What is Phonology?

What is Phonology?

According to Bloomfield,

"Phonology is the organization of sounds into patterns"

In order to fulfill the communicative functions, languages organize their material, the vocal noises, into recurrent bits and pieces arranged in sound patterns. It is the study of this formal organization of languages which is known as phonology.

What is Sound?

How and where is it produced from?

How is it received by the ears?

How and why is one sound different from the other?

Question like this is the subject matter of phonology.

Difference between Phonetics and Phonology:

      Phonetics is the science of speech sounds, their production, transmission and reception. It represents all the speech sounds in general and with no perticular reference to any one language.

      Phonology is the study of vocal sounds and sound changes, phonemes and their variants in a particular language. If Phonetics can be likened to a world, phonology is a country.

      Phonetics is one and the same for all the languages of the world, but the phonology of one language will differ from the phonology of another.

      According to John Lyons, phonology is the level at which the linguist describes the sounds of a particular language. The subject matter of phonology is selected phonetic material from the total resources available to human beings from phonetics.

     The human vocal system can produce a very large number of different speech sounds. Members of a particular speech community speaking that particular language, however, use only a limited number of these sounds. Every language makes its own selection of sounds and organizes them into characteristic patterns. This selection of sounds and their arrangement into patterns constitute the phonology of the language.

Phonetics is general and Phonology is particular and functional.

Major Concepts of Phonology:

1. Phoneme:

Most linguistics have regarded the phoneme as one of the basic units of language. But they have not all defined the phonemes in the same way. the term phoneme was first use in the late 1870s by Saussure. he has introduced two Phonemes but the major work has been done by Edward.

The phoneme according to Bloom is the minimum unit of distinctive sound feature as per the Webster dictionary the phoneme is defined as the smallest unit of speech distinguishing one unit from another. According to Dorman, phoneme is a single speech sound or group of similar or reflects and speech sound functioning in a language.

Depending on the above mentioned points of view of phoneme can be defined as a unite, a bundle of sound feature or the smallest constructive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning for example, 'Put' 'But' 'Cut' 'Bat' 'Cat' 'Sat' 'Mat' etc.

2. Phone:

It is consider to be any objective speech sound consider as a physical event and without regard as to how it finds into the structure of any given language is a phone. Therefore a phone in phonology is the smallest possible segment of sound abstractive from speech.

3. Allophone:

Some sounds the native speaker thinks are the same while others are different. the linguistics has to figure out which sounds are having common elements in it and how it differs from each other. For example: /k/ - Keen, Calm, Coal etc.

Linguistics defines their allophone in the following manners,

1. Sound should be phonetically similar - k - c

2. They should be in complimentary in distribution

3. they should exhibit patterns with other group or sounds

4. Generative Phonology:

Modern science of speech sounds began with the concept of phoneme as developed by the school of linguistic 1930.