4.2. Phonetic notations

Anyone who wants to represent speech sounds in writing has to use the system of phonetic notations, which is generally termed as “transcription”. There are two general types of transcription - broad and narrow.

The first one, broad or phonemic transcription, provides special symbols for all the phonemes of a language. There are various systems of phonetic transcription in use for English, among which the best-known one is that of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The difference among present-day sets of broad transcription of British English is mainly due to the varying significance which is attached to vowel quality and quantity. The transcription introduced by D. Jones aims at reducing the number of symbols to a minimum, so this type does not reflect the difference in vowel quality, but states only the difference in vowel quantity and gives the same symbols for the following pairs of vowels: [i: - i], [u: - u], [ɔ: - ɔ], [ə: - ə]. This type of notation ignores the qualitative difference between these vowels, though most phoneticians nowadays agree that the vowel length is not a distinctive feature of the vowel. The other type of broad transcription is most frequently used in English publishing. It provides special symbols for all the English vowel phonemes: [i: - ɪ], [u: - ʊ], [ɔ: - ɒ], [ɜ: - ə]. Besides this type of notation is a good visual aid and is especially useful in teaching the pronunciation of English.

Narrow (or phonetic) transcription is mainly applied in research work. It provides special symbols for all the allophones of the same phoneme, so it is much more accurate in phonetic detail and contains much more information than a phonemic transcription. For example: [ł] indicates the hard variant of [l]; [k^h] shows that [k] is aspirated; [d^r] means post-alveolar [d], etc.

II. Questions for revision:

1. Give the definition of the phoneme.

2. What sounds are called allophones?

3. Prove that the phoneme is a unity of three aspects: material, abstract and functional.

4. What is the correlation between the phoneme and the allophone?

5. What sounds can be regarded as allophones of the same phoneme?

6. What types of allophones are distinguished? Is it important to distinguish between these types in terms of teaching pronunciation?

7. Why is it impossible to pronounce the phoneme? What do we actually pronounce?

8. What kind of information about the speaker is conveyed by the phonetic distinctions of speech sounds?

9. What is the relationship between the phoneme and the phone?

10. Why are native speakers unaware of the differences between the allophones of the same phoneme?

11. What features are called distinctive or relevant? What relevant features can you name for consonants and for vowels?

12. What features are called non–distinctive or irrelevant? Give examples of irrelevant features in English.

13. How is the invariant of the phoneme formed? What happens if there is a change in the invariant?

14. State the difference between phonological and phonetic mistakes. Who introduced this classification of mistakes?

15. What is transcription?

16. What types of transcription are distinguished? What spheres are they applied in?

17. What types of broad transcription do you know? Which type do you prefer for teaching and learning purposes?