English Language I

English Language

Introduction to Linguistics

Linguistics → the scientific/scholarly study of language. A quote by David Crystal explains it. He has written many comprehensive encyclopaedias of English and is an expert on the language. He gave a general definition of linguistics: it includes both sides. This quotation is important because it reveals how linguistics is multidisciplinary; in fact, there are multiple facets to this subject. It’s a science that is very comprehensive.

Aspects of Language that Can Be Studied

• Sounds → Phonetics/Phonology
• Structure → Morphology/Syntax
• Meaning → Semantics
• Use → Pragmatics

Further Combined Areas of Language Study

• History + Language → Historical Linguistics
• Society + Language → Sociolinguistics
• Cognition + Language → Cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics
• Technology + Language → Computational linguistics (relation with computers and technology)
• Language Learning → Language acquisition
• Multiple Languages → Language contact/multilingualism (English in relation to other languages and how they influence each other)
• Language and Discourse → Discourse analysis, text linguistics, corpus linguistics

Challenges in English Language

The most difficult part of the English language is different, but for Italian speakers, it is the connection between how sounds and spelling work. The written spelling and the sounds are very different. An Irish dramatist, Bernard Shaw, made a provocative comment about the English language regarding this aspect.

George Bernard Shaw and the English Language

George Bernard Shaw once suggested that the word fish should be spelled <ghoti>:

• <gh> from words like enough
• <o> from words like women
• <ti> from words like motion

The problem is that in English one sound corresponds to multiple spellings and there's never a one-to-one correspondence:

• <cup>, <mother>, <young>, <blood>
• <soap>, <grow>, <old>, <rose>
• <bird>, <work>, <herd>, <church>, <earn>
• <bath>, <laugh>

The sound is the same but it's represented in different ways.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Read this set of English words aloud and pay attention to the pronunciation of the vowel sound in each of them: Rune, Who, Shoe, Moon, You, True → How many vowel sounds can you identify? /u:/

Exercise 2

Read this set of English words aloud and pay attention to the pronunciation of the vowel sound in each of them: Beat, Head, Great, Heard, Heart → How many vowel sounds can you identify? /i:/ /e/ /eI/ /3:/ /a:/

The pronunciation of English words is unpredictable: the spelling system (orthography) doesn’t tell you how words should be pronounced.

How can I get to know how to pronounce English words correctly?

• Check the pronunciation in an English Dictionary.
• Be aware that the same word can be pronounced in different ways in the Anglophone world (British English, American English, Australian English, Indian English…)

Examples and Exercises on Graphemes and Sounds

SCHOOL

• How many graphemes (alphabetic symbols, letters)? <s+c+h+o+o+l>, 6
• How many sounds? /sku:l/, 4 sounds

SHORE

• There are 5 graphemes <s+h+o+r+e>
• There are 2 sounds → /ʃɔː/ → BE → British English, 3 sounds → /ʃoʊr/ → AE → American English

There are two possibilities because it depends on British or American English. In the first case, the sounds are two, in the second are three.

Relation Between Written and Spoken Forms

It is mostly a matter of the sound system historical development.

In the case of <meet>; <meat>:

• Middle English → different spelling, different pronunciations
• Today → different spelling, same pronunciation → homophones

Spelling is more conservative than sounds. Spelling can be studied by linguists to reconstruct how the sound of a word has developed through centuries (historical linguistics → it studies aspects linked to the change of pronunciation not corresponding to a change in orthography.)

Language Evolution

A language is a living entity that changes with the passing of time:

• New words are created (to google)
• Old words get out of use (to xerox → a machine that is no longer useful)
• Sounds of words change (it’s a long-term process, not something that happens quickly): back, dash, glad, lamp, hand, glass, dance, after → the vowel sound in the 2 lexical sets was almost the same until the 1660s

Exercises on Homophones and Consonant Sounds

Exercise 1

Provide at least 3 pairs of English homophones (words with different spelling but the same pronunciation). E.g.: site – sight; buy – by – bye; pair – pear; know – no. Sea – see, For – four

Exercise 2

Specify whether each of the following words starts with one, two, or three consonant sounds (not letters!):

• Dog - 1
• Cup – 1
• Ship -1
• There - 1
• Phone - 1
• Phrase - 2
• School – 2

An Introduction to "Contrastiveness"

What’s the difference between the vowel sounds in these pairs of words?

• <sit> <seat>
• <slip> <sleep>

Short vowel sound vs. long vowel sound; the difference is the length. The vowel sound is the only difference between these pairs of words (contrastive pairs).

Accent and Dialect

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• Northern BE (Leeds, north): short vowel sound
• Southern BE (Reading, south): long vowel sound
• ESL/EFL speaker: ‘th’ sound may be realized as ‘t’ or ‘f’ sound → these are variations of accent

Every user of English speaks with an accent. Accent refers to spoken features of English; Linguists study how accents originate and how they are patterned; they do NOT make judgments about the ‘correctness’ of particular accents.

