The Pronunciation of English: A Coursebook; 2nd ed.

This book is an easy, readable introduction to the phonetics and the phonology of English. It is not intended to help students of English as a second language with their difficulties arising form the complex and often irregular relations between the spelling and the pronunciation of English. Two ‘standards’ of pronunciation are recognized in schools where English is taught as a foreign (‘second’) language: RP, recently more usually referred to as BBC English, at home on the British Isles, and GenAm, gaining ground in recent decades on US radio, television and the film industry. The former is preferred in EFL courses in Europe, and the latter on the Western hemisphere. This book concentrates on what is common to regional variants of English, with emphasis on the two standards, and some information on the differences between what the author refers to as ‘dialects’. In the BritishEnglish phonetic writings [largely due to the efforts of J.C. Wells, 1982], the terms ‘dialect’ and ‘accent’ have been so defined that ‘dialect’ refers to lexis, grammar and phonetics/phonology, whilst ‘accent’ only refers to phonetics/ phonology. So the reader who likes consistency and is more familiar with the British publications on the subject, should replace, throughout this book, the former term by the latter. But there is a hitch here too. In much linguistic and phonetic literature, ‘accent’ is used with reference to syllabic prominence. It has recently been suggested that ‘accent’ is phrasal, or sentential prominence, whilst lexical syllabic prominence is termed ‘stress’. It is not unusual for one term to be used in different senses in different disciplines, but in one definite area of study, such as linguistics, it would be preferable to have no terminological ambiguities. The initial two chapters are introductory. The first, chapter 1 (Language and Speech), is a sketch of general linguistics, and the second, chapter 2 (Sounds and Voice), is an outline of acoustic and articulatory phonetics. The next two chapters discuss (chapter 3) consonants and (chapter 4) vowels plus glides. The traditional division into short vowels vs. long vowels plus diphthongs is given up in favour of the recently considered preferable (and more accurate) one into free vs. checked. This distinction is consistently used in chapter 5, which distinguishes heavy vs. light syllables and discusses stress accordingly. Phonotactics (chapter 6) is devoted to sequences of segments (or ‘phones’) within the word, though it continues the unfortunate tradition of never exactly defining what the word is, or at least, what the author means by this term, whether as a phonetic or grammatical entity. The concept of ‘variation’ used here in chapters 7 (Consonant and Vowel Variation) and 8 (Some Consequences of Phonotactics), which mainly deal with assimilation and contextual conditioning, might do with more rigorous, symbolic presentation of allophony. Rhythm (chapter 8) is dealt with using the disputable term ‘stress’ and the no less arguable description of English as a ‘stress-timed language’ as opposed to a ‘syllable-timed’ language such as (supposedly) French. This impressionistic classification has never been definitely proven by objective empirical evidence. In chapter 10, an outline of English intonation is given, and it is justly indicated that the basically different models of ‘levels’ vs. ‘configurations’ do not, as is sometimes assumed, explain the melodic differences between BBC English and GenAm. It might have been made a little clearer that in the BBC English model the focal accents (or nuclear tones) not only differ in the direction of pitch movement, but also in width and/or height. Chapter 11 is entitled ‘Predicting Word Stress’. To avoid ambiguities due to the still open problem of defining not only ‘accent’ but also ‘stress’, an alternative might be suggested of such terms as ‘lexical prominence’ [or ‘potential accent’, Bolinger, 1958] as opposed to ‘postlexical prominence’ (or ‘real accent’). Morpho(phono)logy is treated in chapters 12 (Prefixes: Compound Words and Phrases) and 13 (Phonological Processes in Speech). Throughout the book, when dealing with vocalic phones (or ‘segments’), especially with regional differences in pronunciation, the author uses key words, such as ‘the TREE vowel’ or ‘the Libri