Studying Sound

Abstract

Most introductory books on linguistics will have a section on the sound structure, or phonology, of English, which will aim to tell you how sounds are formed and what the principal symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet are. At some point you will need to come to grips with this alphabet and learn to use its symbols confidently, but it’s probably a mistake to begin studying phonology by trying to acquire what can seem rather dry and difficult information, rather like learning to play a musical instrument by memorising scales. We need to have a sense of what the instrument is able to do first. Similarly with the human voice, which is a form of instrument: it’s important to understand its significance in a more general sense before tackling some of the technical ways in which we can describe its linguistic properties. I suggest we start, then, by using the method we began with in Chapter 2, that is, by defamiliarising the subject we are considering. Let’s start with sound.