Phonetics and Phonology

The study of PRONUNCIATION consists of two fields: PHONETICS PHONOLOGY

What is Phonetics? Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds. Articulatory phonetics Acoustic phonetics Auditory phonetics How speech sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. The perception of speech sounds. Transmission and physical properties of speech sounds.

What is Phonology? Phonology is how speech sounds are organized and affect one another in pronunciation. It deals with the system and pattern of sounds which exist within a particular language. The study of phonology of English looks at the vowels, consonants and suprasegmental features of the language ( stress, intonation)

When we talk about vowels and consonants, within the discipline of phonology, we are referring to the different sounds we make when speaking, and NOT the vowel and consonant letters we refer to when talking about spelling.

Phonemes PIN PEN PET BET In any language we can identify a small number of regularly used sounds (vowels and consonants) that we call PHONEMES. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. For Example: PIN PEN PET BET

MAN m æ n When we speak we produce a CONTINUOUS STREAM OF SOUNDS. In studying speech we divide this stream into small pieces that we call SEGMENTS. For Example: MAN m æ n

MINE m aɪ n It is not always easy to decide on the number of segments. For Example: MINE m aɪ n

Consider written English LETTERS AND SOUNDS It is very important to learn to think of English pronunciation in terms of Phonemes rather than letters of the alphabet. Consider written English enough through thorough thought bough think those thistle thong church chemistry loch Cheryl

Special symbols are used to represent speech sounds.

What is the difference between phonetics and phonology? Phonology deals with the sound systems languages Phonetics deals with the physical realisation of the elements of the sound system, e.g. how the sound is physically produced (articulatory phonetics), or the acoustic characteristics of the speech sound (acoustic phonetics)

suprasegmental elements and suprasegmental elements Phonemes are the different sounds within a language. Although there are slight differences in how individuals articulate sounds, we can still describe reasonably accurately how each sound is produced. To sum up: Phonemes are units of sound which can be analysed . They are also known as SEGMENTS.

SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES are features of speech which generally apply to groups of segments, or phonemes. The features which are important in English are STRESS, INTONATION, and how sounds change in connected speech.

Phoneme Consonants Voiced Unvoiced Vowels Single vowels Short Long Diphthongs

Suprasegmental Features Intonation Stress Word stress Sentence stress

SYMBOLS AND TRANSCRIPTION Symbols are for one of two purposes: They are symbols for the phonemes (phonemic or phoneme symbols) They are phonetic symbols PHONEMIC SYMBOLS The number of phonemic symbols must be exactly the same as the number of phonemes we decide exist in the language. Some of the phonemes symbols consist of two characters as in the word CHIP | tʃɪp |

Phonemic transcription: every speech sound must be identified as one of the phonemes and written with the appropriate symbol. (two kind of transcription: transcription from dictation or transcription from a written text) The phonemic system described for RP contains 44 PHONEMES The best-known system: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

IPA has been developing since 1888. The system represents each sound of human speech with a single symbol. The symbol is enclosed in brackets [ ].

Transcription – the art of reducing speech to writing Remember: a word in isolation may be spoken differently to a word in connected speech to = [tu:] give it to him = [gɪv ɪt tə ɪm] compare

RP AND OTHER ACCENTS Languages have different accents; they are pronounced differently by people from different geographical places, from different social classes, of different ages and different educational backgrounds.

We use the word DIALECT refers to the variety of a language which is different from others no just in pronunciation but also in such matters as vocabulary, grammar and word order. ACCENT are pronunciation differences only.

The accent that we concentrate on and use as our model is the one that is most often recommended for foreign learners studying British English. It is the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on serious national and international BBC broadcasting channels. It has for a long time been indentified by the name Received Pronunciation (RP)