CHAPTER 1 PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

1. What is the difference between the prescriptive and descriptive approach to pronunciation phenomena? Prescriptive teaches correct or proper pronunciation; descriptive teaches something about pronunciation, describes it through speech sounds. 2. Explain the difference between phonetics and phonology with reference to the distinction between language and speech. Ferdinand de Saussure: language (the abstract system of communication shared by a given linguistic community) vs. speech (the concrete, physical realisation in actual situations). While phonology deals with speech sounds as abstract units functioning as building blocks of language, phonetics looks at them in terms of their physical reality, which can be observed in speech. 3. What are the three branches of phonetics and what does each of them deal with? 1. articulatory deals with the articulation of speech sounds, i.e., the activity of speech organs in the course of speaking 2. acoustic deals with the disturbances of air molecules during the transmission of speech 3. auditory concerned with the perception of speech 4. Why is it not correct to say that phonology deals with language in general, while phonetics deals with one particular language? Both disciplines can be concerned with human language, or respectively speech, in general. Likewise, they can both focus on one particular language, or respectively, its realisation in speech. 5. Analyse the sentence This is a book on the level of Martinets second articulation. How many analytical units have you identified on this level? How do you account for the fact that this does not correspond to the number of letters in the spelling?
This + is + a + book
// + // + /s/ + // + /z/ + // + /b/ + // + /k/

(first articulation, meaningful units) (second art, building blocks)

6. What is the difference between the use of slanted and square brackets in transcription? Square narrow transcription, phonetics Slanted broad transcription, phonology 7. Name a few areas of practical application of phonetics and/or phonology. Language teaching, speech pathology (treatment of speech defects), clinical phonology (language disorders), forensic phonetics (acoustic police, court), speech synthesis (computer programmes), training of actors (accents, idiosyncratic pronunciation), elocution lessons (public figures), TV and telephone engineering.

CHAPTER 2 SPEECH PRODUCTION

8. The airstream mechanism normally used for the production of English speech sounds is commonly referred to as pulmonic and egressive. Explain the meaning of these terms. The stream of air employed for the production of sounds comes from the lungs (pulmonic) as we exhale (egressive). 9. Explain the mechanism of phonation. What is the linguistic function of phonation? Phonation is the technical term for the production of voice in the glottis, the part of the larynx (top of the trachea) enclosing the vocal folds and the space between them. The major factors controlling the vibration of the vocal folds are the configuration of the folds and the difference in air pressure below and above the glottis. Supraglottal pressure is normally about equal to atmospheric pressure, while subglottal pressure is higher. If there is a significant constriction in the supraglottal part of the speech tract, most notably at some point in the mouth, the pressure building up behind this constriction reduces the difference between the two pressures. Provided the right configuration of the vocal folds and the right pressure difference, Bernoulli effect will take place, pulling the vocal folds together and thus initiating their vibration by which all vowels and voices consonants are produced. 10. Why do men usually have deeper voices than women? Men tend to have longer vocal folds than women. Since the length of a vibrator is inversely related to the height of the pitch, women generally speak on a higher pitch than men. 11. Which English speech sounds are produced at the glottis? /h/ The vocal folds have to be wide apart, the airstream passes between them causing some friction. // Cockney, RP (bet). The glottis is constricted by holding the vocal folds tightly together for a moment, during which time the air coming out of the lungs is compressed behind this closure. When the closure is suddenly released, the resulting sound is perceived as a burst of energy, or explosion originating in the glottis. 12. What is the linguistic function of the soft palate (velum)? It is a movable speech organ which can be either raised in order to produce oral sounds by blocking the nose, or lowered to produce nasal sounds by allowing a part of the airstream to escape through the nasal cavity. Example: the difference between the initial sounds in English words bet and met is that of nasality. If the back of the tongue is brought into contact with the soft palate, the resulting speech sounds are velar.

