2014-02-18
12726Literature recommended
ORTHOEPIC NORM AND TYPES OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
Lecture No 9-10
PLAN
1. The principal types of English pronunciation. Dialectology and dialect studies.
2. The notion of orthoepic norm. Types and variants of pronunciation. National pronunciation standards of English in the English-speaking countries.
3. Received pronunciation as a standard and its relations with other variants.
4. Major accents in the UK (RP, Northern, Scottish; Estuary English, Cockney). Chief differences between RP and regional accents of British English.
5. General American (GAm) as the American English pronunciation norm. Types of American English pronunciation (Eastern, Southern and General American).
6. Phonological and phonetic distinctions of Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Republic of South Africa English pronunciation.
7. Phonetic processes in contemporary English pronunciation.
1. Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П. и др. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. - М.: Гуманит. Изд. Центр ВЛАДОС, 1996. - с. 247-285.
2. Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П. и др. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. - М.: Высш. школа, 1991. - с. 208-237.
3. Леонтьева С.Ф. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. - М.: Высш. школа, 1980. - с. 206-212.
4. Шахбагова Д.А. Фонетическая система английского языка в диахронии и синхронии (на материале британского, американского, австралийского, канадского вариантов английского языков). - М.: Фоллис, 1992.
5. Шевченко Т.И. Социальная дифференциация английского произношения. - М.: Высш. Школа, 1990.
6. Бабенко А.П.. Христенко Е.В. Американский вариант английского языка. - Харьков: Рубикон, 1991.
7. Abercrombie D. R.P. and local accent // Studies in phonetics and linguistics. - Oxford: Oxford Un-ty Press, 1965.
8. Firth J.R. Standard English // The tongues of men and speech. - Oxford: Oxford Un-ty Press, 1964.
9. Strevens P.D. British and American English // New orientations in the teaching of English. - Oxford: Oxford Un-ty Press, 1977.
10. Wells J.C.The cockneyfication of P.P.? //Gunnel. and N.-L. Johannesson (ed.) Non-standard Varieties of Language: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium 11-13 April 1991. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell,1994.
11. Ramsaran S. RP: fact and fiction // Ramsaran S. (ed.) Studies in the pronunciation of English. - London: Routledge, 1990. - p. 178-190.
12. Roach P. English phonetics and phonology. - Cambridge: Cambridge Un-ty Press, 1991.
The four components of the phonetic structure of ant language (phonemic, syllabic, accentual and intonational) constitute its pronunciation. One of the things that everybody knows about languages is that they have different accents. Languages are pronounced differently by people from different geographical places, from different social classes, of different ages and different educational backgrounds. The word "accent" is often confused with dialect. We will use the word "dialect" to refer to a variety of a language, which is different from others not just in pronunciation but also in such matters as vocabulary, grammar and word-order. Differences of accent, on the other hand, are pronunciation differences only. Type of British English, most familiar as the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on serious national and international BBC broadcasting channels, has for a long time been identified by the rather quaint name Received Pronunciation (usually abbreviated to its initials, RP).
In talking about accents of English, the foreigner should be careful about the difference between England and Britain; there are many different accents in England, but the range becomes very much wider if the accents of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are taken into account. Within the accents of England, the distinction that is most frequently made by the majority of English people is between Northern and Southern. This is a very rough division, and there can be endless argument over where the boundaries lie, but most people on hearing a pronunciation typical of someone from Lancashire, Yorkshire or other counties further north would identify it as "Northern".
Differences among accents of English are usually a subject that many students of English find interesting and wish to know more about. For a long time, the study of accents was part of the subject of dialectology, which aimed to identify all the ways in which a language differed from place to place. in its traditional form is principally interested in geographical differences (exploring rural areas, finding elderly speakers).
Dialectology
Its best-known data-gathering technique has been to send researchers (usually called "field-workers") mainly into rural areas (where the speakers were believed to be less likely to have been influenced by other accents), to find elderly speakers (whose speech was believed to have been less influenced by other accents and to preserve older forms of the dialect) and to use lists of questions to find information about vocabulary and pronunciation, the questions being chosen to concentrate on items known to vary a lot from region to region. Surveys of this kind can provide the basis for many generalisations about geographical variation, but they have serious weaknesses, which will be discussed later.
Dialect is
Differences
When two accents differ from each other only phonetically, we find the same number of phonemes in both accents, but some of all the phonemes are realised differently. There may also be differences in stress or intonation, but not such as would cause a change in meaning. As an example of phonetic differences at the segmental level, it is said that Australian English has the same set of phonemes and phonemic contrasts as RP, yet Australian pronunciation is so different from RP that it is easily recognised as such. A word of caution should be given here: it is all too easy to talk about such things as "Australian English", and ignore the great variety that inevitably exists within such a large community of speakers.
Every individual's speech
We can find differences in pronunciation (as well as in other fields of linguistic analysis) resulting from various factors that we could call static influences
In addition, various situational factors
Some people (who usually turn out to do well in phonetic training) find that in speaking to someone with a different accent their pronunciation gets progressively more like chat of the person they are speaking to, like a chameleon adapting its colour to its environment.
Every national variety of language falls into territorial or regional dialects. Dialects are distinguished from each other by differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. When we refer to varieties in pronunciation only, we use the term accent. So local accents may have many features of pronunciation in common and are grouped into territorial or area accents. For certain reasons one of the dialects becomes the standard language of the nation and its pronunciation or accent - the standard pronunciation.
The literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A standard may be defined as "a socially accepted variety of language established by a codified norm of correctness" (K. Macanalay). Standard national pronunciation is sometimes called "an orthoepic norm''. Some phoneticians however prefer the term "literary pronunciation".
