Restore the hierarchy of prosodic units
Fill in the gaps in the table: functional aspect of prosody
| …………..function of prosody | |
| It unifies words into utterances, the main communicative units. A succession of words arranged syntactically is not a communicative unit until a certain prosodic pattern is attached to it. | |
| The delimitative (segmentative) function of prosody………………………. | |
| The distinctive function of prosody | |
| ………………-distinctive | Prosody differentiates the communicative types of utterances, statements, questions, exclamations, imperatives. |
| modal (attitudinal)-distinctive | …………………. |
| …………….distinctive (logical) | Prosody differentiates the location of the semantic nuclei of utterances and other semantically important words. |
| syntactical-distinctive | ……………………… |
| ……………..-distinctive | ………………………….. |
| ………………….function of prosody | |
| Prosody provides a basis for the hearer's identification of the communicative and modal type of an utterance, its semantic and syntactical structure with the situation of the discourse. |
Seminar 7 Varieties of English Pronunciation
Topics for discussion
1. Speak about the varieties that exist in any language (dialects, idiolectal differences,standard pronunciation).
2. Describe features of RP as the orthoepic norm of British English.
3. Local and regional varieties of English.
4. Phonostylistics as a new branch of phonetics, the object of its investigation.
5. Phonetic styles, their classifications and the principles they are based on.
Literature
1.Боисова, Л.В., Метлюк, А.А. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: учеб.пособие для ин-тов и фак. иностр.яз./ Л.В. Борисова, А.А. Метлюк. – Минск: «Вышэйшая школа», 1980. – C. 109 - 130
2. Соколова, М.А. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. Практикум: учеб.пособие / М.А. Соколова, И.А.Афонская, Л.Б.Ковалева [и др.] – М.: «Профобразование»,2001. – С. 6 – 21, 178 - 190
Key terms: a dialect, the orthoepic norm, a phonetic style, phonostylistics
Tasks
1. Compare the following approaches to the problems of:
a) Social and territorial varieties;
b) «good» and «bad» pronunciation.
No two people pronounce exactly alike. The differences arise from a vari-I ety of causes, such as locality, early influences and social surroundings; there
are also individual peculiarities for which it is difficult or impossible to account...
It is thought by many that there ought to exist a standard, and one can see I from several points of view that a standard speech would have its uses. Ability
to speak in a standard way might be considered advantageous by some of E those whose home language is a distinctly local form of speech; if their voca-I tions require them to work in districts remote from their home locality, they I would not be hampered by speaking in a manner differing considerably from I the speech of those around them. A standard pronunciation would also be I useful to the foreign learner of English.
But though attempts have been made to devise and recommend stan-I dards, it cannot be said that any standard exists. Londoners speak in one way, Bristolians in another, Scotsmen in several other ways and so on...
There are also styles of speech for each individual. There is rapid collo-I quial speech and slow formal style, and there are various shades between the two extremes...
«Good» speech may be defined as a way of speaking which is clearly intelligible to all ordinary people. «Bad» speech is a way of talking which is difficult to most people to understand. It is caused by mumbling or lack of definitehess of utterance...
A person may speak with sounds very different from those .of his hearers and yet be clearly intelligible to all of them, as for instance, when a Scotsman or an American addresses an English audience with clear articulation. Their speech cannot be discribed as other than «good». But if a speaker with an accent similar to that of his hearers articulates in a muffled way so that they cannot readily catch what he says, his way of speaking must be considered «bad»...
A dialect speaker may speak «well» or «badly». The sounds of his dialect are, it is suggested, neither good nor bad intrinsically. They are adequate for communicating with others speaking the same dialect, unless he mumbles his words...
The sounds of London dialect (Cockney), for instance, are not in themselves bad. Words pronounced in Cockney fashion are perfectly intelligible to others who speak with local London pronunciation. Users of RP often find London dialect difficult to understand, but their difficulty is to be attributed to unfamiliarity with that manner of speech and not to any inherent badness in the sounds.
Jones D. The Pronunciation of English. Cambr., 1967. P. 3,5.
If you ask the question «Who speaks good English», you will be almost certain to find that most people will say either «the Queen» or «BBC announcers». It was the policy of the BBC from its earliest days in the 1920s to employ as announcers only those who spoke what was considered, by those with authority in the BBC, to be the best English — the accent that (it was said) everyone would understand — RP, Received Pronunciation.
