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Phonology

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1 Introduction:
 Phonology is the study of how sounds function within a given language. The study of English phonology for our purposes can be divided into two broad approaches: segmental and suprasegmental. 
Segmental phonology is a bottom up view of phonology which deals with the individual sounds which make a difference to meaning. These are called phonemes and their effect can be seen clearly in the following example: * Red (colour). * Read (past tense of the verb to read). * Read (present tense of the verb to read). 
 The pronunciation of 1 and 2 is the same; they are homophones. The spelling of 2 and 3 is the same; they are homographs. All three examples are made of 3 distinct phonemes /r/ followed by a vowel and ending with /d/. The difference in pronunciation of 2 and 3 is only the vowel sound. If we keep the vowel sound the same and change the initial consonant sound from /r/ to /b/ we have a distinguishably different word: bed or bead. In summary a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound which carries meaning. 
A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that makes semantic sense (semantics is the study of meaning.) Take for example the word “childlike”. This word has both two syllables and two morphemes: child – a young human- being, -like – a suffix, meaning “having the characteristics of”. The suffixes –ed and –ing are also morphemes as they change meaning when added. Morphemes are composed of phonemes when spoken. 2 The way that two different people produce phonemes is not exactly the same. Two different realisations of the same phoneme are called allophones.
A common criticism of the phonemic chart is that the sounds do not represent the actual way that different accents pronounce the sounds of English. Whilst this is undoubtedly true to a certain extent, the benefits of having a shared language for learners

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