Uni-Wissen Phonetics and Phonology

Optimize your exam preparation Anglistik/Amerikanistik

John F. Davis

• Publisher: Klett Lerntraining
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783129395684
• eBook ISBN: 9783129391112
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is intended for beginning students of English as a gentle introduction to the fascinating world of the sound of language with particular reference to English. The text has been kept simple with technical terms explained as soon as they are used, so that students with no particular knowledge of the subject can easily find their way around.Sicher im Studium - die Reihe mit dem Grundlagenwissen sämtlicher Teildisziplinen des Studienfachs Anglistik / AmerikanistikUni-Wissen Anglistik/Germanistik bietet Ihnen- das relevante Überblickswissen zum Thema- eine systematische, verständliche und kompakte Aufbereitung- die zuverlässige Grundlage für die zielgerichtete, schnelle und effektive Prüfungsvorbereitung

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CHAPTER Phonetics and Phonology

The aim of this book is to provide its readers with a short introduction to the phonetics and phonology of English within a structuralist framework and to give them a firm foundation from which they can proceed to other approaches to phonology. Limited space will allow consideration of only Standard British Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA). Topics will usually be illustrated from RP, but where GA is different, these differences will be discussed and illustrated too.

1 Difference between Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is that part of linguistics in which we study the physical characteristics of the sounds which we hear in languages. It is interested in how we produce these sounds in the mouth, nose, throat and lungs, and in how the ear and the brain perceive and interpret them.

Phonology is the study of how particular languages use these sounds, e. g. what combinations of consonants a language allows at the beginning or end of a word or syllable, which sounds have a restricted distribution in the language, how some sounds affect neighbouring sounds in that language, etc.

Of what use is a knowledge of phonetics and phonology to students and teachers of English?

Students can improve their own pronunciation if they understand how the sounds of English (or another language) are produced physically (Phonetics) and how the sounds of English (or another language) function in that language (Phonology).

For example, German learners should be aware of the fact that the vowel in the German word schön is said with rounded lips and that it should not be substituted for the non-rounded vowel in the English words learn or bird. This is phonetic knowledge.

Another problem for German learners is not to use the glottal stop at the beginning of an English word starting with a vowel. German words with an initial vowel begin with a brief closing and opening of the vocal cords in the throat, as when a person strains slightly. This glottal stop is rare in English pronunciation and only used before word-initial vowels in very emphatic speech. There is thus a very big difference between the German sentence Anna aß ein Ei, where each word begins with a glottal stop, and the corresponding English sentence Ann ate an egg, where the last consonant in the first three words is run onto the beginning of the word following it, almost as if it were an initial consonant. Thus the function of the glottal stop in the two languages is very different. This is phonological knowledge.

A knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of English can improve the student’s understanding of native speakers of English. Similarly, the English of non-native speakers can be more easily understood if the student has some knowledge of how the phonetics and phonology of the non-native speakers’ language works.

This kind of phonetic knowledge shows us why speakers of certain languages typically make certain kinds of mistakes.

Phonetics and phonology are also important for teachers of English. They can help teachers to understand the ways in which their pupils are pronouncing wrongly and they allow them to offer suggestions for the improvement of a pupil’s pronunciation.

2 Phonetics

1 Preliminaries

We said above that phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds. We must note carefully that we are not concerned here with the letters with which words are written but with the sounds which the letters stand for. The goals of phonetics are to determine and describe the properties of these sounds, how they are produced, how they pass physically from one person to another and how the speaker and the listener perceive them. For this purpose various kinds of phonetics are required.

2 Kinds of Phonetics

Articulatory Phonetics describes sounds with regard to the organs of speech, such as the lips, the tongue, the teeth, etc. We see which organs of speech are used to produce a certain sound, how they are manipulated, where they are moved to.

Acoustic Phonetics is concerned with what happens in the air between the speaker and the listener; in other words it is the study of the acoustic properties of speech sounds. For this, phoneticians use various kinds of technical apparatus, such as the sonograph, a kind of acoustic spectrograph, which analyses sound into its component frequencies and produces a graphical record of the results.

Auditory Phonetics deals with the question of how sounds are perceived by the ear of the speaker or listener, what people think they hear, how the brain distinguishes sounds, how the brain segments sounds into understandable units. For example, if I replace the initial sound of the word glass by a d sound when I ask a native speaker of English Would you like a dlass of beer?, he will probably not notice that I have mispronounced the word glass, as his brain will have processed the erroneous initial sound as the g so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Phonetics and Phonology
• Chapter 2 Phonology
• Chapter 3 Consonant Phonemes and their Phones
• Chapter 4 Vowel Phonemes and their Phones
• Chapter 5 Phonological Processes
• Chapter 6 Scripts and Transcriptions
• Footnotes
• Appendix Bibliography