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

Introduction

There are different aspects (or levels) of language; the most important ones are: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The standard variety of English which linguists use is Standard British English. SBE is a dialect.

Phonetics and phonemes

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 that 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, we will also move beyond the realm of phonetics proper in order to identify the system of speech sounds – or phonemes – which characterize English.

Each time a speech sound is produced it is different; a phone is a physical realization 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 characterized 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 (RP) to represent British English; the Queen speaks RP but hers is a variety associated with the aristocracy, known as conservative RP.

RP – 44 recognizable sounds: 24 consonant sounds, 20 vowel 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. 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 phonetics and phonology. Dumb has three phonemes /d, ʌ, m/; the symbols in slant brackets represent the underlying phonemes but do not give any detailed information about how these phonemes are realized, such as whether or not an /r/ sound is rolled. This type 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. An 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 be 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 and 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 against the hard palate
• Velar: Back of the 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 liquids). The fricative /h/ (sometimes also referred to 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.