Coursework.Info - Inspiration in an Instant

On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:

The Significance/Function of Phonological Rules in Language In a language it is often difficult to tell what the phonetic transcription of a sound will be, when not in isolation. That is, the pronunciation of a sound in a word or sentence is influenced by the sounds around it, and thus, may not be the same as our mental phonemic representation. We can determine the proper phonetic transcriptions/representations of these sounds by first applying phonological rules to the phonemic representations. Every language has a set of phonological rules that are learned sub-consciously by the native speaker. These rules can be applied to individual sounds, but mainly they apply to groups of sounds called natural classes (Fromkin, p.270). The rules help us to understand, what may appear to be irregularities in our language, to actually be predictable forms of speech. A non-native speaker may not be aware of these rules and thus may have...

Get instant access

• Instant, unlimited access to our documents in full
• Swap your work for free access, or pay £4.99
• To see the full version of this document and 150,159 others