PHONOLOGY

PHONOLOGY

Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes /the difference is phonemic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not.

In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of signed languages, with gestures and their relationships as the object of study.

Representing Phonemes
The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. (In practice, this ideal is never realized.) However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / " (but without the quotes/commas).
On the other hand, the actual sounds are enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] " (again, without commas). While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system.
Phoneme Inventories
Doing a phoneme inventory
Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways.
Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by only a single sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds constitute separate phonemes. (It is often not possible to detect all phonemes with this method so other approaches are used as well.) If two similar sounds do not constitute separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme.
Phonemic distinctions or allophones
If two similar sounds do not constitute separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a word are aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. There is no English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated [ph] ( [ph] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of an underlying phoneme /p/.
Another example of allophones in English is how the /t/ sounds in the words 'tub', 'stub', 'but', and 'butter' are all pronounced differently, yet are all perceived as "the same sound."

Change of a phoneme inventory over time
The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics.

Other topics in Phonology
Phonology also includes topics such as assimilation, elision, epenthesis, vowel harmony, tone, non-phonemic prosody and phonotactics. Prosody includes topics such as stress and intonation.

WORD STRESS
In some languages, stress is non-phonemic. Some examples include Finnish and all ancient Germanic languages as well as some modern Germanic languages such as Icelandic. However, in other modern-day Germanic languages such as German or English, stress is phonemically distinctive, although there are only a few minimal pairs. In Punjabi, for example, /Daati/, the personal name used for Goddess Bhagwati contrasts with /Daatti/ , the sickle.
The distinction of stress is often seen in English words where the verb and noun forms have the same spelling. For example, consider 'rebel' the noun (which places the emphasis on the first syllable) contrasted with 'rebel' the verb (which instead puts the emphasis on the second syllable).

Development of the Field
In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (520–460 BC), who is considered the founder of linguistics, in his text of Sanskrit phonology, the Shiva Sutras, discovers the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. The Shiva Sutras describe a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines of the Ashtadhyayi. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Panini's grammar of Sanskrit had a significant influence on Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern structuralism, who was a professor of Sanskrit.
The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay coined the word phoneme in 1876. He worked not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now called allophony and morphophonology). His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure was also significant.
In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations (surface forms) are structures whose phonetic part is a sequence of phonemes which are made up of distinctive features.
In the late 1960s, David Stampe introduced Natural Phonology. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific.

Rishi Kumar Nagar