av Karen Albornoz Guerrero 2 år siden
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Mer som dette
Words are often not pronounced as one might expect from their spelling. It is worth noticing, too, that when a word changes shape morphologically, the stressed syllable may shift as well.
The pronunciation of the words between the British and the United States lies in the emphasis they give to the words.
A lot depends on the sounds that come before and after them, but the fact remains that we spell some sounds in a variety of different ways, and we have a variety of different sounds for some spellings.
Whereas in some languages there seems to be a close correlation between sounds and spelling, in English this is often not the case.
Vowels are all voiced, but there are features which differentiate them. The first is the place in the mouth where they are made. The second feature, which is easier to observe, is the position of the lips. For /a:/, the lips form something like a circle, whereas for /i:/, they are more stretched and spread
Competent speakers of the language make these sounds by using various parts of the mouth (called articulators), such as the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the alveolar ridge (the flat little ridge behind the upper teeth), the palate, the velum (the flap of soft tissue hanging at the back of the palate, often called the soft palate) and the vocal cords.
Words and sentences are made up of sounds (or phonemes) which, on their own, may not carry meaning, but which, in combination, make words and phrases.
Intonation is a notoriously tricky area.
Intonation plays a crucial role in spoken discourse since it signals when speakers have finished the points they wish to make, tells people when they wish to carry on with a turn (i.e. not yield the floor) and indicates agreement and disagreement.
On it's own, pitch is not very subtle, conveying, as we have seen, only the most basic information about mood and emotion. But once we start altering the pitch as we speak
One of the ways we recognise people is by the pitch of their voice. We say that one person has a very high voice whereas another has a deep voice.
Collocations are words which co-occur with each other and which language users, through custom and practice, have come to see as normal and acceptable. It is immediately apparent that while some words can live together, others cannot.
They can also be stretched and twisted to fit different contexts and different uses.
The least problematic issue of vocabulary, it would seem, is meaning. for example polysemy Another relationship which defines the meaning of words to each other is that oihyponymy, where words like banana, apple, orange, lemon, etc. are all hyponyms of the superordinate fruit. And fruit itself is a hyponym of other items which are members of the food family.
One of the reasons we are now able to make statements about vocabulary with considerably more confidence than before is because lexicographers and other researchers are able to analyse large banks of language data stored on computers.
Verbs are good examples, too, of the way in which words can trigger the grammatical behaviour of words around them.
Verbs which are either transitive (they take an object), intransitive (they don't take an object) or both. The verb herd (e.g. to herd sheep)
We have to take into account countable and uncountable nouns.
One of the reasons we can communicate successfully, especially in writing, is because we have some understanding of genre. is to say that a genre is a type of written organisation and layout (such as an advertisement, a letter, a poem, a magazine article, etc.)
In written English this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order - or at least make sense.
•Tone: another feature of the register in which something is said or written is its tone. This includes variables such as formality and informality, politeness and impoliteness.
•Topic: the topic we are addressing affects our lexical and grammatical choices.
•Channel: there are marked differences between spoken and written language. But spoken language is not all the same: it is affected by the situation we are in.
•Gender: research clearly shows that men and women typically use language differently, when addressing either members of the same or the opposite sex..
•Participants: the people involved in an exchange - whether in speech or writing - clearly affect the language being chosen.
•Setting: we speak differently . We often use informal and spontaneous language at home.