Phonetics
Linguistics Tripos Part II: Paper 6
MML Tripos Part II: Paper Li.6
Paper Coordinator 2013/14: Dr Brechtje Post
Past exam papers, full reading lists and lecture handouts are available from the Linguistics Resources on CamTools.
Scope
The overall aim of this course is to provide an understanding of the sound systems of languages. To achieve this, the course examines the human sound producing capacity and the wide variety of ways in which it is used by different languages.
Specific objectives of the paper are the development of familiarity with, understanding of, and (where relevant) practical competence in the following broad topics:
Representing speech
Speaking is a complex, multidimensional event. To represent speech, phonetics crucially
uses abstractions of different kinds (phonological analyses, 'narrow' phonetic transcriptions,
parametric representations, acoustic displays, etc.)
The production of speech
Vocal anatomy and function, and how sound energy is produced and shaped in the vocal tract,
underlie our understanding of linguistic sound patterns.
Sounds of the world's languages
The linguistic side of phonetics is centrally concerned with how sound (including vowels
and consonants, and in some languages pitch) are used to distinguish words, and with
the regularities which underlie apparently diverse sound systems.
Non-lexical phonetics
There are strands in speech (intonation, voice quality, rhythm, etc.) which a speaker can
exploit to communicate information over and above the words of the utterance.
Variation in speech
No two utterances are identical, and phonetics constantly confronts variation (dialectal,
historical, stylistic, individual, etc); accounting for variation is a major task in phonetics.
Applications of phonetics
Phonetics has always been a discipline with practical relevance; applications include
pronunciation teaching, devising writing systems, and forensic identification.
Practical skills
The 'tools of the trade' - traditional auditory-impressionistic and production skills,
and the use of speech analysis software for visualising and quantifying speech acoustics
- are an essential part of being a phonetician.
Teaching
There is one lecture per week and a two-hour practical slot. Supervisions are divided as follows: three in Michaelmas, four in Lent, and one (or two if required) in Easter. There is a three hour written examination; but around half the assessment is based on other tasks, including the production of sounds and the analysis and interpretation of speech samples.
Assessment
Assessment is via a three hour written examination, and a practical exam.
There are three components to the practical assessment:
- Laboratory Phonetics (English) An analysis of a short sample of English, the analysis consisting of a phonemic transcription, a phonetic transcription, an intonational transcription, and a commentary explaining transcriptional choices made in difficult cases. The analysis will be carried out using a combination of auditory phonetic skills and visual examination of acoustic displays including time-frequency-intensity spectrographic representations of the acoustic speech signal. The examination will be completed during a period of 1 hour and 50 minutes in the Phonetics Laboratory.
- Laboratory Phonetics (unknown Foreign) An analysis of a short sample of an unidentified language other than English, the analysis consisting of a phonetic transcription, a tonal transcription, and a commentary explaining transcriptional choices made in difficult cases. The analysis will be carried out using a combination of auditory phonetic skills and visual examination of acoustic displays including time-frequency-intensity spectrographic representations of the acoustic speech signal. The examination will be completed during a period of 1 hour and 50 minutes in the Phonetics Laboratory.
- IPA Production A viva voce examination involving the production of sounds indicated by symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The selection of symbols to be produced will be made available to each candidate 5 minutes before the viva, which itself is also expected to take approximately 5 minutes.
Marks on the Phonetics paper are given as percentages; the practical tasks are weighted to account for a total of 40% of the Examination, 60% being based on the written paper. The breakdown of the weighting of the marks for the practical tasks is as follows: Laboratory Phonetics (English) 15%, Laboratory Phonetics (unknown Foreign) 15%; IPA Production 10%.
Preliminary reading:
Ladefoged, P. [& Johnson, K.] ([2010]/2005/2001 [6th]/5th/4th/ edition) A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Go to other Part II Linguistics papers:
- Linguistic Theory (Linguistics Tripos Part IIB only)
- Phonetics
- Phonology and Morphology
- Syntax
- Semantics and Pragmatics
- Historical Linguistics
- History of the French Language
- First and Second Language Acquisition
- Psychology of Language Processing and Learning
- Language Typology
