Phonology and Meanings

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Phonology and meanings. Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a vast area of language theory. At one extreme, phonology is concerned with anatomy and physiology - the organs of speech and how people learn to use them. At another extreme, phonology shades into socio-linguistics as it is considered as social attitudes to features of sound such as accent and intonation. And part of the subject is concerned with finding objective standard ways of recording speech, and representing this symbolically. For some kinds of study - perhaps a language investigation into the phonological development of young children or regional variations in accent, there is a need to use phonetic transcription to be credible. But this is not necessary in all kinds of study - in an exam, one may be concerned with stylistic effects of sound in advertising or literature, such assonance rhyme or onomatopoeia - and one might do not need to use special phonetic symbols to do this. To say that a language's phonology involves the operation of that language's phonetic resources within the framework of its morphology and syntax is virtually equal to saying that a language's phonological system cannot be identified with either it’s phonetic or morph syntactic system but rather mediates between those systems. This situation can be illustrated by a few English words: mopper, mop, slobber, pop. First, the plural suffix -s is pronounced differently in moppers and mops, like the z of booze in the former but like the s of moose in the latter. Moreover, these differences in pronunciation of the plural -s are not idiosyncratic facts about the words mopper and mop (as, for example, could be claimed for dice as the plural of die), but rather said as a persistent regularity of English. The z pronunciation of -s is the norm for nouns ending in a voiced sound--that is, a sound
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