Phonology: Built on Anatomy and Systematic Rules

The Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz readings laid out a foundation for understanding the speech production process, both in terms of anatomy and in terms of the curious systematic rules that seem to govern the way humans create and interpret sounds. While Gussenhoven concentrates on the anatomy of the organs of speech and how certain sounds are generated and articulated from a biological perspective, Kenstowicz explores a more granular view of “collective phonetic illusions” through examples of the rules which change the way we think about sound. 

After reading Gussenhoven, it is clear why an understanding of the actual speech production process can lead us to an understanding of how we categorize sounds, and even an understanding of how sounds can change when used in combination. Gussenhoven leads his readers on an exploration of the lungs, the larynx, and the vocal tract (the pharynx, mouth, and nasal cavity), detailing how each of these body parts uniquely contributes to the production of speech sounds. These operations can be understood through the lens of no language in particular—the phonetic symbols used for sound interpretation stand for specific speech sounds, regardless of language. Gussenhoven gives several interesting examples of why air pressure differences are essential for speech production, including different types of phonation such as whispering, breathy voices, and creaky voices. In particular, I found it fascinating that most languages have only pulmonic (produced with the help of lungs) and egressive (using the exhalation phase) sounds—I wonder whether we can push further on this insight to find how languages using non-pulmonic and non-egressive sounds first acquired those sounds. 

Meanwhile, Kenstowicz takes a different approach to understanding phonology—not through anatomy, but by the rules governing sounds. These systematic rules, he asserts, change and modify sounds based on their context. For instance, one interesting insight is that when we pronounce “tents,” there is actually no consonant that appears between the [n] and [s] sounds! While we would perceive “tents” and “tends” to be distinct words depending on the context of our conversations, this revelation tells us that there is much more to phonology than we would consciously notice. An example that Kenstowicz draws us back to throughout the reading is the coronal stop [t]—an example that we also explored in class this week. The sound has many different variations, a concept that we can think of as “allophones” which are produced through the systematic rules mentioned earlier. I found this system to be especially interesting in the light of competing rules—if two rules are competing for the same input, the rule that applies in a more specific context “wins.” We usually don’t think of language and the sounds we produce in this way, which seems organized and structured by very specific rules that we might not even intentionally follow. For English speakers, it takes deliberate phonetic training to even recognize that, for words like take and stake, the [t] sounds are different.