General characteristics of sounds
Letters and sounds must never be mixed up. Letters are written, sounds are spoken. It very useful to have written letters to remind us of corresponding sounds, but this is all they do. They cannot make us pronounce sounds which we don’t already know; they simply remind us. In ordinary English spelling is not always easy to know what sounds the letters stand for. We have 24 consonants and 20 vowels to consider. Speech sounds are grouped into language units called phonemes. A phoneme may be thought of as the smallest contrastive language unit which exists in the speech of all people belonging to the same language community in the form of speech sounds and may bring about a change of meaning. The phoneme is realized in speech in the material form of speech sounds of different type. Various speech realizations of the phoneme are called its allophones. The organs of speech are capable of uttering many different kinds of sounds. From the practical point of view it is convenient to distinguish two types of speech sounds: vowels and consonants. Vowels are voiced sounds produced without any obstruction in the supra-glottal cavities and consequently have no noise component. In the articulation of consonants a kind of noise producing obstruction is formed in the supra-glottal cavities. Such sounds may be pronounced with or without vocal cords vibration.
Stress, accent
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense. The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress or lexical stress. The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. The latter is one of the three components of prosody, along with rhythm and intonation. The ways stress manifests itself in the speech stream are highly language-dependent. In some languages, stressed syllables have a higher or lower pitch than non-stressed syllables – this is called pitch accent (or musical accent). Other features that may characterize stressed syllables include dynamic accent (loudness), qualitative accent (differences in place or manner of articulation, typically a more peripheral articulation), and quantitative accent (syllable length, equivalent to agogic accent in music theory). Stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes the difference between the acoustic signals of stressed and unstressed syllables may be minimal. Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside (a geographical or regional accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language (when the language in which the accent is heard is not their native language), and so on. Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word 'accent' refers specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word 'dialect' encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often 'accent' is a subset of 'dialect'.
|
|
|
Rhythm
Rhythm is generally measured in regular flow of speech in which stressed and unstressed syllables occur at definite intervals. There are two kinds of speech rhythm: syllable-timed and stress-timed rhythm. Every language in the world is spoken with one kind of Rhythm or with the other. French, for.example, are syllable-timed language. All syllables are of equal value. They follow each other with fairly equal length and force. We hear smooth flow of syllables without a strong contrast of stress. RHYTHM IN ENGLISH, Russian and some other stress-timed languages is based primarily on the alteration of strongly and weakly stressed syllables. Within each intonation group the stressed syllables occur at fairly equal intervals of time. This means that if there are any unstressed syllables between stressed ones, they have to be fitted in without delaying the regular beat. The greater number of unstressed syllables there is between the stressed ones the more weakly and rapidly they are pronounced. The unstressed vowels in this case have a noticeably different quality — they are shortened and weakened. The English rhythmic structure is different from Russian- all the notional words are stressed, the form-words are fitted in between the stressed ones, when in Rus. almost all the words of an intonation group are stressed. To acquire a good English speech rhythm one should arrange sentences into intonations groups and then into rhythmic groups; weaken unstressed words and syllables, obscuring the vowels in them; making the stressed syllables occur regularly with in an intonation group.
|
|
|
Reduction
Vowels in unstressed syllables are pronounced less distinctly than those in stressed syllables. It is possible to speak about 3 types of vowel reduction: Quantitative, qualitative, complete (zero) reduction. Quantitative reduction results in the change of the length (quantity) of a vowel in an unstressed syllable. It affects long vowels anddiphthongs which become half-long or short. “ ‘We have done it.”/wi:/-long. “We have ‘done it.”/wi’/-half-long; “We ‘did it.”/wi/-short. Diphthongs become half-long when followed by an unstressed, or short, when followed by a stressed one, but it is not reflected in transcription. Qualitative reduction is connected with the change of the quality of a vowel. There are two types of it: 1) Qualitative soft reduction, resulting in the /I/ phoneme. The letters “e,i,y” correspond to it in spelling: expect, cinema, city, service. 2) Qualitative hard reduction, resulting in the neutral vowel / ә/. The letters “a,o,u” and the suffixes –er,-ar,-or,-ous correspond to it in spelling: famous, pilot, melody, actor, polar. Complete reduction results in a full disappearance of a vowel in an unstressed position. It occurs before the syllabic sonorants /m, n, l/ when they are posttonic and preceded by a consonant: conversation/∫n/, written /tn/, pencil /sl/ as well as in.
Дата добавления: 2016-01-06; просмотров: 22; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!