Riassunto esame lingua inglese, prof. Halliday, libro consigliato English Language, Halliday

English language

Chapter 1

English has emerged as a lingua franca that is a language used throughout the world to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages.

Chapter 2

Phonetics study how speech sounds are produced by speakers and perceived by listeners and how sound travels through the air. It studies how the consonants and vowels of English are articulated. All noise travels through the air to the human ear. When noise is generated, air particles vibrate and this vibration is perceived by the listener as sound. Sound is perceived differently according to how the air particles vibrate and according to the shape of the space.

IPA: International Phonetics Alphabet, is a system that is used to represent the sound of language. It consists of a group of symbols which allow us to write down sounds accurately. One symbol represents one sound.

The vocal tract is the parts of the body used for producing speech. It is composed of: lips, teeth, palate, uvula, velum (that acts like a valve to control the flow of air into the nasal cavity), larynx, vocal cords (which open and close to modify the size of the space between them), the tongue. If the glottis is open, air can flow freely and the sounds are called voiceless while if the glottis is narrow the vocal cords vibrate and the sounds are called voiced sounds. When the vocal cords vibrate quickly they produce a high pitch while when the vocal cords vibrate slowly a low pitch is produced.

The articulators involved can be divided into two categories: active articulators, which are mobile, and passive articulators, which are stationary. Depending on the place of articulation we can distinguish bilabial sounds, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar and glottal sounds.

When we describe consonant's manner of articulation we are concerned with how much obstruction there is in the vocal tract. There can be three types of stricture: a complete stricture that produces plosive sounds (bilabial, velar, alveolar, affricates and nasal); a partial stricture that produces close approximation (fricatives); not much stricture at all that produces open approximation (lateral).

When we talk about vowels we aren't referring to the five vowel letters but there are many more vowels in spoken English. All vowels are voiced and are made with open approximation. The space when they are produced is called vowel space and it is represented by a vowel trapezium. Low vowels are also called open vowels and high vowels are also called close vowels, between them there are low-mid vowel and high-mid vowel.

Vowels in which the tongue doesn't move are called monophthongs while those in which it moves and they have two symbols in transcription are called diphthongs. Another characteristic of the vowels is the duration. Monophthongs may be short or long vowels while diphthongs are always long.

Chapter 3

Phonology is the study of the systems, patterns and function of sounds in human language and English phonology is the study of the sound structure of English. Segmental phonology is the study of individual vowel and consonant sounds. Phonemes are sounds or phones that are used to contrast word meaning in a particular language. “Pin” and “Bin”; /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes in English. These two words are an example of a minimal pair. They are words that are identical in all aspects except one. One sound is substituted by another in the same position and there is a difference in meaning.

All speech sounds can be classified as obstruents or sonorants. Plosive, affricates and fricatives are obstruents while all other sounds that is vowels, liquids and nasal are sonorants. All sonorants are voiced. There is normally a voiceless obstruent phoneme that contrasts with its voiced counterparts.

Many phonemes have allophones. They are sounds that are phonetically different in some respects, but which are not used to contrast word meaning. They are in complementary distribution that means that each sound cannot be substituted for the other. Assimilation is the phonetic accommodation of sounds to their neighbours. It is distinguished in regressive assimilation and progressive assimilation. A natural class is a group of sounds that are phonetically similar and display similar behaviour.

Chapter 4

Prosodic phonology is the study of the properties of speech, such as stress and intonation, that aren't normally represented by the letters of the orthography. Each syllable has a nucleus that can be simple, consisting of just a short vowel, or complex, with a diphthong or a long vowel. The nucleus is the head of the syllable, is obligatory. Other syllable constituents are optional.

A syllable can be composed of an onset and a rhyme; a rhyme is divided in nucleus and coda. If a syllable doesn't have a coda it is a light syllable while if it has a coda it is a heavy syllable. This distinction is at the centre of the notion of syllable weight. Open syllables end in a vowel while closed syllables end in one or more consonants.

The syllable is also important in the study of permissible combinations of sounds. Some combinations of phonemes are permitted while others are forbidden. To be able to identify syllable limits we need to understand first the notion of sonority. Sonority denotes the loudness of speech sound. Vowels are general