- •1) Phonetics as a science:
- •2)Experimental phonetics: Methods of investigation (The direct observation method; The experimental method; The distributional method; The semantic method).
- •3)The aspects of speech sounds.
- •4)Physical properties of sounds.
- •5)The organs of speech and their functions: Active and passive organs of speech; The articulatory mechanism and its work.
- •6)Articulatory and physiological classification of English vowels in the works of Soviet, British and American phoneticians.
- •7)Articulatory and physiological classification of English consonants in the works of Soviet, British and American phoneticians.
- •8)Segmental and suprasegmental phonemes: The definition of the phoneme; The aspects of the phoneme; The functions of the phoneme.
- •9) Phonemes and Allophones: The principal allophone; The subsidiary allophones (types); Distinctive and non-distinctive features of phonemes; The invariant of the phoneme.
- •10)Connected speech: Lexical and function words; Strong and weak forms; Neutralization; Assimilation (types); Dissimilation; Accommodation; Elision; Intrusion; Linking (Fillers).
- •11)Syllable: Definition; Parts of syllable; Types and functions of syllables; The structure of the syllable.
- •12)The principal theories of syllable formation and syllable division.
- •13)The accentual structure of English words: Word stress (its types and functions); Sentence stress; Degrees of word stress; The factors that determine the degree and the place of stress.
- •15) Transcription and transliteration. Types of transcription.
- •16)Phonostylistics: The components of extralinguistic situation; The factors which result in phonostylistic varieties.
- •17)Intonation: Definition; The components of intonation and their functions.
- •18)The methods for recording intonation patterns in writing and advantages and disadvantages of these methods.
- •19)The most important nuclear tones in English. Simple and complex tones. High and low falling tones. The types of scales in English.
- •20) The most important elements in the pitch-and-stress pattern of an intonation group (An intonation pattern; The characteristics of an intonation group).
- •21)The pitch and sentence stress components of intonation and their graphical representation on the staves or in the line of text itself.
- •22) Territorial Varieties of English pronunciation. The orthoepic norm. The national language of England. Literary English. Rp and ga.
- •23)Spread of English.
- •24)English-based pronunciation standards of English.
- •25)American - based pronunciation standards of English.
8)Segmental and suprasegmental phonemes: The definition of the phoneme; The aspects of the phoneme; The functions of the phoneme.
Segment is the smallest part of speech continue. In phonetics it is a sound/ phone. Speech is a sequence of sounds, they are separated from one another due to the special analysis. Segmental sound is the smallest part of sp continue that is capable to differentiate words.
Vassilyev: “ Segmental phoneme is the smallest language unit that exists in the sp of all the members of a given language community as such sp sounds which are capable of distinguishing one word of the same lang or one gr form of a word from another gr form of a word.”
Suprasegmental phoneme is larger unit of speech – syllables, words, sentences.
The definitions of the phoneme vary greatly. Shcherba: functional, material and abstract unit. Phoneme- is a minimal abstract linguistic unit in sp in the form of sp sounds opposable to the other phonemes of the same language to distinguish the meaning of morphemes and words.
3 aspects of the phoneme. 1)Material, real, objective. M- phoneme exists in the number of definite articulatory and acoustic sp sounds. R- what is material is real. O- phoneme exists independently of the will of individual persons. 2)Abstract and objective. Phoneme is a language unit and all units are abstract from actual utterances, but each unit is a generalization of utterance. Language itself is abstract from sp – is a generalization of sp. 3) Functional. In phonetics function is usually understood to mean discriminatory function – phoneme distinguishes words from one another.
Basic functions of the phoneme are:
1. Constitutive – phoneme constitutes words, word combinations etc.
2. Distinctive – phoneme helps to distinguish the meanings of words, morphemes
3. Recognitive – phoneme makes up grammatical forms of words, sentences, so the right use of allophones
9) Phonemes and Allophones: The principal allophone; The subsidiary allophones (types); Distinctive and non-distinctive features of phonemes; The invariant of the phoneme.
In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds (phones) that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word. An allophone is not distinctive, but rather a variant of a phoneme; changing the allophone won't change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native, or be unintelligible.
Types of allophones. 1)Principal allophones – they don’t undergo any distinguishable changes in the chain of sp. They are free from the influence of the neighboring sounds. They are most representative of a phoneme as a whole. They have the greatest number of articulatory features among all variants of the phoneme (door, darn, down). 2) free variants of the phoneme- when the phoneme is realized in 2 different allophones and both are correct (калоши-галоши). 3) Subsidiary variant of the phoneme- allophones that undergo changes under the influence of the neighboring sounds. They are used in actual speech. 1. Combinatory allophones- are changed due to the influence of the neighboring sounds to the specific way in which adjacent sounds are produced. They appear in the process of speech and result from 1 phoneme upon another. 2. Positional allophones are used in definite positions traditionally acc to the orthoepic norms of the language [l]-[l] before vowels (land), [l/]- in the word final position/before cons (beautiful)
Native speakers do not observe the difference between the allophones of the same phoneme, because the difference doesn’t distinguish meaning. At the same time they realize that allophones of each phoneme possess a bundle of distinctive features that makes this phoneme functionally different from all other phonemes of the language. This functionally relevant bundle is called the invariant of the phoneme. They can’t be changed without affecting the meaning. To extract the distinctive feature of the phoneme we have to oppose it to some other phoneme in the same phonetic context. If the opposed sounds differ in one feature and this difference brings change in meaning the contrasting features are called distinctive (port-kort [p] [k]- occlusive, fortis,[p]-labial, [k]-backling. Non-distinctive (irrelevant) features- articulatory features that don’t serve to distinguish meaning.