Phonetics I Anthology 2019-2020 (print). vowel chart model and consonant chart models. examples and explanations. PDF

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ENGLISH PHONETICSAND PHONOLOGY IAnthology 2019- 20Fonètica i Fonologia Angleses I (Codi: 362720) Notes and exercises 2018/Teachers: Cristina Aliaga, Eva Cerviño, Gonzalo Iturregui, Marc Miret,Contents Page Course Code: Joan C. Mora, Ingrid Mora, Mireia Ortega, Introduction PART I: NOTES AND EXERCISE...

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ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY I Anthology 2019-20

Fonètica i Fonologia Angleses I (Codi: 362720)

Notes and exercises 2018/19 1

Teachers: Cristina Aliaga, Eva Cerviño, Gonzalo Iturregui, Marc Miret, Joan C. Mora, Ingrid Mora, Mireia Ortega, Course Code: 362720 Contents Page PART I: NOTES AND EXERCISES 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 3 2. The levels of language (phonetics, phonology and linguistics) ............................ 5 3. Basic concepts in phonetics and phonology .......................................................... 8 4. Physiology of speech production .......................................................................... 11 5. The classification of speech sounds ...................................................................... 13 6. Connected speech: assimilation and weak forms .................................................. 19 7. The sound systems of English, Spanish and Catalan compared ........................... 25 8. Some resources on the web ................................................................................... 29 9. Model exams ......................................................................................................... 30

PART II: PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION PRACTICE 10. Phonetic symbols for the transcription of English .............................................. 33 11. Phonetic transcription and phonetic symbols ...................................................... 35 12. The English vowels: contrasts ............................................................................. 36 13. The English vowels and diphthongs.................................................................... 37 14. Schwa .................................................................................................................. 39 15. Some notes to help you with English phonetic transcription .............................. 40 16. Passages for phonetic transcription ..................................................................... 45 17. Phonetic dictations .............................................................................................. 46 18. Texts for phonetic transcription .......................................................................... 50 19. Transcription of the texts..................................................................................... 54

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PART I: NOTES AND EXERCISES

1. INTRODUCTION Fonètica i Fonologia Anglesa I is intended to provide both practice in the phonetics of English and an introduction to the essential theoretical foundations of the discipline. After each topic has been covered in class, you should read the relevant chapter of English Phonetics and Phonology for Spanish Speakers (2nd ed. 2011) by Brian Mott. Some transcription practice will be given in class, but this will never be enough for students to reach the required standard without work outside class. For this purpose, texts have been provided for private study in this anthology (pp. 45-62). Further recorded texts will be found in the textbook, pp. 359-361, transcriptions pp. 413-415 (CD tracks 43-52). Useful bibliography ASHBY, Patricia. 2005. Speech Sounds. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. CARR, Philip. 2013. English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. CRUTTENDEN, Alan. 2008. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 7th ed. London: Hodder. LILLO, Antonio. 2009. Transcribing English. Albolote (Granada): Comares. MCMAHON, April. 2002. An Introduction to English Phonology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ROACH, Peter. 2009. English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge: CUP. TATHAM, Mark, & MORTON, Katherine. 2011. Speech Production and Perception. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. TENCH, Paul. 2011. Transcribing the Sound of English. Cambridge: CUP. ASSESSMENT Continuous assessment (“avaluació contínua”) is the general norm. In this subject, the final exam will constitute 60% of the final grade, and other components 40% (60+40=100%). The pass mark for the course is 50%. The final exam (60% of the final mark) will consist of 3 parts (15%+5%+40%=60%): 1. Phonemic transcription of a dictated passage of approximately 100 words (15%). Scores out of 20 marks. Every wrongly transcribed word deducts 0.5 marks. Requirement: 5/20 is necessary to pass the Phonetics I course Dates: 29th May 2020 (morning groups) and 4th June 2020 (evening groups) during the first 30 minutes of the exam period. 2. Pronunciation test (5%): read aloud of 10 words from the lists of frequently mispronounced words (7 from List 1, 3 from list 2). Scores out of 10 marks, 1 mark per word based on pronunciation accuracy. Dates: 19 and 21 May 2020. Requirement: 5/10 is necessary to pass the Phonetics I course. 3. Written paper (40%) Scores out of 50 marks distributed into 3 sections: 10 short questions (20 marks) + 2 topic questions (20 marks) + 10 short questions based on phonetic data / examples (10 marks). See model exams, anthology, pp. 4-5.

