UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS

NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL

HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

INTRODUCTION
Welcome to UNAHUR’s Intensive Summer Course in English Phonetics. This course is aimed at helping students
improve their understanding of English pronunciation at the segmental level. To begin with, we’ll start by
introducing some important concepts. However, we would like you to try it out first.

ACTIVITY 1:

a. Define in your own words the following terms: Phonetics, Phonology, Acoustic Phonetics, Articulatory
Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics.
b. Transcribe the above mentioned words and phrases.1

Most of the above concepts have been well summarized by Geoff Lindsay2 as follows:

“Phonetics is the study of speech. Speech can be studied from several viewpoints. Phonology studies the way
speech is categorized and organized in languages. Acoustic phonetics studies speech as physical sound.
Articulatory phonetics studies the activity of the vocal organs. Psychoacoustics and audiology study perception
and hearing.”

ACTIVITY CHECKING: Now check your answers to the previous activity with the theory and the footnotes.

ACTIVITY 2: Check these situations and associate them with the previous concepts.3

a. Learning about speech organs in order to classify vowels and consonants.

b. Using the Praat software to check and compare the sound waves produced when articulating the START
vowel and the LOT vowel.
c. Testing students’ understanding of the vowels of the English language through a dictation of minimal
pairs.
d. Studying, through the theory of minimal pairs, the use of the velar nasal /ŋ/ in Spanish to determine
whether its a phoneme or an allophone.
e. Comparing the distribution of the of the velar nasal /ŋ/ in Spanish to and English.

In this course, we’ll resort to the different branches of phonetics and phonology in order to accomplish our
already mentioned goal. It is important to clarify that we won’t explore all the accents of the English language. It
would be impossible to do in such a short period of time. That’s why we’ve had to narrow the scope of our

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Key to Activity 1b: Phonetics / fə'netɪks /, Phonology / fə(ʊ)'nɒləʤi /, Acoustic phonetics / əˈkuːstɪk fə'netɪks /, Articulatory
phonetics / ɑːˈtɪkjʊlət(ə)ri fə'netɪks /, Auditory phonetics / ɔːdɪt(ə)ri fə'netɪks /
2
Source: Lindsey, Geoff, et al (2021). Virtual Summer Course in English Phonetics. University College London.
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Key to Activity 2: a. Articulatory phonetics; b. Acoustic phonetics; c. Auditory phonetics; d. Phonology; e. Phonetics
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 UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS
NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL
HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

proposal. We’ll be dealing with one variety of English pronunciation, which is the one most established as a
teaching standard.

ACTIVITY 3: What are the implications in the use of

these terms to refer to the same accent: Received
Pronunciation, General British, BBC English and
Standard Southern British?4

The variety we’re dealing with is certainly not spoken

by most people in the UK, but it’s understood there
and beyond. It used to be known as Received Pronunciation (RP), but that term is falling out of use, mainly
because 1) the accent has changed and 2) because it seems that the use of the word “received” implies that other
accents would not be acceptable, and that’s not the kind of attitude we’d like to encourage.

For these reasons, other names have arisen. General British is a term very much used nowadays, but it also comes
with certain implications. In fact, geographically speaking, you’ll find speakers of this variety in the south of
England. How can it, then, be called general if its location is quite specific? That’s why many authors prefer calling
it Standard Southern British English (SSBE). If you want to access online material for listening purposes, it’s highly
suggested that you check the BBC. For this reason, another common name for this accent is BBC English.

ACTIVITY 4:

a. Transcribe the following terms: Received Pronunciation, General British, Standard Southern British
English, BBC English, Phoneme, Allophone.5
b. Offer one phoneme with at least two allophonic variations.6

In the description of SSBE/BBC English, we’ll use phonemes. A phoneme is the representation of the smallest unit
of sound that creates difference in meaning. In order to know whether a phoneme is part of a language inventory,
we can resort to minimal pairs. If there’s a different sound, but the word does not change its meaning, then it’s
not a phoneme, but an allophonic variation. An allophone is a different realization of a phoneme.

ACTIVITY 5: You’ll find some minimal pairs that have been transcribed below. Check them and decide whether
they are exclusively made of phonemes (i.e. phonemic transcription) or if they are signalling some kind of

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Image source: https://learntalk.org/en/blog/different-english-accents-from-around-the-world
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Key to Activity 4a: Received Pronunciation / risiːv(d) prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃn̩ /, General British /ˈʤen(ə)rl̩ ˈbrɪtɪʃ /, Standard Southern
British English /ˈstændəd ˈsʌðn̩ ˈbrɪtɪʃ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ /, BBC English /ˌbiːbiːˈsiː ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ /, Phoneme /ˈfəʊniːm /, Allophone /ˈæləfəʊn /
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Possible key to Activity 4b: /t/ as a phoneme with the allophonic variations [tʰ] and [ɾ] in <test> / test / [tʰest] and <better>
/ˈbetə / [ˈbeɾə]
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 UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS
NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL
HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

allophonic variations (i.e. allophonic transcription). For pedagogical purposes, all the transcriptions are made
with squared brackets.7

a. [ hɑːd pʰeɪn ] vs [ hɑːd reɪn]

b. [sɪks] vs [seks]
c. [ ˈɡetɪŋ ɡʊd ɡreɪdz ] vs [ ˈɡeɾɪŋ ɡʊd ɡreɪdz ]
d. [ nɒt ̚̚ naʊ pliːz ] vs [ nɒʔ naʊ pliːz ]
e. BONUS TRACK IN SPANISH [ˈpero] vs [peɾo]

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Key to Activity 5: a. Phonemic; b. Phonemic; c. Allophonic; d. Allophonic; e. Phonemic
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 UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS
NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL
HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

THE USE OF THE PRONUNCIATION DICTIONARY

In this course, we encourage students to use two pronunciation dictionaries. The
first one is the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Its last edition was published
in 2008 and you can download the software included in it by accessing this link.
In order to use it, you have to download the whole folder onto your computer,
unzip the file and click on the file named “lpd.exe”. We highly encourage you to
explore all of this dictionary’s features. However, we’ll deal with the most
important ones in the activities below.

