Chapter 2  Phonology

Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:

1. Voicing is a phonological feature that distinguishes meaning in both Chinese and English.

2. If two phonetically similar sounds occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are said to be in complementary distribution.

3. A phone is a phonetic unit that distinguishes meaning.

4. English is a tone language while Chinese is not.

5. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.

6. In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed.

7. Articulatory phonetics tries to describe the physical properties of the stream of sounds which a speaker issues with the help of a machine called spectrograph.

8. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important areas: the throat, the mouth and the chest.

9. Vibration of the vocal cords results in a quality of speech sounds called voicing.

10. English consonants can be classified in terms of place of articulation and the part of the tongue that is raised the highest.

11. According to the manner of articulation, some of the types into which the consonants can be classified are stops, fricatives, bilabial and alveolar.

12. Vowel sounds can be differentiated by a number of factors: the position of tongue in the mouth, the openness of the mouth, the shape of the lips, and the length of the vowels.

13. According to the shape of the lips, vowels can be classified into close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels and open vowels.

14. Any sound produced by a human being is a phoneme.

15. Phones are the sounds that can distinguish meaning.

16. Phonology is concerned with how the sounds can be classified into different categories.

17. A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of meaning.

18. When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a phonemic contrast.  

19. The rules governing the phonological patterning are language specific.  

20. Distinctive features of sound segments can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments.

Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:

21. A_______ refers to a strong puff of air stream in the production of speech sounds.

22. A_______ phonetics describes the way our speech organs work to produce the speech sounds and how they differ.

23. The four sounds /p/, /b/, /m/ and /w/ have one feature in common, i.e., they are all b_______ sounds.

24. Of all the speech organs, the t_______ is the most flexible, and is responsible for varieties of articulation than any other.

25. English consonants can be classified in terms of manner of articulation or in terms of p_______ of articulation.

26. When the obstruction created by the speech organs is total or complete, the speech sound produced with the obstruction audibly released and the air passing out again is called a s________.

27. S_________ features are the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments. They include stress, tone, intonation, etc.

28. The rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language are called s_______ rules.

29. The transcription of speech sounds with letter-symbols only is called broad transcription while the transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics is called n_________ transcription.

30. When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as i_________.

31. P___________ is a discipline which studies the system of sounds of a particular language and how sounds are combined into meaningful units to effect linguistic communication.

32. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important cavities: the pharyngeal cavity, the o_______ cavity and the nasal cavity.

33. T_______ are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords and which can distinguish meaning just like phonemes.

34. Depending on the context in which stress is considered, there are two kinds of stress: word stress and s_________ stress.