Nasalization

Nasalization

Nasalization is the production of speech sounds by emitting air through the nasal cavity. Air traveling up from the lungs is modified at different points by various structures to produce the different sounds used in speech. As the air flows up, it can be diverted into either the oral or the nasal cavity. Three consonant sounds in English are characterized by nasalized air flow. English vowels are only nasalized when they occur near a nasalized consonant in a word.
The velum, or soft palate, is a muscle located in the back of the roof of a person's mouth. It facilitates or prevents the nasalization of speech sounds by channeling air into either the oral or the nasal cavity. When closed, the velum seals off the nasal cavity for the production of oral speech sounds, open it does the opposite to facilitate nasal sounds. Breathing requires an open velar position so the velum remains open at rest. Closing it to produce oral speech sounds requires active muscle control.
English features three nasalized consonants: n, m, and ng. These three sounds are produced using oral articulators, such as the lips for m, even though the air flows predominantly through the nasal cavity. Although there are no English vowels with nasalization as a distinctive feature, vowels in proximity to nasal consonants will often become nasalized during normal speech production due to a process called assimilation. Listeners perceive failure to nasalize ordinarily assimilated vowels as mispronunciations. Other languages, such as French, feature purely nasalized vowels.
Many children exhibit nasalization errors as they learn to speak. For example, a child may nasalize the beginning of a word that ends in a nasalized sound, or vice versa, such as substituting "man" for "tan" or "man" for "mat." Assimilation errors such as these are easily identified based on communication contexts and typically resolve themselves in early childhood without intervention. Errors of this type that persist past the age of five years should be evaluated by a speech-language pathologist.
Disorders such as cleft palate often result in the overproduction of nasalized speech sounds. In many cases palatal disorders affect the velar musculature and make it difficult to raise the velum and close off the nasal cavity. This results in normally oral sounds being produced nasally which distorts the sound and frequently makes the person's speech difficult to understand. Surgery is often required to correct this type of nasalization error.

Manner of Articulation

Manner of Articulation

Manner of articulation is usually a part of a phonology course that explains how sounds are formed and produced. The parts of the body that help create sound are called “articulators,” which can include the lips, the tongue, and the teeth. Even the nasal cavity, upper palate, the jaw, and the vocal chords are considered articulators. By interacting with each other, these articulators produce sound. In phonology, there are eight manners of articulation that result in sound production.
The first manner of articulation is the plosives or the “oral stops.” In this process, airflow is temporarily discontinued in order to produce a sound. For example, for creating the “t” sound, a person must bring his upper and lower teeth together, with the tongue behind, and a burst of air forces the teeth open, thereby sound the “t.”
In the nasal stop, the oral cavity is completely closed, while the nasal cavity is open. The air going in and out of the nose produces the sound, such as in “m” and “n.” One can notice that an “m” turns into a “b” when the nose is pinched. This is an indication that a sound is nasal; if the sound changes when the nasal cavity is closed.
Another manner of articulation is the fricative, wherein airflow is partly obstructed. When a little bit of the air comes out, it produces sounds such as the “f” or the “s,” when air is let out between the teeth or the lips. Some fricatives contain a vibrating sound, such as the “v” and the “z.”
When a fricative is combined with an oral stop, it forms another manner of articulation called the affricate. Just as in “j” and “ch,” the sound is initiated by an oral stop, but progresses into a fricative. One can notice that the “ch” sound can be produced continuously, as compared to the “t” that is sounded in just one instant.
The flap or the tap is the fifth manner of articulation, wherein the tongue sort of “flaps” while creating the sound. One example is the “t” sound in “water:” by changing the position of the tongue, the “t” begins to sound like a “d,” or “wader.” In the seventh manner, which is the trill, the tongue is made to vibrate by continuously breathing out the air against it. The Spanish language often use the trill to produce a hard “r,” such as in “para” and “perro.”
The approximant and the lateral are manners of articulation that do not need much oral and nasal closure to produce the sound. This is the case for sounds like “y” and “h," where the air just flows right out. In the lateral, the tongue is touching the upper teeth and air is continuously pushed against it, such as in the sound of the letter “l.”

