- •1. Phonetics as a science. It’s aims and significance.
- •2. The branches of Phonetics.
- •3. The connection of phonetics with other branches of linguistics and non-linguistic sciences.
- •4. The interconnection between phonetics and phonology
- •5. The subject-matter of phonology.
- •6. The main achievements in the historical development of phonology.
- •7. The phoneme as the unit of phonology. Its properties and functions.
- •8. Different views upon the phoneme.
- •9. English as a world language.
- •Spread of English in the world
- •11. The English English varieties of pronunciation.
- •English English
- •Southern accents.
- •Northern and Midland accents.
- •12. Received Pronunciation and Estuary English. British standard pronunciation
- •Estuary English
- •13. Dialects in England.
- •14. Differences between Southern and Northern groups of dialect.
- •15. The socio-linguistic situation in the usa. The varieties of American English.
- •16. Differences between Received Pronunciation and General American pronunciation.
- •17. Phonostylistics as a science.
- •19. The subject-matter of phonostylistics (Phs.).
- •17. Phonostylistics as a science.
- •18. Phonetic functional styles.
- •19. The subject-matter of phonostylistics.
- •20. The linguistic and non-linguistic factors studied by phonostylistics.
1. Phonetics as a science. It’s aims and significance.
English like other natural language is based on sounds which are combined to form longer units such as syllables, words, word combinations, sentences and text.
Nowadays in comparison with prior times more attention is paid to teaching pronunciation and spoken language on the whole. So, phonetics is characterized as the study of spoken language or the study of speech sounds.
It includes the systematic classification of spoken sounds: according to the way they are pronounced by organs of speech, according to the way they are transmitted from the speaker to the listener and according to how they sound to the listener.
Students of the faculty of foreign languages must realize how to utter sounds correctly and how to arrange them in words and sentences to be understood by other speakers-this is a practical aspect of phonetics. Practical or normative phonetics is concerned with material form of phonetic phenomena.
The aims of the normative course are predominantly practical, namely:
1 to help the students master the norms and standards of the language studied in the matter of its sounds, word stress and intonation;
2 to help acquire basic knowledge of theory phonetics, both general and of the language studied;
The course of theoretical phonetics pursues the following aims:
1 to refresh and enlarge the knowledge of general and special phonetics and bring it up to date (or to update the knowledge)
2 to acquaint the students with the successes achieved by both russian and foreign linguists in developing the phonetic science.
3 to acquaint the students with modern methods of phonetic and phonemic investigation. It is important for teacher, would be teachers especially, because the teacher must be sure that what he teaches is linguistically correct and must try to work out a truly scientific approach to the material, he teaches both in general and particular.
The course of theoretical phonetics sets rather the task of showing how the phonetic units function in the language, not in speech. Simultaneously, theoretical phonetics restricts itself to regarding phonetic phenomena synchronically, without any special attention paid to the historical development of English. So, phonetics being a linguistic discipline studies the sound system of the language, but unlike other linguistic branches it studies not only the linguistic features but the physical nature of the sound matter-that is the work of the speech operators (articulatory phonetics) as well as acoustic characteristics of sound phenomena and their perception or audition in perception.
Specialists in phonetics may use such instruments as:
a hand mirror
a laryngoscope
artificial palate
practical representation of sounds
photographs
X-ray photographs and cd-records
Tv and computer classes are also very helpful for investigation and study of the articulatory aspect of speech.
Special laboratory equipment, such as kymograph=cymograph, spectrograph, oscillograph, and intonograph help to obtain the necessary data about prosodic properties of speech sounds.
The phonological or functional properties of phonemes, syllables and intonation are investigated by means of special linguistic methods, which help to interpret them as socially significant elements.
Theoretically phonetics is primarily concerned with the expression level, because no linguistic study can be made without detailed consideration of the material on the expression level, so it is obliged to take the content level into account to consideration for only meaningful sound sequences are regarded as speech.
Theoretically significance of phonetics is connected with the further development of the synchronic study and description of the phonetic system of a national language, the comparative analysis and description of different language, the study of the correspondence between them, the diachronic description of successive changes in the phonetic system of a language or different languages.
Practical significance of phonetic is connected with teaching foreign languages. Practical phonetics is applied in methods of speech correction, teaching deaf-mutes, film dubbing, transliteration, radio and television.