Phonetics as a branch of linguistics. Aspects of the sound matter of language. National pronunciation variants in English. Phoneme as many-sided dialectic unity of language. Types of allophones. Distinctive and irrelevant features of the phoneme.
Аннотация к работе
We can perceive sound waves within a range of 16 Hz-20.000 Hz with a difference in 3 Hz. The human ear transforms mechanical vibrations of the air into nervous and transmits them to brain. The listener hears the acoustic features of the fundamental frequency, formant frequency, intensity and duration in terms of perceptible categories of pitch, quality, loudness and length. On the other hand, it is also a psychological mechanism. The point is that repetitions of what might be heard as the same utterance are only coincidentally, if ever, acoustically identical. Phonetic identity is a. theoretical ideal. Phonetic similarity, not phonetic identity, is the criterion with which we operate in the linguistic analysis. Functional aspect. Phonemes, syllables, stress, and intonation are linguistic phenomena. They constitute meaningful units (morphemes, words, word-forms, utterances). Sounds of speech perform different linguistic functions. Lets have a look at the correlation of some phonetic terms discussed above. articulatory characteristics acoustic properties auditory(perceptible) qualities linguistic phenomena vibration of the vocal cords fundamental frequency melody pitch different positions and movements of speech organs formant frequency quality (timbre) phoneme the amplitude of vibrations intensity loudness stress the quantity of time during which the sound is pronounced duration length tempo, rhythm, pauses The phonetic system of language is a set of phonetic units arranged in an orderly way to replace each other in a given framework. Phonetics is divided into two major components (or systems): segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds (i.e. segments of speech) and suprasegmental phonetics dealing with the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts. 1. Segmental units are sounds of speech (vowels and consonants) which form the vocalic and consonantal systems; 2. Gimsons terms differ from those used by Russian phoneticians: apical is equivalent to forelingual; frontal is equivalent to mediolingual; dorsum is the whole upper area of the tongue.