Suppose you were given four card, each of which had a different phoneme of english printed on it :
[k]
[b] [l] [ɪ]
If you asked to arrange these cards to form all the
‘possible’ words that these four phonemes could form, you might order them as
follows:
These arrangements are the only permisible ones for
these phonemes in English. */lbkɪ/,
*/ ɪlbk/, */bkɪl/, and */ ɪlkb/ are not
possible words in the language. Although /blɪk/ and /klɪb/ and / klɪb/
are not existing words (you will not find them in a dictionary), if you heard
someone :
‘i just bough a beautiful a new blick.’
You might ask : ‘What is a ‘blick’’?” If you heard
someone say :
‘I just bough a beautiful new bkli.’
You would probably reply :’What did you say ?’
Your knowledge of English ‘tells’ you that certain
strings of phonemes are permissible and other are not. After a consonant such
as /b/, /g/, /k/, or /p/, another stop consonant is not permitted by the rule
of the grammar. If a word begins with an /l/ or an /r/, every speaker ‘knows’
that the next segment must be a vowel. That is why */lbɪk/ does not sound like
an English word. It violates the restrictions on the sequencing of phonemes.
Other such constraints exist in English. If the
initial sounds of chill or Jill begin a word, the next sound must be a vowel. /tʃut/
or /tʃin/ or /tʃækari/ are possible word in English, as are / dʒæl/ or /dʒit/
or /dʒalɪk/, but */tʃlit/ and */dʒpuz/ are not. No more than three sequential
consonants can occur at the beginning of a word, and these three are restricted
to/s/ +/p,t,k/ + /l,r,w,y/. There are even the restrictions if this consition
is met. For example, /stl/ is not a permitted sequence, so stlick is not a
possible word in English, but strick is.
Other language have different sequential restrictions.
In Polish zl is a permissible combination, as in zloty, a unit of currency.
The constraints on sequences of segments are called
phonotatic constraints or simply the phonotatic of the language. If we examine
the phonotatics of English we find that word phonotatics are in fact based on
syllable phonotatics. That is, only the clusters that can begin a syllable can
be a word, and only a cluster that can and a syllable can and a word. Medially,
in a multisyllabic word, the clusters consist of syllanle final + syllable
initial sequences. Words such as instruct /ɪnstrʌkt/ with the medial cluster
/nstr/ or explicit/ eksplɪsɪt/ with the medial cluster /kspl/ can be divided
into well-formed syllable /in $ strʌkt/ and ek $ splɪs $ ɪt/ (using $ to
symbolise a syllable boundary). We, as speakers of English, know that ‘constluct’
is not a possible word because the second syllable starts with a
non-permissible sequence /stl/ or /tl/.
In Twi, a word may end only in a vowel or nasal consonant.
/pik/ is not a possible Twi word, because it breaks the phonotatic rules of the
language, and /mba/ (‘not come’ in Twi) is not a possible word in English for
similar reasons, although it is an actual word in Twi.
All languages have constraints on the permitted
sequences of phonemes, though different languages have different constraints.
Just as spoken language has sequences of sounds that are not permitted in the
language, so sign language have forbidden combinations of features. They differ
from one sign language to another, just as the constraints on sounds and sound
sequences differ from one spoken language to another. A permissible sign in
Chinese sign language may not be a permissible sign in Auslan, and vice versa. Children
learn these constraints when they learn the spoken or signed language, just as
they learn what the phonemes are and how they are related to phonetic segments.
