- •Idiographic
- •2. The origin of the English Language
- •International Words
- •5. Lexicography
- •3.Major spelling changes in me
- •3. Word stress.
- •4. Utterance prosody (intonation)
- •5. Standard pronunciation and its variants. The orthoepic norm. English.
- •1.Main notions of grammar. Gr. Meaning, gr. Form, gr. Category. Gr. Oppositions (privative, gradual, equipollent). Weak and strong members of the opposition. Immanent and reflective categories.
- •2. Problems of part-of-speech classification. The criteria for discriminating parts of speech. Notional and functional parts of speech. “Subcategorization” of p. Of sp.
- •3. Grammatical characteristics of the noun. Gr. Categories of the noun. The problem of case. Article determination.
- •4. Grammatical categories denoting time and character of action. Person and number. The categories of tense and aspect of the verb. Non-finite forms of the verb.
5. Standard pronunciation and its variants. The orthoepic norm. English.
"Received Pronunciation" (RP) - the "codified" phonetic norm of British English. There are many educated people in Britain who do not speak RP, though their English is good and correct. They speak Standard English with a regional type of pronunciation. English people by the way they talk devided into three groups:
1) RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English without any local accent) ;
2) Non—RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English with a regional accent);
3) Dialect speakers.
Current tendencies in RP: -the diphthongization of the RP <i:> and <u:>; - monophthongization of <ai> and <au>; - the centering of former <ou> and <эu>; - a greater weakening of vowels in weakly stressed syllables; - the assimilation of some sounds; - the final <b,d,g> are now partially devoiced.;- the use of intrusive <r>.
The orthoepic norm of a language is comprised of well-established (codified) variants of pronunciation, stylistic variants and prosodic patterns used in educated speech. The orthoepic norm always includes a set of stylistic variants of pronunciation which are acceptable in certain circumstances. The point is that the spoken language exists in different varieties, such as familiar conversational style, official style.
The orthoepic norm is ever changing and developing. Every regional type of pronunciation is characterized by features that are common to all the dialects used in the region. The regional types of pronunciation are marked one from another by a number of peculiarities specific to each of them. 3 main regional types: Southern, Northern and Scottish regional types- are used by many educated people.
American English (AE), which is a variant of the English language, has developed its own peculiarities in vocabulary, grammatical structure and pronunciation. The peculiarities of GA lie in 1) the pronunciation of sounds and sound combinations; 2) differences in the stress patterns of words, and 3) differences in intonation.
Functional styles - situational variations of speech. (neutral; colloquial etc.) Extra-linguistic factors cause phonetic modifications in speech- the aim of speech; the extent of spontaneity; the nature of interchange; social and psychological factors. The main criteria of classification of phonetic styles -the degree of carefulness, the extent of formality, the rate of speech, the social situations.
There are stylistic (elision, reduction and assimilation) and prosodic distinctive features that differentiate one phonetic style from another. Prosodic features which enable people to distinguish between different phonetic styles: a norm of loudness, speech tempo, pauses.