SOCIAL VARIATIONS IN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. SOCIAL FACTORS AND PHONETIC MARKERS
SOCIAL VARIATIONS IN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. SOCIAL FACTORS AND PHONETIC MARKERS - раздел Образование, Билет 1
In All English-Speaking Countries There Exists A Close And Ob...
In all English-speaking countries there exists a close and obvious connection between language and social class: speech stratification correlates with social stratification. But only in England phonetic factors assume a predominating role which they do not generally have in other parts of the English-speaking world.
There was a survey in 1972 carried out by National Opinion Polls and according to the results of it speech was regarded as more indicative of social class than occupation, education, and income; and the likelihood is that by “the way they speak” respondents meant, above all, accent.
Thus accents are associated with the people who use them, with their way of life, and may have symbolic values. The accents of big urban centres like Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow in UK may have negative associations with the polluted environment of industrial area.
In the USA, New York is viewed as the centre of crime and drug taking (but also the financial and intellectual centre). Although there is no necessary connection at all between personality types and accents, most people react as if there were.
There is a stereotype of an RP speaker to possess authority, competence, intelligence and ambition while local accent is associated with friendliness, personal integrity, kindness. RP speaker may be disliked because he sounds “posh”, “affected”, while a person with a working class accent may be positively assessed for “friendship”, “fight”, “solidarity”, “personal integrity”.
There is a new classification of RP in the 6th edition of A.C. Gimpon’s “Introduction to the Pronunciation of English”:
§ General RP
§ Refined RP
§ Regional RP
Refined RP is defined as an upper-class accent, mainly associated with upper-class families, e.g. officers in the navy and some regiments. The number of speakers using Refined RP is increasingly declining. Reason: for many other speakers a speaker of Refined RP has become a figure of fun, and the type of speech itself is often regarded as affected.
The term Regional RP (U-RP) is used to describe the type of speech which is basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may go unnoticed even by other speakers of RP. For example:
- vocalization of dark [l] to [υ] in words like held [heυd], ball [boυ];
- the use of a/æ instead of /a:/ before voiceless fricatives in words like after, bath, past.
There is one regional type, RP modified towards Cockney, which is called Estuary English. It is often characterized by younger speakers as having “street credibility” or “streetcred’ i.e. as being fashionable. The phonetic features of Estuary English include:
§ the replacement of dark [l] by [υ] as in field [fiυd];
§ the glottalization of /t/ preconsonantly and before a pause, as in not that [no? ¶æt];
§ the use of Cockney-type realization of the diphthongs /ei, ai/, as in late [lait], light [loit]
§ Cockney-type vowel allophones before /l/, e.g. cold [koυυd]
§ Elision of /j/ after /n/, as in new [nu:]
In the 60-s A.C.Gimson distinguished three kinds of RP based on age and professional background:
1. conservative RP (lawyers and clergy);
2. general RP(BBc newsreaders);
3. advanced RP(young people, University graduates, exclusive social groups).
Nowadays the general RP is also called mainstream RP.
Semantic and enclitic approaches to rhythmic units of speech Analyze the two approaches in the following phrase Mr Wilson is in the hospital... Eng SR a regular reoccurrence of stressed syl s Many linguists feel that... The semantic p of v acc to it the unstressed syllables tend to be drawn to the stressed one of the same word or to...
Tendencies in the incidence of stress in English.
Languages are also differentiated according to the place of word stress. The traditional classification of languages concerning place of stress in a word is into those with a fixed stress and those
The units of rhythm in prose and verse.
For many years the object of phonet.analysis was a short sentence(one sense-group). However, the analysis of larger text units( long complex sentences- Superphras.unit) contributed a lot to the tre
Functional or
linguistic level) rhythm
Speech melody, or the pitch component of intonation, is the variations in the pitch of the voice
Consonants
a) In GA [r] is retroflex (pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back). At least 3 degrees of retroflexion which affect the preceding vowel:
National standards
§ RP (Received Pronunciation), or BBC English, in the UK;
§ GA (General American), or American Network English, in the USA;
§ GenCan
Attitudinal meaning of the constituents of the melodic contour.
In Brit. Trad. Some scientists say Melody has no meaning and its meaning is totally depended on context. However there is evidence to the contrary. The independ. Character of tonal meanings is born
Subsidiary.
The actual speech sounds are allophones or variants of the phoneme. Allophones of one and the same phoneme are phonetically similar. They don’t contrast with one another.
F.e. English phon
Structural function
The speaker has to organize and the listener has to identify the hierarchy of information units starting from the most prominent syllable in a word, the most prominent word in an into
Social function
Our oral speech can give info to the listener about his gender, age, education, place – domain of prosody. Prosody is an important marker of personal or social identity: lawyers, preachers, newscas
Stylistic
Each functional style and each function of speech has its own characteristics in melody, tempo, loudness, voice quality, pause. Official style (frequent use of the gradually descending scale
Typology of accentual structures
(из лекций): Degrees of stress
1) primary (strong)
2) secondary (alw preceeds the primary stress: e*xami*nation);
3) tertiary (alw follow th
Word stress
a) The differences in stress are also lexically determined, and, therefore, and hard to generalize:
RP a¢ddress, ¢adult, prin¢cess, ¢detail;
FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION
The principal functions of I. are:
1) Communicative – the change in melody/tone leads to the change of the communicative type of the utterance. (command, r
THE ORPHOEPIC NORM OF ENGLISH (RP) AND ITS TYPES
The conditions for a variety of English pronunciation to be accepted as the orthoepic norm are
1.recognition of the fact that RP has the “prestige a
Standard Scottish Pronunciation.
ü The Southern British type of Engl.pronunciation is known as RP. The term Southern English is indicative only of its birth-place and doesn’t
Factor which determine the variety of phonetic styles.
Phonostylistics deals with phonetic styles, which are- different ways of pronunciation determined by extralinguist.factors and characterized by specific phonetic features.So
The meaning of tones and scales.
The falling tone is most common in statements, special questions, commands and exclamations. The rising tone is common in non-final parts of statements, in general questions, requests and warnings.
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