Практическая фонетика английского языка

Now, what is a phoneme? It is usually defined as the smallest contrastive language unit which is capable of distinguishing one word from another in the same phonetic context. The phoneme is realized in the material form of speech sounds of different types. The variants of the same phoneme are called allo-phones. They occur in various phonetic contexts because of the influence of the neighbouring sounds upon them. Let us consider the follow-ing examples: 1) bee [bi:] – bead [bi.d] – beat [bit] The phoneme [i:] is the longest in the open syllable when it is free (= is not followed by another sound), [i.] is a bit shorter in the second word when it is followed by a weak voiced consonant, and [i] is the shortest (checked) when followed by a strong voiceless consonant, as it is in the last word. 2) tea [ti:] – two [tu:] – ten [ten] In the first word [t] is produced with the strongly spread lips, in the second word – with the rounded lips, in the third word the lips for [t] are neutral. So we can see that one and the same phoneme [i:] (example 1) and [t] (example 2) can be realized in speech differently and its variants may be denoted by the so-called allophonic transcription. One more point is worth mentioning, as far as phonetics and pho-nology are concerned. A person cannot avoid making mistakes when learning a foreign language. Pronunciation mistakes may be of two types – phonetic and phonological. If the learner pronounces a foreign sound with the wrong articulation (for example, substitutes an English sound for a similar Russian sound, i.e. pronounces [тeıbl] instead of [teıbl]), the meaning of the word is not affected. If the speaker uses the wrong phoneme when saying the word, and its meaning is changed, the so-called phonological mistake is made. e.g.She likes working [з:]. She likes walking [ɔ:]. The same is true for mistakes in intonation.