Lingua Inglese 1

Lingua inglese – Olivier

Indice

1. Introduction to English Linguistic [L=40-88]

1.1 Phonetic (3 Capitolo) [L=40-58]

• 1.1.1 Speech sound production
• 1.1.2 Airstream mechanism
• 1.1.3 Organs of speech
• 1.1.4 Description and classification of consonants and vowels 1-2
• 1.1.5 Consonants
• 1.1.5.1 State of glottis 2
• 1.1.5.2 Place of articulation 2-3
• 1.1.5.3 Manner of articulation 3-4
• 1.1.6 Vowels 4
• 1.1.7 Phonetic transcription 5

1.2 Phonology (3 Capitolo) [L=58-70]

• 1.2.1 Segmental phonology 5-6
• 1.2.2 Suprasegmental phonology 6
• 1.2.2.1 Syllables 6
• 1.2.2.2 Phonotactics 7
• 1.2.2.3 Stress and rhythm 7
• 1.2.2.4 Tone and intonation 7
• 1.2.3 Connected speech 7
• 1.2.3.1 Assimilation 7
• 1.2.3.2 Elision 8
• 1.2.3.3 Liaison 8
• 1.2.3.4 Reduction 8

1.3 Morphology (4 Capitolo) [L=76-88]

• 1.3.1 Word 8
• 1.3.2 Open and close class words 8-10
• 1.3.3 Morphemes 10
• 1.3.4 Free and bound morpheme 10-11
• 1.3.5 Derivational and inflectional morpheme 11
• 1.3.6 Morphology process 11-12

English IPA 13-14

Verbi irregolari 15

2. Fotocopie ‘Natural Environment’

• 2.1 Forests 16-25

3. The English Language [L=12-83]

3.1 Origins (2 Capitolo) [L= da 12 a 32]

• 3.1.1 Beginnings (L= 12-17) 26-27
• 3.1.2 I-Umlaut (S) 27
• 3.1.3 England Before English (S) 27
• 3.1.4 Old English (650-1100)

3.2.1 Celtic (L=17-19/S) 28

3.2.2 Latin (L=19-20) 28

3.2.3 Old Norse (L=19-21) 29

3.2.4 Normans (S) 29-30

3.2.5 Epic Pagan Literature (S) 30

3.2.6 Grammar of Old English (S) 30

3.1.5 Middle English (1100-1500) (L=23-25)

• 3.3.1 Vocabulary and spelling changes (S) 31-32
• 3.3.2 Grammatical changes in Middle English (S) 32
• 3.3.3 Geoffrey Chaucer (S) 32

3.1.6 Early Modern English (1500-1750) (L=25-28)

• 3.4.1 Influence of Latin and French on Early Modern English (S) 33
• 3.4.2 Early Modern English Grammar (S) 34
• 3.4.3 The Great Vowel Shift (S) 34

3.1.7 Late Modern English (1500-1900) (L=28-32) 34-35

3.2 Authorities (3 Capitolo) [L= da 33 a 60]

• 3.2.1 Dictionaries 35-36
• 3.2.2 Academies 36
• 3.2.3 Usage Guides 36-37
• 3.2.4 Sources 37-38
• 3.2.5 Logic 38
• 3.2.6 Etymology 38
• 3.2.7 Descriptive or Prescriptive? 39

3.3 Standards (4 Capitolo) [L= da 61 a 83]

• 3.3.1 Standard English: What it is and what it isn’t 39-41
• 3.3.2 Right writing 41
• 3.3.3 Talking proper 41
• 3.3.4 Good grammar 42

Facoltativo:

• Un capitolo di Silent Spring. 43
• Un testo di Gaia Hypothesis. 44

Phonetics - 3 Capitolo

Phonetics is concerned with the wide variety of sounds used by speakers of human languages. There is a huge number of possible speech sounds of which each individual language uses only a small portion. There are three types of phonetics that reflect three different ways to approach speech sounds:

Speech sound production

In order to be able to discuss the articulation of sounds, we need a basic knowledge of the sound-producing system. Three basic components are involved in the production of speech sounds: first the lungs, second the larynx and third the vocal tract above the larynx, including the oral and nasal cavities.

