Книга фонетика

61

verb + ing: hanging, ringing, singing, banging, bringing, putting, talking, whispering, shouting, standing, saying, going, doing, holding, helping, walking, getting, sleeping, running, happening.

Exercise 9. First listen to the dialogue, paying attention to the target sound. Then read the dialogue and listen at the same time. Make the words the same as the recording. There are nine items to change in the dialogue.

62

Exercise 10. Practise reading the corrected dialogue aloud.

HOMETASK:

1.Look back over this unit at words with the target sounds, and write what you noticed about how to spell the target sounds.

2.Listen to the dialogue you’ve listened to in class several times, practice reading it aloud, paying special attention to the target sounds and intonation. Be ready to present the dialogue in class.

3.Transcribe the sentences in Exercise 6. Mark the intonation.

4.Revise theoretical material in Section B, Lecture 5.

UNIT 15. / l /, / r /, / j /, / h /

Exercise 1. A. First practise the sound / n /. Listen and repeat.

B.To make the target sound / l /, the air goes over the sides of your tongue and out of your mouth. Listen: /l/.

C.Listen and repeat both sounds: /n/ and / l /.

Exercise 2. Notice that / l / sounds a little different when it comes at the end of a word or before a consonant. To make this / l / sound, move the back of the tongue up towards the roof of the mouth. Listen and repeat: / l / ball.

Exercise 3. First practise / l / sound in the given words.

/l / at the end of a word: Bill, tell, I'll, Paul, fall, pull, small;

/l / before a consonant: help, difficult, fault, spoilt, child, holding, salesman, myself, always;

63

Syllabic / l / - each / l / sound is a syllable: little, uncle, careful, special, bicycle, sensible, beautiful, gentleman

Exercise 4. Read the dialogue and fill the gaps (l-6) by choosing the correct words from the list above (syllabic / l / ).Then listen to the dialogue and check your answers. Practise reading the dialogue aloud.

A spilt boy in a bicycle shop

Exercise 5. To make the target sound / r /, turn the tip of your tongue up. Do not touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue. The sides of your tongue should touch your top back teeth. Listen and repeat: / r /.

Exercise 6. When there is no vowel following it, / r / is silent. Listen to the dialogue, paying attention to the target sound and intonation. Then read the dialogue.

64

In the airport

Exercise 7. Linking / j /. The sound / j / is used in rapid spoken English to link other sounds. The sound / j / Iinks words ending in / i: / or / ɪ /, e.g. she, he, I, we, my, boy, say,they, when the next word, begins with a vowel. Listen to the examples then listen to six short interactions where this linking happens. Mark where you could hear linking / j / in l-6 below. Then practice the interactions with your partner.

65

Exercise 8. To make the target sound / h /, push a lot of air out very quickly. Do not touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Listen and repeat: / h /.

Exercise 9. Word linking with /h/ Notice that in rapid spoken English, words are sometimes linked by the disappearance of the sound /h/. The sound /h/ often disappears in the weak forms of: he, him, his, her, has, had, have. The pronunciation of these words changes with strong or weak stress in a sentence.

Now listen and mark the disappearing / h / sound in the questions below while you read silently

EXAMPLE Who found (h)im?

HOMETASK:

1.Look back over this unit at words with the target sounds, and write what you noticed about how to spell the target sounds.

2.Listen to the dialogue you’ve listened to in class several times, practice reading it aloud, paying special attention to the target sounds and intonation. Be ready to present the dialogue in class.

3.Transcribe the sentences in Exercise 6. Mark the intonation.

4.Revise all theoretical material.

66

UNIT 16. REVISION

Exercise 1. Find the ed ending that has a different pronunciation.

Exercise 2. Transcribe the following words:

Telephone, remember, cafeteria, photographer's, a policeman, a postcard, a paper plate, American, somebody, a green coffee cup, valley, village, beautiful, railway, Europe, perhaps, hospital, mathematician, author, leather

Exercise 3. Find the s ending that has a different pronunciation.

Exercise 4. For each line (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), first listen to the whole line. Then write down the one word that is said twice. Note that meaning is not important in this exercise. The purpose is to review the sounds by hearing them in contrast. Some of the words are rarely used in everyday English, and this is shown by an asterisk *.

67

Exercise 5. Match the sounds in A (1-7) with the descriptions in B (a-g) of how to

make the sounds. The first has been done as an example.

68

Exercise 6. Listen and add the sound / j / (yellow) or / w / as in the example.

69

LECTURE 1. THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF PHONETICS.

A BASIC PERSPECTIVE

We are used to seeing the written language as a sequence of letters, separated by small segments of space. This is how we were taught to write. We formed our letters one at a time, then slowly and painstakingly brought them together in ‘joined-up’ writing. Everyone born with a normal capacity to learn acquires the ability to listen and speak long before the ability to read and write. The origins of the written language lie in the spoken language, not the other way round. When the English alphabet was first devised, its letters were based on a consideration of the nature of the sounds in Old English, which were more like those we encounter in modern German. However with the course of time things have changed, and today English spelling is thought of as that based on the traditional principle. It can easily be illustrated by the presence of so-called ‘silent letters’ as in cheese, or the different sounds which appear to represent one and the same letter as in pan / æ / and pane / eɪ /.

Pronunciation can always be studied from two points of view: the phonetic and the phonological.

Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice") is the study of the way humans make, transmit, and receive speech sounds. It is primarily concerned with the expression level. However phonetics is obliged to take the content level into consideration. Sound sequences are carriers of organized information expressed by language in different social spheres of communication. It is divided into three main branches, corresponding to these three main distinctions:

70

Articulatory phonetics is the study of the way the vocal organs are used to produce speech sounds. All languages are composed of sound with different articulatory and physical properties. The articulation habits characteristic of all the native speakers of a language are called the articulation basis of the language.

Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds. We can hear that sounds can differ from one another in three ways. They can be the same or different in 1) pitch, 2) loudness, 3) quality.

Auditory phonetics is the study of the way people perceive speech sounds. We hear speech sounds in terms of the four perceptual categories of pitch, loudness, quality and length.

Phonology ( Functional Phonetics) is concerned with the description of an

abstract set of units as the basis of our speech. These units are called phonemes, and the complete set of these units is called the phonemic system of the language. By contrast with phonetics, which studies all possible sounds that the human vocal apparatus can make, phonology studies only those contrasts in sound (the phonemes) which make differences of meaning within language. When we talk about the ‘sound system’ of English, we are referring to the number of phonemes which are used in a language, and to how they are organized. To say there are ’20 vowels’ in a particular accent means that there are 20 units which can differentiate word meanings: / e / is different from / i: /, for example, because there are pairs of words (such as set and seat) which can be distinguished solely by replacing one of these vowels by the other.

To help separate the two ways of looking at pronunciation (phonetic and phonological), the practice has grown up in linguistics of using different kinds of brackets for the two approaches. Square brackets – [ ] – are used when sounds are being discussed from a phonetic point of view – that is, purely as sounds, and regardless of their role in the sound system of the language. Slant brackets – / / - are used when sounds are being discussed from a phonological point of view – that is, purely as part of the sound system, and regardless of the particular way they are