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AQA A-Level English Language

A-Level · AQAEnglish Language28 notes in 6 folders, 161 KB

Notes for AQA A-Level English Language (7702), in folders for the language levels and methods of analysis, meanings and representations, language diversity, language change, child language acquisition and language discourses, following the specification's content in its order. The non-exam assessment (the language investigation and original writing) is not covered.

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  • Language levels and methods of analysis
    • Phonetics, phonology and prosodics7 KB
    • Lexis and semantics5 KB
    • Morphology and word formation4 KB
    • Word classes and phrases5 KB
    • Clauses, sentences and cohesion5 KB
    • Pragmatics6 KB
    • Spoken discourse and transcription5 KB
    • Graphology and multimodal texts4 KB
  • Meanings and representations
    • Audience, purpose, genre and mode5 KB
    • Meaning, representation and identity6 KB
  • Language diversity
    • Standard English and attitudes to variation6 KB
    • Regional varieties in the British Isles6 KB
    • Research into social variation6 KB
    • Age, occupation and ethnicity7 KB
    • Gender and language7 KB
    • World Englishes6 KB
  • Language change
    • Old English and Middle English6 KB
    • Early Modern and Late Modern English6 KB
    • Present-day English5 KB
    • Causes and processes of change6 KB
    • Attitudes to language change5 KB
  • Child language acquisition
    • Stages of spoken development6 KB
    • Phonological development4 KB
    • Lexical and semantic development5 KB
    • Grammatical and pragmatic development6 KB
    • Theories of language acquisition7 KB
    • Written language and literacy7 KB
  • Language discourses
    • Texts about language6 KB

The first note

Language levels and methods of analysis / Phonetics, phonology and prosodics

## Phonetics and phonology **Phonetics** describes the physical sounds of speech: how they are made, what they are like in the air and how they are heard. **Phonology** is about the sound system of a language, meaning which sounds the speakers treat as distinct and how they combine. A **phoneme** is the smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word. English has about 44 phonemes in most accounts of Received Pronunciation, though the exact count depends on the accent and on how the analysis is done. The words *pin* and *bin* differ in one phoneme, /p/ and /b/, so those two are separate phonemes. Speech is transcribed with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), written between slashes for phonemes (/pɪn/). One IPA symbol stands for one sound, which is why it can record what English spelling cannot: *though*, *through* and *tough* share a spelling pattern but not a vowel, and *ship* has three sounds but four letters. ### Describing consonants A consonant is described by three things: voicing, place and manner. - Voicing: voiced sounds make the vocal cords vibrate (/b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/) and voiceless ones do not (/p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/). - Place of articulation: where the airflow is obstructed. Bilabial (/p/, /b/, /m/, both lips), labiodental (/f/, /v/), dental (/θ/ as in *thin*, /ð/ as in *this*), alveolar (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, /l/), post-alveolar (/ʃ/ as in *ship*, /ʒ/ as in *measure*, /tʃ/, /dʒ/), palatal (/j/), velar (/k/, /g/, /ŋ/) and glottal…

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