Discourse analysis

Lesson 28 PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE.

Activity 1 Practice tongue twisters. Work with your partner and say one of the tongue twisters as quickly as possible

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  How much wood would a wood-chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?”
  
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  "If two witches were watching two watches, which witch would watch which watch?”
  
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  "The big bug bit the little beetle, but the little beetle bit the big bug back." 
  
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  "If you want to buy, buy, if you don't want to buy, bye, bye!"
  

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  Why do we use tongue twisters? Do they really help to learn the language? Why? Why not?
  
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  Give examples of your native language tongue twisters (e.g. Uzbek, Russian, Tatar and etc.)
  

If you remember your English language learning started from learning the alphabet, pronunciation, sounds, syllable, intonation and etc. To build a word linguists divide the word into phonemes. What is a phoneme? Let’s review some terminology of phonetics.

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  Phonemes – the smallest meaningful units of the utterance
  
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  There are two type of sounds consonants (C ) and vowels (V)
  
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  Articulation the act or process of speaking. the process of articulation of speech sounds
  

When words follow one another in speech, phonemes may undergo considerable changes e.g. good morning, good evening

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  Assimilation – the effect of previous sound (where one sound is influenced by the pronunciation of a neighboring) e.g. good morning [gəbmͻniη] En; shanba [ʃamba] Uz,
  
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  Elision a sound missed out (e.g. most men [mous men]) “t” is omitted shouldn’t [ʃudn] сейчас [ʃas] RU
  

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  Because of natural flow of speech words are not pronounced separately in speech, the whole sentences, phrases may be pronounced as one unit. E.g we never say the words in the sentence in Uzbek “Men majlisga boraman” separately [ men/ majlisga/ boraman] we say [ men / maylisgaboraman] as a one unit, as you see words are linked, thus there is no use to learn the language by learning pronouncing word one by one. Even the pronunciation and articulation of the sounds should be learnt in a context. One of the best way to practice pronunciation is listening authentic recording.
  

Activity 2 Assimilations and elisions
Work in small groups and consider how the following would be articulated in informal conversation in Standard British English. What changes would take place to the way the prononciation of the individual words in isolation are represented in dictionaries?

1. 
   ten or eleven months ago
   
2. 
   I asked him what went on
   
3. 
   Not her! Not Mary!
   
4. 
   considering my age, I ran miles