Ahmed Qadoury Abed Ph D Candidate Baghdad University College of Arts English Dept 2012/2013

1. Language and Sounds
 The two terms ‘language’ and ‘sound’
are so common in introductory
textbooks about language and
linguistics and wherever there is a
need to talk about communication.
Both terms can raise the need to think
of such following general questions:
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2. General Questions
 What is ‘language’?
 What is ‘sound’?
 What is the relationship between language and sounds?
 Can any sound be part of a language?
 Do sounds work separately or together? If Yes/No, how can
this be done?
 Do we have non-verbal languages (languages with no
sounds)?
 What about animals? Can we consider their crying,
singing, and dancing a language?
 How are human sounds produced / analyzed?
 And there are more!
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3. Selected Definitions of
Language
 In a comprehensive view on these
definitions of ‘language’ presented by
Lyons (1981:3-8) and Gimson
(1970:3), it is so evident that language
is a means of communication:
 Sapir
 Bloch & Trager
 Hall
 Gimson
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4. Sapir’s Definition
 According to Sapir (1921:8):
“Language is a purely human and
non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols”(Cited in
Lyons,ibid.:3).
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5. Bloch & Trager
 Bloch & Trager (1942:5) wrote: “A
language is a system of arbitrary
vocal symbols by means of which a
social group co-operates” Cited in
Lyons,ibid.:4).
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6. Hall’s Definition
 Hall (1968:158) states that language is
“the institution whereby human
communicate and interact with each
other by means of habitually used
oral-auditory arbitrary symbols”
(Cited in Lyons ,ibid.).
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7. Gimson’s Definition
 Gimson states that “a language is a
system of conventional signals used
for communication by a whole
community”.
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8. The Actual Purpose of
language
 In spite of their references and defects,
these definitions reflect more than one fact
about the actual purpose of language:
1- a method of communication,
2- a system of arbitrary vocal symbols,
3- the institution, and
4- a system of signals
 all can reflect that language is an organized
entity of symbols.
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9. Basic Features of these
symbols
 These symbols or signals are used to
1- interact, 2- communicate, 3-co-operate
The other point is being
1- vocal, 2-oral, 3- auditory.
Also , these definitions contain certain words or
phrases , like
1- ‘human’, 2- ‘arbitrary’ ,and 3- ‘habitually used’,
which all indicate that those scholars believe in
specifying the term ‘language ‘ for humans , not for
other means of communication whether these are
related to animals or artificial.
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10. Lyons’ Point of View
 This opinion is fully clear in Lyons’ analysis
and discussion of these definitions stating
that the word ‘language’ is recently used
‘metaphorically’ (p.4),since we have
nowadays :
- body language,
- face language ,
- programming language,
etc.
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11. The meaningful nature of
these symbols
 Another issue in these definitions is the use of
‘symbols’ to mean sounds. Thus, sounds are vocal,
oral, or auditory, but meaningful .This means that
there are meaningless and meaningful sounds.
 For a recently –born baby, sounds articulated by his
parents, brothers and sisters, and relatives are
meaningless, but may be with social function.
 For adults, like Iraqis, we laugh when we hear
Chinese or Japanese, to the extent that both are
identical, and imitating them will bring fun.
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12. Basic Questions &
Phoneticians
Therefore,
 what is a sound?
 And how are these meaningful sounds be
realized?
 Who said this?
These three questions were answered by
those people who spent efforts in analyzing
sounds into meaningful and meaningless.
They are called phoneticians. Simply, they
are people, worked and still working on
recording, analyzing , and then classifying
these sounds into categories or types.
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13. Diachronic and Synchronic
This importance of studying sounds is
both diachronic and synchronic
since “the natural or primary medium
for human language is sound”
(Lyons,1981:66).
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14. Sound is the primary medium
of human language
For this reason, the study of sound is of more central
importance in linguistics than is the study of writing,
of gestures, or of any other language –medium
whether actual or potential.
But it is not sound as such, and not the full range of
sounds, that is of concern to the linguist or
phoneticians.
He is interested in the sounds that are produced by the
human speech-organs in so far as these sounds have
a role in language. Let us refer to this limited range of
sounds as the phonic medium and to individual
sounds within that range as speech-sounds
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15. The Nature of Sound
 A speech sound is one of the individual sounds
produced in sequence during speech. When we
speak, the several speech organs are all in constant
motion: the lips, the jaw, the velum, the glottis and
the several parts of the tongue are all moving about
at their own pace, with only the occasional moment
of motionlessness. Nevertheless, we hear the result
as a linear sequence of individual sounds, each
following the last, and each having its own
distinguishing characteristics. Each one of these
perceived sounds is a speech sound. And yet the
individual sound is not, properly considered, an
element of speech at all, for speech is a significant
function and the sound as such has no significance.
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16. Single Sound but meaningful
 It happens occasionally that the single
sound is an independently significant
element (such as French a “has” of the verb
‘avoir’).
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17. The Physical nature of sound
 According to Finch(1998:49), “sound exists only
when it is going out of existence… Sound is
ephemeral, it seems to lack substance. After all, in
physical terms speech sounds merely consist of
breath”.
