Phonemic And Phonetic Transcription, Spectrograms, And Phoneme Distribution In Languages X And Y

1. Broad transcription 

• Provide a phonemic (broad) transcription of the English passage below, to reflect its phonemic realisation in an English variety of your choice.
• Type the name of your chosen variety of English in the space provided below.
  • If your chosen variety of English is (standard) Australian English, use only the Harrington-Cox-Evans (HCE) transcription system.
• Include primary and secondary stress markers where relevant.
• Enclose your answer using the convention for phonemic transcription.
• Ignore sentence punctuation if you wish.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

2.  Narrow transcription 

• Provide a phonetic (narrow) transcription of the English passage below, to reflect its phonetic realisation in an English variety of your choice.
• Type the name of your chosen variety of English in the space provided below.
  • Deviate as required from any established transcription conventions for this variety of English, to reflect finer details of the pronunciation.
    • Finer details include aspiration, un-releasing, devoicing, vowel nasalisation and any other relevant allophonic realisations.
    • This might require you to disregard word boundaries in places.
  • Include primary and secondary stress where appropriate.
    • Do not include metrical feet and heads, though.
  • Overall, ensure that your transcription is phonologically justifiable.
• Enclose your answer using the convention for phonetic transcription.
• Ignore sentence punctuation.

I came from a real tough neighbourhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn’t a professional, ’cos the knife had butter on it.

3. Spectrograms 

Below are three spectrograms of the English words tiger, buffalo and donkey.

• Identify which spectrogram represents which word.
• In each case, explain how you decided on your answer. You could do this by using one or more of the following methods:
  • drawing arrows pointing to relevant sections of the spectrogram, with explanations at the base of the arrow.
  • labelling sections of the spectrogram and cross-referencing them in your answer paragraph.
  • any other way you think convenient.
• Give as much detail as you’d like, as long as it’s relevant to the answer.
• Ensure that your answers are neat and – especially in this case – legible!

Consider the following data:

            [?tapli?]             ‘two’                            [?aθi?ha??a?]      ‘he laughed’

            [?d???eθe]         ‘he shot it’                  [tad???be]         ‘to drink’                   

            [tag??e]            ‘to sow’                       [?θese]            ‘nose’

            [?θie]               ‘we’                             [?tari?]              ‘bad’               

            [?θi??i]            ‘to run’                       [ta??du]           ‘to sleep’                    

On this basis, write out using formal notation the most economical possible rule that accounts for the distribution of the phones [t] and [θ].

• In your answer, you may EITHER use features, OR use a brief verbal explanation to describe the alternation environment, as shown in the following example (unrelated to the data):

                        [?] à [h] word-finally                      OR                   [+cons][+low][-cont] à [+cont] / ___#

• If you wish, include any relevant additional remarks in your answer.

Consider the following data:

On this basis, write out using formal notation the most economical possible rule that accounts for the distribution of the phones [?] and [l].

What kind of distribution are [?] and [l] in?

• In your answer, you may EITHER use features, OR use a brief verbal explanation to describe the alternation environment, as shown in the following example (unrelated to the data):

                  [?] à [h] word-finally                       OR                   [+cons][+low][-cont] à [+cont] / ___#

• If you wish, include any relevant additional remarks in your answer.

Phonemic transcription: Broad and narrow transcription

Phonemic transcription is a description of sounds used in a language; it clearly states the differences of phonemes in a sentence basing on closely related letters, this brings an effect to the subject during pronunciation, a sentence can have an actual speech sound, but the alphabets used represents different phonemes and allophones, therefore, changing the meaning. On the other hand, phonetic transcription captures more phonetic details when pronouncing a statement; this is by using larger phonetic symbols to state out the phonemes variables clearly. Phonetic symbols are characters used to represent specific speech sounds in a sentence. 

In the passage, the use of phonemes in the repeated words depict different meanings corresponding to the words themselves; there is the use of Australian English. With the use of a repetitive word such as; "times" with the reference of different aspects of the word, the stress on this word (times) can be compared to the stress on this word (times’). With the variables on the sound of on each phoneme, it states out the difference in meaning of each phrase, though the words seem to be alike, the sound emphasis depicted gives out a difference in meaning.

In Phonetic Narrow Transcription, one can identify the difference in the utterance of same words; this is because narrow transcription captures a lot of aspects that are based on the pronunciation of specific words (Cox 2017). In the passage given, there is a use of Canadian English in the phrase; this is evident due to the use of the abbreviated word (‘cos) standing for because. Phonologically, we base on the /oo/ as seen in the words neighborhood, in phonetic transcription, the pronunciation of the word is shown by /u/, the pronunciation never causes the change to the structure of the word nor the meaning, but only the sound changes.

A spectrogram is a visual representation of a signal; a sound is virtually displayed as frequencies and waves, this works by focusing on the pitch and the strength of the letters being pronounced. The harmonics of the sound waves are displayed on the analysis window which is then presented for further readings. The first spectrogram given is for the word donkey, the harmonics of the /d/ produces the strong waves, the /o/ perceives for a while giving the weak harmonics there after the /nk/ produces the utterance of the words determines a relatively high frequency, the frequencies on the window. The second spectrogram is for the word Tiger when pronouncing the word, the letter /t/ and /g/ produces strong frequencies, the vowels between then produces no waves on the spectrogram. The word Buffalo has a series of wave frequencies that is evident in the third spectrogram, the /b/ , //ff/ and /l/ are the main phonemes that are stressed, the utterance of this word (buffalo) produces three sections of frequencies due to the mention phonemes.

In the phones given, the rule of Contrastive distribution has been used, this applies because the allophone used appears as different during utterance (Yule 2016), for example, the phone ‘we’, /e/ phonologically is shown as [i] and we can see the difference in these phones, ‘sleep’ as the phones /ee/ is seen as [i]. By changing one element in a word, the morphological structure of the phoneme is changed, the phones [I] and [r] have different aspects regarding their morphological structure, and they cannot be used against each other therefore being referred to as different phonemes.

In these notations, there are pairs of phonemes that cannot be separated from the other; the same phones are different from their sound during an utterance. In words such as "height" the phones [gh] does not appear during an utterance, the two consonants correlate and cannot be separated as they will create another meaning. By changing the [p] in a phone to [b], the vowel that is next it will change the voice of the phoneme during pronunciation hence giving another irrelevant meaning. This brings us to the rule; equal distribution, whereby the consonant on the phonemes cannot be complemented or replaced by another phone whatsoever.

References.

Cox, F., & Fletcher, J. (2017). Australian English pronunciation and transcription. Cambridge University Press.

Yule, G. (2016). The study of languages. Cambridge University Press.