+ other parts of the speech tract

CHAPTER 3 SEGMENTS OF SPEECH

13. Make a case for and against having the phoneme as an analytical unit of phonology. Against: acoustically, there are no clear boundaries between sound segments. For: phonologically, the human mind analyses the amorphous continuum of sounds in terms of such discrete units. 14. What objection can be levelled against the psychological definition of the phoneme? Modern linguistics is opposed to an extralinguistic definition of fundamental linguistic notions, so attempts to define the phoneme psychologically (as a target sound which the speaker has in mind when uttering the concrete sound) have been dismissed as mentalistic. 15. What are the other ways of defining the phoneme? 1. A family of phonetically similar sounds which appear in complementary distribution. 2. A minimal sound unit capable of contrasting word meaning. 3. A bundle of distinctive features. 16. Give an example of two sounds which are in complementary distribution in English. Allophones - contextually determined varieties of one phoneme: /k/ - [k] (true velar), [ki] (fronted towards the palatal region) 17. Why is the complementary distribution of two sounds no guarantee of those two sounds being allophones of the same phoneme? Complementary distribution can be a matter of pure historical coincidence, as with the English segments /h/ and //. 18. Explain and illustrate the notion of free variation. It is a realization of a certain phoneme by an allophone other than the one which is normally used in a given context, due to a speech defect or as a result of some idiosyncrasy. Example: English-like r instead of the Croatian /r/. 19. Why do we say that the Croatian /v/ has a wider range of performance (area of tolerance) than the corresponding English phoneme? Range of performance the range within which sounds are recognised as belonging to a given phoneme. /v/ can include [w], and /s/ can include //. The Japanese /r/ can include all l-like sounds. 20. Try to think of at least two minimal pairs in English where the difference between the two words is based on the contrast between /s/ and //. Why is it not possible to find examples like that in Croatian? See above. // is not a phoneme in Croatian because it is included in /s/.

21. What are contexts for neutralisation? Contexts in which the opposition between two otherwise separate phonemes is suspended by homophonous pronunciation. Examples: writer rider in American English; Krf krv in Kajkavian dialects of Croatian. 22. What is the difference between distinctive and redundant features? Why is it wrong to say that redundant features are superfluous? Distinctive features provide the basis for distinguishing phonemes, while redundant ones do not. However, redundant features are not superfluous because they have a linguistic function, which is to serve as additional cues in decoding the message. 23. What is meant by the binary nature of distinctive features? Sounds can be classified in terms of presence or absence of a certain feature. Contrasts between phonemes are commonly marked using +/- specification. Jakobson argued that the binarity principle was fundamental to human language and that it reflects the nature of our mental processes and the way our nerve cells function.

CHAPTER 4 PHONEMIC SYSTEMS

24. How would you define Received Pronunciation geographically and sociolinguistically? Which other varieties of English pronunciation are you familiar with? RP is a type of British-English pronunciation which is not associated with any particular region within England and is thus said to be regionally neutral. Sociolinguistically, it is associated with educated, middle-class and upper-class speakers. Other varieties: substandard BritishEnglish accents, such as Cockney, (General) American English, etc. 25. What is the basic articulatory difference between consonants and vowels? In the production of consonants, as opposed to vowels, there is always a radical obstruction to the stream of air at some point in the speech tract. 26. What are the criteria employed by traditional articulatory phonetics to classify consonants? Illustrate the use of these criteria in the description of the articulation of the initial consonant in the word journey. 1. The place of articulation: palato-alveolar 2. The manner of articulation: affricate 3. Voicing: voiced

