Chapter One: ENGLISH PHOHOLOGY

O.L.Zaitseva

ENGLISH PHONETICS

Theory and practice

A Communicative-pragmatic Approach

Pyatigorsk 2013

УДК 802.0

З 17 Recommended for publishing

by Pyatigorsk Linguistic University

O.L.Zaitseva.English phonetics: theory and practice.A Communicative-pragmatic Approach. Учебное пособие. Pyatigorsk: PGLU, 2013, 71 p.

This rather a small book is an attempt to throw more light on a very complicated aspect of teaching the English intonation with its relation to actual usage in communication. The linguistic material used as well as the approbation of many of the views discussed here prove the necessity of teaching Eng­lish phonetics in special classes to enable students to achieve at least approximately the level of fluent English speaking. Mere imitation, though quite valuable in practicing English pronunciation, can't solve the problem of effectiveness of English teaching unless students obtain necessary phone­tic data to help them produce utterances in good fluent English which are adequate to every given situation.

Рецензенты: доктор филологических наук, профессор

О.П.Рябко (ЮФУ)

доктор филологических наук, профессор

Л.В.Правикова (ПГЛУ)

© O.L.Zaitseva

Contents

Theory section

Introduction4

Chapter 1. English Phonology 6

1.1. The phoneme 6

1.2. The consonants of English 7

1.3. The vowels 9

1.4. Patterns of simplification of phonemes in speech 11

Chapter 2. Suprasegmental phonology 15

2.1. Stress and rhythm 15

2.2. The function of intonation 17

2.3. Paralinguistic features of English intonation 19

Chapter 3. The transmission of English 22

3.1. Pronunciation standards and dialects 22

3.2. Varieties of English. 24

Practice section

Introduction

Chapter 4. Pragmatics of English intonation28

4.1. General study items 29

4.2. Giving information 31

4.3. ‘New’ and ‘old’ information 33

4.4. ‘Implied’ information 36

4.5. Asking for information 37

Making a speech 39

4.7. Taking control of the situation 41

4.8. Helping interpret the message 43

4.9. Expressing feelings 45

4.10. Reading aloud 47

4.11. Telling a story 49

Chapter 5. English speech sounds in practice50

5.1. Vowels 51

5.2. Consonants 53

Chapter 6. Accentuation and stress 56

6.1. Rhythmic beat 56

6.2. Stress in polysyllabic words 57

6.3. Stress in compound nouns 68

Chapter 7. Glimpses of American pronunciation and intonation 59

7.1. American vowels and consonants 59

7.2. Types of tonic stress in American English 61

Appendix61

References71

Introduction

The function of the language is to convey messages which we wish to express. It demands the choice of appropriate words, their organization according to the grammar rules. The transmission of the message bу speech or writing is closely connected with its adequate interpretation bу the listener or reader. Communication by language fully relies on the effec­tiveness of the transmission phase, i.e. the intelligi­bility of the pronunciation.

The pronunciation of a foreign language has different problems, which we may face while acquiring necessary skills and habits of speaking, writing and listening comprehension. In the first place we should perceive the differences bet­ween the speech sounds in a foreign language and the speech sounds which are familiar to us in our native language. In the second place, all phonetic behaviour is based on what we need, and what we have to do to make the transmis­sion level available to us. The transmission of language implies the use of our breath force modified by the organs of speech. Thirdly, most English phoneticians think that for a foreign learner of English it is more important to acquire good intonation habits than to arti­culate the sounds of the language perfectly. Possibly it is so, but as a spoken language is a conventional method of communication; it is only natural that we should tend to adopt the system of sounds values as well as into­nation patterning which in practice is the most ef­fective and acceptable means of communication fit for any social situation. In the fourth place, in England there are numerous ways of pronouncing Standard English; and English people are divided by the way they talk, into several groups. One of them comprises those who speak without any regional ac­cent - usually that of the capital - and their way of pro­nouncing is considered to be a model of ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP - the technical term used by phoneticians).

