Scarica Sounds Appealing (Crystal) - Report e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity! Tomasoni Ivan - 20038499 “Sounds Appealing” – Report David Crystal is an important writer and lecturer of the English language, with a worldwide reputation and over one hundred books to his name. He is honorary professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales and in 1995 was awarded the OBE for services to the English language. Sounds Appealing is one of his latest books and was published in 2018. The book deals with English pronunciation, hence the subtitle The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation, and is divided into 31 mini-chapters, and in each one of them Crystal explores a different aspect of Phonetics. In the very first chapter the author highlights the importance of pronunciation over other areas of spoken language, then continues with a brief history about phoneticians and their work. From the fourth chapter the book becomes a bit technical, since prosodic and paralinguistic features are explained. Intonation, stress, speech rate, rhythm and pauses all have a dedicated chapter, from the fifth to the tenth. In the following ten chapters Crystal also explains the main features of vowels and consonants and the way we articulate them, while the last ten chapters focus on linguistic phenomenons such as speaking with a full mouth, being accommodating and how accents change based on time and place. Chapter 5 is one of the most interesting of all. It’s entitled ‘Tain’t what we say... and explains one aspect of spoken language that many people seem to ignore: the tone. The tone of voice we use often outweighs the meaning conveyed by the vowels and consonants, and whatever a sentence might mean, its effect can be altered by changing the tone. The tone is made up of six main factors: pitch (“high” or “low”), loudness, rate (“fast” or “slow”), rhythm (as in music), pause (again, as in music) and timbre (the overall sound of the voice). Our perception of tones of voice is the result of the way people combine prosodic and paralinguistic features. All the vocal organs play a part, but the vocal folds play a crucial role. In fact, when we say we’ve “lost our voice”, we actually mean that we’ve lost the ability to make our vocal folds vibrate. Chapter 25 is also really interesting and it’s about being accommodating. Accommodation means that people are influenced by the behaviour of the person they’re talking with. The funny thing is that if people from different regions like each other, they pick up some features of the other’s way of talking, but if they don’t get on well, then the speech patterns do the opposite: they diverge. All in all it’s an interesting book that explains Phonetics in a simple and funny way. Not only is it full of core concepts about Linguistics, but it also provides a lot of anecdotes and exercises, making it a perfect tool both for Languages students and for anyone wanting to take up the subject more in general.
