Optimize your exam preparation Anglistik/Amerikanistik
E-Book, Englisch, Band 12, 172 Seiten
Reihe: Uni-Wissen
ISBN: 978-3-12-939111-2
Verlag: Klett Lerntraining bei PONS Langenscheidt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Until 1997 John F. Davis lectured in English philology at the University of Cologne. John F. Davis war bis 1997 Dozent für Englische Philologie an der Universität zu Köln.
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1
CHAPTER Phonetics and Phonology
The aim of this book is to provide its readers with a short introduction to the phonetics and phonology of English within a structuralist framework and to give them a firm foundation from which they can proceed to other approaches to phonology. Limited space will allow consideration of only Standard British Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA). Topics will usually be illustrated from RP, but where GA is different, these differences will be discussed and illustrated too. 1 Difference between Phonetics and Phonology
Phonetics is that part of linguistics in which we study the physical characteristics of the sounds which we hear in languages. It is interested in how we produce these sounds in the mouth, nose, throat and lungs, and in how the ear and the brain perceive and interpret them. Phonology is the study of how particular languages use these sounds, e. g. what combinations of consonants a language allows at the beginning or end of a word or syllable, which sounds have a restricted distribution in the language, how some sounds affect neighbouring sounds in that language, etc. Of what use is a knowledge of phonetics and phonology to students and teachers of English? Students can improve their own pronunciation if they understand how the sounds of English (or another language) are produced physically (Phonetics) and how the sounds of English (or another language) function in that language (Phonology). For example, German learners should be aware of the fact that the vowel in the German word schön is said with rounded lips and that it should not be substituted for the non-rounded vowel in the English words learn or bird. This is phonetic knowledge. Another problem for German learners is not to use the glottal stop at the beginning of an English word starting with a vowel. German words with an initial vowel begin with a brief closing and opening of the vocal cords in the throat, as when a person strains slightly. This glottal stop is rare in English pronunciation and only used before word-initial vowels in very emphatic speech. There is thus a very big difference between the German sentence Anna aß ein Ei, where each word begins with a glottal stop, and the corresponding English sentence Ann ate an egg, where the last consonant in the first three words is run onto the beginning of the word following it, almost as if it were an initial consonant. Thus the function of the glottal stop in the two languages is very different. This is phonological knowledge. A knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of English can improve the student’s understanding of native speakers of English. Similarly, the English of non-native speakers can be more easily understood if the student has some knowledge of how the phonetics and phonology of the non-native speakers’ language works. This kind of phonetic knowledge shows us why speakers of certain languages typically make certain kinds of mistakes. Phonetics and phonology are also important for teachers of English. They can help teachers to understand the ways in which their pupils are pronouncing wrongly and they allow them to offer suggestions for the improvement of a pupil’s pronunciation. 2 Phonetics
1 Preliminaries We said above that phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds. We must note carefully that we are not concerned here with the letters with which words are written but with the sounds which the letters stand for. The goals of phonetics are to determine and describe the properties of these sounds, how they are produced, how they pass physically from one person to another and how the speaker and the listener perceive them. For this purpose various kinds of phonetics are required. 2 Kinds of Phonetics Articulatory Phonetics describes sounds with regard to the organs of speech, such as the lips, the tongue, the teeth, etc. We see which organs of speech are used to produce a certain sound, how they are manipulated, where they are moved to. Acoustic Phonetics is concerned with what happens in the air between the speaker and the listener; in other words it is the study of the acoustic properties of speech sounds. For this, phoneticians use various kinds of technical apparatus, such as the sonograph, a kind of acoustic spectrograph, which analyses sound into its component frequencies and produces a graphical record of the results. Auditory Phonetics deals with the question of how sounds are perceived by the ear of the speaker or listener, what people think they hear, how the brain distinguishes sounds, how the brain segments sounds into understandable units. For example, if I replace the initial sound of the word glass by a d sound when I ask a native speaker of English Would you like a dlass of beer?, he will probably not notice that I have mispronounced the word glass, as his brain will have processed the erroneous initial sound as the g sound which he knows from experience to be at the beginning of this word. Another important question which can be asked here is: by what processes do people understand language? Clues and answers to this question may be given by the study of aphasia (the sudden loss of speech, e. g. through an accident to the brain), or by the study of how we learn our mother language or a foreign language as a child or as an adult. Other useful information can be gained from experiments on producing the sounds of a language synthetically, e. g. so as to make computers able to speak. Interesting as all these different kinds of phonetics are, we shall only have time and space to deal with one of them, namely articulatory phonetics, the most useful kind for students of English. 3 Articulatory Phonetics
1 Organs of Speech If we look here at the diagram of a head, nose and throat, we can distinguish eight parts which are important in the production of speech. Moving from the front of the mouth to the back, we find (1) the lips, (2) the teeth, (3) the teeth-ridge (a bump or protrusion of bone just behind the upper teeth), (4) the hard palate (the hard part of the roof of the mouth), (5) the soft palate (the soft part of the roof of the mouth) which ends in (6) the uvula. Behind the lower teeth lies (7) the tongue, and in the throat, inside the larynx (a hollow structure of cartilage and muscle forming the upper part of the air passage to and from the lungs) we have (8) the vocal cords. The lips are used for consonants like [p] and [b]1, for the English semivowel [w] as in wood or for rounded vowel sounds such as [u:] in the English word too or such as [:] in the English word law. The lower lip in combination with the upper teeth can be used to produce the consonants [f] or [v] as in the words fat or very. The teeth are needed for sounds like [?] and [ð] where the tip of the tongue is placed between the teeth to make the initial sound of the words thin and then respectively. The teeth-ridge is a bony ridge immediately behind the upper teeth, containing their roots. As we shall see later, it is useful for the production of a large number of sounds such as [t], [d], [s], [z], [l] and [n], which are formed here with the help of the tip or blade of the tongue. The hard palate is the hard front part of the roof of the mouth, behind the teeth-ridge. The only English sound which is made on the hard palate is [j], the sound we hear at the beginning of young. The soft palate is the soft back part of the roof of the mouth and is important for the production of the nasal sounds [n] and [m], heard initially in the words not, map, and for the production of [?], often spelt ng in English and heard finally in the word sing. When the soft palate is lowered away from the wall at the back of the mouth, air from the lungs can escape through the nose producing the characteristic nasal quality of nasal sounds. In addition to nasal consonants some languages like French, Portuguese or Polish have nasalized vowels, which are also produced with the soft palate lowered. Nasalized vowels are not characteristic of English, though in American speech a vowel which occurs beside a nasal consonant is usually slightly nasalized. The uvula is the fleshy extension of the soft palate which can be seen hanging down at the back of the mouth when the mouth is opened wide. It can be made to vibrate as in the rolled r of Standard German, e. g. in the word drei (= three), but it is not used for any of the sounds in Standard English. This uvular r is heard, however, in place of the standard r-sound in some dialects of English, e. g. Geordie, which is spoken in Newcastle on the coast of northeast England. Of all the organs of speech the tongue is probably the most useful. As it is very flexible, it can be moved around very easily and placed on other organs of speech to produce various...
