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This course introduces students to the systematic study of the phonetics and phonology of the English language. We will learn about the human speech apparatus in detail, and the mechanisms that are involved in speech sound production. The focus is on the sound inventory and the basic phonological patterning of English. We will learn how English sounds are made, and develop a set of rules by which sounds are combined into syllables and syllables into even larger units, such as feet. We will learn some of the common sound changes of English and ways to analyze such changes. The course teaches basic conceptual tools that will allow students to analyze the sound system of English, and indeed the sound system of any language. Although the course emphasizes standard English, we will also examine the sounds of other varieties of English, including Hong Kong English and Singapore English.
This book serves for students major in both linguistics and teaching English as a second language, foreign language studies, general education, the cognitive and neurosciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. There are 12 chapters in this book, covering the general study of language; the study of grammar with morphology, the notions of constituency, syntactic categories, phrase structure trees, structural ambiguity, the infinite scope of language, and the X-bar grammatical patterns; semantics and pragmatics; phonetics; phonology; sociolinguistic study of language; language change; language acquisition; psychology of language and the neurology of language; fundamentals of computational linguistics, and writing.
