Fonetica inglese

LINGUA INGLESE

Idiscover that the phonemes of English make up only a portion of all the possible sound, some language have a fewer phonemes than English other morea. how are sounds represented graphically?

When you write down sounds you make a transcription, but we need to use a special alphabet, the special alphabet is known as the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (IPA), and it is an indispensable tool for the study of phonetics and phonology as it make the task of identifying and referring to sound much easier, this kind of transcription is known as broad transcription.

In phonetics, it is the sound of a word which is of importance and not its written form, we write phonetics symbols in slant brackets // in order to distinguish sounds from letters.

ARTICULATORY PHONETICS

It deals how we physically produce phonemes. The vocal tract is where the sounds are produced, the vocal tract begins at the voice box or larynx and ends at the lips, the larynx is essentially a casing of cartilage rings at the.

top of the trachea, the front of the larynx protrudes (sporge) slightly below the chin and jaw and so you can probably feel is.

In the larynx are two small but extremely important muscles, which can open and close, those are the vocal cords and the space between them is known as the glottis.

The section of the vocal tract between the uvula is known as pharynx.

Above the pharynx, the vocal tract branches into the nasal cavity and the oral cavity.

For the majority of sounds in English, the soft palate is raised, blocking off the nasal cavity. However, there are three consonants in English for which the soft palate is lowered, allowing air to pass through the nasal cavity. The flow of air is called airstream:

1. If it flows out of the lungs, it is called egressive airstream.
2. If it flows into the lungs, it is called ingressive airstream.

In phonetics, a consonant involves some kind of narrow, partial, or complete closure in the vocal tract, usually in the mouth. The closure is brought about by

different parts of the mouth making some kind of contact with each other. There are 24 consonants in the English of RP and most of the symbols used to represent the sounds are the same as the ones used in the roman alphabet, the other symbols are drawn from the Greek alphabet.

A useful way of describing consonant sounds is to look at the way in which they are produced, we distinguish consonant sounds according to PLACE OF ARTICULATION, MANNER OF ARTICULATION, PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF VOICE

a. place of articulation

a. a place of articulation is the part of the vocal tract where the closure necessary for a consonant sound is made, the places of articulation used in the consonant phoneme system of RP are: the lips (/b/), the upper teeth (/ð/), the alveolar ridge (/d/), the hard plate (/j/), the soft plate (/g/), the glottis (/h/)

the part of the mouth involved in the making speech sounds are called articulators; passive articulators are those articulators which do not move (upper teeth, alveolar ridge,

The active articulators are those that do move, such as the tongue tip, blade, front and back, and sides.

The manner of articulation refers to how sounds are produced. Considering the following sounds /b/, /m/, /p/, /w/, they are all made at the same place of articulation, but it is impossible that they are all made in the same manner, or we would not be able to distinguish them.

Identifying the manner of articulation allows us to classify sounds according to what happens to the airstream as it passes through the vocal tract.

We can distinguish five types of sounds in terms of manner of articulation: plosive, nasal, fricative, affricate, and approximant.

Plosives occur when the air reaches the mouth and the lips are closed, causing a small explosion or plosive sound to result (example /b/, /p/, /k/, /g/...).

Nasal sounds occur when the air is released, causing a small burst of air, but with less pressure, and the sound resonates.

In the nasal cavity, in contrast to plosive sounds, the soft plate is lowered so that released air can also pass through the nasal cavity; the sound also has a different quality because there is resonance in the nasal cavity as the air escapes (example /m/, /n/).

Fricatives: the closure isn't so tight that no air at all can escape, the air passes through but there is friction because of the proximity of the tongue to the alveolar ridge. You can pronounce fricatives as long as you have air (example /s/, /f/).

Affricates: the affricate sound is a combination of plosive and a fricative. These sounds begin as plosives, but the air is released more gently than in plosive consonants, so that the closure is partially maintained (example /ʧ/, /ʤ/).

Approximants: There's no closure used for vowels, which rely on the shape of the lips and the position of the tongue in the mouth, without the tongue coming into contact with the other articulators as it does for consonants.

no parts of the mouth is closed and none of the vocal organs come so closed together causing audible friction.

From a phonological point of view the vowels typically occupy the middle of a syllable, which involve the vibration of the vocal cord, they have distinctive resonance made by varying the shape of the mouth, using the tongue and lips.

The 20 vowel sounds of RP English are qualitatively divided according to the following criteria:

1. the distance between tongue and palate - the vertical distance between the upper surface of the tongue and the palate
2. the part of the tongue that is raised - the part of the tongue, between front and back, which is raised highest
3. the position and shape of the lips

UNROUNDED: the corners of the lips are moved away from each other

NEUTRAL: the lips are not rounded or spread

ROUNDED: the corners of the lips are brought towards each other and the lips pushed forward

Vowels are arranged in a closed-open, front-back diagram (a quadrilateral),

Those vowels are primary cardinal vowels and are the most familiar to the speakers of most European languages.