Phonology

Phonology

Phonology is the study of sounds and speech patterns in language. The root "phone" in phonology relates to sounds and originates from the Greek word phonema which means sound. Phonology seeks to discern the sounds made in all human languages. The identification of universal and non-universal qualities of sounds is a crucial component in phonology as all languages use syllables and forms of vowels and consonants.
Syllables are involved in the timing of spoken language since speaking each word takes a portion of time. Syllables are units of measurement in language. Vowels allow air to escape from the mouth and nose unblocked, while consonants create more covering of the vocal tract by the tongue. The heard friction that is a consonant is made from the air that cannot escape as the mouth utters the consonant.
Phonemes are units of sound in a language that convey meaning. For example, changing a syllable in a word will change its meaning, such as changing the "a" in "mad" to an "o" to produce "mod". A phoneme can also achieve no meaning by creating non-existent words such as by changing the "m" in "mad" or "mod" to a "j" to produce "jad" or "jod". Phonemes differ from morphemes and graphemes. A morpheme refers to main grammar units, while a grapheme is the main unit of written language.
Ensuring that the proper pronunciation is used in a language is a practical application of phonology. For example, phonology uses symbols to differentiate the sounds of a particular vowel. The vowels are classified into "front", "central", and "back" depending on the positioning of the jaw and tongue when the vowel sounds are made. Phonology also notes lip position such as if the lips are spread out or rounded as well as if the vowel sound is long or short.
The symbol for the vowel sound in words such as "chilly" or "tin" in phonology is /i/ and refers to a front, short vowel spoken with a tongue in high position and spread lips. Contrastingly, the symbol for the vowel sound in words such as "moon" or "blue" in phonology is /u:/ and refers to a back, long vowel spoken with a tongue in high position still, but with rounded lips.

Phoneme

A phoneme is a basic unit of sound used to build a language. All spoken words are made up of one or more individual phonemes. Few languages use all the sounds available to human speech. Instead, most pull from a selection of standard phonemes to create many thousands of words. Alphabets, including that of English, do not always have a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and letter.
Linguists often differentiate between the possible sounds a human can make and the specific sounds that affect word meaning. They typically use the term, phones, to describe speech sounds in general, and phonemes to refer to sounds that are used to build a language. For the most part, languages do not utilize all the possible phones that the human mouth can create.
Phonemes make up the constituent parts of spoken words. Linguists have formulated a system of symbols to graphically represent phonemes. Most languages have been assigned a list of standard phonemes that represent the most common sounds used in speech. These standard sounds are combined in a variety of ways to create different words.
For the most part, a phoneme is tied to the meaning of a word. As a result, if a phoneme changes, the word’s meaning typically changes as well. For example, if the first sound in the word, bat, is changed from /b/ to /p/, the word becomes pat and takes on a new meaning.
In many languages, each letter corresponds with a phoneme. For example, in the English word bit, each letter represents a phoneme, /b/, /I/, /t/. In many languages, including English, this one-to-one correspondence between letter and phoneme is not standard for all words.
Many English words contain digraphs, which are phonemes that are represented by more than one letter. For example, the first sound in thing, is th represented by the single phoneme symbol, /ð/. The final sound is ng, represented by the symbol, /ŋ/.
Often languages like English allow for two letters to be used interchangeably for one phoneme. For example, the letters c and k may both be used to represent the sound, /k/. The first sounds in the words kit and cap are both /k/.
Sometimes, the pronunciation of a word can differ depending on the dialect of the speaker. Different dialects may pronounce different sounds, or phones, for the same phoneme. If two phonemes can be exchanged in a word without altering the word’s meaning, then linguists say that these two sounds are called allophones.

