11. Практическая часть
[e] – [ei]: let – late
single opposition 1) monophthong vs. diphthong
unrounded, short, lax, mid, front, checked, oral (обе гласные)
[i] – [a:]: lid – lard
multiple opposition 1) short vs. long
2) lax vs. tense
3) checked vs. unchecked
4) close vs. open
5) front vs. back
[i:] – [u:]: mean – moon
double opposition 1) front vs. back
2) unrounded vs. rounded
Билет 14
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RP and GA IN THE PRONUNCTIATION (WORD-STRESS, PROSODY (5)
Word stress
The differences in stress are also lexically determined, and, therefore, and hard to generalize:
RP a¢ddress, ¢adult, prin¢cess, ¢detail;
GA ¢address, a¢dult, ¢princess, de¢tail
One group of words ending in suffixes -ary, -ory, -ery, -ony, -berry is pronounced
with one primary stress in RP whereas in American English there is an additionally secondary stress
which some linguists call “tertiary” (because it follows the primary stress, and is assumed to be weaker than the one preceding the primary stress):
RP dictionary [¢ dikòәnәri];
GA dictionary [¢ dikòinәri]
French borrowings are assimilated in RP and have one primary stress on the initial syllable.
In GA they are still stressed as in French, on the final syllable, or have two stresses, one primary on the last syllable and one secondary on the first:
RP ballet [¢ bælei], garage [gærәdg]
GA ballet [bæ¢ lei], garage [gәra:g]
Prosody (intonation)
The monotony of American speech is created by regular recurrence of similar pitch patterns:
mid-level wavy head plus high fall or level-rise. Thus compared to RP the intonation group in GA starts
at a lower level (like in Russian) but the pitch configuration is specifically English:
sliding on each accent group within a narrow range until it comes to the terminal fall with initial rise,
similar to an RP intensified fall or rise-fall. Compared with the Russian language the final element is very prominent acoustically,
and that is where the most important information point is normally located.
Билет 15
Different approaches to the problem of syllable. The definition of syllable as a unit of the phonetic basis
Syllable is a complicated phenomenon. Syllable is a minimal pronounceable unit, which in the one hand,
is a ground work for speech production &, on the other hand, for speech perception.
Syllable is a minimal pronounceable unit, where the sounds are joined in a way which is special for each particular language.
4 points of view on the syllable:
1) Зиверс, Stetson, Щерба, Васильев, Жинкин define syllable as a minimal pronounceable unit;
2) Потапова, Златоустова define syllable as the basis for the high language units or morpheme words, sentences;
3) Трубецкой, Мартине: syllable is referred to the domain of prosody, prosodic characteristics (length, pitch, timber, force)
of the syllabic vowels & sonorants in different languages;
4) complex approach is widely exposed by Потапова, Златоустова, Косевич, Прокопова. Syllable is a complex phenomenon.
Syllables – minimal pronounceable units into which sounds show a tendency to group themselves.
The syllable or syllables of the word are said to be stressed or accented. The correlation (взаимосвязь)
of varying prominences (выделение) of syllables in a word is understood as the accentual structure of the word or its stress pattern.
Syllable is the minimal grouping of vowels & consonants necessary for articulation (phonetic unit)
& for storing strings of phonemes in the mental representation (phonological unit). S can be defined
as a complex unit made up of nuclear & marginal elements, with vowels acting as nuclear, syllabic elements & consonants as marginal, or non-syllabic ones.
The S may consist of the onset, the nucleus & the coda. The nucleus plus coda constitute the rhyme.
There is no S without the nucleus, the presence of the onset & the coda depends on the phonotactic rules of a particular language.
Syllables can be open, when ending in a vowel (V, CV), closed, ending in a consonant (VC, CVC), covered
, with a consonant for an onset (CV, CVC), uncovered, with no onset (V, VC), light, with a short vowel like [ə] or [ı] or [υ]
& no consonants to follow, & heavy, with a long vowel or a diphthong, or a short vowel with a consonant to follow.
Heavy syllables attract stress, they become stressed, while light syllables are unstressed.
SOCIAL VARIATIONS IN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. SOCIAL FACTORS AND PHONETIC MARKERS
In all English-speaking countries there exists a close and obvious connection between language and social class:
speech stratification correlates with social stratification. But only in England phonetic factors
assume a predominating role which they do not generally have in other parts of the English-speaking world.
There was a survey in 1972 carried out by National Opinion Polls and according to the results
of it speech was regarded as more indicative of social class than occupation, education, and income;
and the likelihood is that by “the way they speak” respondents meant, above all, accent.
Thus accents are associated with the people who use them, with their way of life, and may have symbolic values.
The accents of big urban centres like Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow in UK may have negative associations with the polluted environment of industrial area.
In the USA, New York is viewed as the centre of crime and drug taking (but also the financial and intellectual centre).
Although there is no necessary connection at all between personality types and accents, most people react as if there were.
There is a stereotype of an RP speaker to possess authority, competence, intelligence and ambition
while local accent is associated with friendliness, personal integrity, kindness.
