Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:

57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?

58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?

59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?

60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning.

61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?

KEYS:

Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:

57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?

1) In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.

2) In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed.

3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later at school.

58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?

1) Vowels may be distinguished as front, central and back in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.

2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels, semiclose vowels, semi-open vowels, and open vowels.

3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.

4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound.

59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?

They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.

60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning.

1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds, is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black.

2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives, adverbs, etc. are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.

3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said.

61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?

A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of meaning. If it does, the two sounds then represent different phonemes.