Phonology is the study of how the sounds of speech are organised – in any given language and in human language generally.

The phonemic inventory

Most linguists agree that it is useful to list and count the speech sounds or ‘phonemes’ of an accent or dialect or variety of a language. The phonemes are commonly thought to be the smallest units keeping words apart, as, for example, by may and say, cale and whale, or may and my, say and saw, coal and code, ward and wad. A listing of the phonemes is known as the ‘phonemic inventory’. In English there are often said to be 44 phonemes. Counting them is actually harder than it might seem. I am one of those speakers for whom due and do don’t rhyme. There are speakers like me in Britain and North America. On one possible analysis, we have an extra vowel like the way Russians hear the beginning of the name Yury. But 44 is a reasonable count for most varieties, as listed in the inventory here.

Children often seem to be missing one or more phonemes from the inventory. The number of phonemes matters because it’s  clearly a key point on the learner’s agenda, in the learnability space.

Across the world’s languages, the number of phonemes ranges from 11 to almost 200. Languages vary not just in the count of the phonemes, but in whether they cluster together or how far they combine features in their internal structure. The question is hugely significant for learners. English clusters its phonemes, as in strength. Other languages add complexity to the internal structure of their phonemes, as in the name of the West African language, Igbo, where the GB is a single phoneme, rather than two.

Learners have to work which way their target language goes. In the case of a language with the complex clustering of English, this is a significant issue. In the case of try, for example, with the T influencing the R and the R influencing the T by what is known as ‘coalescence’, it is easy for learners to misconstrue TR as a single phoneme.

Many developmental speech problems involve either missing one or more consonants from the inventory or saying one or more in some non-standard way. But some problems are more severe or with respect to the vowels as well.

But in a way very relevant both to child speech and to the changes in speech over time, there are, in the framework here, smaller units of difference, known as ‘features‘.

Phonological theories

Different phonological theories make different counts of the number of speech sounds or phonemes within a language. Such a listing of the phonemes is known as the ‘phonemic inventory’. In all the varieties of English spoken in London (there are at least four), words like ire and our are pronounced without an R at the end. In the pronunciation of these phonemes, the tongue starts low in the mouth, raises to the top of the mouth, and then lowers to the middle. Within the framework of a theory which allows phonemes to have more than two elements (a sort of theory rejected here), these are ‘tripthongs’, resulting in a larger count of the phonemes.  In the framework here, branchings go at most two ways. And account is taken of the fact that in all of these instances the written form has an R on the right, which is just not pronounced as an R, but as the rightmost edge of the vowel. The R is thus part of the derivation. Theories which allow tripthongs disallow any notion of derivation. Derivational theories simplify the representation at the expense of the pronunciation. There are, I believe, good reasons for preferring derivational theories.

Phonology in speech and language therapy practice

Of all the branches of linguistics it is perhaps phonology which makes the clearest anf most decisive contribution to clinical practice. Digging down underneath speech sounds  to the world of features of various sorts, there are common childhood problems involving just one feature, such as the voicing in B in bear as opposed to pear, or the back of the tongue articulation  in K in key as opposed to tea, or the gesture of partially blocking the airstream in fricatives like TH in thing and S in sing. It is also possible and useful to take account of the larger function of foot structure or metricality in words like hippopotamus which can cause enduring problems, even for some adults. Issues arise by the complex and little understood interactions between segmental features and metricality. These are partially addressed by the therapy I refer to here as Possible Words. This would not be possible without the singular advances in the study of both segmental and metrical phonology in Noam Chomsky’s and Morris Halle’s monumental and seminal Sound Pattern of English or SPE in 1968.

What has to be included

Iirrespective of the differences between derivational and non-derivational theories, phonology includes

• The privileges of occurrence of particular phonemes, the fact that H occurs only at the beginning of syllables the sound written as NG and the KS sound written as X occur only at the end;
• The way they interact with one another and the syntax and morphology;
• The components of syllables;
• The grouping of syllables into ‘feet’, giving the rhythm or metricality of the language.

English just happens to be uncommonly complex with respect to the metricality and syllable structure, and conversely simple with respect to the sounds, their privileges of occurrence, how words are built up, as in play, plays, played, and playing.

Interactions between the phonology and some other point in the derivation

Such interactions are obviously hard to state in theories which reject the notion of derivation. There are not many of them in English, making them easy to ignore for non-derivational theories.

•  R inserted between vowels (in Southern varieties) in sentences connected in sense, as in “I went to Australia R and I fed a kangaroo”, but not otherwise as in “I went to Australia. And you still owe me that money” (exclusive to English varieties of English);
• D assimilating to a following M in good morning as GOOB MORNING in every day speech;
• T or D assimilating to a following R in try and dry and R assimilating to the preceding T in try by what is known as ‘coalescence’.

Derivation as steps in the building of phonemes

In the framework here, every spoken word in every language is by a sequence of steps, assembling the different constituents or building blocks of every phoneme. Paradoxically, the ‘simplest’ phonemes are built by the most complex derivations with relatively large numbers of steps taken by default. In English the building blocks include:

• Stops, ‘voiced’ in B, D, G with the lips, tongue tip, and back of the tongue, and ‘voiceless’ in P, T, K;
• Vowels, or ‘syllabic nuclei’ – short in him, hem, ham, hum, hod, hood, the long vowels in he, hark, hawk, who, ‘diphthongs’ with with the tongue moving in the ‘vowel space’ in hay, high, hoy, hoe, how, the vowel known as ‘schwa’ at the beginning and end of agenda, a long equivalent in her and fur, and the combinations of a long vowel or diphthong with schwa in our, ire, coir, truer, all (significantly) written with an R;
• One complex consonant by the release of a ‘stop’ by a complete closure of the airstream in an ‘affricate’, in chew, jew, itch, edge, church and judge;
• Some unstressed syllabic nuclei with just a consonant in the underlying forms in little and middle;
• Word stress with one primary stress on the left branch of the ‘foot’ in ladder, in the left branch of the rightmost foot in belladonna, and discounting one rime with a short nucleus on the right edge, as in hippopotamus.