The 20 vowels sound of RP English are quantitatively divided into SHORT VOWELS (7), LONG VOWELS (5) and DIPHTONGS (8).

FROM PHONETICS TO PHONOLOGY

So far we have looked mostly at phonetics, we have been concerned with the production and classification of individual speech in RP, however, we have already introduced a few phonological concepts, which are:

1. We know that phonology deals with the distribution of the sounds in a language as a system.
2. We know that phonemes are abstract representations of sound as they occur in the system of a language.
3. We know that individual variation in the pronunciation of a single phoneme are called allophones.

LINGUA INGLESE I

We are going to look at the way in which speech sounds operate in combination with each other from PHONETICS through SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY to SUPRASEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY.

How they vary in different environments and how phonemes group together to form syllables and words.

SUPRASEGMENTAL - It deals with aspects of speech such as pitch and intonation.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSONANTS (to keep things simple)

MONOSYLLABIC words have the structure CVC (C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel) and the DISYLLABIC word will be CVCV(C). There are three positions in which the consonants can occur:

1. WORD-INITIAL (at the beginning of a word)
2. WORD-FINAL (at the end of a word)
3. WORD-MEDIAL (between vowels in a word of two syllables or more)

Most consonants occur in all these positions; however, there are a few special cases which are worth considering separately:

1. The voiced palato-alveolar fricative
2. The glottal fricative
3. The nasal
4. The approximants

1. The distribution of the voiced palato-alveolar fricative /Ʒ/:

- It only occurs word-initially in a handful of French loan words such as "genre" and "gigolo". The sound can also occur in word-medial position, such as "measure".

Pleasure, and it occurs also word-final in a few French words but the pronunciation may alternate with /ʤ/. It can be considered a fairly rare consonant anyway.

The distribution of the glottal fricative /h/ is common at the beginning of words (hotel, home), although rarer word-medial. However, it never occurs in English at the end of a word (word-final).

The distribution of nasal sounds: /m/ and /n/ appear in all three positions - word-initial, word-medial, word-final - but /ŋ/ occurs in word-final (sing) and word-medial (finger) positions, but NEVER in word-initial.

The distribution of approximants /l/, /r/, /w/, and /j/: the approximants are the phonemes with the most limited distribution in single consonant occurrences. Although they are very productive clusters, all four of them occur word-initial (rise, look, wet, you). /l/ and /r/ appear often word-medial (allow, arrow), /w/ occurs more rarely word-medial (award), meanwhile /j/ does not occur.

word-medialonly /l/ occurs in word-final position (cool)

THE DISTRIBUTION OF VOWELS

in MONOSYLLABIC words, the structure can be VC, CV, CVC

1. LONG MONOPHTHONGS OCCUR IN ALL THREE POSITION: /i:/ eave, bead, bee, /ɑ:/ art, bard, bar, /ɔ:/ought, board, bore, /u:/ ooze, food, boo, /ɛ:/ irk, bird, purr

2. IN SHORT MONOPHTHONGS SHORT VOWELS DO NOT OCCUR IN OPEN SYLLABLES (CV) and with thevowel sound /ʊ/ does not occur in VC (closed) monosyllables, meanwhile /ə/ only occurs in unstressedsyllables! Thus, it does not occur in monosyllabic words (although it does occur in monosyllabic wordswhen pronounced in connected speech)

3. CLOSE DIPHTHONGS OCCURE IN ALL THREE STRUCTURE: /eɪ/ bait, age, bay, /aɪ/ bite, ice, buy, /ɔɪ/void, oil, boy, /əʊ/ bode, ode, beau, /aʊ/ fowl, owl, bough

4. CENTERING DIPHTHONGS OCCURE IN CVC AND CV STRUCTURE: /ɪə/ beard, beer (+ ear, VC), /ɛə/ laird,bear (+ air, VC), /ʊə/ gourd, poor

LINGUA INGLESE ISYLLABLE STRUCTURE

Central to the structure of a syllable

is a vowel, a long monophthong may be a word of its own (are /ɑ:/) as may a diphthong (ear /ɪə/)

A single consonant cannot constitute a word, in a monosyllabic word the vowel may preceded and succeeded by a consonant or consonant, if, on the other hand, a consonant is preceded by a vowel a disyllabic word results.

The central element of a syllable is a VOWEL the following graphic may represent the English syllable's structure:

A combination of consonants is called CLUSTERS and the maximum number of consonants in SYLLABLE-INITIAL position is THREE. We mentioned before that all consonants with the exception of /ŋ/ can occur in INITIAL POSITION, all those consonants are called INITIAL CONSONANTS and the preceding and following consonants are called PRE-INITIAL and POST-INITIAL CONSONANTS.

CLUSTERS: A combination of