Pronunciation norm of English and its dictionary presentation.
Literary pronunciation/standard of pronunciation is defined by its norm. Pronunciation normis a set of parameters describing that phonetic shaping of spoken form of a national language which at a given time is 1) generally considered correct, 2) statistically relevant and/or 3) enjoys social prestige.
Pronunciation norm must not appear for EFL learners as a set of rigid regulations, fixed once and for ever. It is dynamic in nature i.e. liable for changes in the course of time, in language diachrony. At any particular time in the evolution of an accent, in language synchrony, there are likely to be a number of different, co-existent, realizations of phonemes, word pronunciation forms – pronunciation variants.
The English pronunciation norm appears for EFL learners in the explicit, materialized form through its codification (кодифікація, фіксація в словниках), i.e. reflection/fixing of actual pronunciation forms in pronunciation dictionaries and other sources of reference.
Proninciation norm may be of two types: actual and codified. There is no one-to-one correlation between them: codified pronunciation is never fully adequate to the actual one. For technical reasons pronouncing dictionaries do not reflect the newest tendencies occurring in the living pronunciation.
The most authoritative specialist dictionaries of English pronunciation which cover both of the two of the most prestigious accents of English – contemporary RP/BBC English and GenAM – are The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) and The Longman English Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD).
The EPD has been in use for about 90 years. It was originally compiled by Prof. Daniel Jones and first published in 1917. The first 14 editions of the EPD covered only British English. The 15th edition (1997) introduced American pronunciation.
The most recent edition of the EPD is the 17th which was first published in 2006 under the title The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (CEPD) CEPD.
The LPD is compiled by John C. Wells and was first published in1995. The third (currently the latest) impression of the LPD is of 2008. It gives full coverage of both British and American English.
Both The CEPD (2003) and The LPD (2000) are the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative sources of reference for the pronunciation of contemporary English which EFL teachers and learners can rely on.
Word stress as a component of sound structure of English.
Word stress (WS) can be defined as the singling out of one or more syllables in a word, which is accompanied by the change of the force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the sound which is usually a vowel [Леонтьева 1988:179].
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The analysis of WS can be carried out according to the following parameters: 1) the nature of English word-stress; 2) its degree and syllabic location; 3) its functions; 4) basic stress patterns of the English words.
Phoneticians claim that at least four different factors are important in making a syllable prominent: loudness, length of the syllables, pitch, and quality. English lexical stress is traditionally defined as dynamic implying the greater force (muscular energy) with which the syllable is pronounced. However, recent investigations of lexical stress in English show the existence of a hierarchy of acoustic cues to the stressed status of a syllable in English: the perceptually most influential cue is (higher) pitch, the second most important cue in the hierarchy is (longer) duration, the third is (greater) intensity and the last is segmental (sound) quality [Laver 1995:513].
Types of English word stress according to its degree. Strictly speaking, a polysyllabic word has as many degrees of stress as there are syllables in it. But the majority of British phoneticians (D. Jones, R. Kingdon, A.C. Gimson among them) and Russian phoneticians (V. A. Vassilyev, J. Shakhbagova ) consider that there are three degrees of word-stress in English: 1) р rimary - the strongest, 2) secondary - the second strongest, partial, and 3) weak - all the other degrees. The syllables bearing either primary or secondary stress are termed stressed, while syllables with weak stress are called, somewhat inaccurately, unstressed. American linguists distinguish four degrees of word stress, adding the so-called tertiary stress (третинний).Secondary stress differs from tertiary that it usually occurs on the third or fourth pre-tonic syllable, and tertiary is always post-tonic, e.g. administrative, dictionary, category.
In Ukrainian, and Russian there are two degreesof word stress: primary and weak.
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Types of English word stress according to its position. Languages of the world which make a linguistic use of stress fall into one of the two broad types: 1) locating the word-stress predominantly on a given syllabic location in the word or 2) allowing much more freedom for placement the stress [Laver 1995:519]. We can call the first type a language which uses (predominantly) fixed lexical stress, and the second type one which permits variable lexical / (free) stress. In English lexical stress is free (variable). In languages with variable/(free) lexical stress, e.g. English, Ukrainian, etc., it may fall on the first syllable in some words, in others - on the second or third (etc.), i.e. it is free in the sense that the main stress is not tied to any particular location in the chain of syllables constituting a word as in languages with fixed lexical stress.
The word stress tendencies are as follows: 1) the recessive tendency; 2) the rhythmic tendency; 3) the retentive tendency and 4) the semantic factor [Vassilyev 1970: 271-279].
The first and the oldest of the English lexical stress tendencies (characteristic of all Germanic languages) known as the recessive tendency originally consisted in placing lexical stress on the initial syllable of nouns, adjectives and verbs derived from them and on the root syllable of words which belonged to other parts of speech and had a prefix. There are two subtypes of this tendency: 1) unrestricted: when stress falls on the initial syllable, provided it is not a prefix which has no referential meaning . A great majority of native English words of Germanic origin are stressed this way: "father, " mother, " husband, " wonder. 2) restricted: when stress falls on the root of the native English words with a prefix which has no referential meaning now: a " mong, be " come, be " fore, for " get, etc.
Rhythmic tendency results in alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Borrowed polysyllabic words developed a secondary stress on the syllable separated from the word-final primary stress by one unstressed syllable. These words began to be pronounced, in isolation, on the model of short phrases in which a stressed syllable alternates with an unstressed one: pronunciation /pr@%nVnsI"eISn/.
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The retentive tendency consists in the retention of the primary stress of the parent word in the derivative: "person - " personal, or more commonly the retention of the secondary stress on the parent word: "personal – % perso " nality.
There are certain categories of English words stressing of which is determined by the semantic factor, e.g. compound words and words with the so-called separable prefixes. The majority of such words have two equally strong stresses, both stressed parts are considered to be of equal semantic importance, with the semantic factor thus canceling the rhythmic tendency in word stressing , e.g. compound adjectives (hard-working, blue-eyed), verbs with post positions (sit down, take off), numerals from 13 to 19 (fourteen, sixteen).
Word stress in a language performs the following functions:
1) The constitutive function: it organizes the syllables of a word into a language unit having a definite accentual structure.
2) The identificatory function: correct lexical stress enables the listener to decode the information in verbal communication adequately, while misplaced word stresses prevent understanding.
3) The distinctive / contrastive function: word stress alone is capable of differentiating the meanings of words or their forms. But still there are about 135 pairs of words of identical orthography in English which could occur either as nouns (with stress on the penultimate syllable) or as verbs (with stress on the final syllable), with a very small number of cases the location of lexical stress alone being the differentiating factor: "import (noun) - im " port (verb), "insult (noun) - in " sult (verb) [Laver 1995:516].
The placement of WS in English depends on the following factors: 1) whether the word is morphologically simple, or whether it is complex containing one or more affixes (prefixes or suffixes) or a compound word; 2) the grammatical category to which the word belongs (noun, verb, adjective, etc.); 3) the number of syllables in a word; 4) the phonological structure of the syllables [Roach 1995:88]; 5) the historical origin of a word.
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