HANOI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

UNIVERSITY OF ST MARK AND ST JOHN

BA Honours International Professional English (IPE)

ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

YEAR OF STUDY: 2020 MODULE: IPRD03-HUST 20/21A

By
20202020/21
submitting this assignment for evaluation, I acknowledge that the assignment is my own
work, and where the work of others has been used, it has been appropriately cited and
referenced.

NAME: Nguyen Thi Trang STUDENT No:20096340-20183233

NAME OF MODULE: LANGUAGE AWARENESS

ASSIGNMENT: WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT

DUE DATE: 13 January 2020 DATE RECEIVED: (For teachers only)

MARKS Examiner 1: Examiner 2: Final:

SIGNATURE Examiner 1: Examiner 2:

FINAL WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT

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 I. INTRODUCTION

I am going to take a profound look and analys pronunciation, stress and intonation in a video-

recorded speech in General American English. It would be better if the analysis is almost based

on comparion with British English. Along with that, I also discuss about the way speakers use

language in informal speech.

II. BODY

1. Speech introduction

So as to inspect truly the matter, it is very essential to understand the background

information of the speech beforehand. It is combined of two clips retrived from Youtube, both of

which are spoken in General American English (hereinafter reffered as GA) and have length

totally about 4 minutes with the extract of around 500 words. The first discourse is a

conversation in the show named “The Ellen show” between her own and the guest Emma

Watson. This is a humorous talk show with satiric attitude in general. Thus, the used language is

not technical but informal. The other one is a family dinner scene from a fantastic Disney Pixar

animation movie “Inside out” which is appraised as one of the best scenes. This language here is

also informal GA and close to daily use.

2. Distinctions between British English and General American English

There are several main differences between British English (BE) or RP (Received

Pronunciation) or IPA and GA which is necessary to be recognised because they are likely to

result in some intelligible issues (Markward, 1958 and Salama, 1976). Firstly, the

monophthong /æ/ is tendentiously pronounced like /e/ in GA rather than /a/ in RP. For example,

the word “well-mannered” (7) was pronounced nearly like /ˌwel ˈmen.ɚd/ or acted (30) like

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/ektid/. However, in some cases, like “ask” (21) is transcibed phonetically /æsk/ in GA instead of

/ɑːsk/ in BE. Next, let us discuss about vowel /ɒ/. In GA, it is replaced with / a: / the back

unrounded vowel that one hears in RP pronunciation in above example “ask” (Putri, u.k.), which

can be seen in the line (23) with the word “was” (/wɑːz/ in GA and /wɒz/ in BE). Besides, it is a

tendancy that all GA vowels are characterized by r-colouring when they are followed by the

letter “r” in the spelling. This r-colouring is particularly noticeable in the case of the mid central

vowels as in “courting” (8); “ignored”, “first” (9) or in the last syllable of “whatever” (10) and

“remember” (11), etc… This is extremely unfamiliar in Queen’s English. Moreover, one of the

most typical features of GA concerns the realization of /t/ between vowels, which is seemed to

be the most obvious distinctions from RP. In this position, both in individual words and across

word boundaries, /t/ is pronounced as a quick tap and is accompanied by voicing, so that

issounds almost like a /d/ (Putri, u.k.). In the first few lines of transription, “dating” and “gotta”,

for instance, are represented by phonetic symbols /deɪdɪŋ/ and /ˈɡɑːdə/ respectively.

3. Stress

Stress, also known as accent, which refers to pronunciational pattern used by people in a

community or a social grouping (Yan and Vasegi, 2002) and it is categoried into lexical stress

and sentence stress. In GA in general and these discourses in particular, speakers tend to pay

more attention to sentence stress. As you can see, many words are de-stressed such as “really”

(7) /riː.ə.li/ or “usually” (8) /juː.ʒu.ə.li/, etc. Almost of these are considered as content words that

are more important than the others (function words). There is a tendency called stair-step format

in speech when speakers rise or fall their voice. Let us go into detail in line (2) “I assume you’re

dating”. After taking a long flat step until “dating” from the beginning of the sentence, the

interviewer ended by putting the stress on the key word “dating” /ˈdeɪdɪŋ/. The following

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sentence (3) is given here as another example when her voice went down “I don’t know if you’re

in a relationship” with stress on the last word, too. Also, it is easily to be realized in a longer

sample like (10). It was divided into small chunks 1/“And then-and then”; 2/ “maybe they’ll

acknowledge about my presence”; 3/ “and then they’ll probably be a little mean to me”; 4/ “and

then maybe”, 5/ “we’ll, you know whatever”. She stopped each chunk with the falling tone apart

from slightly higher tone in “maybe” in chunk 2/. As a drawn result, native speakers incline to

drop off at the end, which was demonstrated by Yan and Vasegi (2002) that American have a

tendency to say the final words in sentence with a lower pitch. In general, this is known as

intonation that will be analysed more concrete in the next part.