Airstream mechanism

The majority of sounds used in the world’s languages are produced by an airstream that is pushed up from the lungs and leaves the body through the mouth or the nose, or sometimes both. This is called an egressive pulmonic airstream mechanism.

Organs of speech

The airstream from the lungs is modified by the so-called organs of speech to produce a variety of different sounds. The description and classification of sounds for the most part depends on how and where the airstream is modified by these articulators. We distinguish movable (or mobile) active articulators that can be voluntarily controlled, such as the lips or the tongue, and immovable (or non-mobile) passive articulators that cannot be voluntarily controlled, such as the alveolar ridge or the hard palate.

Description and classification of consonants and vowels

All speech sounds used by the world’s many languages fall into two natural classes, namely consonants and vowels. The fundamental phonetic difference between these two types is that consonantal sounds are articulated with a narrow or complete closure in the vocal tract, whereas vowels are produced without any obstruction of the airstream.

When we articulate a consonant, the airstream is partially or fully obstructed by some of the articulators in the vocal tract. The description and classification of consonants includes three different criteria:

States of the glottis

The air for the production of pulmonic sounds passes from the lungs through the glottis, which is the opening between the vocal folds in the larynx. When the glottis is narrow and the vocal folds are held close together, the air causes the vocal folds to vibrate; the resulting sounds are said to be voiced. When the glottis is open and the vocal folds are pulled apart, the airstream passes through the vocal folds without causing them to vibrate; the resulting sounds in this case are referred to as voiceless.

There is a simple test to find out whether a sound is voiced or voiceless: touch a finger to the larynx or close your ears with your fingers while you produce a sound. The contrast between voiceless and voiced sounds is usually accompanied by a difference in the force with which the airstream is pushed up from the lungs. Voiceless sounds are made with strong breath force and are thus called fortis. Voiced sounds, on the other hand, are usually made with comparatively weak force and are referred to as lenis sounds.

Place of articulation

In describing and classifying a consonant, it is also important to state the exact place where the airstream is obstructed. The place of articulation is usually labelled using the names of the articulators that approach each other or make contact while producing a consonant.

Manner of articulation

Different sounds that share the same place of articulation are called homorganic. [p] and [b] are both bilabial sounds and are thus referred to as homorganic. The third criterion used to provide unique and unambiguous descriptions of consonants is the so-called manner of articulation.

Vowels

In contrast to consonants, vowels are articulated without any obstruction of the airstream in the vocal tract. Vowels are essentially always voiced and more sonorous than consonants.

• Vowels differ in quantity: they can be short or long.
• Vowels also differ in quality, depending for the most part on the movements of the tongue.

The description and classification of vowels consists of the following three criteria:

The difference between oral vowels, produced with the velum raised and air escaping only through the mouth, and nasal vowels, produced with the velum lowered and some of the air passing through the nasal cavity.

Phonetic transcription

Most languages do not have a one-to-one correspondence between pronunciation and spelling (or orthography). Phonetic transcription provides such a system of one-to-one correspondence between sounds and symbols, the so-called phonetic symbols. Phonetic symbols are always enclosed in square brackets [ ]. A whole set of phonetic symbols forms a phonetic alphabet. The best-known system that provides phonetic symbols for the sounds of any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

The idea of creating a phonetic alphabet was first proposed by Otto Jespersen in 1886, and the first version of the IPA was published in 1888. The aim of the system was to create a separate symbol for each sound which could then be used in any language in which the sound appeared.

The monophthongs of English can be distinguished into short and long vowels. These types, however, are not only distinguished by vowel length, but also by vowel quality, i.e. the positions of the tongue are different. Long vowels are usually followed by a length mark that consists of two vertical dots (:).

