Questions

1. In what way phonetics is connected with phonology?

2. Who was the founder of the phoneme theory?

3. What is Shcherba’s view on speech sounds?

4. What are the main functions of the phoneme?

5. What is the difference between phonemes and allophones?

6. What is the difference between positional and combinatory allophones?

7. What is the difference between the relevant and the irrelevant features of the phonemes?

8. In what way is the phone treated by different scientists?

9. What are the three aspects of the phoneme?

10. What do you know about distributional analysis and the patterns of distribution?

11. What is the difference between single, double and multiple oppositions?

12. What is the difference between semantic and purely distributional methods of phoneme identification?

13. How is the problem of phoneme solved by different linguistic schools?

III. Regional and stylistic varieties of English pronunciation Outline

3.1. Pronunciation Standard of British English

3.2. Styles of Pronunciation

3.3. Classification of pronunciation variants in English. British English

3.1. Pronunciation Standard of British English

The national languages of today are products of a long historical evolution. Their roots can be traced back to the local dialects of the feudal period.

At the beginning of the epoch of feudalism, the inhabitants of the different principalities, duchies, kingdoms that composed a feudal state, lived in comparative isolation and spoke their own dialects. There was no trade, practically no education; there were few causes for migrations of people, and, consequently, the local dialects of the time developed within their own territories.

With the growth of commerce, a new interest in travelling, and the spread of learning towards the end of the epoch of feudalism, the isolation between the different parts of the same feudal state began to break up.

Due to various causes – political, cultural, commercial, economic – one of the local dialects took precedence over all the others. That outstanding dialect became the foundation of the national language of the state. The national language of England developed on the basis of the London dialect, because London expanded rapidly into an important centre of commerce, industry and learning as early as the 14th century. The speech of aristocracy and the court phonetically was that of the London area. Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent, often referred to as "King's English". It was also the accent taught at public schools.

The process of formation of the national language of England was accompanied by the development of its literary form. This process was accelerated by the spread of learning and literature.

The special characteristics of literary English are its grammatical structure, vocabulary and phonetic structure. A person speaking literary English is marked at once as being educated, it is considered that he speaks "good", "correct" English. The pronunciation of educated people is usually termed "Received Pronunciation" by English phoneticians. In Russian, the term "Literary Pronunciation" is commonly used.

The growth of a language is a spontaneous process. At the same time the literary form of a language is nearly always preserved with great care; it is maintained and extended by educational institutions, the radio and by television. Received Pronunciation has been accepted everywhere for the teaching of English to foreigners.

If a choice is at all possible, it is between the British and the American pronunciation standards. British Received Pronunciation is the recognized and accepted literary form of pronunciation. It is upheld by public opinion. It has been described in a great number of books by English phoneticians.

The American pronunciation standard should not be chosen for teaching purposes for a number of very valid reasons:

1. The American pronunciation standard is comparatively new and has no long tradition to back it.

2. Besides, it is less uniform than British Received Pronunciation.

Although one of the great advantages of British Received Pronunciation is its uniformity, this does not mean that B. R. P. is absolutely rigid and allows of no variations. Different individual variants of the same phoneme are used by different speakers. Besides, there are variations in the pronunciation of the same word (e. g. poor, sure, direction, often).