The second dictionary we suggest you use is Geoff Lindsey’s CUBE dictionary.
First, let’s read what he proposes:

SSB: the default accent of CUBE8

CUBE stands for ‘CUrrent British English’. CUBE’s search results always include a
phonetic transcription, in blue, which the editors consider a representative
pronunciation of the word in contemporary ‘Standard Southern British’ (SSB). This kind of English may be thought of
as characteristic of university-educated young adults from the south of England. It is heard from a majority of
presenters and correspondents in British news broadcasting. Clearly it is not a majority accent in the UK (so the
term ‘General British’ used by some publishers is misleading). But English speakers around the world are familiar
with it — it is often heard in Hollywood films, for example — and internationally it is associated with Britain.

Many sources, including the Cambridge, Collins, and Longman dictionaries, still use for their British English
transcriptions a set of vowel symbols which was chosen by A. C. Gimson more than half a century ago to describe
explicitly the upper class speech of the period before the tumultuous social changes of the 1960s: classic Received
Pronunciation (RP).

This Gimsonian transcription does not give an explicit indication of 21st century SSB. In fact, if its vowel symbols are
pronounced with the explicit values of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the result is an accent which now
sounds to native speakers old-fashioned, ‘posh’ and even amusing. Unfortunately publishers and authors typically
fail to make this discrepancy clear to their readers, who often take the symbols more literally than is now
appropriate. (Another problem with the Gimsonian vowel symbols is that they make the wrong groupings. For
example, the vowels which Gimson chose to write with the IPA length symbol /ː/ no longer constitute — if they ever
did — any kind of true phonetic or phonological grouping.)

Because this rather inaccurate and misleading old system is still so widely used, CUBE includes the option to display
it (in black) by ticking the box ‘trad’ under SYSTEMS. We hope that you find it useful to compare it with our more
accurate transcription in blue.

8
Source: http://seas.elte.hu/cube/accent.html
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 UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS
NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL
HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

Here are some practical guidelines on how to use this online dictionary. First you’ll type http://cubedictionary.org/
on your browser (or just click here). Once in the website, make sure you tick the “trad” box in the “SYSTEMS”
section and the box “full word”, provided that you’re looking for a specific word:

Then, type the word you want to look up. When typing <phonetics>, this is the result:

The result in blue shows the contemporary and most accurate transcription of the chosen word. Next to it, you
have the traditional transcription of the same word. We will follow that system since it’s the most spread in the
teaching field. However, it’s very important that you get familiar with the new trends since they will soon become
the mainstream way of teaching pronunciation. If you want to know more about the CUBE dictionary, you can
check this video where Geoff Lindsey himself explains how to use it. Last but not least, notice that you can also
click on the play button so as to listen to the chosen word being pronounced by different speakers in the website
YouGlish. This is also a very interesting resource since it shows you words being pronounced in different contexts
out of real situations, and not a recording made for the exclusive purpose of creating a dictionary.

Activity 1: Download the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Look up the following words and answer the
questions below: total, sudden, fire, twenty, afternoon, last, play.

a. What do you think raised symbols like [ ᵊ ], [ᵐ] or [ᵇ] represent?

b. What do you think symbols in italics like [ t ] represent?
c. Considering stress, what might the symbol ◂ represent? What about the symbol §?
d. How are conjugations shown?9

Activity 2: Use the CUBE dictionary to look up the following words: girl, green, dentist, microscope, scared.
Check the contemporary transcription and the traditional one so as to complete the following chart:

VOWEL TRADITIONAL VOWEL SYMBOL CONTEMPORARY VOWEL SYMBOL

FLEECE /iː/

DRESS /e/

NURSE / ɜː/

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Key to Activity 1: a. Raised symbols represent sounds that can be optionally inserted; b. Symbols in italics represent sounds
sometimes optionally omitted; c. The symbol ◂ signals the possibility of stress shift, whereas the symbol § is used to offer
alternative pronunciations to the standard which are widely used; d. Conjugations are shown below the word that triggers
any type of conjugation.
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 UNIVERSIDAD PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO de INGLÉS
NACIONAL DE CURSO INTENSIVO DE FONÉTICA SEGMENTAL
HURLINGHAM SUÁREZ, VINCENTI

PRICE /aɪ/

GOAT /əʊ/

SQUARE /eə/10

Activity 3: What about stress? How is it represented in the CUBE dictionary?11

Are you curious about the latest changes in the vowel system of SSBE? Here’s a picture12 that illustrates them.
However, don’t forget we’re sticking to the traditional symbols in this course.

10
Key to Activity 2: FLEECE /ɪj/, DRESS /ɛ/, NURSE /əː/, PRICE /ɑj/, GOAT /əw/, SQUARE /ɛː/
11
Key to Activity 3: it follows a similar tradition to the one in Spanish, where we have a written accent or what we call <tilde>
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Source: https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/
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