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This document discusses words in spoken and written language. It defines phonological words as word-forms in spoken language. Unlike written words which are separated by spaces, phonological words flow together in speech without pauses between them. However, listeners can still recognize the individual words. The document goes on to distinguish between content words like nouns and verbs, which convey most of a sentence's meaning, and function words like prepositions and pronouns, which have a mainly grammatical role. Content words are characterized by having one syllable with main stress.

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50 views

1

This document discusses words in spoken and written language. It defines phonological words as word-forms in spoken language. Unlike written words which are separated by spaces, phonological words flow together in speech without pauses between them. However, listeners can still recognize the individual words. The document goes on to distinguish between content words like nouns and verbs, which convey most of a sentence's meaning, and function words like prepositions and pronouns, which have a mainly grammatical role. Content words are characterized by having one syllable with main stress.

Uploaded by

Khan Khan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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English words 9

So far we have only considered orthographic words, i.e. recognisable physical written word -forms.
Obviously, words as physical objects exist not only in writing, but also in speech. We will now briefly
turn to word-forms in spoken language. We will refer to them as PHONOLOGICAL WORDS.

The challenge of word recognition arises in an even more obvious way when we consider speech.
Words are not separated distinctly from each other. We do not leave a pause between words that
could be equated to a space in writing. (If we did that, conversation would be painfully slow! Just try
speaking to one of your friends today leaving a two-second gap between words. See how they
react.) In normal speech words come out in a torrent. They overlap. Just as droplets of water cannot
be seen flowing down a river, individual words do not stand out discretely in the flow of
conversation. So they are much harder to isolate than words in writing. None the less, we are able to
isolate them. If you heard an utterance like:

[2.4]

The cat slept in your bed. /ekæt slept In: bed/

(Note: *** shows that the following syllable is stressed; phonemic transcription is written between
slant lines.)

You would be able to recognise the six phonological words that have been written in PHONEMIC
TRANSCRIPTION (which shows the PHONEMES. i.e. the sounds that are used to distinguish the
meanings of words) although what you hear is one continuous stream of sound. For purely practical
reasons, throughout the book, unless otherwise stated, phonemic transcriptions and references to
pronunciation will be based on RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP), the prestige accent of standard
British English-the variety popularly known as the Queen’s English or BBC English.

An intriguing question that linguists and psychologists have tried to answer is: how do people
recognise words in speech? We will address this question in detail in section (11.2.1) below. For now
let us simply assume that phonological words can be identified. Our present task will simp ly be to
outline some of their key properties. To do this it will be useful to distinguish between two types of
words: the so-called CONTENT WORDS and FUNCTION WORDS. Content words are the nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs which contain most of the REFERENTIAL (or COGNITIVE MEANING) of a
sentence. This roughly means that they name individuals and predicate of them certain properties.
They tell us, for instance, what happened or who did what to whom, and in what circumstances. An
example will make the point clear. In the old days, when people sent telegrams, it was content
words that were mainly (or exclusively) used. A proud parent could send a message like Baby girl
arrived yesterday which contained two nouns, a verb and an adverb. Obviously, this is not a well-
formed, grammatical sentence. But its meaning would be clear enough.

Function words are the rest-prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles and so on. They have a
predominantly grammatical role. A telegram containing only the words She it and for us would
convey little idea of what the intended interpretation was. This is not to say that function words are
superfluous. Without them sentences are usually ungrammatical. A sentence like *Nelly went town
which lacks the preposition to is not permitted. We have to say Nelly went to town. In English,
content words have this property: one of their syllables is more prominent than the rest

Because it receives MAIN STRESS. This is seen in the words below where the syllable with main
stress is

Preceded by **:

[2.5]

Initial stress Medial stress Final stress

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