Study sheet: English Phonology and Pronunciation

📋 Course Outline

1. English and French Sound Systems
2. Vowel Colours and IPA
3. Consonants and Articulation
4. Phonemes Graphemes and Syllables
5. Word Stress and Weak Vowels
6. Stress Patterns and Suffixes
7. Isochrony and English Rhythm
8. Tone Units and Intonation
9. Focus and Contrastive Stress
10. British and American Vowels
11. Core Phonology Glossary

📖 1. English and French Sound Systems

★ Must-know

📌 French vowels are generally described as pure and stable in quality, whereas English vowels vary in length and may change in quality.

• The main differences include:
  • the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/
  • the English /r/
  • vowel length
  • tonic stress
  • schwa

📌 English is mainly stress-timed, whereas French is mainly syllable-timed.

Further detail

📌 In British English, postvocalic /r/ is generally not pronounced, whereas American English usually pronounces it.

💡 Memory Hook

French keeps vowels pure; English varies vowel length and reduces weak syllables.

📖 2. Vowel Colours and IPA

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Schwa : the neutral weak vowel /ə/, produced with the tongue relaxed and with very little movement

📝 Essential Points

• The short-vowel correspondences are:

  • pink /ɪ/ KIT
  • red /e/ DRESS
  • black /æ/ TRAP
  • mustard /ʌ/ STRUT
  • orange /ɒ/ LOT
  • cookie /ʊ/ FOOT

• The long-vowel correspondences are:

  • green /iː/ FLEECE
  • purple /ɜː/ NURSE
  • auburn /ɔː/ THOUGHT
  • scarlet /ɑː/ BATH
  • blue /uː/ GOOSE

• The diphthong correspondences are:

  • canary /eə/ SQUARE
  • teal /ɪə/ NEAR
  • brown /aʊ/ MOUTH
  • azure /ʊə/ CURE
  • gold /əʊ/ GOAT
  • grey /eɪ/ FACE
  • white /aɪ/ PRICE
  • turquoise /ɔɪ/ CHOICE

💡 Memory Hook

A colour chart maps each English vowel sound to one memorable colour.

📖 3. Consonants and Articulation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Phonetics : the scientific study of speech sounds, including their acoustic, articulatory, and auditory properties

📝 Essential Points

• English has 24 consonant sounds, including 16 familiar symbols and eight consonant sounds whose symbols require specific learning: /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /dʒ/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʒ/, and /ŋ/; the course also lists /j/ as the sound of <y>.

• The consonant groups are:
  • plosives /p b t d k g/
  • fricatives /f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h/
  • affricates /tʃ dʒ/
  • nasals /m n ŋ/
  • other consonants /l r j w/

💡 Memory Hook

Stop, restrict, affricate, nasal, then approximate the airflow.

📖 4. Phonemes Graphemes and Syllables

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Phoneme : a basic sound unit that can distinguish meaning, and British English has 44 phonemes
• Syllable : one vowel sound, which may be a diphthong, and every word has at least one syllable

★ Must-know

📌 A grapheme is a written letter or spelling representation, whereas a phoneme is a spoken sound represented between slashes.

Further detail

• English spelling can represent one vowel sound in several ways, as in dress, friend, bread, any, and said.

💡 Memory Hook

Graphemes show spelling; phonemes show the sounds that distinguish meaning.

📖 5. Word Stress and Weak Vowels

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Word stress : the emphasis placed on a particular syllable of a word, usually making it longer, louder, higher or lower in pitch, and clearer in vowel quality

★ Must-know

• A stressed syllable may be longer, louder, higher in pitch, and pronounced with a full vowel, whereas weak syllables are shorter, quieter, and commonly contain /ə/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /i/, /u/ or a syllabic consonant.

📌 A word with more than one syllable has one primary stressed syllable, although longer words may also contain secondary stress and weak syllables.

Further detail

• Primary stress is marked by /ˈ/ before the stressed syllable, and secondary stress is marked by /ˌ/.

💡 Memory Hook

L-L-P-V: stressed syllables are longer, louder, pitched, and use full vowels.

