34. Phonological rules for English plurals and more
There
are three rules for forming regular plurals
in English, exemplified by: book/books ([-s]),
dog/dogs ([-z]), and bus/buses
[-əz]). (Note that in General
American English we usually say [-əz]
and not [-ɪz], as you probably learned
in English class – [-ɪz] is
more common in British English than in American.) You probably learned these rules
fairly early on in your study of English. These are phonological
rules, because the phonological structure of a word determines which type of plural
ending is added.
The same rules also apply to adding the /-s/
marker for possessives, e.g. Mark/Mark's,
Bob/Bob's and Trish/Trish's, as well as for the third
person singular form of verbs, as in take/takes, drag/drags,
and push/pushes. While anticipatory assimilation
is more common in English, as exemplified by the nasalization of vowels that
occur before nasal consonants, the rules for English plurals, possessives, and
third person singular verb forms offer examples of perseverative
assimilation, in which a sound(s) is (are) influenced by sounds that
occur before it. In this case, the factors involved are voicing
and sibilant consonants.
Here is a page on English plurals rules that is
intended for "cued speech", "a system for supplementing information
on the lips" in order to help deaf people learn to speak more accurately.
This is interesting, in that it requires the cuer to know explicitly many things
about English pronunciation that hearing native speakers tend to take for granted
and not be explicitly aware of.
http://www.uri.edu/comm_service/cued_speech/plurals.html
This
page also treats various types of irregular plurals in English: the invariable
plural, as in deer/deer, fish/fish, aircraft/aircraft, -en
as in oxen and -ren as in children, internal vowel change
as in foot/feet, tooth/teeth, and so forth, There is also an interesting
section on the pronunciation of some written contracted forms.
This
page uses a phonetic alphabet quite different from the IPA, but you should find
it fairly easy to decipher. Here is a page explaining the conventions:
http://www.uri.edu/comm_service/cued_speech/splguide.html
Here
is a very succinct summary of the plurals rules by a teacher of English in the
Philippines. Apparently Filipino students have the same tendency as Taiwan students
do, that of pronouncing all final s's in spelling as [s].
(The rules are copied below in case the source page is removed, as often happens
with the Internet.)
http://www.englishforums.com/English/PluralOfNounsPronunciation/lxvg/Post.htm#58163
Re: Plural
of nouns: Pronunciation. Reply Quote
In American English, the sound
of "s" depends on which sound comes before it.
1. If the noun
ends in an unvoiced consonant sound: /f/, /k/, /p/, /t/, /th/-(thin), pronounce
"s" as /s/.
2. When it ends in a voiced consonant sound, /b/,
/d/, /g/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /r/ or with a vowel sound, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/,
/u/, pronounce "s" as /z/.
3. If it ends with /s/, /z/, /sh/,
/ch/-chair, /zh/-the second "g" in garage, /dz/-(j), pronounce "s"
or "-es" as /iz/.
In other words, if the noun ends with a sound
other than the 5 unvoiced consonants, pronounce "s" with a /z/ (or with
an /iz/ as the case may be).
It is not only assimilation
that is in operation here. Its opposite, dissimilation,
is also at work. In assimilation, two sounds become more like each other when
they are in proximity. In dissimilation,
just the opposite happens: some kind of phonological change occurs in order
to make two sounds more distinct. In the case of words ending in a sibilant,
an epenthetic
("extra") schwa [ə] is
inserted in order to separate sounds that are phonetically close. What sibilants
have in common is that they are all produced with a hissing sound. If similar
hissing sounds are pronounced in succession, e.g. bus + s [bʌss],
the plural ending cannot be clearly perceived by the listener. By assigning
it a separate syllable in which it is preceded by the neutral vowel, we can
hear the plural, possessive, or third person singular verb marking clearly.
This is an example of dissimilation at work.
The pronunciation rules for regular verbs marked
for past tense and past participle (we'll just say "past tense" here
for simplicity) also involve both perseverative assimilation and dissimilation.
Using spelling as a clue, we will assume the underlying plural marker to be
/s/. In the case of the regular past
tense verb marker, we will assume the underlying form to be /d/.
As with the plurals rules, /-d/ is devoiced
when preceded by a voiceless sound, and maintains its voicing when preceded
by a voiced sound. But to obtain the dissimilation rule, we must examine other
features of the past tense marker besides voicing. /d/
has no hissing sound, so the sibilant rule will not apply here. Sounds classified
as sibilants are based on both manner of articulation
– they are all fricatives or affricates – and
place of articulation – all are either alveolar or palato-alveolar
sounds. If the same pattern applies to the past tense marker, what kinds of
sounds can we expect will require a dissimilation rule? You may know the answer
already, but try to derive it anew by yourself on the basis of manner and place
of articulation. Please think about this carefully before reading on.
/d/
is a stop, produced at the alveolar
ridge. What are the alveolar stops in English? /d/
and /t/. And indeed, if a verb ends in
/d/ or /t/,
we also add an epenthetic [ə] schwa
before adding the final /d/ marking. But
do we pronounce it [t] as in picked
or [d] as in canned? According
to the rule of perseverative assimilation which applies here, the final consonant
should have the same voicing value as the preceding sound. That sound in this
case is a schwa, which is a vowel, and vowels are voiced. So the past tense
of regular verbs ending in [d] or [t]
is [d],
just as the plural marking after sibilant consonants is [z]
rather than [s].
Here
are some pages that summarize the rules for the past tense of regular English
verbs:
http://www.znanje.org/knjige/english/grammar/verbs/spast.htm
http://www.bartleby.com/64/pages/page220.html
Contraction
(page 32) and schwa elision (page 33) both involve phonetic reduction.
Another important kind of phonetic reduction is the neutral
vowel or schwa. We have thus far,
including on this page, referred to schwas as a given, without discussing in detail
what a schwa actually is, where the word schwa
and concept of the schwa originally came from, and the role of the schwa in the
rhythm of spoken English. We'll do this on the next page.
Next: Neutral
Vowels
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