Accent → a social and/or regionally distinct way of pronunciation, or it can emerge as a byproduct of language acquisition (transfer of pronunciation schema from L1 to Lx). The way we speak is affected by our mother tongue, our social group, etc.

RP (Received Pronunciation) in England

• Accent of English
• Temporal origin dates back to the Middle Ages
• Geographical origin in the East-Midlands Triangle
• High social prestige
• Model of pronunciation during the 18th and 19th centuries (especially for social climbers, a good language to be judged as a good speaker)
• Model for non-native speakers of English (how they should speak)
• Nowadays progressively replaced by Estuary English, a new kind of pronunciation, once again connected with prestige; it contains certain features related to Cockney and low social classes

Dialect → a regional and/or social variety that is shared by a group of speakers in a common language-cultural area (political area) that is related but different from the standard language on a lexical, grammatical, and phonological level. Dialectal variation involves syntax/grammar, not only pronunciation.

• Absence of copula for present tense states and actions:
• He’s tall; they’re running (GA)
• He tall; they runnin’ (AAVE) → African American Vernacular English, mostly associated with black speakers
• Use of invariant be for habitual aspect:
• She walks to school (GA)
• She be walkin’ to school (AAVE)
• She raised her little finger (BE) vs. She raised her pinkie (Scottish English) → dialectal variations involving lexicon

Every English speaker uses some form of dialect. For historical, political, socio-economic reasons, some dialects have become ‘standard’ → Once a dialect becomes the most important, it becomes a standard dialect, and it gets the name of THE language of that country. Standard dialects are the ones that are taught, transmitted, and codified. Standard dialects are the ‘powerful’ varieties, but they are in no way better than non-standard forms.

Structure

Example adapted from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, considered the father of modern linguistics and of structuralism, which is the idea that language has a structure, the signified and signifier, concept and form, or the distinction between langue and parole, synchrony or diachronic (the first focuses on a specific period, the second on how it has changed with the passing of time). His ideas start from the reflection on what structure is.

“For many years I took a morning train to work. The train was the 7.52 from Greenfield to Manchester. Sometimes this train arrived with two yellow carriages, sometimes with four blue ones. Sometimes the train arrived, and subsequently departed, late. Sometimes it didn’t arrive at all.”

Whatever the physical appearance of the train (blue, yellow) and however late it was, the fact remained that the train itself was still the 7.52 train from Greenfield to Manchester. The identity of the train depended on its place in the timetable. That timetable is an example of structure.

• The railway timetable represents the underlying structure of the running of trains.
• The timetable doesn’t tell us whether the trains are blue or yellow; these are part of the physical characteristics of the trains themselves, and not part of the underlying structure.
• The sound structure of a language (its timetable) is the phonology of that language.
• The physical manifestation of the actual sounds is the phonetics of that language. pin, nip, spin.

Exercise on Phonetics

Consider the 'p' sound in the words. Hold the open palm of your right/left hand about 5 cm from your mouth:

1. Pronounce the word nip
2. Pronounce the word spin
3. Pronounce the word

A) The ‘p’ sound is produced with an aspiration/explosive release (a puff of air is produced when the ‘p’ sound occurs in word initial position and in a stressed syllable)

B) No aspiration for the ‘p’ sound, which becomes less audible

C) The 'p' sound of spin is produced with less explosive release than the 'p' of pin; the 'p' sound that occurs after the 's' sound and before a vowel begins to sound something like a 'b'.

Focus on physical characteristics and acoustic properties of sounds → Phonetics. Repeat the same type of exercise paying attention to the realization/pronunciation of:

• tun, nut, stun - The ‘t’ sound in the words
• kin, nick, skin - The ‘k’ sound in the words

1) The sounds ‘p, t, k’ have identical patterns of distribution, i.e., they can occur pre-vocally (before a vowel), post-vocally (after a vowel), and after ‘s’.

2) In the same environments, each of these sounds seems to behave in exactly the same way (they form a ‘class’ of sounds because of this) → these are Phonological observations.

Phonology deals with the relatedness (or lack of relatedness) of particular sounds; it also studies how sounds are distributed.

<> = means that the word is just the sum of letters, a grapheme. Moving from letter to sounds, it's a transcription, which can be phonemic (there are no diacritic symbols) or phonetic (they are different depending on where they appear. The small symbols are diacritic and they represent the most precise representation of pronunciation.)

The little h indicates that you should aspirate the sounds. The second symbol indicates the occlusion that should accompany the realization of the sound p. The small circle indicates that the letter is voiced: the p is realized to make it more similar to a 'b' sound.