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Dates: 29th May 2020 (morning groups) and 4th June 2020 (evening groups) for 2.5 hours after the phonetic transcription exam. The continuous assessment tasks are the remaining 40% of the mark for this course and will be distributed as follows: 1. Phonetic transcription test of words in isolation (10%) Date: March 12th 2020. 2. Mid-term multiple-choice test (10%) Date: April 21st 2020. 3. Phonetic transcription test of sentences (10%) Date: May 5th 2020. 4. Comprehensibility /accentedness tasks or participation in phonetics research tasks (to be announced in due time) (10%). Dates: Weeks 2-3 in February 2020 and weeks 4 in April and 1 in May 2020. Students unable to submit to continuous assessment are required to fill in a form within the first 30 days of the beginning of the course. These students will be required to do a final exam worth 80% of the final mark and will be asked to hand in task 4 (10%) on the day of the final exam. The final exam for these students will include an additional section with 10 multiple-choice items (10%). The 2nd sitting (“re-avaluació”) will consist of a final exam worth 80% of the final mark that will include an additional section with 10 multiple-choice items (10%) and students will be asked to hand in task 4 (10%) on the day of the final exam.

*https://www.ub.edu/portal/documents/6247957/6273838/sol_avaluacio_master.pdf/8e2bf342 -9868-1857-1e62-e7e68c856f57 IMPORTANT NOTE: Students must attend class with and do the exam of the group in which they are matriculated. Failure to comply with this requirement may lead to students not having their final mark transferred to the “acta”. Any student wishing to change group must do so officially and inform the teachers involved.

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2. PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS Language is made up of several different interacting levels: The Linguistic Sciences

Linguistics

Phonetics

Phonetics (phonic substance and speech sounds)

articulatory phonetics

Phonology (organization and function of speech sounds)

acoustic phonetics

Grammar and Semantics

morphology syntax lexicon discourse

auditory phonetics Language Variation

historical linguistics

psycholinguistics sociolinguistics

Although we can concentrate on any one of these levels largely to the exclusion of the others, as is often done in language teaching or for the purpose of linguistic analysis in order to see particular patterns of organization like combinations of vowels and consonants, verb paradigms or lexical fields more clearly, these different facets of the structure of language are in fact inextricably interrelated.

M = Morphology

P1

P = Phoneticsº S1

P

M

S

P1 = Phonology S = Syntax

S1 = Semantics The fact that the different levels of language come into play simultaneously might be represented O O = Other levels by the following model of language structure proposed by David Crystal (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 82), which is rather like a space station, and shows that entering the system at any one level provides access to all the other levels.

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The levels of language Phonetics deals with the (1) articulation of sounds, (2) their transmission from speaker to hearer, and (3) audition or perception of these sounds by the hearer. It is not considered to be part of linguistics. Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies (1) the sound systems of languages (sounds and sound combinations) and (2) which sounds are most commonly used in the world’s languages (and whether the existence of one sound implies the existence of any other(s)). Morphology is the study of word structure. Words are composed of morphemes. A word may consist of only one morpheme, like manage, or two or more, like manage-(e)d and un-manage-able. The field of morphology is divided into Inflectional Morphology and Derivational Morphology. Derivational morphology tends to be much less predictable than inflectional morphology. Syntax studies the way words combine to form larger units like phrases, clauses and sentences. Lexicon refers to the words of a language or language variety, especially the way they are organized in the mind. A unit of vocabulary is called a lexical item or a lexeme. The words in the mental lexicon are organized into an indeterminate numer of lexical (semantic) fields, such as COLOUR, ANIMALS, FOOD, COOKING, MEMORY, PERCEPTION, CLOTHING, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, SCIENCE, etc., just like a thesaurus. Thus they are not listed in alphabetical order as in a dictionary, but rather as superordinates and hyponyms, or in groups of synonyms and antonyms. Languages do not manifest symmetrical patterns of superordinates and hyponyms owing to the many gaps in the lexis of individual languages. Discourse is the study of larger patterns of meaning, i.e. stretches of speech or writing longer than the sentence, such as stories, conversations, jokes and letters, and is concerned with such aspects of language as inter-sentence connectivity. Pragmatics deals with the speaker’s intended meaning. The simplest formulation of meaning would be to say that it equals semantics + pragmatics. The interaction of the levels of language Phonology and grammar. -(e)s = third person singular present tense, or plural Phonology and syntax: don’t with final [-nt] in isolation or in careful speech, but this pronunciation may alter in connected speech: Don’t be silly [ˈdəʊm bi ˈsɪli]; don’t you think it’s time [ˈdəʊntʃə ˈθɪŋk ɪts ˈtaɪm]. Phonology and semantics: seat v. sheet. Semantics and morphology: -ness = noun, -ing = gerund, -hood = state. Semantics and syntax: nothing doing v. doing nothing. Syntax and pragmatics: Geoff and I v. Me and Geoff. Generation and interpretation of language The human brain contains a mental dictionary, i.e. a lexicon of words and the concepts that they stand for, and a set o f rules (a grammar) which combines the words to relate the concepts to one another. Any act of communication begins with the intention to convey a message, a gathering together of the concepts to be expressed, and a search for the words with which to translate those concepts into speech. 6

