2. Phonological System

This part is the sub topic of Theoretical Framework in Chapter II Theoretical Approach and Framework of the research entitled "A Comparative study between Mandarin and English phonological System".


a) Phonology & Phonetics
Phonology is the study of sound systems and abstract sound units such as phonemes and distinctive features. In phonology, there is a subfield of segmental phonology. It deals with the analysis of speech into phonemes (or segmental phonemes), which correspond fairly well to phonetic segments of the analyzed speech. (“Segments”, 2007: par. 4).
Fromkin and friends (1990: 64) state that Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of human language; it is also the kind of knowledge that speaker has about the sound patterns of their particular language. According to Hyman (1975: 2), Phonology has been defined as the study of sound systems, that is, the study of speech sounds structure and function in languages.
According to Fromkin and friends, Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that are utilized by all human language to represent meanings (1990: 27). Another source states that Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), and their production, audition and perception (“Segments”, 2007: par. 6).
According to Hyman, a phonetic study tells how the sounds of a language are made and what their acoustic properties are. A phonological study tells how these sounds are used to convey meaning (1975: 2).

Phonetics has three main branches:
1) articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech;

2) acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear; and

3) auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input which is received.

There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech such as tooth-gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extended IPA is commonly used.(International Phonetic Alphabet, 2008: par. 1)

b) Phoneme
It is known that phoneme is the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning. Phonemic is a transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a language. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is described as phonemically meaningful. Besides, a transcription that indicates more detail, such as allophonic variation is called phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ]. (“Phoneme”, 2008: par. 1)
Fries states that phonemes are not a letter although sometimes a letter of alphabet may represent a phoneme, as the p in pin, but a phoneme is never a letter; it is a unit of sound. Hanzi Chinese does not have alphabetical letter, yet it has phonemes. (1957: 9). Phoneme is different from letter; the letter p in telegraph does not represent the phoneme /p/ there.
According to Fromkin and friends (1990: 66), the first rule to determine the phonemes of any language is when two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in the string is called minimal pair. Another source states that phonemes could be assigned if two sounds which are phonetically similar occur in the same phonetic environment, and if the substitution of one sound for the other results in a difference meaning (Hyman, 1975: 60). For examples of minimal pairs are sip and zip; man and can; run and fun; those words are minimal pairs.

c) Allophone
In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme; speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a single distinctive sound in that language. Thus an allophone is a phone considered as a member of one phoneme (“Allophone”, 2007: par.1). For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they occur in complementary distribution. English speakers generally treat these as the same sound, but they are different; the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain). Plain [p] also occurs as the p in cap [kæp], or the second p in paper [pʰeɪ.pɚ]. In contexts where plain p appears in English like spin, cap, paper, speakers may hear it as b since the p in these contexts lacks the burst of air found with the “p” in pin.

d) Suprasegmental Phoneme or Prosody.
In phonetics, segment is used primarily “to refer to any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech”. (“Segment”, 2007: par.1). So that, segment is a phonetic alphabet which represents individual speech sound. Besides, suprasegmental phoneme is acoustic properties of speech that cannot be predicted from a local window on the orthographic (or similar) transcription. (“Prosody”, 2007: par.1). These properties are pitch, length, and stress. In this research, the researcher only focuses on pitch (tone).

A speaker in all language has an ability to control the pitch of his voice including when a speaker is speaking. There are two kinds of controlled pitch movement; it is high-voice pitch and low-voice pitch. These movements are known in human language as tone.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, contrast, emotion, or other such atmospheres, but not every language uses tone to distinguish lexical meaning (“Tone”, 2007: par.1). According to the explanation about tone, it is very closely related to the pitch, or frequency of the voice. According to Laver in Man Gao, there are two types of tone system: word-based tone system and syllable-based tone system. Some languages -such as English- use word-based tone system whose pitch is associated with the entire word. But Mandarin Language uses syllable-based tone system whose pitch is associated with the syllable (2002: 6-7).

Tone Language is a language that uses pitch of individual syllables to contrast meanings (Hyman, 1975: 85). Tonal language has two broad categories: Register tone systems and contour tone systems. Register tone systems is tones that signal meaning differences. But in some languages, tones change pitch on single syllables. Moving pitches that signal meaning differences are called contour tone system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other Topics of research are here.