Topic 6: Sound alternations. Types of Alternation. Syllabic structure of English words

1. Sound variations in words, their derivatives and grammatical forms of words are known as sound alternations. It is obvious that sound alternations are caused by assimilation, accommodation and reduction in speech. Alternations of consonants are mainly due to contextual assimilations.

Historical alternations distinguish grammatical forms of words and lexical units in the process of word-building.

Sound alternations are also widely spread on the synchronical level in the present-day English and are known as contextual.

We are interested now in the sound in its weak position. Vowels are said to be in their strong position when they are in stressed syllables and in the weak position when they are in the unstressed ones. Consonants may well be said to be in their strong position before vowels and in the intervocalic position; they are in weak positions when they are word final or proceed other consonants.

The so-called morphological school represented by Soviet philologists R.I.Avanesov, V.P.Sidorov, P.S.Kuznetsov, A.A.Reformatsky supported the theory of neutralization of phonemes. The loss of one or more distinctive features of a phoneme in the weak position is called phonemic neutralization. In English, the voicing opposition is neutralized after the initial [s].

The so-called Leningrad phonological school (L.V.Shcherba and his followers L.R.Zinder, M.I.Matusevitch) assert that the phoneme is independent of the morpheme. So [A] in вода belongs to the [a] phoneme while [o] in воды to the [o] phoneme. The supporters of this conception claim that the phoneme cannot lose any of its distinctive features.

N.S.Trubetskoy (the Prague phonological school) arrived at an original solution of the phonemic status of a sound in alternations. To overcome the difficulty he introduced a broader phonological unit than a phoneme and named it an archiphoneme. An archiphoneme is defined as a combination of distinctive features common to two phonemes

2. SYLLABIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS

The syllable is a very complicated phenomenon and it can be studied on four levels: acoustic, articulatory, auditory and functional, which means that the syllable can be approached from different points of view. The severe complexity of the phenomenon gave rise to many theories. No phonetician has succeeded so far in giving an exhaustive and adequate explanation of what the syllable is. There exist two points of view:

1. Some linguists consider the syllable to be a purely articulatory unit which lacks any functional value. This point of view is defended on the grounds that the boundaries of the syllable do not always coincide with those of the morphemes.

2. However the majority of linguists treat the syllable as the smallest pronounceable unit which can reveal some linguistic function.

3. Now we shall consider two very important functionsof the syllable.

The first function we should mention is known to be the constitutivefunction of the syllable. It lies in its ability to be a part of a word or a word itself. The syllable forms language units of greater magnitude, that is, words, morphemes and utterances. In this respect two things should be emphasized. First, the syllable is the unit within which the relations between the distinctive features of the phonemes and their acoustic correlates are revealed. Second, within a syllable (or a sequence of syllables) prosodic characteristics of speech are realized, which form the stress-pattern of a word and the rhythmic and intonation structures of an utterance. In sum, the syllable is a specific minimal structure of both segmental and suprasegmental features.

The other function of the syllable is its distinctive function. In this respect the syllable is characterized by its ability to differentiate words and word-forms. To illustrate this, a set of minimal pairs should be found so that qualitative and/or quantitative peculiarities of certain allophones should indicate the beginning or the end of the syllable.

Summarizing we might say that at the functional level of description the syllable could be conceived of as a smallest pronounceable unit with potential linguistic importance. That is why it reveals its functional value only occasionally.

By way of conclusion we could enumerate the following peculiarities of the syllabic structure of English which should arrest the learner's attention:

1) syllabic boundary is inside intervocalic consonant preceded by vowels, for example: Betty, racket, money, hotter,

2) syllabic boundary is before an intervocalic consonant if it is not preceded by the above-mentioned vowels, for example: later, speaker;

3) the sonorants [1], [m], [n] are syllabic if they are preceded by noise consonants, for example: little, blossom, sudden;

4) there cannot be more than one vowel (a diphthong or a monophthong) within one syllable;

5) the typical and most fundamental syllabic structure is of (C)VC type;

6) word final consonants are normally of weak-end type.