Lecture 1 Phonetics as a Linguistic Science Plan

OTHER COMBINATORY-POSITIONAL CHANGES

There are other combinatory-positional changes besides as­similation. The modification of one of the adjacent consonants to the preceding or following consonant is known as assimilation.

There are cases when the articulation of a consonant is modified under the influence of an adjacent vowel, which is called adaptation, or accommodation. The accommodated sound retains its main phonetic features and is pronounced as an allophone of the same phoneme slightly modified under the influ­ence of a neighbouring sound. Modem English distinguishes three main types of accomodation⁵.

1. 
   An unrounded allophone of a consonant phoneme is re­placed by its rounded allophone under the influence of the follow­ing rounded vowel phoneme, in an initial position:
   

Unrounded allophones Rounded allophones of




tea /ti:/ less /les/ none/плп/

too /tu:/ loose /lu:z/ noon /пи:п/
of consonant phonemes consonant phonemes

2. 
   A fully back allophone of a back vowel phoneme is re­placed by its slightly advanced (fronted) allophone under the in­fluence of the preceding mediolingual phoneme /j/, e. g.
   

A vowel phoneme is represented by its slightly more open allophone before the dark /1/ under the influence of the lat- ter's back secondary focus. Thus the vowel sound in tell, bell is slightly more open than the vowel in bed, ten: /bel/ - /bed/, /tel/ - /ten/.

The phonetic changes, which results in a sharpening of the difference between two phonemes, is called dissimilation, e. g. the English word heaven is the result of a change of (m) to (v) be­cause of the final. The word marble is due to a French marbre whose second «г» was changed into «I»¹.

Elision is the omission of a sound in rapid speech, e. g. an old man /эп'эиГтаеп/, and so /an'ssu/.

Haplology is the process of dropping a group of sounds which should be articulated twice in a word, e. g. morphonology for morphophonology, probably (from probablely).

Reduction is also one of the wide-spread combinatory- positional change which has been explained in chapter V, 5.2.3 in connection with unstressed vowels.

1^ Charles A. Ferguson. New Directions in Phonological Theory: Language Acquisition and Universals Research. In «Current Trends in Linguistic Theory» Indiana Univ. Press, 1977, pp. 293-297.

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