AQA A-Level English Language

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 (/h/).
• Manner of articulation: how the airflow is obstructed. Plosives stop the air completely and release it (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/), fricatives force air through a narrow gap (/f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /h/), affricates are a plosive released into a fricative (/tʃ/, /dʒ/), nasals send air through the nose (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/), approximants are close to vowels (/l/, /r/, /w/, /j/).

So /b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive and /s/ is a voiceless alveolar fricative.

Describing vowels

Vowels are described by the height of the tongue (close to open), how far forward it is (front, central, back) and the shape of the lips (rounded or spread). A monophthong is a single steady vowel, as in /iː/ in seen, /ɪ/ in sit, /ʊ/ in put and /ɑː/ in car. A diphthong glides from one vowel quality to another within one syllable, as in /aɪ/ in time, /eɪ/ in lake and /əʊ/ in go. The schwa, /ə/, is the weak central vowel of unstressed syllables, such as the first and last sounds of about and sofa.

Accent

An accent is a way of pronouncing a language, and so concerns phonology only; a dialect also involves vocabulary and grammar. Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally associated with education and the upper and middle classes in England, and it carries no regional marking. It is spoken by a small minority, though it was long taken as the model in broadcasting and in teaching English to learners.

Some of the features that separate accents are listed here.

Accents are also shaped by the way speech is joined up, so that the sounds in a word often change in connected speech. These changes are called phonological processes.

• Elision: a sound is lost (next day said with no /t/, friendship said /frenʃɪp/).
• Assimilation: a sound changes to become more like its neighbour (handbag said as hambag, where /d/ is lost and /n/ becomes /m/ before the bilabial /b/).
• Vowel reduction: unstressed vowels are weakened to schwa.
• Liaison and intrusion: a sound is added to link two vowels, as in "the idea-r of it", where an /r/ appears although there is none in the spelling.
• Epenthesis: an extra sound is inserted, as when film is said with a vowel between /l/ and /m/ in some accents.

Prosodics

Prosodic features are the features of speech that run across sounds, not belonging to single phonemes.

• Pitch and intonation: the rise and fall of the voice. A rising intonation at the end of a statement (often called uptalk or the high rising terminal) can sound like a question or can seek agreement. A falling pattern tends to signal a complete statement or a command.
• Stress: the extra force placed on a syllable or word. In English it can distinguish word classes (the noun record is stressed on the first syllable, the verb record on the second) and it can shift the meaning of a sentence ("I didn't say he stole it" is not the same as "I didn't say he stole it").
• Volume: loudness, raised for emphasis, anger or to attract attention, and lowered for secrecy or intimacy.
• Pace or tempo: speech may be slowed to give weight to a point or speeded up to show excitement or nervousness.
• Pause: silent gaps, which may be planned for effect or unplanned because the speaker is hesitating.
• Rhythm: the pattern of strong and weak syllables across an utterance. Most varieties of English are stress-timed, which means stressed syllables come at fairly regular intervals and the unstressed syllables between them are squeezed.
• Voice quality: whispery, breathy, creaky or nasal, which can carry attitude or identity.

Prosody matters in analysis because it often carries the speaker's attitude, and because it can change the function of an utterance. The word right can be a question, a statement of agreement, a signal that the speaker is about to change topic, or sarcasm, depending on intonation and stress alone.

Sound effects in written texts

Writers use the sound of words for effect, and these terms are used when analysing poetic, advertising and persuasive language.

• Alliteration repeats the same initial consonant sound in nearby words.
• Assonance repeats vowel sounds and consonance repeats consonant sounds.
• Onomatopoeia is a word whose sound imitates what it names (clang, hiss).
• Sound symbolism links particular sounds with qualities, so that plosives often feel sharp and abrupt, and long vowels and nasals feel soft or slow.
• Spelling can imitate pronunciation (eye dialect such as "wot" or "gonna") to suggest accent, informality or the speaker's background.