27. What are the three parameters involved in the cardinal vowel diagram? How many theoretical degrees of opening are recognised in the cardinal vowel scale (=a system of universal phonetic reference points in describing the quality of vowels)? 1. The part of the tongue involved (front/central/back; vertical axes) 2. The degree of tongue height (close/half-close/half-open/open; horizontal axes) 3. The shape of the lips 28. How many cardinal vowels are there all together? What is the difference between primary and secondary cardinal vowels? There are 18 cardinal vowels. The difference between primary and secondary cardinal vowels is based on the shape of lips. The first five primary cv are spread, while the remaining three are rounded; with the secondary series the shape of the lips is reversed in relation to the corresponding vowels from the primary series. The primary cardinal vowels are unmarked because they represent those combinations of the three parameters which are most commonly found in the worlds languages. 29. How are diphthongs described articulatorily? What are the two constituent parts of diphthongs? The two constituent parts are the starting point and the end point. In the pronunciation of diphthongs the organs of speech start off at some starting point and glide to the position for the end point, which is why diphthongs are also called gliding vowels. 30. What is the difference between closing and centring diphthongs? Do you know of any varieties of English which do not have the category of centring diphthongs? Closing diphthongs have a close vowel as the endpoint, while central diphthongs are glided toward a central endpoint. General American has closing diphthongs only. 31. Identify a triphthong in an English word. Coward, fire. Triphtongs are produced by combining closing diphthongs with // within the same syllable. They tend to be smoothed out into diphthongs or even monophthongs and have a somewhat marginal role in the English vocalic system.

+ categories of RP vowels and consonants; the cardinal vowel scale

CHAPTER 5 IPA SOUNDS AND NOTATION 32. What are glottalic sounds? A category of non-pulmonic sounds in which the producer of the airstream mechanism is the glottis; can be divided into implosives and ejectives. 33. Name a language which makes distinctive use of implosives. Vietnamese. 34. What is the basic difference between implosives and ejectives? Implosives are ingressive plosives, normally voiced, while ejectives are voiceless. 35. How are ejectives represented in the notational conventions of the IPA? They are represented by their homorganic pulmonic counterparts (plosives or fricatives) followed by an apostrophe. 36. What are clicks? What is meant by the paralinguistic use of clicks in English? They are sounds produced with a velaric airstream mechanism. They are stop consonants, in the production of which the release of the closure is accompanied by the suction of air at the velum, achieved by downward movement of the tongue body. In English, they are not used as distinctive units of phonemic systems, but the sound indicated as tut tut or tsk tsk in British and American English, respectively, does have a marginal function of expressing disapproval. 37. Name some guttural sound and a language that makes distinctive use of it. The voiceless uvular stop [q] in Arabic, its voiced counterpart [G] in Eskimo. 38. What is a potential pitfall in the pronunciation of English words like news and value for native speakers of Croatian? The combinations of sounds *lj+ and *nj+, found in words like news and value sound similar to Croatian palatals (spelt as lj) and (spelt as nj), which do not exist in English. 39. How is the Croatian initial consonant of Hrvatska different from the English one in heavy? In Croatian the initial consonant is the voiceless velar fricative [x], while in English it is the glottal fricative [h]. 40. What is the phonetic difference between the Croatian initial segment of vaza and the English initial consonant of very? In Croatian the initial consonant is the labiodental approximant [], while in English it is the fricative [v].

41. How do you account for the fact that some English speakers have one more consonant in their phonemic system than the others? The voiceless rounded labiovelar approximant or fricative [], pronounced by simultaneously rounding the lips and raising the back of the tongue, is heard in those varieties of English which distinguish which from witch. The sound then functions as an additional member of the phonemic system in those English accents (mostly GenAm, Scottish, Irish). 42. What is the difference between the rhotic and non-rhotic accents of English? Name a few varieties from each of the categories. Non-rhotic: most of the accents spoken in England, accents spoken in Wales. Rhotic: 43. What is the phonetic difference between the RP r and its General American counterpart?

44. Define and exemplify trills, flaps and taps!

45. What is the Northumbrian burr?

46. How would you describe the articulation of the Croatian [r] to a foreigner?

47. Name some allophones of the English phonemes /p/, /g/ and //.

48. What types of release can a plosive have? Give some examples from English!

49. Illustrate the use of one diacritical sign in phonetic notation.