RP speaker may be disliked because he sounds “posh”, “affected”, while a person
with a working class accent may be positively assessed for “friendship”, “fight”, “solidarity”, “personal integrity”.
There is a new classification of RP in the 6th edition of A.C. Gimpon’s “Introduction to the Pronunciation of English”:
General RP
Refined RP
Regional RP
Refined RP is defined as an upper-class accent, mainly associated with upper-class families,
e.g. officers in the navy and some regiments. The number of speakers using Refined RP
is increasingly declining. Reason: for many other speakers a speaker of Refined RP has become a figure of fun,
and the type of speech itself is often regarded as affected.
The term Regional RP (U-RP) is used to describe the type of speech which is basically RP
except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may go unnoticed even by other speakers of RP. For example:
vocalization of dark [l] to [υ] in words like held [heυd], ball [boυ];
the use of a/æ instead of /a:/ before voiceless fricatives in words like after, bath, past.
There is one regional type, RP modified towards Cockney, which is called Estuary English.
It is often characterized by younger speakers as having “street credibility” or “streetcred’ i.e. as being fashionable.
The phonetic features of Estuary English include:
the replacement of dark [l] by [υ] as in field [fiυd];
the glottalization of /t/ preconsonantly and before a pause, as in not that [no? ¶æt];
the use of Cockney-type realization of the diphthongs /ei, ai/, as in late [lait], light [loit]
Cockney-type vowel allophones before /l/, e.g. cold [koυυd]
Elision of /j/ after /n/, as in new [nu:]
In the 60-s A.C.Gimson distinguished three kinds of RP based on age and professional background:
1. conservative RP (lawyers and clergy);
2. general RP (BBc newsreaders);
3. advanced RP (young people, University graduates, exclusive social groups).
Nowadays the general RP is also called mainstream RP.
Билет 16
FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION
The principal functions of I. are:
1) Communicative – the change in melody/tone leads to the change of the communicative type of the utterance. (command, request).
2) Expressive (attitudinal). This functions consists in expressing the attitude of the speaker towards what is being spoken about.
The ability of intonation to express attitudes is associated with tones and pitch range features
accompanied by voice quality and tempo changes: John’s come. – John’s come!
There is a distinction between the attitude towards what the speaker is saying, and his/her emotional state.
The emotional (physical and psychological) states are classified into strong and weak, positive
and negative and they are universal, i.e. shared by all people.
Then there are also conventional, culture-bound social norms which put constraints on the freedom of expression,
on the ways of demonstrating emotions and attitudes. This makes it difficult for a foreign learner to interpret attitudinal intonation means.
3) Culminative – difference between the new and the given info (theme – rheme): ex.: Harrington’s the THIRD one. – The THIRD one is Hurrington.
4) Highlighting – singling out words according to the degree of their semantic importance.
5) Semantic – the difference in the meaning of the whole sentence or just one word brought about by a change in the pitch pattern:
She does not lend her books to anybody (with a low fall) (не дает книги никому)
She does not lend her books to anybody (with a fall-rise) (не дает книги случайным людям)
6) Discourse – look at sentence intonation patterns within larger contexts in which they occur.
We speak in order to communicate, and we need to interact with our listeners to do this.
We must indicate what type of information we are presenting and how it is structured, and at the same time
we must keep our listeners’ attention and their participation in the exchange of information.
Thus, practically all the separate functions traditionally attributed to intonation (см. перечисленные выше)
could be seen as different aspects of discourse function.
The notions of fixed and free stress. Account for the position of stress in the following words: examination, colonization, brother, above, absent-minded, ex-president, barometer.
Fixed stress – all the words have a stressed syllable in one and the same position in relation to the beginning
or the end of the word. French- the main accent is tied to the last syllable of the word.
Czech- the main accent falls on the initial syllable of each word and gram. form of a word(+Finnish, Estonian, Polish)
Leng.with Free stress (E,R) – stress may occur on any syllable of the word.
constant accent- remains on the same morpheme in different grammatical forms of a word or in different derivatives from one root.
Shifting accent- falls an different morphemes in different gram.forms of the word: сад-сады, вода-водовоз.
The word stress in English as well as in Russian is not only free but it may also be shifting, performing the semantic function
of differentiating lexical units, parts of speech, grammatical forms. In English word stress is used as a means of word-building;
in Russian it marks both word-building and word formation, e.g. 'contrast — con'trast; 'habit — habitual 'music — mu'sician; дома — дома; чудная — чудная, воды — воды.
Eֽxaminátion- Rhythmical tendency (The rhythm of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables
gave birth to the rhythmical tendency in the present-day English which caused the appearance of the secondary stress in the multisyllabic French borrowings)
ֽColonizátion- Rhythmical tendency (same).
