Lectures in Theoretical Phonetics of English

Popular terminology

discourse – any act of speech, which occurs in a given place and during a given period of time

spoken discourse – oral speech

Discourse consists of at least one utterance – a stretch of speech produced by a single speaker with silence before and after on the part of that speaker.

Utterance consists of at least one tone unit = sense group = intonation group or unit is a stretch of speech which has describable intonation (one of the intonation contours that exists in a particular language).

A tone unit consists of at least one syllable, but usually of a number of syllables (words).

A syllable consists of a vocalic element with or without non-vocalic elements before and after it.
A syllable consists of at least one segment (sound), usually more than one. The speaker's vocal organs are continuously moving from one position to another, nevertheless, we perceive a succession of different sounds linked together. Each articulatory position or movement is an articulatory feature. These features usually occur in simultaneous groups or bundles.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics which studies the characteristics of human sound making, especially those sounds used in speech and it provides methods for their description, classification and transcription.

Aspects of a sound

1)articulatory
2)acoustic
3)perceptive (auditory phonetics)

On the basis of these aspects we have the main branches of phonetics.

Phonetics analyses are valid for all human speech sounds regardless of the particular language of the speaker.

General Phonetics

The aim of General Phonetics is the attempt to discover universal principles governing the nature and use of the speech sound.

Experimental Phonetics very often is related to general phonetics, only the accent is on the method.
Theoretical Phonetics
2.

General phonetics. We expect to find certain information about articulation.

Special phonetics. Studies the same problems in a concrete language.
Special phonetics can be descriptive, historic or diachronic, synchronic.

Historical phonetics establishes the changes in the phonetic system of a certain language or language family at different stages of its historical development, studying closely written monuments, comparing different spellings of one and the same word, rhymes and metres in poetry.

Contrastive or comparative phonetics. Makes some contrast between phonetic phenomena in 2 languages. The number of languages may be greater.

Phonostylistics. Studies phonetic phenomena from the stylistic point of view, concentrating mainly on certain intonation styles: the informative style, academic style or scientific, publicistic (or oratorical) style, declamatory style (connected with artistic presentation of some material), colloquial style.…