Abstract
This chapter explores both articulatory and acoustic characteristics of English vowels building on the awareness gained in Chapters 3 and 4. Hands-on activities also expand on skills with Praat mainly in visualizing and measuring the duration and formant frequencies as the main acoustic signatures of vowel quality. The chapter uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Well’s lexical sets for describing English vowels and strengthening the awareness of sound–spelling correspondences and differences between the British and American varieties of English.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Some sources differentiate slightly higher (close-mid) position in British English and slightly lower (open-mid) in American English accompanied with the IPA symbol [ɛ]. This may also be related to the use of [e] for diphthong [eɪ] in American English (face lexical set), the first part of which is clearly higher than the sound of the dress set. But for the purposes of this book, we will use the symbol [e] for the dress set in both varieties.
- 2.
Here the words ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ are in quotes to highlight the descriptive approach of this book (Chapter 2) that should be in no way taken to prescribe some dialects are better or ‘more correct’, etc.
- 3.
There are several monosyllabic function words that can be pronounced with schwa in context, for example ‘for’ mentioned as an example of [ɔː] is commonly pronounced with [ə] if the word ‘for’ is not stressed or highlighted. The subsequent chapters of the book, particularly Chapter 10, will provide ample examples.
References
Carley, Paul, Inger M. Mees, and Beverly Colins. 2018. English phonetics and pronunciation practice. London: Routledge.
Catford, John. 1988. A practical introduction to phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Paul Kerswill, Ruth Wodak, Anthony McEnery, and Francis Katamba. 2018. English language: Description, variation and context, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. Vowels and consonants. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, Erik R., and Tyler Kendall. 2007. NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/norm/norm1.php. Accessed 13 April 2020.
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English I: An introduction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
5.1 Electronic Supplementary Material
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beňuš, Š. (2021). English Vowels. In: Investigating Spoken English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54348-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54349-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)