Andrew Spencer

Linguistics: Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes

We began section 2 by asking how many sounds there are in English, but we found there were various practical difficulties in responding to this question and never arrived at an answer. There is a further reason why the question cant be answered straightforwardly, and understanding this is our first concern in this section. In fact, speech sounds can differ from each other in a non-discrete, continuous fashion. We can see this particularly easily in the vowel system. One of the main differences between the [iː] of read [ɹiːd] and the [ɪ] of rid [ɹɪd] is length. But just how long is a long vowel? An emphatic pronunciation of read , say in a plaintive ‘Leave me alone – Im trying to READ’, has a much longer vowel than a non-emphatic pronunciation. The precise length of any vowel will depend on the rate of speaking, degree of emphasis and so on. A similar case is presented by the aspirated plosives. In any dialect, a [p h ] sound, as in the word pit , will be aspirated to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of emphasis. We see, therefore, that there is a sense in which sounds form a continuum; from this perspective, there is an infinite number of speech sounds in any language. Phonemes Fortunately, there is another perspective from which sounds are discrete units or segments , and we can come to terms with this by asking what is the difference between the words pit and bit ?