Phonetic vs. Phonemic Transcriptions

Phonetic transcriptions are ‘narrow’

Phonemic transcriptions are ‘broad’

Phonetic transcriptions symbolize how sounds actually sound when spoken

Phonemic transcriptions symbolize the underlying form of sounds

Phonetic transcriptions work at the level of event (the actual spoken sound)

Phonemic transcriptions work at the level of system

Phonetic transcriptions appear in square brackets [ ]

Phonemic transcriptions appear in slant brackets / /

Brief Recap

• Linguistics as a multifarious discipline (core areas of sounds, grammar, meaning, and use).
• The relation between orthography & sounds in English; it’s different from the Italian language, because there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence.
• Sound change in the history of English → spelling can reflect earlier pronunciations of English words.
• Different spelling but the same sound: homophony.
• Different accents & dialects of English in the world → Everybody has an accent. It’s possible to speak about many Englishes, using the plural term, because there’s a wide variety of this language and it takes different shapes. Speaking of dialect and accent is different, because a Dialect is a more general concept including grammar, vocabulary, and sounds, while an Accent only refers to the actual pronunciation, it's a less general concept.

Phonology

The sound structure of a language is the phonology of that language. It’s a linguistic science. Phonology also studies:

• Phoneme: the underlying structure of a sound. E.g. English has about 24 consonant phonemes and ca. 20 vowel phonemes (in most varieties).

Phonology deals with the phonemes of a language, it studies in which sequences they can appear (phonotactics) and how they change in actual speech (e.g. assimilation). It deals with the relatedness of particular sounds (e.g. ‘p’, ‘t’, ‘k’); it also studies how sounds are distributed (e.g. contexts of occurrence), how sequences of phonemes appear in language, and in which combinations sounds can work in English; sounds are not seen as isolated but how they influence each other.

Phonetics

The physical manifestation of the actual sounds is the phonetics of that language and it is more related to the actual production of sounds. It can be subdivided into different branches:

• Articulatory phonetics: production of the speech sounds by the articulatory apparatus; it focuses on which part of our apparatus is involved.
• Acoustic phonetics: physical transmission of speech sounds from hearer to listener;
• Auditory phonetics: perception of speech sounds by the listener;

Sound Description

Phonetics → phonetic transcription (actual production of sounds described in a very detailed way).

Phonology → phonemic transcription (underlined structure of the sounds).

Phonetics & Phonology: Similarity

Consider the word pin. Focus on the sound and say the word many times: pin…pin…pin…pin…pin…pin. In one sense you are saying the same word: all those ‘pin’ have sufficient properties in common for you and for me to hear them as the same.

Yet, in another respect, your repetitions aren’t the same. If you would listen to each of your repetitions in a laboratory, you would realize that there are differences:

• In the degree of plosion of the sound ‘p’
• In the degree of voicing

The sound is perceived as the same just because they are similar, but there's a slight variation in the way we say it, just like the matches. Almost identical.

I recognize that I’m using a particular sound (‘p’), even though that sound is not exactly the same when I repeat the word pin → the sound is similar. There are different degrees of similarity; it can be extremely low, or so high that you can think that they are the same.

Pin… pin… pin → almost identical ‘p’ sound

Pin nip spin → very similar ‘p’ sound

Similarity is an important criterion for recognizing ‘p’ as a sound (phone) of English, but it’s not enough for calling it a phoneme of English.

Phonetics & Phonology: Contrastiveness

Consider the following words: PIN, TIN, BIN, SIN, FIN, THIN, CHIN. Sounds that make meaningful contrasts between words are called PHONEMES.

• Phonemes are distinctive sounds (phonology);
• Phones are general sounds (phonetics)

Exercise on Minimal Pairs

Provide examples of five minimal pairs in Italian: rosa-cosa, marta-sarta, viso-riso, matto-ratto, sera-nera, stella-stalla, soglia-foglia, gente-mente.

Provide examples of five minimal pairs in English: find-mind, found-pound, dog-fog, rhyme-time, boat-coat, food-mood, lake-fake, rock-lock.

The symbols in brackets stand for sounds; even though some of them look like letters, all of them indicate SOUNDS.

IPA Consonant Chart

IPA Vowel Chart

Exercise on Language Learning

Speaking a language is such an ordinary activity that most of the time we don’t think about what we are doing when we speak. Speaking becomes more difficult when we start learning a second or foreign language:

• New words
• New sounds

In most of the words, there are specific sounds that don't exist in other languages: Italian/German/French… speakers learning words such as bath, this… English… speakers learning words such as aglio, gnocchi…

Each of the world's languages uses only a subset of all possible speech sounds, which appear on the chart as the full list of sounds because every language uses only one part of it, and there's no language that uses all of them.

Languages differ in which sounds they include in their speech inventory.