The orphoepic norm of english (rp) and its types

The conditions for a variety of English pronunciation to be accepted as the orthoepic norm are

1. recognition of the fact that RP has the “prestige accent”; the presence of factors that encourage standardization of pronunciation.

2. Registering/recording the well-established variants of pronunciation by the pronouncing dictionariesWide currency, conformity to the main phonetic tendencies, social acceptability.

3. Intolerance of dialectal pronunciation and variants of non-standard pronunciation; a non-regional character of pronunciation.

All the national types of English pronunciation have many features in common because they are of common origin. At the same time, they have a varying number of differences due to the new conditions of their development after separation from British English and to the degree of their connection with British English after that separation.

At present, there may be distinguished the following types of cultivated English:

1. Southern English Pronunciation, or RP;

2. Northern English Pronunciation;

3. Standard Scottish Pronunciation.

• The Southern British type of Engl.pronunciation is known as RP. The term Southern English is indicative only of its birth-place and doesn’t mean that it is confined nowadays only to the South of England. Pronunciation of standard British English based on the speech of educated speakers of southern British English. The type of pronunciation often recommended as a model for foreign learners. Accents usually tell us where a person is from; RP tells us only about a person's social or educational background. RP is often identified in the public mind with “BBC English”.

Features:

• RP is non-rhotic: written r is pronounced only if it is followed by a vowel

• great attention is paid to articulating consonants clearly except for the r consonant, which is not pronounced when it immediately precedes a consonant (as in cart)

• there is a great number of distinct vowel sounds, e.g. caught, cot, cart are different in RP

• on the other hand, in common with most non-rhotic dialects words formerly and formally are homophones in RP, although rhotic speakers pronounce the words differently from each other. Similarly are pronounced in RP words "ion" and "iron

• Northern English is the speech of those born and brought up in the region between Birmingham and the border of Scotland. This type of pronunciation is not to be sharply separated from the South English type since it contains some features of the latter, modified by the local speech habits. But it has certain distinctive features:

• [a] for RP [æ] in words like bad, man;

• [æ] for [a:] in words like glass, ask, dance, in which the letter a is followed by a word-final consonant or by 2 consonants other than r. (the word father is the exception).

• [υ] for [] in words like cup, love;

• [e] or [e:] for [ei] in words like may, take.

• Standard English of Scotland is considerably modified by Southern British, but some of its features go back independently to the Northumbrian dialect of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

???Different approaches to syllable division in English

The sounds of language can be grouped into syllables accord. to certain rules. The part of phonetics that deals with this aspect is called phonotactics. The problem of syl division exists in case of intervocalic consonants and their clusters like in words city, agree, extra. Theoretically two variants are possible: a) the point of syllable division is after the intervocalic consonant; b) the point of syllable division is inside the cons-t. In both cases the 1^st syl-le remains closed according to phonotactic rules of the E language, because the short vowel should remained checked. The results of instrumental analysis show that the point of syllable division in words like pity, topic, Bobby is inside the intervocalic consonant. In E the stressed syllable in the structure (C)VCV(C) is always closed if the syllabic vowel is short and checked.

There are two authentic sources for looking up syllable boundary of any given word in E: EPD (Cambridge Engl Pronouncing Dict-y) and LPD (Longman). The two sources agree on the following: 1. Compounds should be divided into syllables according to the morphological principle: hard-ware. 2. A single consonant which appears between two syllables after a short stressed vowel should be attached to the preceding vowel: bett|er. However there are differences as to where to put a consonant which follows a long vowel or a diphthong. EPD attaches a single word-medial consonant to the following syllable (Maximal Onset principle): la.dy, in.vi.ted, while LPD puts all word-medial single consonants and clusters to the stressed syllable (Maximal Stress principle): lad y, in vit ed. Thus the word window will be differently attested in the two dictionaries due to the two different principles of syllable division: EPD win.dow, LPD wind ow. Experimental evidence, as reported from British sources by Alan Crutenden, shows that following a long vowel a consonant was syllabified with the following syllable which supports EPD: la-dy. The retention stage of a consonant belongs to the previous short vowel, while the release is with the next syllable. In fact, the boundary between the two syllables runs within the medial consonant: city [sit-ti] better [bet-t`].

Theories on syllable formation and division (подходит для билета 15)

Speech can be broken into minimal pronounceable units into which sounds show a tendency to cluster or group. These smallest phonetic groups arc generally given the name of syllables. Being the smallest pronounceable units, syllables form morphemes, words and phrases. Each of these units is characterized by a certain syllabic structure. Thus a meaningful language unit phonetically may be considered from the point of view of syllable formation and syllable division.

Билет 18