The words are accessed in the lexicon and then grammatical rules like addition of –s to form the plural in English will be applied by the syntactic component. There is still some discussion as to whether words are stored in the lexicon as wholes (FULL LISTING HYPOTHESIS) or whether it is their component morphs which are stored separately and then assembled. Apart from producing subject-verb concord like The boy is eating, The boys are eating, the syntactic component makes questions and determines the correct output for word and phrase order. The phonological component ensures the correct phonological form for each word and for the utterance as a whole Comprehension, roughly speaking, involves a reversal of this process. There are two main tasks involved: (1) decoding the speech signal, (2) attaching meanings to what is heard. The recognition of words is a fundamental and indispensable stage in language comprehension. Misinterpretation of messages may occur through factors like structural ambiguity, garden-path sentences and misanalysis of word boundaries.

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3. BASIC CONCEPTS IN PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY PHONETICS: “The science which studies the characteristics of human sound-making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their DESCRIPTION, CLASSIFICATION and TRANSCRIPTION”. (D. Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, p. 363) There are three main branches: (1) ARTICULATORY PHONETICS – which studies the way speech sounds are made; (2) ACOUSTIC PHONETICS – which studies the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear; (3) AUDITORY PHONETICS – which studies the perceptual response to speech sounds, as mediated by ear, auditory nerve and brain. Phonetics is a pure science and need not be studied in relation to any particular language. PHONOLOGY: If Phonetics provides descriptions and classifications of speech sounds, Phonology employs these to study the SOUND SYSTEMS OF LANGUAGES. “Out of the very wide range of sounds the human vocal apparatus can produce, and which are studied by Phonetics, only a relatively small number are used distinctively in any one language. The sounds are organized into a system of contrasts, which are analysed in terms of phonemes, distinctive features, or other such phonological units, according to the theory used” (Crystal, 2008, p. 365). Phonology has two goals: (1) To write descriptions of the sound patterns of particular languages. (2) To make general statements about the nature of the sound systems of the languages of the world and establish universals. For example, a language does not usually have voiced stops without voiceless ones. A language does not have /ei/ unless it has /i/. Vowel systems tend to be predominantly symmetrical, with the vowels distributed fairly evenly between back and front, and open and close. A three-vowel system, for example, will not consist entirely of front vowels, or entirely of close vowels. Large sound systems are orderly expansions of smaller ones. In Phonology, the expression DISTINCTIVE FEATURES is used to refer to any features of speech which enable a contrast to be made between phonological units. Such features might also be labelled RELEVANT, FUNCTIONAL or SIGNIFICANT. “Distinctive features may be seen either as part of the definition of phonemes, or as an alternative to the notion of the phoneme. The first of these views is found in the approach of the Prague School, where the phoneme is seen as a BUNDLE of phonetic distinctive features: the English phoneme /p/, for example, can be seen as the result of the combination of the features BILABIAL, VOICELESS, PLOSIVE, etc. Other phonemes will differ from /p/ in respect of at least one of these features.” (Crystal, 2008, p. 151)

