Chapter 2

Phonetics and phonology (I)

Phonetics and phonology encompass segmental and suprasegmental information. Segments consist of vowels and consonants that are central to conveying the meanings of words. Suprasegmentals are speech attributes that can accompany singular segments and extend over syllables, words, or phrases. Suprasegmental features include features such as tone, intonation, and stress. Chapter 2 introduces segmental features and Chapter 3 focuses on the suprasegmental features of spoken Mandarin Chinese. A brief background on phonetics and phonology is provided in Section 2.1. Readers who are already comfortable with concepts such as consonant, vowel, phoneme, and allophone may wish to skip to Section 2.2.

In this book, hànyŭ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 (Pinyin), the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese, will be used to annotate Chinese sounds. Additionally, IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which is devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language, will be used occasionally to clarify the accurate pronunciations, since conventional written forms are often unsatisfactory guides of pronunciations. Throughout the book, phonetic symbols written in IPA will be given in square brackets to distinguish from the Pinyin system (see Table 2.1 for an example of Chinese word 糖 “candy”). For the sake of simplicity, we use a broad transcription in most cases and keep diacritics to a minimum.