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INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORETICAL PHONETICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Topic 1

Phonetics as a branch of linguistics

1. The subject matter of phonetics and its history. The contribution of Russian and foreign linguists into the development of phonetics.

The term “phonetics” comes from the Greek word “phōneticòs”, which means “pertaining to voice and sound”. It is an independent branch of linguistics dealing with the sound system of the language, word stress, syllabic structure and intonation. Phonetics is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized or given audible shape. It studies the nature of these noises, their combinations and their functions in relation to the meaning, because only meaningful sound sequences (i.e. which contain some organized information), produced by human articulatory organs, are regarded as speech. Phonetics also focuses on the relation between written and spoken language.

Phonetics began long before there was either grammar or linguistics. Ancient objects, drawings and written documents show that people were aware of and interested in speech, its origin and abnormalities a long time ago. A science of phonetics flourished in India more than 2000 years ago.

The study of the human organs producing speech sounds began in the 17^th century and was determined by the necessity to teach deaf and dumb people. This work is connected with the names of the Spanish linguist Bonet and the Dutch scholar Amman. At the end of the 18^th century the acoustic theory of vowels was introduces by the German researcher Kratzenstain and later developed by Helmholtz. In the middle of the 19^th century the results of the investigation in the sphere of anatomy and physiology of speech sound formation were summed up in the works of the German scientist Brücke. After the invention of laryngoscope, in 1852 the first observations of the vocal cords were made. The research of the sound system of the language from the linguistic point of view was first presented in the book of the German phonetician Sievers “Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie” (1876), the second edition was published under the title “Grundzüge der Phonetik” (1881). In 1886 International Phonetic Association (IPA) was founded. IPA started publications of a special phonetic magazine “Le Maitre Phonetique”. It stated symbols for sounds of many existing languages, including English. Now two kinds of transcription can be distinguished: phonemic transcription, used to represent the phonemic system of a language, and phonetic transcription used to represent phonemic variants.

Many Russian and foreign linguists contributed to the development of phonetics by generating various theories. Working on the phoneme theory I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay stated synchronic and diachronic alternations of sounds within a morpheme, L.V. Shcherba put forward the theory of phonemic independence which was later developed by his follower L.R. Zinder. Besides, L.V. Shcherba traced the evolution of phonemic variants into separate phonemes and the opposite process. N.S. Trubetzkoy’s contribution into the development of phonetics consisted in the theory of phonological oppositions and the theory of the neutralization of the phoneme. Distinguishing phonemic level in the language structure, the American scholar L. Bloomfield emphasized the importance of the analysis of the phonemes for making the thorough and complete description of the language. American and English phoneticians tried to single out various degrees of word stress and principle nuclear tones of a syntagm. Such foreign scholars as H. Sweet, D. Jones, G. Palmer, L. Armstrong, I. Ward, R. Kingdon, J. O’Connor, A. Gimson, M. Halliday, K. Pike made investigation of intonation and its components. Syllabic structure of words was also carefully studied. Among theories of syllable formation and syllable division there are the expiratory theory, proved by instrumental technique of Stetson, the relevant sonority theory, suggested by O. Jespersen, the muscular tension and the three types of consonant theories, put forward by L.V. Shcherba, the loudness theory, created by N.I. Zhinkin.

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