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Dẫn luận nn
Dẫn luận nn
Organs of speech are the organs of human body that can be used to produce
sound. We can say that they are part of respiratory and digestive systems.
The first organ is lungs which supply the airstream. Without airstream, we cannot
produce sounds.
The second organ is larynx which is called the voice box. It has 2 vocal cords.
The opening between the vocal cords is called glottis. The larynx is important organ
of speech. When the glottis is half open, the vocal cords vibrate, we have voiced
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sounds. When the glottis is open, the vocal cords do not vibrate, we have voiceless
sounds.
The third organ is pharynx which is the cavity located in the throat
immediately behind the mouth. It has uvular. When the uvular is lowered, the
airstream goes through the nose to make nasal sounds. When the uvula is raised, the
airstream goes through the mouth to make oral sounds.
The fourth organ is oral cavity which is in the mouth. This is where sounds
produced in the larynx are resonated. The size and shape of this resonance chamber
can be changed according to the tongue and the lips.
The final organ is the nasal cavity which is situated on the top of the oral
cavity and is separated from the oral cavity by the palate. It can act as a resonance
chamber.
Consonants are speech sounds that they cannot be in isolation and produced
with obstruction to the airstream. For example, /p/ is a consonant, so it cannot
stand alone. When we produce this sound, the airstream goes out with an
obstruction formed by two lips.
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Ex: I can swim. Since “can” is unstressed, /…/ reduced into the schwa
sound /…/
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These rules are important because there are a lot of sound changes in English.
Firstly, in English words, we have three structures such as consonant-vowel (C-V),
V-C, and C-C. Sound changes occur the most in the structure C-C as consonants have
the definite places of articulation, and we need to change sounds to pronounce
easier. Secondly, in long utterances, English rhythm is stress-timed which leads to
that English sound changes are more common. For example, the sentence ‘I can sing
a song’, we stress two words, namely ‘sing’ and ‘song’, and we have two rhythms in
this utterance, so we need the rules of phonology to pronounce fluently.
A word is the smallest meaningful unit which can occur its own in speech and
writing. For example, the noun “beauty” is a word.
New word is a new form of words with new lexical meaning. “Beautiful”, for
instance, is a new word of the word “beauty” because it is formed by adding the
suffix {ful} into the noun “beauty”.
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other constituent in the sentence. For example, “the table likes beer” is not
meaningful because the subject “the table” is not an experiencer, so it is not suitable
for the verb “like”. Secondly, semantic features are contradictory. For instance, “the
round table is square” is meaningless since the adjectives “round” and “square” do
not have the same semantic feature, leading to the fact that they never go together.
The final factor is no sense words. If a sentence is formed by words that do not exist
in dictionary, it is definitely meaningless. For example, “twas brilling, and the slithy
toves” is not meaningful because it has some no sense words as “twas”, “brilling”,
slithy”, and “toves”. From three aforementioned factors, a grammatical sentence is
meaningful if it adapts all of those aspects.
Firstly, they help us know the formation of words and sentences. When
they can go together to form a larger unit, the structures are correct. The sentence
“She is a beautifully girl”, for example, is incorrect because the adverb “beautifully”
cannot combine with the noun “girl” to form a noun phrase.
Also, it helps us guess the meaning of words and sentences. For instance,
if someone does not know the meaning of the word “happiness”, they can guess
based on the adjective “happy” and the suffix “-ness”.
adjective “zippable” is formed by two parts “zip” and “able”, so it means that
something can zip. Therefore, “unzippable” is that something cannot zip. Another
way is that it is likely to be divided into a verb “unzip” and a suffix “-able”, and the
verb “unzip” is formed by two parts “un” and “zip”, so it means open. Therefore,
“unzippable” means that something can open. As a result, when we put a constituent
in different groups, we have different meanings.
+ Situational context: we know all the words but we don’t know the
meaning because we are not in the context. (we can only know when we are
in the context). Ex: “What time is it?” In the situation that a student goes to
school late and the teacher ask this question, it means that “Why are you
late?”
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