English Phonetics and Phonology – An Introduction

PHILIP CARR is Emeritus Professor at Montpellier University, France. He is the author of Phonology (1993), A Glossary of Phonology (2008), and Linguistic Realities (1990), editor of Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues (2001) and Headhood, Elements, Specification and Contrastivity (2005). With Jacques Durand, he co-founded the project The Phonology of Contemporary English.

Prefaces to the First Edition ix Preface to the Second Edition xiii Preface to the Third Edition xv Acknowledgements xvii List of Sound Recordings xix About the Companion Website xxiii Figure 1 The organs of speech xxiv Figure 2 The International Phonetic Alphabet xxv 1 English Phonetics: Consonants (i) 1 1.1 Airstream and Articulation 1 1.2 Place of Articulation 2 1.3 Manner of Articulation: Stops, Fricatives and Approximants 5 2 English Phonetics: Consonants (ii) 11 2.1 Central vs Lateral 11 2.2 Taps and Trills 11 2.3 Secondary Articulation 12 2.4 Affricates 12 2.5 Aspiration 13 2.6 Nasal Stops 13 3 English Phonetics: Vowels (i) 17 3.1 The Primary Cardinal Vowels 17 3.2 RP and GA Short Vowels 19 4 English Phonetics: Vowels (ii) 23 4.1 RP and GA Long Vowels 23 4.2 RP and GA Diphthongs 24 5 The Phonemic Principle 29 5.1 Introduction: Linguistic Knowledge 29 5.2 Contrast vs Predictability: The Phoneme 30 5.3 Phonemes, Allophones and Contexts 37 5.4 Summing Up 38 6 English Phonemes 43 6.1 English Consonant Phonemes 43 6.2 The Phonological Form of Morphemes 45 6.3 English Vowel Phonemes 49 7 English Syllable Structure 55 7.1 Introduction 55 7.2 Constituency in Syllable Structure 55 7.3 The Sonority Hierarchy, Maximal Onset and Syllable Weight 59 7.4 Language-Specific Phonotactics 63 7.5 Syllabic Consonants and Phonotactics 64 7.6 Syllable-Based Generalizations 65 7.7 Morphological Structure, Syllable Structure and Resyllabification 66 7.8 Summing Up 69 8 Rhythm and Word Stress in English 71 8.1 The Rhythm of English 71 8.2 English Word Stress: Is it Entirely Random? 72 8.3 English Word Stress: Some General Principles 75 8.4 Word Stress Assignment in Morphologically Simple Words 76 8.5 Word Stress Assignment and Morphological Structure 80 8.6 Compound Words 85 8.7 Summing Up 87 9 Rhythm, Reversal and Reduction 91 9.1 More on the Trochaic Metrical Foot 91 9.2 Representing Metrical Structure 94 9.3 Phonological Generalizations and Foot Structure 98 9.4 The Rhythm of English Again: Stress Timing and Eurhythmy 100 10 English Intonation 109 10.1 Tonic Syllables, Tones and Intonation Phrases 109 10.2 Departures from the LLI Rule 111 10.3 IPs and Syntactic Units 116 10.4 Tonic Placement, IP Boundaries and Syntax 121 10.5 Tones and Syntax 123 10.6 Tonic Placement and Discourse Context 124 10.7 Summing Up 125 11 Graphophonemics: Spelling-Pronunciation Relations 129 11.1 Introduction 129 11.2 Vowel Graphemes and Their Phonemic Values 130 11.3 Consonant Graphemes and Their Phonemic Values 135 12 Variation in English Accents 143 12.1 Introduction 143 12.2 Systemic vs Realizational Differences between Accents 144 12.3 Perceptual and Articulatory Space 148 12.4 Differences in the Lexical Distribution of Phonemes 152 13 An Outline of Some Accents of English 155 13.1 Some British Accents 155 13.2 Two American Accents 164 13.3 Two Southern Hemisphere Accents 167 13.4 An Overview of Some Common Phenomena Found in Accent Variation 170 14 First-Language (L1) Acquisition of English Phonetics and Phonology 181 14.1 The First Six Months 181 14.2 The Second Six Months 183 14.3 The Second Year of Life 184 14.4 The Mental Lexicon and the Emergence of Phonological Rules and Representations 187 14.5 The Bilingual Child 188 15 Second-Language (L2) Acquisition of English Phonetics and Phonology 193 15.1 Introduction: General Issues 193 15.2 Types of Problem in L2 Acquisition of English Phonetics and Phonology 195 15.3 Phonetic Inventories and Phonemic Systems 195 15.4 Graphophonemic Problems 200 15.5 Phonotactics 201 15.6 Rhythm and Word Stress 202 15.7 Intonation 204 15.8 Concluding Remarks on L2 Acquisition of English Phonetics and Phonology 205 Suggested Further Reading 209 Index 213