Phonetics and Morphology: Understanding the Building Blocks of Language, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Linguistica Inglese

Scarica Phonetics and Morphology: Understanding the Building Blocks of Language e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity! PHONETIC is the science that studies the physical characteristics of the sounds, and it deals with 3 aspects of the sounds: • production ↝ articulatory • transmission ↝ acoustic • reception ↝ auditory PHONOLOGY, instead, is the study of the sounds which have functional and distinctive roles in the language: in fact, it describes the organization, the identification and description of the sound system. A phoneme is a distinctive sound in a language capable of creating a distinction in meaning between two words, because they have no individual meaning but combining between them, they form words. In some cases, there is no one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, the letters of the alphabet, because many of these are silent. A word that differs for just one phoneme is called minimal pair, while the different realization of the same phoneme is called allophone. There are also other realizations of words like HOMOPHONE (ort diff but ph id) and HOMOGRAPH (ort id but ph diff). → To represent phonemes and sounds in a language people use a set of symbols to create a PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), to describe the standard pronunciation of words in English. In standard British English there are 44 phonemes: 12 Vowels, 8 Diphthongs and 24 Consonants. The ACT of PHONATION consists in the contraction of the muscles in our chest and the production of a flow of air which passes through larynx, glottis, pharynx, oral cavity and nose. VOWELS are oral, voiced and egressive sounds produced without any obstruction of the airstream coming from the lungs. We must take into consideration the position of the tongue to describe their pronunciation: • depending on the vertical distance btw the tongue and the palate ↝ Open, Half- Open, Closed • depending on which part of the tongue is raised ↝ Front, Central, Back • depending on duration, so the length ↝ Long and Short Also the position of the lips affect the difference between vowels ↝ Rounded, Spread, Neutral DIPHTHONGS are a combination of two vowels, whose the first is more audible than the second • closing diphthongs: the second element is closed • centring diphthongs: the second element is central and unstressed CONSONANT are sounds produced with an egressive flow of air coming out from the mouth and the nose accompanied by an obstruction or friction. They are Occlusive (obstruction of airstream), Continuant (no complete occlusion), Voiced (vibration of vocal cords) and Voiceless (no vibration). They can be defined by 2 parameters: • MANNER OF ARTICULATION: refers to the position of the organs. •PLOSIVE: the air is blocked and then explodes •FRICATIVE: there is a friction caused by the obstruction of airstream by tongue, teeth and lips, or their combination •AFFRICATE: it is plosive and fricative at the same time •NASAL: the airstream is pushed up through the nasal cavity •LATERAL: the tongue is in central position in the mouth and the air is forced out from the side of the tongue •GLIDE: are semi-vowel, so are continuant and voiced •LIQUID: there is an amount of obstruction but doesn’t involve a friction •APPROXIMANTS • PLACE OF ARTICULATION: indicate the place where obstruction is made •BILABIAL: both lips are brought together •LABIODENTAL: upper teeth touch lower lips •DENTAL: the blade of the tongue is behind the upper teeth •PALATAL: the tongue touches the palate •ALVEOLAR: the tongue touches the alveoli •PALATO-ALVEOLAR: the tongue is in back position •VELAR: contact occurs between the tongue and the soft palate GLOTTALISATION: obstruction of glottis in the production of affricate and plosive sounds. DUALITY OF PATTERNING is described by the arbitrariness in the relationship between sound and meaning, and phonemes that have no individual meaning can be combined to produce a lot of meaningful units. A SYLLABLE: phonological unit made up for one or more phonemes they can be OPEN (ending with vowel) and CLOSED (ending with consonant) - STRESSED (louder than the unstressed: longer length and higher pitch) and UNSTRESSED (very short sound and sometimes it could also disappear in pronunciation). In fact the STRESS is the relative prominence given to a syllable and it has 4 acoustic components: PITCH-DURATION-LOUDNESS-QUALITY. It is indicated by a vertical line (stress mark) in phonetic transcription. English syllables are variable: this is called STRESS-TIME RHYTHM and depends on how many stressed syllables it contains. CONNECTED SPEECH is a continuous sequence of sound in a spoken language, because there is no pause corresponding to the space between written words. The transition from each sound to another is smooth, in fact phonetic variability is caused by 3 factors: • speed in utterance • rhythmic pattern of the syllable • influence of phonetic environment ↓ this last one causes many types of phonetic variation: MORPHOLOGY is the study of the internal structure of words. It describes the ways in which small element called morphemes can combine to form words. Now the division of a word is based not on sound but on meaning Morphology can be divided into 2 branches: ¨ DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY, with derivational morphemes: it deals with the process of word formation through affixation; this type of morphemes are used for deriving new words attaching to another morphemes. EX: in 'modern-ize', 'read-er', '-ize' and '-er' are derivational suffixes. ¨ INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY with inflectional morphemes: it deals with the change in the form of words according to grammatical context; this type of morpheme express grammatical