English Sound Alternations and Phonological Explanations of Regular Plural Nouns, Regular Past Tense Verbs, and Verbs for Third-Person Singular Subject

Abstract

English as a language is characterized by uniqueness and complexity. Regarding its pronunciations, there is more than one way to spell an English common spelling of a letter or a symbol. Hence, phonetic transcriptions exist to give a certain pronunciation for all words. English phonetic transcriptions give a certain pronunciation for all English words. In phonetic transcriptions, there are two functions of sounds called phonemes and allophones. A phoneme is a sound that represents a meaning, while an allophone is a variation of sounds which represents a phoneme. As one word may consist of more than one sound, these sounds are arranged, making an environment of sounds. In an environment, a sound may change to another form in order to correspond with the environment; this is called sound alternation. In English language, there are three common sound alternations that happen. They are sound alternations in regular plural nouns, regular past tense verbs, and verbs for third-person singular subject in present tense. In order to find these alternations and explain the processes, the theory of generative phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle is used to elaborate the phonological explanations. This research is categorized as qualitative research because this research dives into the concept of sound alternations with the data in the form of words and sounds. The source of the data is Daniel Jones’ Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (2011) using the purposive sampling method to take six samples of words to represent each group of the three data.