Standard English Speech

Originally published in 1932, this book presents a guide to various aspects of English phonetics aimed at foreign students of the language. Illustrative figures and a bibliography are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the teaching of English, linguistics and phonetics.

"Questions at Issue in Our English Speech" by Edwin W. Bowen is a must-read for anyone who has ever been interested in the English language. The marked difference between spoken and written English is laid out clearly in this text which aimed to show how much skill one needs to master one, let alone both. Though years have passed since it was published, the book still rings true to this day.

This monograph reconsiders the question of speech isochrony, the regular recurrence of (stressed) syllables in time, from an empirical point of view. It proposes a methodology for discovering isochrony auditorily in speech and for verifying it instrumentally in the acoustic laboratory. In a small-scale study of an English conversational extract, the gestalt-like rhythmic structures which isochrony creates are shown to have a hierarchical organization. Then in a large-scale study of a corpus of British and American radio phone-in programs and family table conversations, the function of speech rhythm at turn transitions is investigated. It is argued that speech rhythm serves as a metric for the timing of turn transitions in casual English conversation. The articular rhythmic configuration of a transition can be said to contextualize the next turn as, generally speaking, affiliative or disaffiliative with the prior turn. The empirical investigation suggests that speech rhythm patterns at turn transitions in everyday English conversation are not random occurrences or the result of a social-psychological adaptation process but are contextualization cues which figure systematically in the creation and interpretation of linguistic meaning in communication.

Part of the series on American English from 1781 to 1921, Volume VIII includes a guide to the phonetics of American English with the purpose to provide a rational method of examining pronunciation, the most important of the practical aspects of speech. Also included is American English (1921) that reflects the progressive development of the author’s ideas on the subject over a forty-year period. It consists of a critical discussion of works on Americanisms, a list of ‘exotic’ or supposed Americanisms which appear in the primary collections of Americanisms, a list of ‘real’ Americanisms which do not appear in those works, a list of misunderstood Americanisms, and finally a bibliography.

Excerpt from The Development of Standard English Speech in Outline This little book is the outcome of lectures which have been delivered for some years past to our students of Middle English. In preparing the manuscript for publication and in reading proof I have got much help of every sort from Assistant Professor 0. S. Northup and Dr. B. S. Monroe. As a whole, then, the book may be said to represent Cornell aim and method. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In this activity-based text, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting a bewildering array of 'facts' about variety in English, she encourages the reader to actively investigate the differences between these two modes of communication by comparing actual speech patterns with literary ones. This indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis provides both an overview of the relationship between speech and writing and an introduction to a central theoretical issue in language studies. By the end of the book, readers will have had the opportunity to consider material from an extensive selection of spoken and written varieties - including boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts - while being encouraged to formulate their own opinions with regard to lexis and structure. In addition, the tasks that have been incorporated into the end of every chapter provide suggestions for further self-study and follow-up work.