Sunday, October 7, 2012
Phonetics--10/9/2012
Today in Phonetics, we spent the entire lecture talking about narrow transcription and what that entails. For narrow transcriptions, aspects like aspiration, glottal stops before vowels (at the beginning of words), and diacritics are usually included because narrow transcriptions are more specific. So in a broad transcription, the words "pit" and "spit" would be transcribed with the same symbol for p, [p], even though the p in "pit" is aspirated since it's at the beginning of the word. The p in "spit", on the other hand, is unaspirated and when said by itself without the "s" in front of it, it sounds a bit like a [b] though it's classified differently. The difference between an aspirated and unaspirated "p" doesn't matter in a broad transcription but in a narrow transcription, the "p" in "pit" would be written with a superscript "h" next to it. Some other diacritics are the syllabic "m", "n", and "l", which are used at the ends of words. For example, the syllabic "l" makes a sound like the one in "bottle".
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What are the respective uses of narrow and broad transcription? It seems that narrow is more accurate/faithful, no?
ReplyDeleteIt depends on what context you're using the transcriptions. For languages that have very clear distinctions between, for example, aspirated and unaspirated Ps, you would need a narrower transcription because those differences are important for that language. For English, a broad transcription is usually fine because we don't have those same distinctions. However, if you were to compare it to say, Hindi, where those distinctions exist, you would need a narrow transcription in order to see where the differences and similarities are. Basically, narrower transcriptions are used for specific purposes where specificity is crucial. Besides that, broader transcriptions can be used without a problem. Also, this is a spectrum so it's a bit difficult to sometimes figure out what is broad and narrow.
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