21 consonants
4 stresses
4 pitches
1 plus juncture
3 terminal juncture

Total 45

Vowels: Trager and Smith propose nine simple vowels arranged 3x3:
Front Central Back
High i 1 u
Mid e e o
Low m a
Semi-Vowels: There are three semi-vowels /y,w,h/.

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