Фонетика английского языка

LECTURE 1 THE SUBJECT- MATTER OF PHONETICS OUTLINE

 

1.  Phonetics as an independent branch of linguistics.

2.  The branches of phonetics.

3.  Theoretical and practical significance of phonetics.

 

LITERATURE:

S.F. Leontyeva. A theoretical Course of English Phonetics. M., 1988, P.P.8 - 21

V.A. Vassilyev. English Phonetics. A Theoretical Course. M.,1970, P.P. 7 - 28

M.A. Sokolova. English Phonetics. A Theoretical Course. M.,1991, P.P.33 - 42

 

Phonetics is an independent branch of linguistics which is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized: the nature of these noises, their combinations, and their functions in relation to the meaning.

Only meaningful sound sequences are regarded as speech, and the science of phonetics is concerned only with such sounds produced by a human vocal apparatus as are, or may be, carriers of organized information of language.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics which studies speech sounds (phonemes), word stress and intonation. Phonetics studies the articulation and acoustic qualities of speech sounds, the physical characteristics and sound perception of stress and intonation, the lexical and grammatical role of phonemes, word stress and intonation. In other words, it studies the sound matter of the language, its aspects and functions.

It follows from this that phonetics is a basic branch of linguistics; neither linguistic theory nor linguistic practice can do without phonetics, and no language description is complete without phonetics. That is why phonetics, the science concerned with the spoken medium of language, claims to be of equal importance with lexicology, grammar and stylistics. Phonetics is describable as the study of the regular meaningful patterning of vocalizations in a language. It includes two levels of analysis and description.

On one level the phonetics of a language can be described in the terms of the individual sounds which speakers use to form words and larger utterances. When we describe the phonetics of a language in this way, we are taking a segmental perspective. The segmental features, or segments, of a language are its consonants and vowels.

From a broader, more global - and more accurate - perspective, the phonetics of a language can be described in terms of features which span (охоплювати) more than one segment. In this style of description, a language is characterised in terms of its transsegmental or suprasegmental properties, or prosodies. The prosodic aspects of speech include such properties as duration, rhythm, stress, pitch, (висота) intonation and loudness. A complete phonetic description of a language will comprise descriptions of both its segmental and transsegmental characteristics.

Thus, phonetics is itself divided into two major components: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds ("segments" of speech) and suprasegmental phonetics, whose domain is the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.

The connection of phonetics with other linguistic sciences is exercised first of all via orthography, which in its turn is very closely connected with phonetics.

Phonetics formulates the rules of pronunciation for separate sounds and word combinations. The rules of reading are based on the relation of sounds to orthography. Through the system of rules of reading phonetics is connected with grammar. For example, one of the most important phonetic phenomena - sound interchange - shows these connections. It can be observed in the category of number. Thus, the interchange of F-V, S-Z, helps to differentiate singular and plural forms of the nouns as CALF-CALVES (), HOUSE-HOUSES. Vowel interchange helps to distinguish the singular and the plural of such words s MAN-MEN, MOUSE-MICE etc. It is also connected with the tense forms of irregular verbs: SING-SANG-SUNG; WRITE-WROTE-WRITTEN. It also helps to distinguish between parts of speech: BATH-BATHE; HOT-HEAT; TYPE-TYPICAL.

Phonetics is also connected with grammar through its intonation component. Intonation can serve to single out the logical predicate of the sentence:

He came home. Not Mary or John.

He came home. You can see him now.

He came home. Not to the club.

Phonetics is also connected with lexicology. It is only due to the presence of stress in the right place, that we can distinguish certain nouns from verbs: OBJECT - TO OBJECT; ABSTRACT - TO ABSTRACT. Homographs can be differentiated only due to pronunciation, because they are identical in spelling: LEAD - LEAD, WIND - WIND. The position of the word stress helps to distinguish between homonymous words and word groups: BLACKBIRD - BLACK BIRD.

Phonetics is also connected with stylistics through intonation and its components: speech melody, utterance stress, rhythm, pausation, which serve to express emotions, to distinguish between different attitudes on the part of the speaker. It is also connected with stylistics through repetitions of words, phrases and sounds. Repetition of this kind serves the basis of rhythm, rhyme and alliteration (the use of the same consonant (consonantal alliteration) or of a vowel, not necessarily the same vowel (vocalic alliteration), at the beginning of each word or each stressed syllable in a line of verse, as in around the rock the ragged rascal ran).

Phonetics has the following branches: articulatory and perceptive; acoustic; functional.

