Uni-Wissen Phonetics and Phonology E-Book

John F. Davis

• Herausgeber: Klett Lerntraining
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Uni-Wissen
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 375

Beschreibung

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 / Amerikanistik Uni-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

Leseprobe

John F. Davis

Phoneticsand Phonology

Klett Lerntraining

Dieses Werk folgt der reformierten Rechtschreibung und Zeichensetzung. Ausnahmen bilden Texte, bei denen künstlerische, philologische oder lizenzrechtliche oder andere Gründe einer Änderung entgegenstehen

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© Klett Lerntraining, c/o PONS GmbH, Stuttgart 2009. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

www.klett-lerntraining.de

E-ISBN 978-3-12-939111-2

Contents

Chapter 1Phonetics and Phonology

1Difference between Phonetics and Phonology

2Phonetics

1Preliminaries

2Kinds of Phonetics

3Articulatory Phonetics

1Organs of Speech

2Active and Passive Articulators

4Classification of Speech Sounds

1General Remarks

2Phonetic Symbols

5Detailed Classification of English Consonants and Semivowels

1Manner of Articulation

2Voiceless versus Voiced

3Fortis versus Lenis

4Place of Articulation

6Detailed Classification of Vowels

1Preliminary Classification

2Parameters

3Cardinal Vowels

7Detailed Classification of English Vowels

1High Vowels

2Mid Vowels

3Low Vowels

4Varieties of English

5Diphthongs and Triphthongs

8Syllabic Consonants

Chapter 2Phonology

1Structural Phonology

1Preliminary Considerations

2Phonemic Analysis

1Phonological Opposition

2Sounds and their Variants

3Phonemes and their Phones

4Complementary Distribution and Free Variation: Allophones and Free variants

5Neutralization

6Other Approaches

3Suprasegmental Phonemes (Prosodic Features)

1Preliminaries

2Stress

3Tone and Intonation

4Length

5Juncture and Boundary Phenomena

Chapter 3Consonant Phonemes and their Phones

1Plosives

1Aspiration

2Degree of Voicing

3Kind of Release

4Place of Articulation

2Fricatives

1Distribution

2Voicing

3Alternation

3Affricates

1Distribution

2Voicing

4Nasals

1Distribution

2Voicing

3Place of Articulation

4Length

5Syllabic

5Lateral Phoneme

1Distribution

2Place of Articulation

3Voicing

4Length

5Syllabic

6Clear/Dark

6Phoneme /r/

1Distribution

2Voicing

3Length

4Syllabic

5Linking /r/

6Intrusive /r/

7Semivowels /j/ and /w/

1Distribution

2Height

3Voicing

4Compression

8Concluding Remarks on Consonant Phonemes

Chapter 4Vowel Phonemes and their Phones

1High Vowels

2Back Vowels

3Central Vowels

4Diphthongs

Chapter 5Phonological Processes

1Assimilation

1Progressive

2Regressive

3Historical

2Coalescence

1Nowadays

2Historical

3Mixed

3Elision

1General Remarks

2Historical

3Nowadays

4Restrictions

4Epenthesis

1Nowadays

2Historical

5Compression

6Weakening

1Weak Forms

2Conjunctions

3Prepositions

4Pronouns and Determiners

5Auxiliary Verbs

6Final Remarks

Chapter 6Scripts and Transcriptions

1Transcriptions

2Scripts

1British

2American

3American English in IPA Script

4Conclusion

AppendixBibliography

Preface

This volume is the fruit of many years of teaching phonetics and phonology to beginning students of English at Cologne University. It is aimed at readers who have no previous knowledge of the subject. For this reason I have confined myself to the structural approach in phonology (the phoneme and its realizations) as this provides a good foundation for the later study of other approaches and can be compared with the study of arithmetic before one goes on to mathematics. As phonetics is by nature associated with hearing rather than sight, a book of this kind is at a disadvantage, since the reader cannot hear the author, as students can their teacher. However, I have tried to make the text as simple and comprehensible as possible, providing examples that should partly compensate for this drawback.

I am very grateful to Professor Ansgar Nünning for inviting me to contribute to the Series he has edited, and a special word of thanks must be said to the staff of Ernst Klett Publishing House for coping so efficiently with the problems of printing a phonetic text and in particular to Manfred Ott for his patience and willing assistance in helping me to overcome the technical difficulties. My largest debt of gratitude, however, is to the many students who have asked me numerous interesting questions about phonetics and phonology over the years in the course of my teaching. It is from them that I have learnt a great deal which I hope to have passed on to others in this book.

John F. DavisOctober 1998

1

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.