Phonetics.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 448.

Varieties of American RP

Social factors

AMERICAN

the story is not long, the cause is the British colonization.

17-18c BE developed specifically on the American continent and retained some typical period of BE of that period, and some linguists think that American is a kind of a variant of the BE of that period.

1806 -1^st American dictionary Webster

mass immigration

political break

world domination – Mass media, selling industries, money markets, economical power, entertainment, developing the hardware and software, Cinema and filmmaking, TV,

BE is a parent language for many national varieties of English in different countries

3 regional types

nasality, retroflex, 5 diphthongs,

6 never :

- never divide a syllable

- never separate a letter

- never divide a suff or ending (able, fully,)

- never divide a word so that the endings of two letters (er,ed,es) begins the next line

- never divide a word less than 2 syllables

- never divide a single word of 1 syllable (less than 5 letters)

parents - no

fire - no

teacher - no

plu - ral

din - ner

dis – ap- pear

speak - ing

house - work

Phonetics is the science that studies the sound matter of the language, its semantic functions and the lines of development. Phonetics as a branch of linguistics studies sounds in their broad sense. The sound system of the l-ge comprises 2 levels: segmental sounds (vowels and consonants) and prosodic (suprasegmental) phenomena (pitch, stress, tempo, rhythm, pauses). Ph. also studies how the sounds are produced. It studies the acoustic property of sounds. Ph has a long history. It was known to ancient Greeks. As a science with its subject and methods it began to develop in the 2^nd half of the 19 century in Western Europe and in Russia. Depending on which of sound phenomena is studied, phonetics is sub­divided into four main branches: articulatory, acoustic, auditory, functional. Articulatory-how the air starts moving, all the movement of speech organs while producing sounds. It is concerned with the study of sound as a result of the activities of speech organs. It deals with our voice—producing mechanism and the way we produce sounds, and prosodic phenomena. It studies respi­ration, phonation (voice—production), articulation and also the mental pro­cesses necessary for the mastery of a phonetic system. Methods employed in articulatory phonetics are experimental and the method of direct observation. Acoustic deals with acoustic aspect of sounds, it studies how the air vibrates between the speaker's mouth and listener's ear. It studies speech sounds with the help of experimental (instrumental) methods. Auditory (perceptual) studies the hearing process, man's perception of segmental sounds, pitch variation, loudness and duration. It studies the ways in which sound perception is determined by the phonetic system of a language. The methods used in perceptual phonetics are also experimental. They in­clude various kinds of auditory tests. Functional (phonology, social) - it is a purely linguistic branch of ph, it deals with sound phenomena. This aspect was 1^st introduced in the works by Russian linguist де Куртене. He was the founder of the phoneme theory. Later this theory was developed by Russian Щерба, Реформатский. They even claimed that phonology should be differentiated from phonetics. They were for that separation because they considered ph to be a biological science while only phonology could be described as a linguistic science. But the linguists of other countries disagree with division. It is not logical to separate form from function and exclude ph from linguistic sciences. The other branches of phonetics: special (concrete language), general (speech mechanism), historical (historical development), descriptive (in particular period), comparative (comparative study of ph sys of 2 lan-ges), applied/practical (practical applications), theoretical (theory).