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

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 comprehend 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.

Phoneticians study the production of the sound in 3 way:

- Auditory phonetics how speech sounds are perceived

- Acoustic phonetics how speech sounds are made up

- Articulatory phonetics how speech sounds are produced.

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 knows 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

word are articulated in speech. There is a need to use a separate writing system, called IPA.

There are 3 types for 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 3 ways for 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

1. Functional of grammatical perform some kind of grammatic role, carrying a little

meaning of their duration

2. Lexical or content carry most of the content of a sentence

- Bound morpheme they stay only attached to free morphemes.

1. Affixes they can be:

-Inflectional establish a relationship between 2 or more words, they are only 8 in

English:

rd

(-s 3 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:

1. Coinage or invention  process that create new words to express new ideas or products

2. Reduplication the repetition of one or more syllable, ex. “fifty fifty”

3. Eponyms  word that comes from a person’s name

4. Toponyms  words that comes from a place’s name

5. Conversion  process that create new words by using a word in another functions,

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

-forniture to bed

6. Abbreviation

-titles

-phonological reduction

1. apocope or back-clipping ex. Pub

2. aphaeresis or fore-clipping ex. Zine (from Magazine)

3. fore- and aft-clipping ex. Flu (influence)

4.hypocorism  ex. Telly (from television)

- blends  a combination of 2 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

7. Compound where 2 or more free morphemes are combined, compounding is the most

productive kind of word formation after derivation. There are 3 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/coordinatve compounds ex. Bittersweet, pathway.

8. 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.

If the reference is outside the text, we have an Exophoric reference.

If the reference is inside the text, we have an Endophoric reference and it can be:

- Anaphoric if the reference comes after the referent

- Cataphoric if the reference comes before the referent.

- SPEECH ACTS

An utterance can be:

- A locutionary act what we say

- An illocutionary act what we don’t say but intend

- A perlocutionary act when I say something in a way but I intend something different.

All utterances have purpose, that can be:

- Constative utterance

- Ethical utterance

- Phatic utterance I don’t convey info but I show that I want to talk, ex. “nice day, isn’t

it?”

- Performative utterance they have a specific instruction, and can be formal context or

informal context

- COHESION AND COHERENCE

Cohesion and coherence must be present if we would talk of a text. A text refers to a stretch or

complete piece of a speech.

A text is cohesive if its elements are linked together. A text is coherent if it makes

sense. It should be clear that these are not the same thing. That is, a text may be cohesive

(i.e. linked together), but incoherent (i.e. meaningless).

Cohesion refers to the grammatical and lexical relationship within a text; it is made of:

- Reference personal and possessive references;

demonstrative reference this, that, these, those;

comparative referencesimilar, same, so, more)

- Substitution Nominal substitution I like the blue shirt, but this one is better;

Verbal substitution  he is smocking more than he used to;

Clausal substitution is there going to be a storm? They say so.

- Ellipsis Nominal ellipsis  four oysters followed and then other four

Verbal ellipses have you been swimming? Yes I have

Clausal ellipses  what were they doing? Holding hands

- Conjuction Additive  and, furthermore, in addition

Adversative  but, however, nevertheless

Causal  because

Temporal  after, before, then

Coherence is what make text semantically meaningful. If a text coherences, it makes sense. It

can be thought as how meanings and sequences of ideas relate to each other, ex.

Problemsolution; questionanswer.

- EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Human babies are born unable to speak, and they remain in this state for many years. After

babies produce strings of sounds, babbling, and then it develops in holophrastic that consists of

one word utterances. After the conversational skills develop fast.

Psycholinguistics touches language acquisition and syntax.

- HISTORY OF ENGLISH

The language of Angles was brought to the Celtic islands alongside the other Germanic groups,

the Saxons and the Jutes. The Celtic languages of Britain were pushed to the north and west by

the invaders. During the Roman occupation, Latin and the native Celtic languages co-existed.

- OLD ENGLISH

The difference in Old English is the case system. In modern English, the function of words in a

sentence is indicated by word-order.

In Old English, inflections added to the end of nouns indicated their function in the sentence.

Old English had grammatical gender for nouns, so a word would be marked as masculine,

feminine or neuter.

In the Middle English period, most of the case system was lost. In favour of a more fixed

word-order.

By the time of the introduction of printing presses, Middle English relied more on syntactic

word-order than inflection.

- SOCIOLINGUISTICS Sociolinguistics can help us

This field investigates between language and society.

understand why we speak differently in various social contexts, and help uncover the social

relationships in a community. There are 2 strands of sociolinguistics:

- Interactional Sociolinguistics focus on language in its social context, the language

used in interaction by closely observing a "speech event" in a particular community.

- Variationist Sociolinguistics focuses on social variation in dialects and examines how

this variation is highly structured. This structured variation tells us that this is part

of Human language capacity, a built in system of language in a brain.

Important is the difference between accent and dialect:

- Accent refers to pronunciation

- Dialect refers to lexis and grammar as well as pronunciation.

Sociolinguistics argue that a group of individual cannot be defined as a speech community

because they speak the same language. The speech community can be seen as an abstract

concept. Speakers can be geographically disparate.

- WORLD ENGLISHES

World Englishes is a recently emergent area of sociolinguistic study, the expansion of different

varieties of Englishes around the world has been intensified by English as the global language

of the internet.

Braj Kachru argued that instead of thinking about “English” in singular form, the language

should be seen as a pluralized concept.

There are many types of Englishes around the world, that can be summarized in the following:

- Inner circle (ENL English as a Native Language) where the English language has

its status

- Outer circle (ESL English as a Second Language) refers to contexts where English

has become an official language thanks to the colonialism

- Expanding circle (EFL English as a foreign language) the places where English is

used as a foreign language.

English is defined the Lingua Franca, and the acronym ELF (English as a Lingua Franca)is

now used. Lingua franca is defined as a common language. The need for a lingua franca arises

when people speaking different languages come into contact.

The use of English as a lingua franca will led to the “Euro-English” variety, that could undergo

the process of standardisation.

A language to become standardized, it needs to undergo the process of codification, through

the publication of dictionaries and grammar books.

- STYLISTICS

All text display style. The discipline of stylistics explores the relationship between language

patterns and interpretation.

"Stylistics is the modern version of the ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric,' which taught its

students how to structure an argument, how to make effective use of figures of speech.

- METHODOLOGICA