Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese 1, prof. Sturiale, libro consigliato The Frameworks of English, Kim Ballard

HONETICS AND HONEMES

Phonetics is the study of the sounds of speech. There are several branches of phonetics but we will

only be dealing here with articulatory phonetics, which is the area which deals with the actual

production of speech sounds. Closely related to phonetics is phonology, which is more concerned with

sound systems and patterns. We will begin by looking at speech production (a branch of phonetics), but

in conjunction with this we will also move beyond the realm of phonetics proper in order to identify the

system of speech sounds – or phonemes – which characterise English.

Each time a speech sound is produced it is different; a phone is a physical realisation of a speech sound.

A phoneme is the smallest speech sound that has linguistic value; when a series of phones are similar in

terms of articulation and can be distinguished from another group in terms of meaning and collocation,

the group is given a name (it is a phoneme). The phoneme is an abstract term, specific to a particular

language.

As we said, Standard English is a dialect: in other words, it is a variety characterised by certain lexical

and grammatical features. All speakers of English have a dialect; similarly, all speakers have an accent.

Accent is the term we use to refer to characteristics of pronunciation. Often, we can identify where

someone comes from by their accent. Linguists have traditionally selected an accent known as Received

Pronunciation (BR) to represent British English; the Queen speaks RP but hers is a variety associated

with the aristocracy, known as conservative RP.

RP – 44 recognisable sounds: 24 consonant sounds, 20 vowels sounds.

A particular sound can be pronounced in different ways depending on the position or context in which

it occurs; for instance, compare the way you pronounce /l/ at the start of loop with /l/ at the end of pool.

l l

The first one is known as clear , while the other one is known as dark . Despite this difference of

pronunciation, however, we are unlikely to claim that these two sounds are distinct sounds in the way

that /b/ and /p/ are. A phoneme is an abstract unit representing the smallest distinctive speech sound

that distinguishes one word from another; the surface forms of the phonemes, which vary depending on

the position of a sound or on the speaker's accent, are allophones.

One of the problems of writing down speech sounds, or making a transcription, is indicating them

clearly to the reader. The letters <b,a,t> do not always stand for the sounds they represent when bat is

pronounced. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an indispensable tool for the study of

ʌ

phonetics and phonology. Dumb has three phonemes /d, , m/; the symbols in slant brackets represent

the underlying phonemes but do not give any detailed information about how these phonemes are

realised, such as whether or not a /r/ sound is rolled. This time of transcription is known as a broad

transcription. It is possible to use additional symbols and special markings called diacritics in a

transcription in order to identify allophones. And allophonic or narrow transcription of speech is placed

within square [ ] brackets.

The symbols between square brackets [ ] indicate a phonetic symbol. The symbols between slant brackets

// indicate a phoneme. The letters of ordinary spelling (orthographic symbol) or grapheme are placed

between angled brackets < >.

The vocal tract is where the sounds are produced. It begins at the larynx and ends at the lips. The larynx

is a casing of cartilage rings at the top of the trachea. In the larynx are two small but extremely important

muscles, the vocal cords; the space between them is known as the glottis. The section of the vocal tract

between the larynx and the uvula is known as the 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 (or

velum) is raised, blocking off the nasal cavity. The lungs are crucial to the production of sound. English

phonemes are made by the air passing from the lungs, up to the trachea, then through the larynx and the

rest of the vocal tract. This flow of air is known as an airstream. If the airstream flows out from the

lungs it is an egressive pulmonic airstream (some languages make use of an ingressive pulmonic

airstream).

In phonetics, a consonant involves some kind of narrow, partial or complete closure in the vocal tract.

By contrast, a vowel sound involves no closure or contact of this kind and the airstream flows

unobstructed out of the mouth. RP is based on a system of 24 consonants. We classify consonants

according to three aspects: place of articulation, manner of articulation and presence or absence

of voice. The parts of the mouth involved in making speech sounds are called articulators; they can me

passive (upper teeth, alveolar ridge and hard palate) or active (lips, soft palate, glottis, tongue). The

tongue is often brought into contact with another part of the mouth in order to make a closure; we

distinguish the different parts of the tongue – the tip, the blade, the front and the back, and also the

sides.

