SOUND ALTERNATIONS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 519.

In the previous section we saw how the pronunciation of speech sounds can vary according to their position in the word, and that the variation is usually quite regular and can be stated in the form of "rules" which predict the variants or allophones, that will occur in each position. In this section we shall look at varia­tion of a different kind, involving not only interchange between sounds, but also between related phonemes. We shall now touch upon the sound variations in words, their derivatives and gram­matical forms of words. These variations are known as sound al­ternations. It is perfectly obvious that sound alternations are caused by assimilation, accommodation and reduction in speech. Alternations of consonants are mainly due to contextual assimila­tions: the dark [ł] in spell alternates with the clear [l] in spelling. Vowel alternations are the result of the reduction in unstressed

positions: combine I'kɒmbaın] (n) — combine [kəm'baın] (v) where [ɔ] in the stressed syllable of the noun alternates with the neutral sound in the unstressed syllable of the verb. In Russian alternation may be illustrated by the following pair of words: роса [рʌса] — росы [росы]. The [ʌ] sound in the unstressed syllable of the word роса alternates with the [o] sound in the stressed syllable of the plural form росы. To approach the matter from the phonological viewpoint it is important to differentiate phonemic and allophonic alternations. Some sound alternations are traced to the phonetic changes in earlier periods of the language development and are known as historical.

In this section we are concerned with typical, well-docu­mented sound changes. A thousand years ago, the English spoke a language which was the direct ancestor of the English we speak today. Yet this language which we call Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is not intelligible to present-day speakers in the written forms in which it has been handed down to us, nor would it be intelligible, if it were spoken: it has to be learned as if it were a foreign language. There are many reasons for this: there have been changes in the vocabulary, and changes in the grammar, but the primary reason for the differences between Old and Modern English is the sound changes which have taken place over the intervening period. Sound changes occur gradual­ly; the time scale for significant changes is usually measured in hundreds of years, rather than decades. The English spoken in the 1930s sounds old-fashioned, but the changes are in details only. For two stages of "the same" language to resemble different languages require a much longer period. English speakers need assistance in reading Chaucer (fourteenth century), just as Greeks today study the Classical Greek of the fifth century ВС as if it were a foreign language. Historical alternations distinguish grammatical forms of words and lexical units in the process of word-building, e.g. provide — provision (provide was at one time pronounced with [i:]). The [i:] was converted to [aı] by complex rules of diphthongization and vowel shift. These changes, it should he noted, reflect actual changes in the history of English. Here is another example: the OE [k] phoneme split into two se­parate phonemes, modern [k] and [ʧl. Thus alongside cat, cool, from the OE catt, col, we have choose, chin from OE cēosan, cinn. Minimal pairs such as kin — chin; care — chair establish that Modem English has the two sounds as separate phonemes.

The alternations exemplified above are quite regular. Histori­cal alternations mark both vowels and consonants, though the alternating sounds are not affected by the phonetic position or context, neither are they subjected to stylistic modifications. To sum up, the sound changes which occurred in the process of his­torical development of the English language are reflected in present-day English as alternations of phonemes differentiating words, their derivatives and grammatical forms. We are going to introduce here phonetic realizations of the most common histori­cal alternations and their functions in word building and word formation. The alternations are often supported by suffixation. The following list of examples presents the most common types of alternations.