- •Phonetics as a subject (general notes).
- •Phonetics as a subject, its branches.
- •Connection of phonetics with other sciences.
- •The phoneme theory (the definition of a phoneme, its functions).
- •Phonological schools. Methods of Phonological analysis.
- •Methods of the phonemic analysis
- •The English Vowel system.
- •1. Stability of articulation
- •2. Position of the tongue
- •3. Position of the lips
- •Classification of the English vowels.
- •1. Stability of articulation
- •2. Position of the tongue
- •3. Position of the lips
- •The English Consonant system.
- •9. Classification of the English consonants.
- •Assimilation. Types of assimilation.
- •Word-stress or accent in English (its nature, functions, position in words).
- •Word stress in a language performs three functions.
- •Place of word stress in English.
- •Syllable formation and syllable division.
- •Word-stress and sentence-stress, their difference.
- •Theories of syllable formation and syllable division.
- •English Intonation (general notes).
- •Intonation in unemphatic speech.
- •17. Intonation in emphatic speech.
- •The ascending scale; the sliding scale; the level scale; the scandent scale.
- •18. Functions of intonation.
- •D. Crystal distinguishes the following functions of intonation.
- •19. The English Tunes.
- •20. Received pronunciation and general American pronunciation.
Word-stress and sentence-stress, their difference.
The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress or lexical stress. The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress.
Sentence stress is a greater prominence of words which are made more prominent in the international group. The prominence of accented words is achieved through the greater force of utterance and changes in the direction of voice pitch.
Stress in utterance provide the basis for understanding the content, they help to perform constitutive, distinctive, indemnificatory function of intonation.
Word stress is definitely the key to understanding spoken English and it is used so naturally by native speakers of the English language that they are not even aware they are doing it. When non native speakers talk to English natives without the use of word stress they are likely to encounter two problems:
1. The listener will find it difficult to understand the fast speaking native.
2. The native speakers may find it difficult to understand the non native speakers.
Any word spoken in isolation has at least one prominent syllable. We perceive it as stressed. Stress in the isolated word is termed word stress, stress in connected speech is termed sentence stress. Stress is indicated by placing a stress mark before the stressed syllable.
Stress is defined differently by different authors. B. A. Bogoroditsky, for instance, defined stress as an increase of energy, accompanied by an increase of expiratory and articulatory activity. D. Jones defined stress as the degree of force, which is accompanied by a strong force of exhala tion and gives an impression of loudness. H. Sweet also stated that stress is connected with the force of breath.
Word stress can be defined as the singling out of one or more syllables in a word, which is accompanied by the change of the force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the sound, which is usually a vowel.
Theories of syllable formation and syllable division.
The syllable is a complicated phenomenon and like a phoneme it can be studied on four levels - articulatory, acoustic, auditory and functional. The complexity of the phenomenon gave rise to many theories.
We could start with the so-called expiratory (chest pulse or pressure) theory by R.H. Stetson. This theory is based on the assumption that expiration in speech is a pulsating process and each syllable should correspond to a single expiration. So the number of syllables in an utterance is determined by the number of expirations made in the production of the utterance. This theory was strongly criticized by Russian and foreign linguists. G.P. Torsuyev, for example, wrote that in a phrase a number of words and consequently a number of syllables can be pronounced with a single expiration. This fact makes the validity of the theory doubtful.
Another theory of syllable put forward by O. Jespersen is generally called the sonority theory. According to O. Jespersen, each sound is characterized by a certain degree of sonority which is understood us acoustic property of a sound that determines its perceptibility. According to V.A. Vassilyev the most serious drawback of this theory is that it fails to explain the actual mechanism of syllable formation and syllable division. Besides, the concept of sonority is not very clearly defined.
Further experimental work aimed to description of the syllable resulted in lot of other theories. However the question of articulatory mechanism of syllable in a still an open question in phonetics. We might suppose that this mechanism is similar in all languages and could be regarded as phonetic universal.
In Russian linguistics there has been adopted the theory of syllable by LV Shcherba. It is called the theory of muscular tension. In most languages there is the syllabic phoneme in the centre of the syllable which is usually a vowel phoneme or, in some languages, a sonorant. The phonemes preceding or following the syllabic peak are called marginal. The tense of articulation increases within the range of prevocalic consonants and then decreases within the range of postvocalic consonants.