English Phonetics and Phonology

Abstract

You probably want to know what the purpose of this course is, and what you can expect to learn from it. An important purpose of the course is to explain how English is pronounced in the accent normally chosen as the standard for people learning the English spoken in England. If this was the only thing the course did, a more suitable title would have been “English Pronunciation”. However, at the comparatively advanced level at which this course is aimed, it is usual to present this information in the context of a general theory about speech sounds and how they are used in language; this theoretical context is called phonetics and phonology. Why is it necessary to learn this theoretical background? A similar question arises in connection with grammar: at lower levels of study one is concerned simply with setting out how to form grammatical sentences, but people who are going to work with the language at an advanced level as teachers or researchers need the deeper understanding provided by the study of grammatical theory and related areas of linguistics. The theoretical material in the present course is necessary for anyone who needs to understand the principles regulating the use of sounds in spoken English.