4. Intonation

Intonation is defined as the sentence’s melody which plays a very significant part when

expressing various thoughts and emotions (Zulfugarova, 2018). Let us discuss about the

intonation in these discourses. We can commence with the first one. The intonation of both

speakers is fairly stable because it is a short consevation with almost length belonging to the

interviewee. However, we still could see a bit intonation variation when she rose her voice at the

sentence (12) “I’m sorry. What just happened?”. The reason why she changed to higher pitch is

due to intention to display her surprise. Moreover, she stressed more clearly on this sentence

rather than the others, which is seemed to be a way to created intonation.

It is even more obvious in the second discourse as it is a family argument. Typically, the girl

began with sad emotion manifested by soft voice and quite rapid rhythm along with sigh “It was

fine, I guess. I don’t know” (27). She suddenly changed her attitude when accentuating words

one by one instead of the previous stressing interval “School was great, alright?” (43) and

gradually rised up to far higher pitch as well as stronger stress in sentence “Just, shut up!” (60),

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which made the father exchange his attitude and get angry with her. This instance shows that

rhythm possibly creates the intonation.

5. Connected speech

Another noticeable feature of pronuncition this paper will discuss is connected speech. For

instance:

“There’s definitely one or two…” (6)

/ðerz definli /

This is phenomena called elision refering to common sound deletions. The vowel /ə/ and

consonant /t/ were elided to make the whole sentence sound more fluently. This also occurs

with /d/ sound and weak vowel as well.

Also in the (6), there is another connected speech type that is linking when word boundaries

involving a consonant or a vowel are connected in order to drag final consonants to initial

vowels, …

“…that I’ve…” (tha-dive)

Furthermore, the speakers used intrusion as a device to insert an extra sound which resemble

/j/, /r/ or /w/ when two vowel sounds meet, for the purpose of marking transition sound between

them. You can see in the following examples:

* go /w/ out (11); no /w/ one (33); do /w/ it (11);

* did /j/ you (19)

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 Besides, assimilation is also used here, especially assimilation of voice. It changes voiced

consonant into voiceless preceding voiceless consonant like:

“I don’t wanna have to …”: /aɪ doʊn wɑːnə hæf tu/

And following examples are given to show next case in connected speech.

“don’t know” (14) / doʊn knoʊ/

“doesn’t notice” (22) / /dəz noʊdɪs/

The /t/ sound was not pronounced there. When a word or syllable ends with “nt” in GA, it is

common to just pronounce /n/ if the next word begins with a vowel.

6. The way speakers use language in informal speech

Language usage or language choice is considered as the most distinctive factor in

comparison between technical passage and informal speech. Since speakers tend to take

advantage of idioms and collocation in conversation which are close to daily use. In the sentence

(34), for instance, he used consecutively “garbage night” refering to the day when people places

garbage outside their residences for collection and “leave the toilet seat up” which means

something men often do after using toilet and also is considered to rude or disrespectful towards

women who use it after. Additionally, “You want a piece of it?” (56) is an interesting example in

informal speech which is used to provoke someone to get in a fight with you. One the other hand,

these cases show grammatical structure in daily speech. When speaking informally, it is very

regular for native speakers to remove auxiliary verbs, which can be perceived in both questions

(34) and (56).

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 Native people also utilize some conversational language here, such as “young lady” (55)

are the common way parents call their daughter when trying to discipline her or wanting to

address her in angry or upset context. While, “pops” (56) is informal way to call father.

Last but not least, one of the main features of spoken English is discource markers that are

applied extremely frequently in the speech, especially “like” and “you know” Although they

seem like pointless space-fillers, we use them to connect, organize, and mannage what we say;

they can help subtle details and show listener how to interpret what the speaker is saying. In this

case, the word “like” has many meanings, it could be understanded as a verb (14); a discource

marker (7), (8), (13), … or even a synonym of “say” (12), yet it is almost used as a discource

marker to give speakers moment to think what to say next. Other examples, “so” is said here to

get someone’s attention, especially so as to ask them a question (23); meanwhile, “alright” is

used to mark a boundary in dialogue (17), (46), ...

III. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, there are some pronunciational differences between GA and RP that are very

common. Besides, spoken GA and other kinds of English accents are influenced by many factors

that are geographical place, culture, lifestyle, …, which makes a diversity in accents.

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References:
Markward, A. (1958). A Communicative Grammar of English. Singapore: Longman.
Putri, A. (unknown). British and American Pronunciation.
Salama, N. (1976). Teaching Foreign Language Skill. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Yan, Q., Vaseghi, S., & Proceedings of International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and
Signal Processing (CASSP'02). (May 01, 2002). A comparative analysis of UK and US English
accents in recognition and synthesis. 1.
Youtube.com. (2012, 10 16). Retrieved from TheEllenShow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YtqfWK0dkq0&t=6s&ab_channel=TheEllenShow [Accessed 12 Jan. 2021].
Youtube.com. (2015, 10 24). Retrieved from Movie Remixer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Cjgdiy_SGjA&t=2s&ab_channel=MovieRemixer [Accessed 12 Jan. 2021].
Zulfugarova, R. (2018, 6 12). THE FUNCTION OF INTONATION IN THE
ENGLISHLANGUAGE. pp. 18-21.

APPENDIX

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Discourse 1:
So you’re dating. (1)
I assume you’re dating. (2)
I don’t know if you’re in a relationship. (3)
But there’s gotta be a difference between English guys and American guys, right? (4)
Uhm, yeah… (5)
There’s definitely one or two differences that I’ve noticed. (6)
English guys are like very well put together, and they dress really well and they’re very well-
mannered. (7)
But they’re also very restrained, like usually, in the whole courting situation… I’m used to being
like… (8)
First of all, ignored for like the first two months of the ritual. (9)
And then, maybe they’ll acknowledge about my presence, and then they’ll probably be a little
mean to me, and then, maybe, we’ll, you know whatever. (10)
And then I arrive in America and I remember, like…few nights in to Brown, this guy just being
like, “I like you, you’re great, let’s go out on a date, let’s do it”. (11)
And I’m like “I’m sorry, what just happened?” (12)
This is like, you know, a huge culture shock for me… is that, you know, that they’re very like
open and, very straightforward. (13)
But they wear flip-flops, so I don’t know if I like that. (14)
Yea, it’s about… you gotta figure it out. (15)
It’s hard. (16)
Alright, well, uh,… I really thing you’re just fantastic, so come back any time you want. (17)
You’re really just something else. Amazing… (18)

Discourse 2:
Did you guys pick up on that. (19)
Sure did. something's wrong (20)
Should we ask her (21)
Let's probe but keep it subtle so she doesn't notice (22)

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So, how was the first day of school? (23)
She's probing us (24)
I'm done, you pretend to be joy (25)
Okay um (26)
It was fine, I guess. I don’t know. (27)
Hmm oh very smooth that was just like joy (28)
Something is definitely going on (29)
She's never acted like this before … what should we do (30)
We're gonna find out what's happening but we'll need support. Signal the husband. (31)
Oh she's looking at us what did she say? (32)
What? Oh sorry sir no one was listening. (33)
Is it garbage night? We left the toilet seat up? What? What is it, woman? What? (34)
He's making that stupid face again (35)
I could strangle him right now. (36)
Signal him again (37)
Ah, so, Riley how was school (38)
Oh seriously (39)
You gotta be kidding me? (40)
For this we gave up that Brazilian helicopter pilot (41)
Move, I'll be joy (42)
School was great, alright? (43)
Riley, is everything okay? (44)
Sir, she just rolled her eyes at us (45)
What is her deal? Alright, make a show of force I don’t wanna have to put the foot down. (46)
No, not the foot (47)
Riley I do not like this new attitude (48)
Oh I'll show you attitude, old man. (49)
Oh no no no. Stay happy. (50)

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What is your problem? Just leave me alone (51)
Sir, reporting high levels of sass (52)
Take it to DEFCON 2 (53)
You heard that, gentleman. DEFCON 2 (54)
Listen, young lady. I don't know where this disrespectful attitude came from (55)
You want a piece of this, pops?, Come and get it (56)
Yeah well, well…. (57)
Here it comes. Prepare the foot. (58)
Keys to safety position. Ready to launch on your command, sir. (59)
Just, shut up! (60)
Fire… (61)
That's it. Go to your room! Now! (62)
Foot is down! The foot is down! (63)
Good job, gentlemen, that could’ve been a disaster. (64)
Well, that was a disater….. (65)

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