Most people have a very idealistic view of what spoken Eng­lish is, or should be, like. People vary in the speed of their speech, in pitch characteristics, in loudness, in articulatory pre­cision, etc. They developed certain tendencies that can now be observed in the system of English pronunciation. We have to face the fact that the formal slow style of speaking disappeared, giving place to so-called slow colloquial style, now being in the state of declining. Strictly speaking, the latter is in itself a formal style already, which is opposed by normal in­formal style, in many respects, quite different from slow col­loquial. Accordingly, many features of slow colloquial style are lost in normal informal speech, which is more rapid and less explicitly articulated than the former. That proves a certain change in the style of pronunciation and poses many problems for learners of English. Some of these problems we shall try to discuss in our book in English phonetics.

Finally, it should be noted that English is or, perhaps, already has become a global language, which means it no longer belongs to the domain of people living in the United Kingdom. English spoken in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa has the status of an official language, and in each country it has its own peculiarities. Add to this English as a second and a foreign language spoken in many European, Asian, African and Latin American countries. Thus, not only English grammar and vocabulary gain from this, but intonation and pronunciation also. And this is reality, and it brings changes into nowadays spoken English.

Chapter One: ENGLISH PHOHOLOGY

The phoneme

Segmental phonological system in English includes two smaller subsystems of vowels and consonants. In this part we shall discuss the notion of so-called ‘ideal’ forms of conso­nants and vowels, syllables and words. After giving their brief description, we shall observe the patterns of their simplification (or modification) in normal informal speech.

The idealistic view is naturally attractive in teaching ‘good’ English because every word is uttered identifiably and quite correctly. It is repeatable and teachable model and certainly a practicable model at early stages of producing spoken English. Advanced students should reach a model level based on English as normally spoken by native speakers. It's clear that in the normal English context the notion of ‘cor­rectness’ needs to be replaced by the notion of ‘appropriate­ness’. If native speakers of English can communicate perfectly efficiently in informal English, which is far removed from ‘slow colloquial’ to ideal, there is no reasonable sense in which such English may be described as ‘incorrect’ (оr ‘careless’, or even ‘slovenly’). The pronunciation might reasonably be described as careless when it functions inefficiently as a mode of communication, when the speaker finds that the people just do not understand what he says. Clearly, most of the time anyone is listening to English being spoken, he is listening for the meaning of the message - not to how the message is being pronounced. What matters here is that all speech sounds (or phonemes) he pronounces should be accepted as appropriate in the community that is using them. In their everyday infor­mal speech native speakers of English produce many sounds which can be described in terms of their phonetic realizations. A phonetic sound should be interpreted as a phonetic realization (representation) of a certain phoneme. In different lan­guages a phonemic sign ‘t’ may have different phonetic repre­sentations and pronounced differently (consider the English alveolar and Russian dental variants of that phoneme). This reveals an 'abstract' nature of the phonemes (defined as the minimum significant units of language), when the variety of physical signals might be assigned to one phoneme. Thus, we view the phonemic system of a language as a system proper to a native speaker of a language. Certainly, speakers of all languages produce a far wider range of different pho­netic sounds than phonemic description would suggest.

When we come to consider the nature of phonemic description of a language, we need to abstract even further. Because we view the whole phonological system which enables speakers of a language to communicate with each other in order to des­cribe the system of communication which is common to a speech community of individuals with different physical characteris­tics, we must ignore these individual variables, and surely, abstract from the effect which the acoustic signal might have if we consider the individual features and the manner of de­livery a speaker has.

Out of all features of a speech sound we select some which enables us to characterize this very phoneme as a member of a certain group of phonemes which have similar characteris­tics as well as to distinguish it from all the others.

One more important point - while speaking about phonemic description of a speech sound we view it in isolation without considering any influence from the preceding and following context it may have. And our ‘ideal’ phoneme has three stages of articulation: on-glide, retention stage and off-glide. This rarely happens when the phoneme is pronounced in a se­quence.

