1.Theoretical phonetics as a science. Subject-matter and branches of phonetics.

Theoretical phonetics as science. Branches of phonetics. Methods of investigation.

Phonetics is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized or given audible shape: the nature of these noises, their combinations, and their functions in relation to the meaning.

Practical or normative phonetics studies substance, the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning.

Theoretical phonetics is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in the language.

Phonetics studies the sound system of the language, that is segmental units (phonemes, allophones), suprasegmental units (word stress, syllabic structure, rhythmic organization, intonation). Thus phonetics is divided into two major components: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds (i.e. "segments" of speech), their behaviour; and suprasegmental phonetics whose domain is the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.

All speech sounds have 4 aspects (mechanisms):

- Articulatoty

- Acoustic

- Auditory

- Functional – every language unit performs a certain function in actual speech. Functional aspect deals with these functions.

In accord with these 4 aspects of speech sounds 4 branches are distinguished, each of them has its own method of investigation:

- Articulatoty phonetics - studies (investigates) sound producing mechanism.

- Acoustic phonetics - studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker''s mouth and the listener''s ear.

- Auditory phonetics- the branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process. Its interests lie more in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity, than in the physiological working of the ear or the nervous activity between the ear and the brain.

- Functional phonetics – is also termed phonology. Studies the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language, how they are utilized in that language and what part they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language.

Another subdivision of phonetics:

1. General phonetics – studies general laws, formulates general theories (theoy of intonation, syllable, formation, phoneme)

2. Special phonetics – based on general phonetics. Deals with phonetical peculiarities of certain language.

3. Some linguists distinguish historical phonetics – it traces the development of the phonetic system in the course of time finding out the basic laws of the system.

Для доп. вопросов.

Morpheme – is one of the central notions of grammatical theory, without which no serious attempt at grammatical study can be made. Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language.

Phoneme-is the smallest contrastive unit of speech that distinguishes one word from another in meaning.

2. The morphological structure of a word. Types of Morphemes.

Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis.

The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe “form ”+ -eme. The Greek suffix –eme has been adopted by linguistic to denote the smallest unit or the minimum distinctive feature.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these cases a recurring discrete unit of speech. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of single morpheme. they are composed of morphemes of different types:

• root-morphemes

• affixational morphemes.

Words that consist of a root and an affix are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word building known аs affixation (or derivation).

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of the word; it has a very general and abstract lexical meaning common to a set of semantically related words constituting one word-cluster, e.g. (to) teach, teacher, teaching. Besides the lexical meaning root-morphemes possess all other types of meaning proper to morphemes except the part-of-speech meaning which is not found in roots.

Affixational morphemes include inflectional affixes or inflections and derivational affixes.

Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms.

Derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. They are lexically always dependent on the root which they modify. They possess the same types of meaning as found in roots, but unlike root-morphemes most of them have the part-of-speech meaning which makes them structurally the important part of the word as they condition the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs to. Roots and derivational affixes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, fill-, are understood as the lexical centers of the words, and –less, -y, -ness, -er, re- are felt as morphemes dependent on these roots.

Distinction is also made of free and bound morphemes.

Free morphemes coincide with word-forms of independently functioning words, free morphemes can be found only among roots, so the morpheme boy- in the word boy is a free morpheme; in the word undesirable there is only one free morpheme desire-; the word

bound morphemes are those that do not coincide with separate word- forms, consequently all derivational morphemes, such as –ness, -able, -er are bound.

Root-morphemes may be both free and bound. The morphemes theor- in the words theory, theoretical, or horr- in the words horror, horrible, horrify; Angl- in Anglo-Saxon; Afr- in Afro-Asian are all bound roots as there are no identical word-forms.

Allomorph is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a specific environment and so characterized by complementary description.

Complementary distribution is said to take place, when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment.

Different morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution, i.e. if they occur in the same environment they signal different meanings. The suffixes –able and –ed, for instance, are different morphemes, not allomorphs, because adjectives in –able mean “capable of beings”.

Allomorphs will also occur among prefixes.

+ Structural types of words.

The morphological analysis of word- structure on the morphemic level aims at splitting the word into its constituent morphemes – the basic units at this level of analysis – and at determining their number and types. The four types (root words, derived words, compound, shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word building.

According to the number of morphemes words can be classified into monomorphic and polymorphic.

Monomorphic or root-words consist of only one root-morpheme, e.g. small, dog, make, give, etc.

All polymorphic word fall into two subgroups:

1. derived words

2. compound words

– according to the number of root-morphemes they have.

Derived words are composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational morphemes, e.g. acceptable, outdo, disagreeable, etc.

Compound words are those which contain at least two root- morphemes, the number of derivational morphemes being insignificant. There can be both root- and derivational morphemes in compounds as in pen-holder, light-mindedness, or only root-morphemes as in lamp-shade, eye-ball, etc.

3. Functional style of the language of academic (scientific technical) writing.

There are 3 aims of functional style of language of academic prose. These are:

1. to prove a hypothesis

2. to create new concepts

3. to disclose the internal laws of existence, development, investigate relations between different phenomena

We can use different language means in this style.These means have special features:

1. they should be objective

2. should be precise

3. should be unemotional

4. devoid of аnу individuality

There are 5 groups of words which are used in scientific style:

1. prepositions: of, to, in, for, with, on, at, by, from, out, about, down

2. prepositional phrases: in terms of, in view of, in spite of, in common with, on behalf of, as a result of, on the ground of, in case of

3. conjunctional phrases: in order that, in case that, in spite of the fact that, on the ground that, for fear that

4. pronouns: one, it, we, they;

5. notional words: people, time, two, like, man, made, years.

Functional style can be divided into 2 forms:

1. written form (scientific articles, monographs or textbooks)

2. oral form (scientific reports, lectures, discussions at conferences)

The most noticeable features of this style are:

1. the logical sequence of utterances

2. А developed and varied system of connectives.

3. the use of terms specific to each given branch of science

4. 3 types of sentence patterns: postulator, argumentative, formulate

5. the use of quotations and references, including the nаmе of the writer referred to, the title of the work quoted the publishing house, the place and уеаrof publishing, the page of the excerpt quoted оr referred to.

6. the use of foot-notes. This is in full accord with the main requirement of the style, which is logical coherence of ideas expressed.

7. the impersonality of scientific writings

There is а noticeable difference in the syntactical design of utterances in the exact sciences (mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc.) and in the humanities. The passive constructions frequently used in the scientific prose of the exact sciences аге not indispensable in the humanities. This, perhaps, is due to the fact that the data and methods of investigation applied in the humanities аге less objective.