Linguistics | Phonology | Definition and Functions

Phonology

 

Definition:

Phonology is the study of the sound system of a language, its internal structure and its composition from smaller units such as features and phonemes and into larger units such as syllables, words and Phrases and also how speech sounds function in languages.

Phonology study:

Phonology is the studies of function of speech sounds and the structure in a language. It is the studies of the distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a language. That is to say the ways in which speech sounds form systems and patterns. 

Phonology is the description of the sound system and sound patterns in a language. It is about the different patterns of sounds in different positions in different linguistic units within each language, or within different languages. 

Phonology also involves studying a language to determine its distinctive sounds, etc. That is, those sounds that transmitting a difference in meaning.

Phonology describes speech systems for particular languages and shows how sounds may change based on other sounds in same environment. 

Phonology head to be more abstract, dealing not directly with the physical nature of speech sounds, but rather with the largely unconscious tacit rules for sound patterning that are found in the mind/brain of a native speaker, and which govern human sound production and understanding. To ’know’ the phonological structure of the language means to know the sounds of the language and their principles of organization, the patterns they enter into.

The notion of phone/speech sound is a primitive notion in phonemic analysis. A phonologist starts phonemic analysis by noting the phones of a language. It is after the analysis is complete that we get to know about a phone being a contrastive unit (i.e. phoneme) or a variant of another contrastive unit (i.e. allophone).

 At the pre-analytical stage, all segmental speech sounds are phones. However, not all phones/ sounds within a language have the same status. Thus, a phone is the name of a sound while a phoneme is the name of the underlying notion in the speaker’s brain. 

Some phones are phonemes; others are allophones of a phoneme. The situations as a phoneme are a language specific matter. Phonemes are defined with a particular language sound system.