The branch of phonetics that studies the way in which the air is set in motion, the movements of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the production of the sounds is called articulatory phonetics. The branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process is known as auditory or perceptive phonetics. Its interests lie in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity. The means by which we discriminate sounds - quality, pitch, loudness, length are relevant there. The articulatory and perceptive branches of phonetics are of great importance to anyone who teaches or studies pronunciation.

Acoustic phonetics studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker's mouth and the listener's ear. This branch of phonetics presents special interest for research work and applied linguistics. In the nearest future it may start to play a growing part in teaching phonetics due to the development of computers.

Articulatory and perceptive investigation of speech sounds is done on the basis of a good knowledge of the sound production mechanism, its structure, work and perceptive effects. Acoustic properties of sounds (length, intensity, pitch etc) are investigated by the acoustic and auditory phonetics. Phoneticians cannot only act as describers and classifiers of the material form of phonetic units. They are also interested in the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language, how they are utilised in that language and what part they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language. The branch of phonetics that studies the linguistic function of consonant and vowel sounds, syllabic stucture, word accent and prosodic features, such as pitch stress and tempo is called functional phonetics.

Functional phonetics is divided into phonology, general and special phonetics, historical and comparative phonetics, theoretical and practical phonetics and phonostylistics.

Phonology can be described as the study of the sound patterns of languages or of the pronunciation patterns of speakers.

General phonetics studies all the human sound producing possibilities and the functioning of the speech mechanism. It has formulated a set of important theories: the phoneme theory, the theory of syllable division and syllable formation, stress, intonation, graphical rules and rules of orthography. Special phonetics studies the phonetic system of a concrete language.

Historical phonetics studies the phonetic system of a language in its historical development.

Comparative phonetics compares the phonetic systems of different languages.

Theoretical phonetics gives necessary information on theoretical problems of a language, while practical phonetics aims to help learners to master the norms of the language under study. The study of the phonetics from the stylistic point of view is phonostylistics.

Theoretical significance of phonetics is connected with the further development of the synchronic study of the phonetic system of a national language, the comparative analysis of different languages and the diachronic study of the successive changes in the phonetic system of a language. An understanding of phonetics has proved extremely useful in such spheres as the following: investigations in the historical aspects of languages, and in the field of dialectololgy; designing or improving of systems of writing or spelling (orthographies for unwritten languages, shorthand,(стенографія) spelling reform), in questions involving the spelling or pronunciation of personal or place names or of words borrowed from other languages.

Practical significance of phonetics is first of all connected with teaching foreign languages. The teachers of foreign languages are always being told that it is essential that they should be skilful phoneticians. I would say that all language teachers willy-nilly are phoneticians because it is not possible to teach a foreign language to any type of learner, for any person, by any method without giving some attention to pronunciation. And I believe that any attention to pronunciation is phonetics.

A knowledge of a structure of sound systems, and of the articulatory and acoustic properties of the production of speech is indispensable (обов’язковий) in the teaching of foreign languages. The teacher has to know the starting point, which is the sound system of the pupil's mother tongue, as well as the aim of his teaching, which is a mastery of the pronunciation of the language to be learnt. He must be able to point out the differences between these two, and to arrange the adequate training exercises. Ear training and articulatory training are both equally important in modern language training. The introduction of technical equipment -disks, tape recorders, language laboratories, etc. - has brought about a revolution in the teaching of foreign languages.

A study of phonetics has educational value for everyone, realising the importance of language in human communication. Through the study of the nature of language valuable insights are gained into human psychology and into the functioning of man in society. That is why phonetics has considerable social value.

Phonetics enters into a number of specialized fields and it is not possible to restrict the investigation of any phonetic phenomenon by the methods of linguistics only. The way in which phonetics overlaps (частково співпадати) in its subject-matter with other academic studies has become well appreciated over the last few years, and in the past two decades we have seen the development of quite distinct interdisciplinary subjects, such as sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics correspondency), psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics and others.

In our technological age phonetics has become important in a number of technological fields connected with communication. For instance, in the experimental stage are devices for reading the printed page, that is for converting the printed symbols into synthetic speech.

Within the bounds of possibility is the automatic or phonetic typewriter, which will convert speech directly into printed words on paper. It is certain that further collaboration will develop between phonetics and sound engineering to the mutual benefit of each.

