Lingua inglese: Auditory phonetics how speech sounds are perceived, Functional of grammatical, Word-formation, phonological reduction, semantic and pragmatic

Phonetics and phonology

The study of the sound that we produce is called phonetics; it is descriptive, it tells me that a word can be pronounced in different ways. The sound is produced by the organ of speech which comprehends lips, teeth, tongue, hard and soft palate and vocal cords. If the vocal cords vibrate during the passage of the air we have a voiced sound, if not we have a voiceless sound.

Phonetics

Phoneticians study the production of the sound in three ways:

• Auditory phonetics - how speech sounds are perceived
• Acoustic phonetics - how speech sounds are made up
• Articulatory phonetics - how speech sounds are produced

Phonology

Phonology studies the sounds as an abstract system, through the phonemes (the smallest units of the words). The variants that exist within individual phonemes are known as allophones. Words where there is only one sound change between them are known as minimal pairs.

The orthography, the written system of the English language, doesn’t correspond with how words are articulated in speech. There is a need to use a separate writing system, called IPA.

There are three types to create consonant sounds:

• Place of articulation (bilabial, labio-dental, alveolar, palatal, velar)
• Manner of articulation (nasal, fricative, approximant, affricate)
• Voiced or voiceless sounds

There are three ways to create vowel sounds:

• The position of the tongue
• The position of the lips
• The duration

Morphology

Morphology studies the shape and the form of the words. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. A word can be composed of one or more morphemes.

There are different morphemes:

• Free morphemes can stand alone
  • Functional of grammatical perform some kind of grammatic role, carrying a little meaning of their duration
  • Lexical or content carry most of the content of a sentence
• Bound morphemes they stay only attached to free morphemes.
  • Affixes they can be:
    • Inflectional establish a relationship between two or more words, they are only eight in English:
      • -s 3^rd singular person present
      • -ed past tense
      • -ing progressive/gerund
      • -en past participle
      • -s plural
      • -s’ possessive
      • -er comparative
      • -est superlative
    • Derivational more common are prefix (before other morphemes) and suffix (after other morphemes) in English, but less common are infix and circumfix. Some suffixes can change the class of a word; can convert a noun into an abstract one (friend – friendship), others convert a diminutive (dad – daddy), others refer to an amount (spoonful).

Word-formation is the most productive area of morphology, it comprehends:

• Coinage or invention → process that creates new words to express new ideas or products
• Reduplication → the repetition of one or more syllables, ex. “fifty fifty”
• Eponyms → word that comes from a person’s name
• Toponyms → words that come from a place’s name
• Conversion → process that creates new words by using a word in another function, converting its original grammatical class to another:
  • Adj to noun: daily, comic
  • Adj to verb: cool, dirty
  • Preposition to verb: to up
  • Preposition to adj: in
  • Preposition to noun: the ins and the outs
  • Verb to noun: flop
  • Noun to verb: to text, to message, to rubbish
  • From computerese: to scroll
  • Furniture to bed
• Abbreviation
  • Titles
  • Phonological reduction
    • Apocope or back-clipping → ex. Pub
    • Aphaeresis or fore-clipping → ex. Zine (from Magazine)
    • Fore- and aft-clipping → ex. Flu (influence)
    • Hypocorism → ex. Telly (from television)
  • Blends → a combination of two or more words to create another one, taking the beginning of a word and the ending of the other one, ex. Spanglish (Spanish + English)
  • Acronyms → are pronounced as a single word, ex. NASA
  • Initialism → are pronounced as a sequence of letters, ex. DNA, USA
• Compound → where two or more free morphemes are combined, compounding is the most productive kind of word formation after derivation. There are three kinds of compounds:
  • Endocentric/headed compounds they have a head on the right side, one of the words is the central in meaning
  • Exocentric compounds they have no head
  • Copulative/coordinative compounds ex. Bittersweet, pathway
• Borrowings → new words are formed by adopting words from other languages.

Semantic and pragmatics

Semantic refers to the construction of meaning in language, pragmatics refers to meaning construction. An important distinction in semantic is to define the sense and reference.

Sense refers to the central meaning of a linguistic form. Reference characterizes the relationships between language and the world. An example: “the morning star” and “the evening star”, both can be defined as having the same reference (the moon), but they have different senses.