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THE PHONEME Languages differ as to which units they use distinctively. What is distinctive in one language may not be so in another. The minimal distinctive units of language are what we call phonemes, which are not sounds, but linguistic abstractions. However, the degree of abstraction varies according to the concept of different linguists. According to the American survey known as UPSID (The University of California, Los Angeles Phonological Segment Inventory Database), the number of phonemes in the world’s languages ranges between 11 and 141; the consonant range is 6-95 segments, and the vowel range is 3-46 segments; 70% of the world’s languages have between 20 and 37 segments; a typical language has over twice as many consonants as vowels. Owing to the different number of phonemes in different languages, languages use different PHONETIC SPACE. For example, Tagalog, with its three-vowel system, needs less precision for /i/ than English does in this area with the / – // opposition. Cf. also Japanese /l ~ r/: Japanese has only one phoneme in this articulatory area, and this phoneme therefore has greater latitude. The terms PHONEME, ALLOPHONE and PHONE PHONE = any speech sound; a phoneme-token – a single instance of the utterance of a phoneme on a particular occasion by a particular speaker. ALLOPHONE = a phoneme sub-type – one of the members of a phoneme “family”; a particular way of realizing a phoneme in a particular phonetic environment; a positional variant of a phoneme which occurs in a specific environment and does not serve to distinguish meaning. PHONEME = the minimal distinctive unit of phonology which serves to distinguish meaning. Problems of segmentation Sometimes problems of segmentation arise. Are /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ one phoneme or two? Or putting it more technically, are they monophonematic or biphonematic? As regards /tʃ/in Spanish there is no great problem. Spanish has no independent phoneme /ʃ/ so we classify /tʃ/ as a separate phoneme. The unitary interpretation is preferred in English because we do not split /tʃ/ and /dʒ/:a grey chip is distinguishable from a great ship. Note also that Cheese and apple can be fumbled as Eese and chapple, but would never come out as *Sheese and tapple. Daniel Jones “physical” view of the phoneme The phoneme is regarded as a “family” of sounds satisfying certain conditions, notably: (a) The various members of the “family” must show phonetic similarity to one another, in other words be “related in character” (Jones, 1950: 10). (b) No member of the “family” may occur in the same phonetic context as any other; this condition is often referred to as the requirement of complementary distribution. Differentiation of meaning is considered a corollary of the definition, not the basis (Jones, 1950: 13-15). Jakobson refers to this view as the “generic” view. Phoneme is opposed to sound as class is to specimen. 9

THE PHONEME: DANIEL JONES’ PROPOSITIONS 1) The theory of the phoneme can only be based on the speech of one particular person. Different speakers can have different phoneme inventories. 2) The theory can only apply if based on one consistent style used in one dialect. Slow speech and fast speech produce different pronunciations; Northerners may say /lʊk/ or /luːk/ depending on whom they are addressing; in Standard English horse and hoarse are homophones, but not in every dialect. 3) The theory can only apply to isolate words, not connected speech; sequences like [ɡʊɡ ɡl] and [ɡʊb bɪ] present problems of phonemic analysis (see Roach, section entitled “Aspects of Connected Speech”). If phonemic grouping were based on connected speech, [y] and [] would be different phonemes in French because of oppositions like tu es [tyɛ] and tuait [tɛ]. Note also the problem of German [x] and [ ç]. The latter allophone is used after front vowels, and the former after back vowels. On the basis of pairs like tauchen [tauxn] ‘to dive’ and Tauchen [tauçn] ‘little rope’, it looks as if we have to treat them as phonemes. However, as [-çn] in Tauchen is an invariable diminutive ending, it can be treated as if it were a separate word, i.e. dealt with on a morphophonological level. 4) The theory of the phoneme should not include prosodic features. 5) A sound cannot belong to more than one phoneme. We cannot say that in English [n] and [ŋ] are usually distinct, but that in ink the [ŋ] belongs to the /n/ phoneme. For then we could say that [m] belongs to /n/ in lamp as *[lænp] does not exist. EXCEPTIONS TO (5): (i) Overlapping. Example: the retracted variety of French // sounds much like the advanced variety of //. (ii) In a hypothetical language in which [d] and [z] occurred in the same environment and [dz] in a different one, [dz] could be assigned equally well to either /d/ or /z/. 6) The members of a phoneme must be phonetically similar. English /ŋ/ and /h/ are in complementary distribution, but they are not phonetically similar and ...