functions. EX: in 'cat-s', 'talk-ed‘: '-s' and '-ed' are inflectional suffixes. The MORPHEME is the smallest linguistic unit of meaning and an abstract entity: it can't be divided into smaller units. Morphemes have two characteristics: 1. must be identifiable from one word to another; 2. must also contribute in some way to the meaning of the whole word. ¨ BASE = an element to which additional morphemes are added(free or bound, root morpheme or complex word). Also called a STEM. A base can consist of a single root morpheme or can also contain more than one morpheme. Ex: kind = base to form 'kindness‘; kindness= base to form kindnesses; ¨ ROOT = a (usually free) morpheme around which words can be built up through the addition of affixes Ex: dehumanizing if you strip off all the affixes (‘-ing’, ‘-ize’, and ‘de-’) you get the root: ‘human’ is what you have left. The physical form of a morpheme is called MORPH. An ALLOMORPH is the different realisation of the same morpheme. There are 2 types of morpheme: - FREE MORPHEMES= can stand alone as words, and they can be FREE LEXICAL or FREE FUNCTIONAL morphemes; EX: 'item'. - BOUND MORPHEMES= cannot stand on their own as separate words but need to be attached to another morphemes. They can be the AFFIXES (Prefixes and Suffixes) and BOUND ROOTS. EX: ‘s’ SYNTAX is the study of the way in which words combine between them to form larger unit of meaning, such as phrases, clauses, sentences. It includes the rules which allow speakers combining words too, so the order of constituents specifies their syntactic function. Usually, the subject is placed before the verb, and then the object is after the verb, SVO; and this is an unmarked order of constituents. A PHRASE is a meaningful syntactic unit made up of one or more words, so it can be also longer. It is structured about a HEADWORD: this is an obligatory element in a phrase, because gives it the name and without it wouldn’t exist a sense. A phrase could be a noun – verb – adjective – adverbial – prepositional phrase, if the headword is respectively a noun, verb, adjective, adverbial, preposition. In addition to the headword, there are the MODIFIERS, accompanying words which define and modify the head. They are divided into PRE-modifiers and POST- modifiers: the first can filled by adjective to form adjective phrases, and nouns to form noun phrases; the second one can filled by prepositional phrases, relative clause and non- finite clauses. There are also the DETERMINERS, so articles, demonstratives, possessives, quantifiers and numerals. A CLAUSE is a larger grammatical unit which consist of 1 or more phrases, and which typically contains one VERB-phrase with other added elements. There are different types of clauses with different structures and functions: - FINITE CLAUSE: it can stand alone because it’s independent. - NON-FINITE CLAUSE: it cannot stand alone. - MAIN CLAUSE: it is usually finite and so can stand alone in sentence. - SUBORDINATE CLAUSE: it must be attached to a main clause because it isn’t independent. They can be FINITE or NON-FINITE, according to the VP. - A FINITE SUBORDINATE CLAUSE contains a VP marked for a tense. They could be Nominal, Relative, Adverbial and Comparative. - NON-FINITE SUBORDINATIVE CLAUSE isn’t marked for a tense, so there are the three categories of Infinitive, -Ing and -Ed clauses to represent them. - [a subordinate conditional clause is formed by a main clause + a conditional sentence, according to the likelihood of the condition and so there are 4 types]. - DECLARATIVE – INTERROGATIVE – IMPERTATIVE – EXCLAMATIVE CLAUSE: if the clause is used to make a statement, to ask a question, to express a command or to make an exclamation. - SIMPLE – COMPOUND – COMPLEX CLAUSE: COORDINATION is the linking of a main clause with another main clause. Coordination clauses form a COMPOUND SENTENCE. While SUBORDINATION is the joining of a main clause with a subordinative clause. Subordinative clauses form a COMPLEX SENTENCE. TYPES OF LANGUAGE CHANGES o PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE deals with any mutation of the sound system of a language. For example the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT (GVS) that started in the 15th century, pronunciation of long vowels was raised (PUSH CHAIN PROCESS). o MORPHO-SYNTACTIC CHANGE refers to any change in both morpho- phonematic and syntactic systems of a language, like the levelling of the noun ending system in the transition from OE to ME. The mechanisms of morpho-syntactic change are: - ANALOGY, the process of modelling a language form in relation to an already existing form of that language; - BACKFORMATION, is the subtraction of elements to form another word - BLENDS, is a fusion of elements of two other words - FUNCTIONAL CONVERSION, use of one part of speech as another - CLIPS, is formed shortening a longer word - ACRONYMS, combination of the initial letters of words –NEOLOGISM, new coinage o SEMANTIC CHANGE refers to any mutation in the meaning of individual lexical items influenced by external factors (BORROWING). Most loanwords entered the vocabulary during the renaissance (latin words) or after the invasion (french). INKHORN CONTROVERSY: debate about the merits of otherwise of the acquisition of artificial, bookish Latin vocabulary in place of natural, common German because it was perceived as alien. There are different kinds of semantic change (2 of meaning and 2 of connotation): - WIDENING or GENERALISATION: use of a particular item in more than a context - NARROWING or SPECIALISATION which indicates the opposite process of widening - PEJORATION, a degradation in meaning, which is linked to speakers’ attitude and prejudice - AMELIORATION or elevation of meaning, which refers to a change denoting a positive attitude towards a certain word –TRANSFER, sometimes the meaning shifts so that the word refers to a different set of things (METAPHORS).