 Sounds are produced by a stream of air which comes
from the lungs and passes through the vocal cords
into the mouth and nasal cavities. The noises we
make come from deep inside us and will vary in pitch
and volume according to the way in which we
manipulate the air with our lips, tongues, and other
vocal organs ( or articulator).
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18. Articulators
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19. The Musical Nature of Sound
 With speaking, as in playing an
instrument, we have to learn to
synchronise a number of different
activities to produce a smooth
sequence. In this sense, speaking is
like following a score. Speaking, then,
is in some ways akin to singing. The
sounds we produce are notes. And,
as with music, rhythm, tempo, and
pitch are all important in speech
production.
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20. The Conceptual Nature of
Sound
 The true, significant elements of language
are generally sequences of sounds that are
either words, significant parts of words, or
word groupings. What distinguishes each of
these elements is that it is the outward sign
of a specific idea, whether of a single
concept or image or of a number of such
concepts or images definitely connected
into a whole. The single word may or may
not be the simplest significant element we
have to deal with (Sapir,1921: 5ff).
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21. Human language and animal
communication
 Again, what about animals?
 Do they have languages?
Majority of linguists agree that there should be a
kind of distinction between human languages and
animal communication. Crystal (2006: 9f) ,for
example, states that such difference in human
language and animal communication systems is due
to the existence of certain properties in human
languages ; properties that contribute to its flexibility
and versatility ,such as arbitrariness ,duality,
discreteness, productivity , etc. Sound change is also
considerable.
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22. Animal language
 Recently, and due to the vast scientific research, the
term ‘language’ is applied to bees dancing, animals
(like ants) walking in a queue, etc. Another
justification for this difference between animal and
human systems is presented by Gimson (1970:
42)where majority of animal sounds are produced in
isolation and without the meaningfulness imposed
by a linguistic system; therefore, they are no more
than phonetic terms. Animals produce sounds as a
reflex of certain basic stimuli to signal fear, hunger,
sexual excitement, and the like (p.7).
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23. Difficulties of the Phonetic
Approach
 Gimson goes further to state that any
phonetic approach to the sounds of
language encounters considerable
difficulties:
 firstly, the identification and
delimitation of the sound unit ( or
segment) to be described , and
 secondly, the way in which different
sounds are treated as if they were the
same.
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24. Stages of sound production
 As far as sound production and analysis, all
books of phonetics state that there are three
stages (see Ladefoged,2006):
 Speech production (studied by articulatory
phonetics)
 Speech transmission (studied by acoustic
phonetics)
 Speech perception ( studied by auditory
phonetics)
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25. Dealing with an unknown
language
 According to O’Connor (1973), in dealing with an
unknown language:
 one has to approach the drawing up of a phoneme
inventory in this way,
- considering the sounds,
- looking at their distribution ,
- finding out whether they can make differences of
meaning or not,
- and then grouping them together as representing the
same phoneme.
 At best it is a hazardous and difficult operation. In
one’s own language it is much easier to proceed
from larger to smaller units – to start with whole
utterances and break them down by comparison into
smaller and smaller elements until finally you arrive
at something which cannot be broken any further,
and this is the phoneme. 25

26. Phonetician’s difficult task in
describing sounds
 O’Connor himself states the difficult task of
phoneticians in describing and classifying
phonemes: “complete description is beyond
our powers since it would mean mentioning
an infinite number of features”(p.125). In
classifying sounds, “all we need to do is to
mention those features by which they differ
and leave it at that”(p.126).
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27. Different aspects in specifying
sounds
Different aspects are mentioned to be important in
specifying sounds ( Gimson,ibid.:53):
 The source of air movement (lung air ,pharynx air,
mouth air)
 Direction of air movement ( ingressive or egressive)
 Amount of air pressure (fortis or lenis)
 Vocal-cord action (voiced, voiceless)
 State of soft palate (velic closure / opening)
 Place of interference (glottal…bilabial)
 Manner of interference (plosive …lateral)
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28. Sound Differences
 Speech sounds can differ from one
another in three ways:
1- stress
2- pitch
3- quality
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29. Sound Quality
 Sound quality is related to two factors: sound
spectral pattern and the actions of the vocal organs
produced the sound. O’Connor (ibid.:103) states an
example of this by comparing two pronunciation of
the word see concluding that no similarity in sound
production even in two people either for articulators
or acoustic reasons ( like differences in size and
shape of individual’s vocal cavities, structure of
vocal cords ,and air –flow characteristics). The
important point here is that your pronunciation of
these sounds is your individual voice quality, a
tendency common among us in identifying certain
social, cultural, demographic features.
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30. Factors influencing sound
understanding and recognition
 Furthermore, understanding and
recognizing the message delivered by the
sound or sound sequence is influenced by
other factors: prosodic such as
 1-stress,
 2-pitch,
 3-intonation,
 4-rhythm,
 5- voice quality,
 6- loudness, etc.,
and paralinguistic, such as context of
situation.
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