Phonetics

Phonetics

Phonetics is a discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech. Phonetics is not concerned with the meaning of these sounds, the order in which they are placed, or any other factor outside of how they are produced and heard, and their various properties. Phonetics is closely related to phonology, which focuses on how sounds are understood in a given language, and semiotics, which looks at symbols themselves.
There are three major subfields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication. Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sounds they hear, acoustic phonetics looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear, and articulatory phonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. Articulatory phonetics is where the majority of people begin their study of phonetics, and it has uses for many people outside of the field of linguistics. These include speech therapists, computer speech synthesizers, and people who are simply interested in learning how they make the sounds they do.
The International Phonetic Association has a special alphabet for describing all of the different sounds, or phones, currently thought to be used in human speech. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has more than 100 distinct phones listed and given distinct notation. Sounds can be separated into a number of different groups, based on whether they use air from the lungs or not, whether they are voiced or not, the position of the tongue in the mouth, and how the sound is altered. While the bulk of sounds made by the speakers of the world fall into a somewhat narrow band of this spectrum, there are other sounds that are quite different, such as the clicks and smacking sounds made in some African languages.
Most consonants, called pulmonic consonants, use air from the lungs and can be placed on a grid depending on which parts of the vocal tract are used to articulate the speech sound and how air is obstructed as it passes through the mouth. For example, the sound /p/ uses both lips to articulate air, and is therefore known as a bilabial. It also consists of a full stop of air, known as a plosive. The /p/ sound, therefore, as well as the /b/ sound, can be described as a bilabial plosive. The /b/ sound, since the vocal fold is vibrating as it is said, is called a voiced bilabial plosive, while the /p/ sound, which has no such vibration, is called an unvoiced bilabial plosive.
All the consonant sounds used in speech can be described in this manner, from the /r/ sound in English, which we can call an alveolar trill, for example, to the sound at the beginning of the word ‘yet’, transcribed in IPA with the symbol j and described as a palatal approximant, to the deep-throated Arabic sounds of the pharyngeal fricatives.

Syntax

Syntax

Syntax looks at the rules of a language, particularly how the various parts of sentences go together. While similar to morphology, which looks at how the smallest meaningful linguistic units, called morphemes, are formed into complete words, syntax examines how fully formed words fit together to create complete and understandable sentences. Understanding a language's syntax is important for understanding what makes a sentence grammatically correct.

The Purpose of Syntax

Linguists and grammarians who study syntax are not necessarily prescriptivist, which means they do not attempt to tell people how to "correctly" form a sentence. Rather, they are descriptivist, in that they look at how people actually speak and then create rules that describe what a language community considers grammatical or non-grammatical. Syntax deals with a number of elements, all of which help to facilitate being understood through language. Without rules, there would be no foundation from which to discern meaning from a bunch of words strung together; whereas these rules allow for a virtually infinite number of sentences.

Word Order in Language Construction

Perhaps the most important aspect of syntax is how the various parts of speech connect together. Every language has rules that dictate where certain types of words can be used in a sentence, and how to interpret the resulting sentence. A new language learner has to understand how this word order is structured, which can be difficult for someone used to a different language.
In English, the basic order is "Subject-Verb-Object;" this means that in a simple sentence, the first noun phrase is the subject, and the subsequent predicate includes the verb phrase and may contain an object. This allows English speakers to understand that in the sentence "The boy kicked the ball," the "boy" is the subject, and therefore the one doing the kicking, whereas the "ball" is the object being kicked. If someone wrote the sentence, "The ball kicked the boy," the meaning would be reversed somewhat strangely, and "Kicked the ball the boy," would immediately be recognized as a violation of basic syntactical order and read as nonsense.
Not all languages follow this same order, however. In Spanish, for example, the order of the words is more flexible in most cases, and serves to shift the emphasis of a sentence rather than its meaning. Similarly, adjectives in English usually precede the word they describe, while they come after the described word in languages such as French.

Parts of Speech

Another aspect of syntax covers the various parts of speech that a language uses and separates the words of the language into these groups. Each part of speech in turn has various rules that may be applied to it, and other rules that dictate when it cannot be used. English, for example, makes use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other word types, while different languages may not have a separate class for adjectives or make use of classes not found in English. Thai, for example, doesn't distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, while Japanese has several different types of words that act as adjectives.

Run-Ons and Incomplete Sentences

Through an understanding of proper syntax, speakers and writers know how sentences should be broken up. When two or more sentences are improperly combined into a single sentence, it usually creates a "run-on." Similarly, a sentence that does not contain a full syntactic idea, such as "Swam quickly to the bank," is considered incomplete. Understanding linguistic rules allows speakers and writers to effectively communicate ideas to others.