Introduction
Pronunciation is a much more important and pervasive feature of communication than is generally recognized. It is the crucial starting point for all spoken language, since thoughts must be articulated in sound in order to be heard and so to become a message that can be communicated to another person. Pronunciation is required not merely for talking, but for communicating and making sense to another person, that is, for making meaning in both an audible and an understandable form. A person’s pronunciation ensures the clarity required for a listener to be able to pick out words from the stream of speech and put them together in meaningful, comprehensible patterns, and also projects information about the speaker and the context of communication that makes a certain impression and establishes the common ground between speaker and listener that is needed for effective communication. In both of these aspects, pronunciation is the foundation of messaging in speech—through articulating words and their combinations in grammatical and discourse units and through projecting multiple facets of social and contextual meaning.
Research into pronunciation in real-world contexts, which today incorporate people’s transglobal movements and interactions, is making its centrality and multiple functions in communication increasingly clear. A growing body of research demonstrates that pronunciation is an aspect of language and communication which demands attention in educational and workplace contexts where speakers who have different mother tongues seek to communicate in a common language, which in the world today is often English. The emphasis of this book is on pronunciation practice and research focused on teaching, learning, and using English in these real-world contexts of transglobal and international communication.
In this chapter, we take an in-depth look at the nature of pronunciation as a component of language and communication, in its many aspects as both production and perception of speech, and in its many functions for conveying meaning of different types. We begin by differentiating the terms and disciplines that are associated with the study of speech sounds, in order to make clear to readers our own references to pronunciation in this book. Next, we review the features of pronunciation and the different types of linguistic and social meaning expressed, first by the pronunciation of individual sounds and then by the pronunciation of stretches of speech. In that part of the discussion, we give many examples of the kinds of meaning conveyed by pronunciation and how misunderstanding may result from unclear pronunciation or different conventions for pronunciation and the interpretation of speech in different speech communities. That review is followed by a consideration of pronunciation as a feature of group and individual identity. The chapter also provides a review of key concepts as they are used in the different areas of pronunciation research and practice included in this book. By reviewing the multifaceted nature of pronunciation as a pervasive dimension of communication and introducing key terms and concepts for talking about pronunciation in its many manifestations, this introductory chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book.
The Nature of Pronunciation and Why It Is Important
A First Look at Phonology and Pronunciation
In linguistics, phonology refers to the sound system of a language, that is, the distinctions in sounds that are meaningful for that language, or to the sound stratum or level of language, as distinct from the other “higher” strata (e.g., of lexis and syntax) of language. Phonology can be thought of as the surface level, or the building blocks, of a language. All of the spoken units of a language, from syllables up to whole discourses, are expressed through or composed of speech sounds, segmental features or phonemes (consonants and vowels) and suprasegmental features or prosodies (properties of stretches of speech). Phonology is therefore one of the aspects that can be described or analyzed about a language and its individual elements (words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and discourses such as conversations or speeches). It is also one of the aspects of speech that can be described or analyzed with respect to individual speakers or groups of speakers.
Phonology comprises the meaningful units of sound out of which all spoken language is formed and connected, by convention, to meanings that human beings recognize and respond to—both internally, in terms of their thoughts and feelings, and externally, in terms of their interactive moves. Phonology can therefore be viewed as having both psychological and social dimensions. Phonology also has a cognitive dimension, since the articulatory, auditory, psychological, and social patterning of spoken language is imprinted in specific neural pathways. The brain is then able to control and integrate all aspects of phonological performance, both subconsciously and consciously, to ensure that speech is produced with a high degree of understandability according to the speaker’s intention.
Pronunciation is a prominent term among a number of different terms used within the realm of phonology and the various types of research and practice connected to the sound stratum of language. Although phonology is sometimes used as a cover term for all of the phenomena related to linguistic sound, it is often restricted to the description or the study of meaningful distinctions in sound of a language, and on this basis differentiated from phonetics, which refers to the description or the study of the details of language sounds. Linguists regularly use these two terms with this contrast in mind, phonology to refer to the system and units of linguistic sound that are meaningful for a language and phonetics to refer to the physical properties of those units. The emphasis of theoretical linguists on theoretical phonology (or in some cases, theoretical phonetics) can be contrasted with the practical applications of applied linguists, which can be referred to as applied phonology (or in some cases, applied phonetics). The term pronunciation tends to have a practical or applied emphasis and so is generally not used by theoretical linguists and researchers in second language acquisition (SLA), who typically refer to phonology (or occasionally phonetics) as their area of study. Language teachers generally use the term pronunciation, referring to an area of proficiency in language learning or a type of skill in spoken language performance, rather than phonology.
Researchers and practitioners with a practical or applied emphasis may use any of these terms (phonology, pronunciation, or phonetics) together with others, such as articulation, relating to the mechanics of producing speech sounds (e.g., speech therapists), or accent, relating to the general characteristics of speech that are associated with a certain geographical locale or social group (e.g., managers and trainers in business). Social psychologists may refer to pronunciation or accent as a focus of investigation on people’s attitudes to specific languages or speaker groups. Because we aim to focus on the practical aspects of phonology, we will refer to pronunciation for the most part, while using the other terms as appropriate for our coverage of research and practice in the various disciplines and areas of spoken language performance included in this book.
As a type of linguistic skill or language proficiency, pronunciation involves learning to articulate and discriminate the individual sound elements or phonemes making up the system of consonants and vowels of a language, sometimes referred to as segmental phonology, and the features of connected speech making up its prosody or prosodic system, sometimes referred to as suprasegmental phonology. The prosodic system or suprasegmental phonology includes, at a minimum, tone and intonation (defined by pitch), rhythm (defined by duration), and stress or accentuation (defined by acoustic intensity , force of articulation, or perceptual prominence). From the perspective of language teaching, prosody may also include articulatory (or vocal) setting, a complex of specific postures of the vocal organs (lips, tongue, jaw, and vocal folds), and/or voice quality, the vocal characteristics resulting from such settings, that are associated with different languages and pragmatic meanings.
Phonemes are key to the makeup of words and their component parts— syllables , the allowable individual phonemes and phoneme combinations that can carry stress (e.g., /a/ alone but not /b/ alone; vowel [V] and consonant [C] in combination, /ba/ [C + V] and /ab/ [V + C]; and the vowel flanked by consonants /bab/ [C + V + C] and //blabz/ / [CC + V + CC]). Individual phonemes differentiate rhyming pairs (e.g., lap and cap, up and cup, seek and peak) as well as all kinds of minimal pairs —pairs of words that differ in meaning based on a difference in one phoneme (e.g., cab and cap, cup and cap, clap and cap, pick and peek). Prosody comes into play when individual consonants and vowels are joined together to make syllables, as the components of the meaning-units ( morphemes ) composing words, which are the building blocks of phrases and all longer grammatical units and stretches of speech. Patterns of rhythm, stress/accentuation, tone, and intonation delimit the structure and meaning of words and larger units.
Intonation is sometimes referred to as speech melody or, informally, the “tunes” of language. Traditionally, American linguistics has made a distinction between tone as referring to word-level pitch patterns and intonation as referring to sentence-level or utterance-level pitch patterns (and often incorporating stress patterns as well) that is not made in British linguistics, where tone is a component of intonation (e.g., Halliday & Greaves, 2008). In this book, we will sometimes use tone to refer to pitch patterns or contours that function above the word level, reflecting the British tradition followed in some studies. As in the case of other terms connected to pronunciation teaching and research, we seek to avoid terminological confusion and overload while also aiming to accurately represent the way that terms are currently being used.
The sound system of each language ...