We also should make a clear distinction between the pho­nemic classification and the possible phonetic realization of phonemes. Since the characterization of an abstract pho­neme is not the same as the phonetic description of a phonetic segment, we may not follow the conventional arrangements of pronunciation text books in discussing classes of phonemes. We shall group phonemes into classes which are determined by the way in which they function in English.

Thus, at the phonemic level we may not distinguish between ‘bi-labial’ and ‘labial-dental’ consonants since this distinc­tion is not relevant at the phonemic level. At this level we are concerned with discussing the patterning of phonemes and all we need to know whether a phoneme is ‘labial’ or not.

At the phonetic level it is of course extremely important to know that the initial consonant in ‘pew’ is ‘bi-labial^’ and that in ‘few’ – ‘labial-dental’.

Now we'll try to show the existing difference between two approaches in classification of consonants: phonetic (given by A.Gimson) and phonemic (given by G.Brown) which owes more to N.Chomsky and A.Halle. We'll also introduce a classification which is an attempt to give a complete phonological classification.

The consonants

When it comes to identifying consonants we may state three facts about them that matter:

(a) kind of obstruction which is formed in the mouth when they are produced;

(b) sort of articulatory peculiarities they have;

(c) if the work of vocal cords is involved.

Thus a consonant may be defined as a speech sound in the production of which an obstruction (complete or incomplete) is formed in the mouth cavity.

In G.Brown's classification consonants are arranged in columns and row each having some articulatory feature in common.

Table 1

The first column Acontains all phonemes with the similar features - the lower lip is involved in its articulation. Theу are all labial. The second column В contains the consonants which are formed by a closure between the tongue tip or blade and the dental ridge or the upper teeth. They are dental/alve­olar. The third column С contains consonants which involve complete articulation with the tip/blade of the tongue opposed to some part of the dental ridge. This class can be called post-dental. Column Dcontains consonants which involve articulation further back in the oral cavity than other consonants. They are called palatal. Column Econtains consonants which are formed with back of the tongue making a closure against the soft palate or velum. They are called velar. The last co­lumnF contains only one phoneme ‘h’. It is a glottal or pharyngal fricative.

The horizontal division is based on manner of articulation. Row 1contains consonants which are formed by a complete ob­struction of the air-stream: p, t, k, b, d, g are called stops or plosives; tς, dz - affricated stops. This group also has voice distinctions between its members: p - b, t-d, k-g, tς -dz .

Row 2contains f, θ , s, ς, v, ð , z, z which, are called fricatives. There is no complete obstruction of the air-stream which results in hissing sound. The fricatives in columns A and В are much less fricative than those in columns C, D.

Row 3 contains the nasal consonants m, n, n. During the articulation of nasal consonants the released air passes through nasal cavities and sets up resonance there.

Row 4contains a set of consonants which is indeed an as­sorted set. They are realized neither by complete obstruction nor by incomplete obstruction. They have much more vowel-like articulation. All of them, if prolonged, sound like vowels. But they should be regarded as consonants since they can all precede a vowel (‘wet, yes, let, red’). All these consonants have voiceless variants which may be slightly fricative when they follow voiceless initial consonants as in ‘play, twist, free’.

The last row contains ‘h’ with a wide variety of realization; all of them are breathy onsets to following vowels.

The precise phonetic classification given by A.Gimson is illustrated in the following groups:

(1) plosives -p b t d k g;

(2) affricates - tς, dz tr dr;

(3) fricatives - v θ ð s z ς, z h;

(4) nasals - m n ŋ ;

(5) lateral and frictionless consonants -1 r;

(6) semi-vowels - w j.

His classification, though having some features in common with the classification given by G.Brown can't prove to be as logically arranged as that given in Table 1. Being more concerned with the patter­ning of phonemes rather than with the details of their pronun­ciation, we should not forget that our knowledge of the patterns significantly effects the way in which we perceive details of producing speech sounds.

We may offer one more classification in which consonants are arranged in a tree chart. At each level of division we have an opposition with some articulatory feature in common, left from the preceding division. Only ‘h’ doesn’t fit into this chart.

Table 2

consonants

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