Practical phonetics is also applied in methods of speech correction, in logopedics (in curing pathological speech), in surdo-pedagogics (in teaching deaf -mutes), on radio and television, in film-dubbing, etc. For those who work in speech therapy, which handles pathological conditions of speech, phonetics forms an essential part of the professional training. Phonetics also enters into the training of teachers of the deaf and mute people and can be of relevance to a number of medical and dental problems.

 

LECTURE 2 PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPEECH OUTLINE

 

1.  Levels of analysis

2.  The speech mechanism

3.  Acoustic and articulatory aspects of speech sounds

4.  A phoneme and its phonetic variants

5.  Phonetic transcription

 

LITERATURE:

V.A.Vassilyev.P.P.134-182

S.F.Leontyeva.P.P.48-54

M.A.Sokolova. P.P.33-50

What is that differentiates language from babbling or other kind of vocalizations which would not normally be considered language? It is the possibility of tying the sounds to regular patterns of meaning. Spoken language is a combination or interplay of noises and silences generated by the speech mechanism and mutually arranged in regular and meaningful patterns.

The branch of phonetics which is concerned with relationships between sounds in a language is called phonology. Phonology is describable as the study of regular, meaningful patterning of vocalizations in language. It includes two levels or aspects of analysis and description. On one level, the phonology of a language can be described in terms of individual sounds which speakers use to form words and larger utterances. When we describe the phonology of a language in this way we are taking a segmental perspective. The segmental features, or segments, of a language are its consonants and vowels.

From a broader, more global perspective, the phonology of a language can be described in terms of features which span more than one segment. In this style of description, spoken language is characterized in terms of its suprasegmental (or transsegmental) properties, or prosodies. The prosodic aspects of speech include such properties as: duration, rhythm, stress, pitch, intonation and loudness. A complete phonological description of a language will comprise descriptions of both its segmental and trassegmental characteristics.

We language teachers are primarily interested in phonology, that is in the patterns of sounds which make up speech. However, we must also concern ourselves with phonetics, which is the basis for phonology. If characteristics of individual speech sounds are carefully investigated and precisely described phonetically, then we will be on a firm basis for investigating and describing how the individual sounds pattern (імітувати) within a given language.

It should be mentioned that the prosodic, or transsegmental aspect forms the framework and the basis for the segmental aspect. This is because the transsegmental properties of speech span more than one segment, across stretches of speech. The prosodic aspect can also be thought of as a deeper and more primal (головний) aspect of phonology because it is more directly related to the breath stream which drives the whole speech mechanism. Once the prosodic aspect is determined, then the breath stream is further modified within the vocal tract, beginning at the larynx, to make all the modifications needed to produce individual sounds.

Speech can be described in a general way as a human form of communication in which the organs of speech, the vocal organs, are used to generate patterns of sounds that have meaningful associations. At a very basic level, the speech mechanism has just three components: air, some type of resistance or obstruction, which impinges (ударятись об) the air and so makes a sound of some kind, and some type of amplification (посилення) to make the sound loud enough for people to hear it easily.

Speech is impossible without the following four mechanisms:

- the power mechanism;

- the vibrator mechanism or the voice producing mechanism;

- the resonator mechanism; мех. протяжності

- the obstructor mechanism. перешкоджаючий

The power mechanism consists of the diaphragm, the lungs, the bronchi [br )nkai], the windpipe (дихальне горло), the glottis (голосова щілина), the larynx (гортань), the mouth and the nasal cavities (носова порожнина).

The vibrator or the voice producing mechanism consists of the vocal chords [k ): d] (голосові зв’язки).

The resonator mechanism consists of the pharynx (глотка), the larynx, the mouth and the nasal cavities.

The obstructor mechanism consists of the tongue, the lips, the teeth, the soft palate (м’яке піднебіння) with the uvula [ju:vjэlэ] (язичок), the hard palate, the alveolar ridge (альвіолярний відросток).

It should be borne in mind that the four mechanisms work simultaneously and that each sound is the result of the simultaneuos work of all of them.

Articulatory differences between sounds depend on the three articulatory criteria. They are:

- the presence or absence of an articulatory obstruction to the air steam;

- the concentrated or diffused (розсіяний) character of muscular tension;

- the force of exhalation.

On the basis of these three criteria consonants may be defined as sounds in the production of which there is an articulatory obstruction to the air stream; muscular tension is concentrated in the place of obstruction; the exhaling force is rather strong. Vowels may be defined as sounds in the production of which there is no articulatory obstruction to the air stream; muscular tension is diffused; the exhaling force is rather weak. Sonorants are sounds intermediate between noise consonants and vowels because they have features in common. There is an obstruction, but not narrow enough to produce noise. Muscular tension is concentrated in the place of obstruction, but the exhaling force is rather weak.

