Blurb:

In this chapter we begin with one accent of English – Southern England Standard Pronunciation (SESP) – although the principles of description will apply to any accent. We will confine our attention to the phonology of monomorphemic words in citation form as an initial introduction to features of Systemic Phonology and to the basic design of system network displays.

System in word phonology is not like system in lexicogrammar or intonation, as sets of options from which a speaker chooses to create meaning; system at the rank of word (and also, largely, at the rank of groups/phrases) is rather the specifications of what the speakers of a language recognize as having been established in their language to represent its words.

Moreover, as we have maintained, the primary function in phonology is to serve lexicogrammar by providing each distinct unit with their uniquely distinctive shapes. However, as we have noted previously, we have to concede that in the historical development of the language, phonological shapes that were once distinctive and unique may no longer be so, and ‘accidentally’ become homophones; another example is English right, write, rite, wright, which were, in Early Modern English phonology, distinct: /rɪçt/, /ʋritǝ/, /ritǝ/, /ʋrɪçt/ (see e.g. Gimson 2014: 66–73); all eventually became SESP /raɪt/ through various historical processes. Nevertheless, apart from such historical accidents, the primary function of phonology is to provide a distinctive shape to all the discrete units of the lexicogrammar.

Every word in citation form must be represented by one foot, apart from the few instances indicated in 1.4. This is why in this presentation of Systemic Phonology the specifications of types of foot comes first, rather than the bottom-up approach from consonant and vowels segments.

As we stated in 1.5, a full description of the phonology of words of any language would ideally include statements about the structures of the foot and its range of prosodic shapes, the permissible number of syllables (‘syllabic count’), the permissible kinds of structure in a syllable, the inventory of phonemes at the nucleus of the syllable and at the margins, permissible combinations of phonemes and specific allophonic details.