English Segmental Phonology

English Segmental Phonology

In general there are different characteristics which are going to help to understand the phonology. Phonology is one of branches of linguistics which concerns about system in a particular language and they are related to phoneme, phonemic and allophone.
Phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language, usually demonstrated by the minimal pair such as “pin” and “bin” which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. However, sometime it is not possible to demonstrate the minimal pair which supports the contrastiveness of two phonemes, so it is necessary to resource to examples of contrast in analogous environment. Moreover each language has its own phonemic system; on it learners practiced division of generative words into phonemic families and creation of new words. In addition to this phonemes are divided in two: segmental “consonants and vowels” and suprasegmental “stress, intonation (melody of the language) and duration” Where we can find twenty four consonants p, t, k, b, d, g, f, v, ө, đ s, z, s, z, h, c, J, m, n, η, l, r, w, y as well fourteen American vowels iy, I, ey, æ, ә, ε, Λ, Ә, З~,uw, υ, ow, ):, a. Another characteristic is the allophone, sounds that are merely phonetic variant of the same phoneme for example: [p] and [pH] are allophones of the phoneme /p/.[t] and [tH] are allophones of the phoneme /t/.
At the end, the minimal meaningful sounds, the phonemes and phonology are concerned about sounds alternate, as well as issues syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. One example of what a phonologist might study 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.