Diphthongs (or: gliding vowels), are vowels that change their quality during their articulation. The articulators move or glide from one vowel position to another, changing the height of tongue, sometimes the part of tongue and sometimes lip rounding.

There are two different types of diphthongs in English:

• Closing diphthongs they rise to a rather close (or high) position towards the end of their articulation.
• Centring diphthongs

Diacritics

Occasionally, our phonetic transcription has to be more precise or we need to represent sounds slightly different from what we find in the IPA charts. In these cases, we can modify the IPA symbols by the addition of little extra symbols, so-called diacritics.

Phonology - 3 Capitolo

Phonology is concerned with the speakers’ knowledge of the sound system of one specific language. It is the branch of linguistics that studies the sounds used by a given language, the so-called sound inventory, and investigates the function and (mental) organisation of these sounds in the specific language in question. There are two branches of phonology:

Segmental phonology

Phonemes are defined as the smallest meaning-distinguishing units in language. In order to identify the phonemes used by a particular language, we have to find pairs of words that differ in only one sound and are different in meaning. These pairs are referred to as minimal pairs, the method is called the minimal pair test. Features that distinguish one phoneme from another are called distinctive features, marked by plus (+), or absence, marked by (-), of the single feature of voicing.

However, not all sounds that are phonetically different distinguish meaning in English and appear in minimal pairs. For example, most learners of English as a second or foreign language are taught at some point that there are two different "kinds of I" in many accents of English, namely the clear I and the dark I. Different phones that:

• Do not distinguish meaning
• Are regarded as "the same" sound
• Are phonetically similar are said to be allophones of the same phoneme.

Allophones are thus different phonetic realisations (or: phonetic variants) of what speakers of a language automatically and unconsciously group together into an abstract phonological unit called the phoneme. It is a convention that phonemic symbols are enclosed by slashes / /, whereas allophones are phonetic realisations and are as such enclosed by square brackets.

Suprasegmental phonology

Phonology does not only deal with the individual segments speech is made up of. It also studies those phonological properties that extend over more than one segment, hence the name suprasegmental phonology. Suprasegmental phonology involves two different aspects: First, this type of phonology is concerned with the combination of segments into larger units such as syllables. Second, it studies the phonological properties of longer stretches of speech such as stress, rhythm, tone and intonation, often collectively referred to as prosody.

Syllables

Syllables are phonological units above the phoneme level that can be vaguely defined as the smallest rhythmic unit of speech. Most people can intuitively count syllables in words without having an exact knowledge of what a syllable is. Words can consist of one syllable, i.e., they are monosyllabic, or two or more syllables, i.e., they are polysyllabic.

In English, all syllables contain a nucleus. This vowel may be followed by a coda that consists of up to four consonants and is said to form the rhyme together with the nucleus. Syllables that have an empty coda are referred to as open syllables, as opposed to the so-called closed syllables, which are "closed" by one or more consonants following the vowel. Vowels are thus not only sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the airstream but can also form the nucleus of a syllable. In opposition to vowels, consonants cannot form the nucleus of a syllable. Semivowels are special in that they are, on the one hand, vowel-like in pronunciation but, on the other hand, they can never form the nucleus of a syllable.

Phonotactics

The study of the possible combinations of phonemes in a language is referred to as phonotactics. All languages have such sets of constraints concerning the combination of phonemes, but the actual rules are language-specific and differ extensively between individual languages. Phonological phenomena such as stress, rhythm, tone and intonation can be subsumed under the term prosody of an utterance.

Stress and rhythm

The degree of force used in producing a syllable is called stress (or: accent). We distinguish stress from the absence of stress, and we refer to stress levels as primary, secondary, and unstressed. Stress is important because it affects the rhythm of a language and how sentences are pronounced in terms of pitch, loudness, and length.