📖 6. Stress Patterns and Suffixes

★ Must-know

📌 In many words ending in -tion or -ic, stress falls on the syllable directly before the suffix, as in vibration, collision, hectic, and prolific.

• Neutral endings include:
  • -y
  • -ful
  • -ness
  • -able
  • -ally
  • -ed
  • -ing
  • -ly

📌 Two-syllable nouns often have first-syllable stress, while two-syllable verbs with the same spelling often have second-syllable stress, as in record and reCORD.

• Stress can distinguish meaning, as in CONvict versus conVICT and REcord versus reCORD.

Further detail

📌 The suffixes -ity and -ify generally produce a 100 stress pattern, while -uous and -ious generally produce 100 and -ous as one syllable generally produces 10.

💡 Memory Hook

Root, suffix, then stress: identify the ending before locating the stressed syllable.

📖 7. Isochrony and English Rhythm

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Isochrony : the tendency for stressed syllables in English sentences to occur at roughly regular time intervals regardless of the number of unstressed syllables between them

📝 Essential Points

• English rhythm fits extra unstressed syllables between stressed beats by reducing them, shortening them, and often replacing their vowels with weak forms.

📌 Stress-timed rhythm gives prominence and roughly equal intervals to stresses, whereas syllable-timed rhythm gives syllables roughly equal importance and duration.

💡 Memory Hook

More unstressed syllables → greater reduction so stressed beats remain roughly regular.

📖 8. Tone Units and Intonation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Tone unit : a group of words forming a distinctive unit in an utterance, and every tone unit contains at least one nucleus
• Nucleus : the most prominent syllable in a tone unit and marks a major change of pitch direction
• Pitch : Pitch is the frequency of vibration of the vocal cords, and tone is the major pitch movement within a tone unit.

★ Must-know

📌 A tone-unit boundary normally occurs between meaningful clauses or ideas, not between words that belong closely together.

Further detail

📌 Tone-unit boundaries are marked by | for a brief pause and ‖ for a long pause or the end of an utterance.

💡 Memory Hook

Message → tone unit → nucleus → pitch movement.

📖 9. Focus and Contrastive Stress

📝 Essential Points

📌 In a neutral context, the nucleus normally falls on the last lexical word or syllable of the tone unit.

• Moving the nucleus changes which part of an otherwise identical utterance receives contrastive focus and therefore changes the implied meaning.

• In the utterance “Is this your pen?”, stressing IS, THIS, YOUR, or PEN respectively contrasts the truth of the question, the object, the owner, or the object being identified.

💡 Memory Hook

Neutral focus falls late; contrastive focus moves the nucleus to the corrected word.

📖 10. British and American Vowels

★ Must-know

📌 British /ə/ in words such as letter may correspond to General American /ər/ because British English is non-rhotic and General American is rhotic.

Further detail

📌 In the British and General American vowel systems, /ɒ/ in British LOT corresponds to /ɑː/ in the General American PALM set, while British /əʊ/ in GOAT corresponds to American /oʊ/.

• The listed differences include:
  • British near /ɪə/ versus American /ɪr/
  • British square /eə/ versus American /er/
  • British cure /ʊə/ versus American /ʊr/

💡 Memory Hook

British /ɒ/ and non-rhotic /ə/ contrast with American /ɑː/ and rhotic /ər/ in key contexts.

📖 11. Core Phonology Glossary

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Phonology : the branch of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages or of a particular language
• Minimal pair : two linguistic forms that differ by one phoneme in an otherwise identical sequence, such as pat and bat
• Allophone : one of two or more similar speech sounds belonging to the same phoneme and not contrasting in meaning
• Syllabic consonant : a consonant that forms the peak of a syllable, and English /l r m n/ can be syllabic in unstressed syllables

• Vocal tract : the air passage above the larynx whose shape determines the quality of speech sounds and which includes the pharynx, nasal cavity, and oral cavity

📊 Synthesis Tables

English and French Prosody

Dimension	English	French
Rhythm	Stress-timed	Syllable-timed
Lexical stress	Present and strongly marked	Absent
Nuclear stress	Strongly marked	Weakly marked
Intonation	Large range with smooth contours	Narrower range with step changes
Vowel reduction	Frequent, mainly /ə/	Rare