English faculty II course paper theme: difference between communicative english and written english

Aspects of alphabetic transcription

Other alphabets, such as Hangul, may have their own phonetic extensions. There also exist featural phonetic transcription systems, such as Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech and its derivatives.
The International Phonetic Association recommends that a phonetic transcription should be enclosed in square brackets "[ ]". A transcription that specifically denotes only phonological contrasts may be enclosed in slashes "/ /" instead. If one is in doubt, it is best to use brackets, for by setting off a transcription with slashes one makes a theoretical claim that every symbol within is phonemically contrastive for the language being transcribed.
Phonetic transcriptions try to objectively capture the actual pronunciation of a word, whereas phonemic transcriptions are model-dependent. For example, in The Sound Pattern of English, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle transcribed the English word night phonemically as /nixt/. In this model, the phoneme /x/ is never realized as [x], but shows its presence by "lengthening" the preceding vowel. The preceding vowel in this case is the phoneme /i/, which is pronounced [aɪ] when "long". So phonemic /nixt/ is equivalent to phonetic [naɪt], but underlying this analysis is the belief that historical sounds such as the gh in night may remain in a word long after they have ceased to be pronounced, or that a phoneme may exist in a language without ever being directly expressed. (This was later rejected by both Chomsky and Halle.)
There is freedom in how closely sounds may be transcribed for phonetic transcriptions. A broad transcription is one that just provides a generalized idea of the sounds of a language; in some circumstances, this may be comparable to a phonemic transcription (but without any theoretical claims). A narrow transcription is a close transcription that captures all the fine characteristics of the sounds. These are not black-and-white decisions, but rather the extremes of a continuum with numerous options in between. Brackets are used to enclose each.

For instance, a restricted transcription of the English word pretzel in some dialects would be [phwt.s], noting various phonetic elements that even a native speaker might not be able to pick up on. [pht.s] is an illustration of a broad transcription because it just highlights some of the simpler to hear components. The transcription [pt.sl] is even more inclusive. Here, each symbol denotes a clear speech sound without providing any extraneous details. No assertions are made regarding the phonemic state of the sounds in any of these transcriptions. Instead, they stand for particular ways that the sounds that make up the word can be made.

There are several ways to represent this word phonetically as well, however the variations are typically not ones of accuracy but rather of interpretation. Pretzel, for instance, may be either /prt.sl/ or /pret.sl/. Since it is not necessary to identify an English r from a rolled r, the unique sign for English r is not utilized. There are several theories in the literature as to what the fundamental distinction between the vowels in pretzel and pray is, and these claims are reflected in the distinctions in the letter e. Even though they can't both be heard, the second transcription asserts that the word has two vowels, whereas the first transcription asserts that there is only one.
However, phonemic transcriptions may also be broad or narrow, or perhaps it would be better to say abstract vs. concrete. They may show a fair amount of phonetic detail, usually of a phoneme's most common allophone, but because they are abstract symbols they do not need to resemble any sound at all directly. Phonemic symbols will frequently be chosen to avoid diacritics as much as possible, under a 'one sound one symbol' policy, or may even be restricted to the ASCII symbols of a typical keyboard. For example, the English word church may be transcribed as /ʧɝːʧ/, a close approximation of its actual pronunciation, or more abstractly as /crc/, which is easier to type. Phonemic symbols should always be explained, especially when they are as divergent from actual pronunciation as /crc/.
Occasionally a transcription will be enclosed in pipes ("| |"). This goes beyond phonology into morphological analysis. For example, the words pets and beds could be transcribed phonetically as [pʰɛʔts] and [b̥ɛdz] (in a fairly narrow transcription), and phonemically as /pets/ and /bedz/. Because /s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes in English, they receive separate symbols in the phonemic analysis. However, you probably recognize that underneath this, they represent the same plural ending. This can be indicated with the pipe notation. If you believe the plural ending is essentially an s, as English spelling would suggest, the words can be transcribed |pets| and |beds|. If, as most linguists would probably suggest, it is essentially a z, these would be |petz| and |bedz|.
To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English word jet is not read as "yet". This is done with angle brackets or chevrons: ⟨jet⟩. It is also common to italicize such words, but the chevrons indicate specifically that they are in the original language's orthography, and not in English transliteration.
Iconic
In iconic phonetic notation, the shapes of the phonetic characters are designed so that they visually represent the position of articulators in the vocal tract. This is unlike alphabetic notation, where the correspondence between character shape and articulator position is arbitrary. This notation is potentially more flexible than alphabetic notation in showing more shades of pronunciation (MacMahon 1996:838–841). An example of iconic phonetic notation is the Visible Speech system, created by Scottish phonetician, Alexander Melville Bell (Ellis 1869:15).