5 - ‘Speak the speech’: Shakespearean phonology

Summary

Phonology is the study of the sound system of a language – a system that consists of two dimensions. The ‘segmental’ dimension includes all the spoken vowels and consonants, and the rules governing the ways these combine to make syllables; the ‘nonsegmental’ dimension includes the patterns of pitch, loudness, tempo, rhythm, and tone of voice. A particular segmental sequence, such as the string of seven units which make up the words ‘But soft’, can be said in a variety of different ways – relatively high or low, loud or soft, fast or slow, urgent or hushed … There are over a hundred variants commonly encountered in everyday speech today, and actors in performance add significantly (and often idiosyncratically) to the phonological repertoire. A set of these variants (specifically, those to do with rhythm in versification) is traditionally studied under the heading of prosody (see further below).

There is a degree of correspondence with the graphological features identified in Chapters 3 and 4. The vowels and consonants of speech are written down using the vowels and consonants of writing. But as there are only twenty-six units of writing (letters, or graphemes) and forty-four spoken sounds (phonemes) in most accents of Modern English, clearly the correspondence cannot be a straightforward one – hence the complexities of English spelling. The nonsegmental features of speech are written down using the punctuation marks and other graphic conventions of writing, but only in a very approximate way – for example, there is no simple rule which makes questions always have a rising pitch pattern and statements a falling one.