1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

6. TYPOLOGY OF PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEMS IN THE 
ENGLISH AND NATIVE LANGUAGES 
 
Plan: 
1.The main unit of phonological system 
2.Division of vowels 
3.Division of consonants 
 
Basic concepts of the subject: 
Phoneme, phonological level,vowel and consonant phonemes, soft 
or palatalized, hard phonemes, plosive, fricative, sonorous, affricative 
phonemes, labial, interdental, alveolar, medio –lingual, back lingual, 
guttural 
 
Phonological level is the first among those levels which form 
complex hierarchical structure of the language. 
The main unit of this level is a phoneme. Phoneme as the main unit 
of the phonological level of the language that fulfils two functions 
essential to communication: 
1) constitutive function. Phonemes are the necessary building 
material for the units of morphological and other levels, (neither 
morphemes nor words can exist without phonemes); 
2) distinctive function which gives chance to distinguish 
morphemes from each other, words from each other. It has important 
significance for the communicative purpose. Thus phoneme can be 
defined as "the class of sounds physically similar and functionally 
identical". 
So one and the same phoneme can sound variously on different 
conditions. Such sounds representing variety of one and the same class 
of physically similar sounds are called allophones or versions of the 
same phoneme. Besides phonemes and their versions supersegmentive 
units are stress and intonation which belong to the phonological level 
too. Subsystem of English vowels is divided into two types of 
phonemes: 1)12 monophthongs and 2) 9 diphthongs. 
English monophthongs are classified according to the position of 
tongue and according to the position of its rise with two varieties 
:narrow and wide. 

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According to the position of the tongue English vowels are divided 
into 5 groups: 
1) front: [i:, e, æ] 
2) front — retracted (draw back): [ɪ] 
3) medial: [ə:]; [ə]; [ᴧ] 
According to the height of the raised part of the tongue vowels are 
divided into 6 groups: 
1) upper rise, narrow: [i:], [u:] 
2) upper rise, wide: [i], [u] 
3) medial rise, narrow: [e], [ə:] 
4) medial rise, wide: [ə] 
5) lower rise, narrow: [ᴐ:]; [ᴐ] 
6) lower rise, wide: [ᴧ]; [a:]; [æ] 
Comparative vowel tables 
The first comparative tables appeared in the 19th century, but they 
had no pedagogical aims in view, their aim was to prove the common 
origin of some two modern languages belonging to the same family. In 
the 2nd decade of the 20th century prof. D.Jones suggested a 
classification based on the principle of the so called “cardinal vowels”. 
This principle aims at avoiding *the individual approach in 
establishing the relative positions of vowels in different languages , at 
introducing into phonetics a universal principle, as a foundation of any 
vowel classification and comparison. 
English and Uzbek Vowel Phonemes 
According to the