Bróther- Recessive, Unrestricted
Above- Recessive, restricted
ábsent-mínded- Retentive- (a derivative retains the stress of the original words )
ex-président- Retentive (semantic factor- compound numerals and adj and words with meaningful prefixes have one stress.)
barómeter- Rhythmical tendency (majority of 3-4 syllabic words with one accent are stressed on the third syllable from the end, and thus stress is called rhythmical)
Билет 17
THE ORPHOEPIC NORM OF ENGLISH (RP) AND ITS TYPES
The conditions for a variety of English pronunciation to be accepted as the orthoepic norm are
recognition of the fact that RP has the “prestige accent”; the presence of factors that encourage standardization of pronunciation.
Registering/recording the well-established variants of pronunciation by the pronouncing
dictionariesWide currency, conformity to the main phonetic tendencies, social acceptability.
Intolerance of dialectal pronunciation and variants of non-standard pronunciation; a non-regional character of pronunciation.
All the national types of English pronunciation have many features in common because they are of common origin.
At the same time, they have a varying number of differences due to the new conditions
of their development after separation from British English and to the degree of their connection with British English after that separation.
At present, there may be distinguished the following types of cultivated English:
Southern English Pronunciation, or RP;
Northern English Pronunciation;
Standard Scottish Pronunciation.
ü The Southern British type of Engl.pronunciation is known as RP.
The term Southern English is indicative only of its birth-place and
doesn’t mean that it is confined nowadays only to the South of England.
Pronunciation of standard British English based on the speech of educated speakers of southern British English.
The type of pronunciation often recommended as a model for foreign learners. Accents usually tell us where a person is from;
RP tells us only about a person's social or educational background. RP is often identified in the public mind with “BBC English”.
Features:(4)
RP is non-rhotic: written r is pronounced only if it is followed by a vowel
Great attention is paid to articulating consonants clearly except for the r consonant,
which is not pronounced when it immediately precedes a consonant (as in cart)
There is a great number of distinct vowel sounds, e.g. caught, cot, cart are different in RP
On the other hand, in common with most non-rhotic dialects words formerly and formally
are homophones in RP, although rhotic speakers pronounce the words differently from each other. Similarly are pronounced in RP words "ion" and "iron
ü Northern English is the speech of those born and brought up
in the region between Birmingham and the border of Scotland.
This type of pronunciation is not to be sharply separated from
the South English type since it contains some features of the latter, modified by the local speech habits.
But it has certain distinctive features:(4)
[a] for RP [æ] in words like bad, man;
[æ] for [a:] in words like glass, ask, dance, in which the letter a
is followed by a word-final consonant or by 2 consonants other than r. (the word father is the exception).
[υ] for [Ù] in words like cup, love;
[e] or [e:] for [ei] in words like may, take.
ü Standard English of Scotland is considerably modified by Southern British,
but some of its features go back independently to the Northumbrian dialect of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.
???Different approaches to syllable division in English
The sounds of language can be grouped into syllables accord. to certain rules. The part of phonetics
that deals with this aspect is called phonotactics. The problem of syl division exists in case of intervocalic consonants
and their clusters like in words city, agree, extra. Theoretically two variants are possible: a) the point of syllable
division is after the intervocalic consonant; b) the point of syllable division is inside the cons-t.
In both cases the 1st syl-le remains closed according to phonotactic rules of the E language, because the short vowel
should remained checked. The results of instrumental analysis show that the point of syllable division
in words like pity, topic, Bobby is inside the intervocalic consonant. In E the stressed syllable
in the structure (C)VCV(C) is always closed if the syllabic vowel is short and checked.
There are two authentic sources for looking up syllable boundary of any given word in E:
EPD (Cambridge Engl Pronouncing Dict-y) and LPD (Longman). The two sources agree on the following:
1. Compounds should be divided into syllables according to the morphological principle: hard-ware.
2. A single consonant which appears between two syllables after a short stressed vowel should be attached to the preceding vowel:
bett|er. However there are differences as to where to put a consonant which follows a long vowel or a diphthong.
EPD attaches a single word-medial consonant to the following syllable (Maximal Onset principle):
la.dy, in.vi.ted, while LPD puts all word-medial single consonants and clusters to the stressed syllable (Maximal Stress principle):
lad y, in vit ed. Thus the word window will be differently attested in the two dictionaries
due to the two different principles of syllable division: EPD win.dow, LPD wind ow.
Experimental evidence, as reported from British sources by Alan Crutenden, shows that following
a long vowel a consonant was syllabified with the following syllable which supports EPD: la-dy.
The retention stage of a consonant belongs to the previous short vowel, while the release is with the next syllable.
In fact, the boundary between the two syllables runs within the medial consonant: city [sit-ti] better [bet-t`].
Theories on syllable formation and division (подходит для билета 15)
Speech can be broken into minimal pronounceable units into which sounds show a tendency to cluster or group.
These smallest phonetic groups arc generally given the name of syllables. Being the smallest pronounceable units,
syllables form morphemes, words and phrases. Each of these units is characterized by a certain syllabic structure.
Thus a meaningful language unit phonetically may be considered from the point of view of syllable formation and syllable division.
Билет 18