In England RP is the prestige accent (though not in other English-speaking countries). If you speak it, you may be judged differently upon who is listening. It is a fact that our judgement of what a speaker says is influenced by his or her accent.
An experiment was set up in which a lecturer who could speak both RP and a marked regional accent gave the same lecture, several times, to a series of different audiences who did not know the real purpose of the experiment. Lectures spoken in RP were judged by a majority of listeners to be superior in
I content to those spoken in the regional accent. How you speak, therefore I (your accent), affects people's judgements of what you say (your meaning).
How might this affect the response to listening to the news on TV or I radio? Does broadcast news in England have to be read in RP? If the news | were to be read by an announcer with a broad Glaswegian accent, would it be I taken seriously?..
Prestige dialects and accents do nbt rise because of their beauty of lin-I guistic superiority, but because those who originally speak them are influen-I tial and others copy them.
During the 1939—1945 war the Yorkshire broadcaster Wilfred Pickles was employed to read the news in his Halifax accent, but the attempt to use his popularity as an entertainer to make the news more homely completely failed. There were many complaints, people couldn't believe the news if it was read in a regional dialectal accent.
Freeborn D., Longford D., French P. Varieties of English. Lnd., 1986. P. 17,19.
...Traditionally, dialects were considered to be mainly regional. More recently, however, it has been recognized that social variation, i.e. differences between speakers which can be attributed to factors such as social status and education, is as extensive as, and perhaps even more significant for its speakers than, any purely regional variation. The differences are greatest in those societies with the greatest social stratification, particularly in highly urbanized communities, in which education, technology and literacy rank high in importance. In these societies, one variety usually establishes itself as the standard — and this is often based on the speech of the most educated, or otherwise most prestigious, group within the com-l munity. The other varieties then enjoy greater or lesser prestige, depending on a number of factors...
Social dialects are, in theory, independent of regional variation, but the two interact quite considerably...
Often, the standard is based on the dialect of the capital city, lince this is the centre of commerce, government and culture... Social dialects not only distinguish between different groups of speakers; they also have an influence on the speech of individuals at all levels of society. A speaker may adopt a more or a less prestigious variety, depending on the situation or the occasion. In more formal situations we tend to use a pronunciation (as well as a vocabulary and grammar) which approximates more closely to the standard, and in less formal situations one which is less «prestigious», One example of this is the phenomenon known as «telephone voice», in which a speaker, in answering the telephone, «puts on» an accent quite different from the one he (or she) has just been using in casual conversation. Similarly, if we are asking the bank manager for a loan, or trying to make a good impression at an interview, we tend to use a more standard form of pronunciation than when, say, having a drink with friends, where less standard forms are more appropriate and acceptable.
Hawkins P. Introducing Phonology. Lnd., 1984. P. 226-228.
There are two widely shared opinions about the form and status of Received Pronunciation. The first is that it developed out of a regional (London-based) variety into a non-regional social prestige variety which is now widely accepted as a standard in Great Britain and even in some Commonwealth countries like New Zealand. In foreign language teaching it has been the target norm for many decades and its influence is spreading still. The second consensus concerns the British Broadcasting Corporation's role as a codifying agent... and a highly valued and effective propagator. Gimson has only recently reaffirmed these views in his Twentyman Lecture: «In fact, broadcasting must have been responsible for much wider dissemination of the accent... Because the whole population has, for nearly half a century, been exposed through broadcasting to RP in a way that was never the case before; it can be safely assumed that a much greater number of speakers, in more extensive layers of society, use RP or a style of pronunciation closely approximating to it. The result has been a certain dilution of the original concept of RP, a number of local variants formerly excluded by definition having now to be admitted as of common acceptable usage. The kind of dilution I have in mind concerned, for instance, the replacement of a short Щsound in the terminations — «less», — «ness» by the so-called central vowel [9], other almost total elimination of the diphthong [иэ^] in such words as «sure, pour, tour, moor» in favour of [3:] as in «paw».
The Consolidation of Educated Southern English as a Model in the Early 20th Century// International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. 1982. P. 91.