Word Phonology in a Systemic Functional Linguistic Framework - Phonological Studies in English, German, Welsh and Tera (Nigeria) - Paul Tench
Towards a Systemic View of Phonology
Word Phonology in a Systemic Functional Linguistic Framework - Phonological Studies in English, German, Welsh and Tera (Nigeria) - Paul Tench
Paul Tench [+]
Cardiff University (retired)
Paul Tench was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University, Wales. He retired in 2007 after more than 40 years in full-time academic life and is now active as a Research Associate at Cardiff. His main teaching responsibilities were in phonetics, the phonology of English, applied linguistics in language teaching and introductions to Systemic-Functional Linguistics. His research focussed mainly on the description of British English intonation, which resulted in The Roles of Intonation in English Discourse (1990), the Intonation Systems of English (1996) and Transcribing the Sound of English (2011) and many journal articles. His first major publication was Pronunciation Skills (1981). Since retirement he has devoted time to exploring system networks at the level of word phonology, and to working with minority language groups in devising orthographies for hitherto unwritten languages in Nigeria and Zambia. His publications can be viewed in http://www.paultenchdocs.co.uk/.
Description
People are aware of pronunciation, if not phonology and phonetics. Phonetics is the study of the production, transmission and reception of sounds in human speech and is the subject of careful, informed, scientific investigation. Phonology is the study of the usage of speech sounds in language in general and languages in particular and is the subject of careful, informed, linguistic investigation. Pronunciation, on the other hand, is everyone’s activity in spoken communication; that is what we hear and what we produce in talk; it is everyone’s experience and hence is part of everyone’s business.