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This book is a textbook designed for students who have no previous knowledge of phonetics or phonology and who will not pursue their studies in English phonetics and phonology any further. This book mainly introduces theory-neutral essentials of English phonetics and phonology. Beginning with an elementary introduction to articulatory phonetics, the book then proceeds to introduce main aspects of phonological structure of present-day English. There are 13 chapters in this book, thoroughly examining topics in English phonetic and phonology, including consonants and vowels; the phonemic principle; English phonemes; English syllable structure; rhythm and word stress in English; rhythm, reversal and reduction; English Intonation; grapho-phonemics; variation in English accents; etc.
This book concentrates on practical rather than theoretical aspects of phonetics and phonology. The book is divided into 4 sections. Section A introduces some basic concepts such as phoneme. Section B closely studies the phonetics of English such as vowels and consonants, stress and intonation. Section C explores English in a selection of its many varieties of accents, from Dublin to Delhi, from Scotland to Singapore. Development of English over the centuries, especially its pronunciation change, is also examined. Section D extends further by means of a selection of writings about phonetics by well-known experts in the field.
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.