To know how sounds are produced by speech organs is not enough to describe and classify them as language units. When we talk about the sounds of a language, the term "sound" can be interpreted in two rather different ways. In the first place, we can say that “t” and "d" are two different sounds in English. The difference between them is of a meaningful character: tie-die. But on the other hand, if we listen carefully to the T in "let us" and compare it with the "t" in "let them" we can hear that these two sounds are not the same, the "t" of "let us" is alveolar, while the T of "let them" is dental. In both examples the sounds differ in one articulatory feature only; in the second case the difference between the sounds has functionally no significance. To avoid this ambiguity, the linguists use two separate terms: "phoneme" is used to mean the sound in the contrastive sense, and "allophone" is used for sounds which are variants of the phoneme: they usually occur in different positions in the word and cannot contrast with each other, nor be used to make meaningful distinctions.

Thus the phoneme may be defined as the smallest linguistically relevant unit of the sound structure of a language which serves to distinguish one word from another. Allophones are free realisations of one and the same phoneme. This phoneme is abstracted from its variants and is characterised by features that are common to all its variants.

Phonemes are discovered by the method of minimal pairs, i.e. a pair of words which differ in lexical meaning based on a difference in one sound. For example, if we replace [b] by [t] in the word [ban] we produce a new word [tan] - [ban] is a pair of words distinguished in meaning by a single sound change. Two words of these kind are termed a "minimal pair". It is possible to continue this process. We can also produce [can-ran-man-fan], that is a minimal set. The change of the vowel [  ] in the word [ban] provides us with another minimal set: [bun-bone-ben-burn-boon-born]. The change of the final consonant [n] in [ban] will result in a third minimal set: [bat-bad-back-bag-badge-bang]. To establish the phonemes of the language the phonologist with the help of contrastive (співставний) and complementary (додатковий) distribution tries to find pairs that show which sounds occur or do not occur in identical positions. This procedure is called a commutation test.

The phonemes of a language form a system of oppositions in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position in at least one lexical or grammatical minimal pair. If the substitution of one sound for another results in the change of meaning, the commuted (замінені) sounds are different phonemes, that is units which are phonologically significant.

In actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of. In every language these sounds are united in a comparatively small number of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of the words; that is they serve the purpose of social intercommunication. It is these sound types that should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as differentiatory units of the language. The actually pronounced speech sounds are variants, or allophones of the phonemes. Allophones are realised in concrete words. They have phonetic similarity, that is their acoustic and articulatory features have much in common, at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words. For example, in speech we pronounce not the sound type [t], which is aspirated, alveolar, forelingual, apical, occlusive, plosive, voiceless -according to the classificatory definition, but - one of its variants, e.g. labialised in the word [twice], dental in the word [eighth], post-alveolar in [try], exploded nasally in [written], exploded laterally in [little], pronounced without aspiration in [stay], etc. The number of phonemes in each language is much smaller than the number of sounds actually pronounced.

We define a phoneme as a minimal abstract linguistic unit realised in speech in the form of speech sounds opposable (які можна протиставити) to other phonemes of the same language to distinguish the meaning of morphemes and words.

Let us consider a phoneme from the point of view of its three aspects.

Firstly, the phoneme is a functional unit. As you know, in phonetics function is usually understood to mean discriminatory function, that is, the role of the various components of the phonetic system of the language in distinguishing one morpheme from another (a speech element having a meaning or grammatical function that cannot be subdivided into further such elements), one word from another, one utterance from another. And the opposition of phonemes in the same phonetic environment differentiates the meaning of morphemes and words: [pen-pain], [days-dies], [pearl-pole]. Thus we may state that the phoneme can fulfil the distinctive function.

Secondly, the phoneme is material, real and objective. That means that it is realised in speech in the form of its allophones. The sets of the allophones belonging to the same phoneme are not identical in their articulatory content though there remains some phonetic similarity between them.

Thirdly, the allophones of the same phoneme, no matter how different their articulation may be, function as the same linguistic unit.

So, the phoneme is realised in speech in the material form of speech sounds, its allophones. All the allophones of the same phoneme have some articulatory features in common, that is all of them possess the same invariant (незмінний звук). Simultaneously each allophone possesses quite particular phonetic features which may not be traced in the articulation of other allophones of the same phoneme.