LESSON I

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 704.

A phoneme may be thought of as the smallest contrastive language unit which exists in the speech of all people belonging to the same language community in the form of speech sounds and may bring about a change of meaning.

The phoneme

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech, their production, combination, description, and representation by written symbols.

There are three major subfields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication.

Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sounds they hear, acoustic phoneticslooks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear, and

articulatoryphonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus.

Phonetics studies the sound system of the language:

· phonemes

· word stress

· syllabic structure

· intonation

Speech sounds are grouped into language units called phonemes.

The phoneme is a functional unit. That means that being opposed to other phonemes in the same phonetic context it is capable of differentiating the meaning:

Pie – tie, lot-lit, ride-rite, fit-feet

Are you fond of this cut? Are you fond of this cart? Are you fond of this card?

The phoneme is realized in speech in the material form of speech sounds of different type.

Read the material and get ready to answer the following questions:

1. What is the purpose of the course of Phonetics?
2. Why is pronunciation so important?
3. What type of pronunciation is the course based on?
4. Who introduced the term RP?
5. Where is RP easily understood?
6. What does RP mean?
7. How may one and the same vowel sound be represented in writing?
8. What can one and the same vowel letter or letter combination represent?
9. Can some words have the same spelling but different pronunciation? Furnish examples.
10. What is phonetics?
11. What branches of phonetics are there?
12. What does phonetics study?
13. What is a phoneme?
14. What unit is a phoneme?
15. Why is it important to know the organs of speech?
16. What are the parts of the roof of the mouth?
17. What are the parts of the tongue?
18. What about tips and lips?
19. What is there in the mouth cavity?
20. What cavities are there?
21. Speak on how the air passes while producing speech sounds.
22. In what case does the air pass through the nasal cavity?
23. What does the larynx contain?
24. What can you say about the position of the vocal cords?
25. When do the vocal cords produce noise?
26. What is the position of the vocal cords when we pronounce vowels and voiced consonants?
27. What is the position of the vocal cords when we pronounce voiceless consonants?
28. What is the space between the vocal cords called?
29. What organs of speech serve as resonance chambers?
30. What are speech sounds divided into?
31. What sound is a vowel?
32. What does the tamber of vowel sounds depend on?
33. What sound is a consonant?
34. What does the particular quality of consonant sounds depend on?
35. What are consonants subdivided into?
36. What prevails in the production of sonorants?
37. What are the English sonorants?
38. What prevails in all other consonants?
39. What types of obstruction are there?
40. When is a complete obstruction formed?
41. In the case of what consonant sounds may the contact be released quickly?
42. In the case of what consonant sounds may the contact be released slowly?
43. In the case of what consonant sounds is the contact not released during the articulation?
44. When is an incomplete obstruction formed?
45. What narrowings are there?
46. How is a round narrowing formed? In the case of what consonant sounds?
47. When is the narrowing called flat? In the case of what consonant sounds?
48. Learn the nursery rhymes and reproduce them: Humpty Dumpty, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.
49. Practice reading tongue twisters fluently and with proper articulation of sounds.