Although, by comparison with most other languages, English has a very complex vowel system and an only averagely complex consonant system, there are far more developmental problems with respect to the latter than with respect to the former. It is worth asking why this might be so. By the proposal here, even an average consonant system is intrinsically more complex than a complex vowel system. It would seem possible that this may be due to the greater complexity in the derivation of consonants from their original formation in the evolution of human speech.

In 1968 Chomsky and Halle published the Sound Pattern of English, giving prominence to a featural analysis of the sound structure of the language, with key aspects of this analysis by derivation.

in 1669, 300 years earlier, William Holder proposed a first vcrsion of this  featural and derivational approach, motivated mainly by speech pathology.

By the hypothesis here, all aspects of phonemic structure are by derivation from primitive features.

Length

In many languages, phonemes can be doubled in length, with the difference in length alone enough to change one word into another. This is the case in Arabic, Finnish, Cypriot Greek, and many other languages. But not in English. At least in modern English, there are no long consonants, although there may have been once upon a time, as suggested by the spelling of hammer and rudder.

There are instances in English where a phoneme is repeated at the end of one word or bit of a word and at the beginning of the next, as in non-native and soulless, with both native and soul existing independently as separate words. So long consonants can be pronounced, but not as part of a single word.

There are more potentially confusing miscues for the learner . Length can be deceptive. Most of the difference between hit and hid is signalled by the length of the vowel. The nominally short vowel in hid can be almost as long as the long vowel in heed. The identity of the consonant depends on the length of the vowel before it. Different tokens of one sound may vary enough from one context to another to count as different phonemes in one language and the same phoneme in another language.

Some children wrongly conclude that in English there are long consonants, with the effect that they say finger with a NN in the middle and the F replaced by a T or a D, with the effect that the word sounds like TINNA or DINNA, where the N is perceptibly doubled.

The differentiation here betwceen long and short consonants has to take place in the mind of the learner.

Sequence

As noted by Alexander Melville Bell, in everyday spoken English “You should have done that” is often pronounced with two of the vowels unpronounced as “You SH D V done that.” There are words like wished, watched, and bridged, but these have a root in wish, watch, and bridge, and a form related to ED defining a time scale in the past. But no word in English contains the sequence SH D V.

The vowels in should and have can be left unpronounced because of their special status as ‘auxiliary verbs’ in traditional theories of grammar, supplanted by the framework here (largely due to the work of Chomsky).

The learner of English has to set aside the potentially misleading evidence of “You SH D V done that.”

Complexity

English has just one sort of complex phoneme, what are known as affricates, at the beginnings and ends of church and George. Affricates begin with a complete closure of the air-stream, and end with a mere obstruction. At the beginning of the syllable, affricates only occur on their own before the vowel.

Some children find affricates hard to hear or say. But the issue for such children may be by a misanalysis . They may be hearing these phonemes as two phonemes one after the other, in the case of chair, for instance, as a T followed by a SH.

Many languages have phonemes more complex than those of English, The learner has to learn that uncommon sequences and the effect of unpronouneced vowels are not instances of complexity.

In the case of words lke string, glimpse, and next with three adjacent consonantal elements before and after the vowel, there is a significant commonality between S and T in the fact that both are articulated with the tongue tip. In glimpse and next, the edgemost S is attached last, initially as a single positive value of continuance, and the final T in next as an abstract consonant, pronounced as T by default rules in the course of the derivation.

Constraint based theories

By theories which categorise themselves as ‘constraint based’, there is no such things as derivation. The input is continually re-evaluated according to a set of universal constraints. By such theories, the phonology and phonotactics of a language either allow or disallow particular formations. One such formation is the doubling of consonants. In all probability, doubling was allowed in historic forms of English, as suggested by the spellings of hammer and rudder, both seemingly two syllable root forms. There is a doubling of the N in modern unnerving. But here the N of the negative un– is stuck on the left edge of the nonexistent root ‘nerving‘. By constraint based theories, modern English blocks doubled consonants within the root, while a older variety of the language had no such constraint. with all the phenomena listed here which are never exampled in the learner’s experience.

Modern English disallows GN and KN at the beginning of a syllable, but these were previously allowed as shown by the spellings of knot and gnome, as they are still allowed in German and Dutch. Here a constraint has developed blocking clusters formed by two stops, a nasal preceded by a non-nasal.

But to some, including me, constraint systems are unlearnable in principle (despite the vigorous protestations of constraint theorists). And they could not have naturally evolved. There is an infinite regress between the constraint and what is being constrained.

By the framework and proposal here, learnability can only be stated with respect to what is allowed, not what is disallowed.

On such reasoning, it does not need to be specified in the grammar of Southern British English pronunciations that there are no root forms beginning with the sound at the end of ring and song. Rather the learner is forced to conclude, by the complete absence of any root forms beginning with the NG sound, that where these forms do occur they have to be derived from two elements, one defining the airflow through the nose, the second defining the action of the back of the tongue and the soft palate, with a single sound in the final pronunciation.

By contrast, in Northern British English varieties, there are many different configurations with the G pronounced in some varieties, and not pronounced in other varieties.