- •1.Phonetics as a science.
- •2.Principal pecularities of General American vowels.
- •3. The branches of Ph. Onomotopoeia.
- •4. Principal pecularities of General American cons – s.
- •5.The first component of the Ph system of English
- •6.The articulatory and acoustic aspects of the e speech sounds. The power mechanism. The vibrator mech
- •7. The second component of the Ph system of English
- •8.The articulatory and acoustic aspects of the e speech sounds. The resonator mech. The obstructer mech.
- •9. The third and the forth components of the Ph system of English
- •10. The main principles of all current articulatory classifications of vow.
- •11. Different opinions on the nature of the phoneme and its definition.
- •12. Articulatory differences betw vow, cons, sonorants.
- •13. Phonemic variants or allophones
- •14. Sentence stress, or accent
- •15. Articulatery and physiological classification of e vowels.
- •16.Received Pronunciation. Changes of vow quality.
- •17. Articulatery and physiological classification of e vowels. According to the degree of tenseness, length.
- •18.Received Pronouciation. Changes in cons quality.
- •19. Articulatery and physiological classification of e vowels. According to the stability of articulation.
- •20. Assimilation.
- •21. General American pronunciation
- •22.Differences in the articulation bases of english and russian vowels
- •23. Received pron.
- •24.Differences in the articulation bases of the english and russian consonants
- •25.Articulatory and physiological classification of English consonants. Accord to the work of the vocal cords and the force of exhalation, active organs of speech and the place of abstraction.
- •26. The influence of assimilatiom on the work of the vocal cords
- •27.Articulatory and physiological classification of English consonants. Accord to the manner of noise production and the type of obstruction, position of the soft palate.
- •28. Intonation. Rhythm and tempo. Pausation and tember.
- •29. Functional aspect of speech sounds. The phoneme theory.
- •30. The rules of word stress in English
- •31. Theories of syl formation and syl division.
- •32. Articulatory transitions of vowel and cons phonemes.
- •33. Syllable.
- •34. The influence of assimilation on the manner of noise production and the place of articulation.
- •35.Functional characteristics of the syl
- •36. The influence of the rythmic tendency on word-stress sys in modern Eng.
- •37. Stress
- •38. Acoustic aspect of speech sounds.
- •39. Intonation
- •40. Received pronunciation. Spread of English.
- •41. Received and ga pronunciation. General considerations.
- •42. The influence of assimilation on the active organ of speech.
29. Functional aspect of speech sounds. The phoneme theory.
Ph studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, phonology investigates sounds as units which serve communicative purposes. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound, the unit of phonology is a phoneme. Phonemes can be discovered by the method of minimal pairs. This method consists in finding pairs of words which differ in 1 phoneme, e.g. if we replace [b] by [t] in the word ban we produce a new word tan, ban-tan is a pair of words distinguished in meaning by a single sound change. 2 words of this kind are termed minimal pairs.
The phonemes of a lang form a system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least 1 position.
The founder of the phoneme theory was Baudouin de Courteney. His theory of phoneme was developed and perfected by Shcherba, who stated that in actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of, and that in every lang these sounds are united in a comparatively small number of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words. It is these sound types that should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as differentiatory units of the lang. The actually pronounced speech sounds are variants or allophones of phonemes. Allophones are realized in concrete words. They have phonetic similarity, at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words, e.g. in speech we pronounce not the sound type [t] which is asperated, alveolar, forelingual, apical, occlusive, plosive, voiceless-fortis – according to the classificatory definition, but one of its variants, e.g. labialized in the word twice, dental in the word nineth, post-alveolar in try and so on. The number of sound types, or phonemes, in each lang is much smaller than the number of sounds actually pronounced.
Phonemic variants or allophones are very important for lang teaching, their mispronunciation doesn’t influence the meaning of the words, their misuse makes a person’s speech sound as foreign.
The variants used in actual speech are called subsidiary. Susidiary allophones can be positional and combinatory. Posit alloph are used in certain positions traditionally, e.g. the Eng [l] is realized in actual speech as a positional alloph: it is clear in the initial position and dark (твердый) in terminal position, e.g. let and mill. Rus positional alloph can be obserdved in such words as рубль. Combinatory allophones appear in the process of speech and result from the influence of the phoneme upon another.
Each phoneme manifests itself in a certain pattern of distribution. The simplest of them is free variation, that is the variation of one and the same phoneme pronounced differently, e.g. the pronunciation of the initial [k] with different degree of aspiration. Complementary distribution is another pattern of phoneme environment, when one and the same phoneme occurs in a definite set of context in which no other phoneme ever occurs. Contrastive distribution is one more pattern of phoneme environment, e.g. bad – bed, pit – peat – these are minimal pairs.
Minimal distinctive features are discovered through oppositions. This method helps to prove whether the phonemic difference is relevant or not, whether the opposition is single, double or multiple, [d], [t] have only one distinctively relevant feature – single opposition. If there are two distinctively relevant features, the opposition is double , e.g. [p] and [d] differ after following lines: [p] – voiceless, fortis, labial, bilabial; [d] – voiced, lenis, lingual, forelingual, apical, alveolar. The opposition [b], [h] is multiple, because these phonemes differ along the following lines: [b] - voiced, lenis, labial, bilabial, occlusive; [h] - voiceless, fortis, pharingal, constrictive.
Бодуэн-де-Куртене defined the phoneme as a physical image of a sound, he originated the so called “mentalist” view of the phoneme.