Type of sound Articulators involved

Bilabial Lips

Labio-dental Upper front teeth placed against the lower lip

Dental Tongue between the front teeth and touching the

upper teeth

Alveolar Tongue against the alveolar ridge

Palato-alveolar Tip of the tongue making contact with the alveolar

ridge, while the front of the tongue is raised

towards the hard palate

Palatal Tongue gainst the hard palate

Velar Back of th tongue against the velum

Glottal Vocal cords

According to the manner of articulation, a sound may be a plosive, a nasal, a fricative, an affricate

or an approximant. Both plosives and nasals are collectively known as stops. An affricate is a

combination of a plosive and a fricative. The four approximant sounds in RP - /w, l, r, j/ - are also called

semi-consonants or semi-vowels (when they're produced, the restrictions to the air passage are less

than for the other types); the consonant /l/ is sometimes referred to as a lateral approximant, to

distinguish it from /r/, which is a central approximant (they're both referred as liquid). The fricative /h/

(sometimes also referred as an aspirate) is voiceless because to produce it the vocal cords need to be

more open than for voiced consonants but not fully open as when breathing out normally.

No such closures are used for vowels, which rely instead 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. The vowels

have been divided into two types – monophthongs and diphthongs (which are glides from one vowel

position towards another). There are 20 vowels in RP.

We can make a contrast in length. Length is indicated by a colon : after the vowel in question.

The tongue position for monophthong vowels is usually plotted by a dot on a grid that relates to the

shape of the mouth:

The labels at the top – front, central and back – refer to the areas of the tongue.

A close vowel will have a relatively small cavity between the tongue and the palate, while an open vowel

will have a relatively large one. There are two intermediate measures of tongue height – half-close and

half-open.

The vowels at the extremes of the grid are known as cardinal vowels and are used as points of reference.

The 'neutral' sound /ə / which occurs more or less in the middle of the grid is of particular interest; it

is very common in English, and it's known as schwa. To articulate schwa you have your mouth in what

is likely to be its most natural position. Keep your tongue in its resting position, open your lips slightly

and add voice.

Three diphthongs move towards /ɪ /, and another two towards /ʊ / - these five are often referred to as

closing diphthongs; the other three move towards schwa, and they're often referred as centring

diphthongs.

Sounds that are completely blocked in the mouth are called stops; sounds in which the airstream is

uninterrupted or partly interrupted in the mouth are called continuants.

S P

EGMENTAL HONOLOGY

Phonology is often divided into segmental (which deals with the distribution of the phonemes, how

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

suprasegmental (which deals with aspects of speech such as pitch and intonation which colour speech

at the syllable level and beyond).

Consonants occur in different positions: word-initial, word-medial and word-final.

The approximants are the phonemes with the most limited distribution in single consonants occurrences,

although they are very productive in clusters. All four approximants occur word-initially. In RP, only /l/

occurs word-finally, although in many other accents so does /r/ (the rhotic ones).

RP has seven short vowels, five long monophtong vowels and eight diphothongs, which are also long

vowels. In RP the short vowels do not occur in open CV syllables. /ʊ/ does not occur in VC

monosyllables. In RP, /ʌ/ has replaced /ʊ/ word-initially as well as in other positions. Schwa only occurs

in unstressed syllables.

One allophonic feature of vowels which is useful to know about is nasalisation; this occurs when the

velum has been lowered during the articulation of the vowel and air passing through the nasal cavity gives

the vowel a slightly different quality from usual. The diacritic ~ indicates that a vowel has been nasalised.

Phonemes vary when in contact with adjacent phonemes from other words: these variations are the result

of connected speech. Elision is a term that defines the loss of a speech segment; it is likely to occur

when clusters of consonants form or when identical segments occur in a sequence. In connected speech,

segments can both disappear and appear; in other circumstances, they will become more like the segments

which precede or follow them – this phenomenon is known as assimilation.

V E

ARIATION IN NGLISH

Speakers fall into one of three groups: ENL (English as a Native Language), ESL (English as a Second

Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language). At least 60 sovereign states in the world have

English as an official language. English may have the status of an official language, but its importance is

lingua franca

as a . Second language speakers may or may not be as fluent as native speakers, but it is

less likely they will speak English in a private, domestic context or regard English as their ‘primary’

language. Of all the non-standard varieties of English, the most marked in terms of their difference from

any of the standards are the English-based pidgin and creole varieties found in the Caribbean, the Pacific

and West Africa. These are hybrid languages originally formed for a specific purpose through contact

between speakers of two dissimilar languages; a pidgin has no native speakers whereas a creole is a pidgin

that has developed sufficiently to be learnt as a native language.

In the last 60 years or so then, a process of l