April McMahon

2 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PHONOLOGYcharacteristics of the English sound system that make it specificallyEnglish, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move intothe domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection andorganisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested inthe sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers andhearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of thoselanguages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarilyaccess and talk about in detail: we often have intuitions about languagewithout knowing where they come from, or exactly how to express them.But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of Englishwill tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word,whereas *fnil is not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In theusual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while*fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English soundsystem. However, English speakers are not consciously aware of thoserules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those wordsthat the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initialconsonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likelyanswer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informantwill produce similar words like sniff or snip to back up her argument), butthat *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the phonologist to expressgeneralisations of this sort in precise terms: after all, just because knowledgeis not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or notworth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciouslythink ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus,right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely to makeany conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go downstairsin the first place; and relatively few people will know the names ofthe muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individualactivities involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process:think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. Allof this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. Wedecide to speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech productionare beyond our conscious reach; and thinking deliberately aboutwhat we are saying, and how we are saying it, is likely to cause selfconsciousnessand hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speechrather than improving matters. Both language and mobility (crawling,walking, running downstairs) emerge in developing children by similarcombinations of mental and physical maturation, internal abilities, andinput from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learnedbecomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of