PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

The course is one of the core educational activities of the degree course in Language Sciences, curriculum in Linguistics for Deafness and Language Disorders. It is one of the linguistic disciplines promoting metalinguistic awareness, through the acquisition of models of speech and their application to the languages spoken by the student. In particular, the course aims to illustrate the principles and rules of phonetic description on the one hand, and, on the other, to present the fundamentals of phonology, in order to promote understanding of the nature and features of speech sounds and how they are exploited to covey linguistic meaning.

Students will acquire the fundamentals of phonetics form different viewpoints, and with special emphasis on articulatory description. On the other hand, they will understand the fundamentals of structural phonology.
On the basis of the acquired theoretical and methodological competence, students will be able to understand the phonetic/phonological structure of the Italian language, applying their knowledge to the IPA transcription. The analysis of the English language will be carried out under a contrastive perspective, starting from the British standard.
Practice of transcription will develop the critical competence of students, who will phonetically analyse speech, and as a consequence improve their pronunciation skills.

No specific previous knowledge is required.

Phonetics: scope and main areas of interest
Articulatory phonetics
Transcription
Basic concepts of acoustic and perceptive phonetics
Fundamentals of phonology
Structuralist phonological analysis: Trubeckoj, Jakobson, Martinet

Albano Leoni, Federico / Maturi, Pietro (2018), Manuale di Fonetica. Roma: Carocci.
Maturi, Pietro (2014), I suoni delle lingue, i suoni dell'italiano. Bologna: il Mulino.
Santulli, Francesca (1996), Lineamenti di fonetica articolatoria e di fonologia strutturale, in: Negri, Mario (ed.), Navadhyayi. Roma: il Calamo.

Further readings will be made available on the Moodle platform of the Course.

Oral exam: assessment of knowledge and understanding of theoretical and methodological principles; application to a task of phonetic transcription (from speech to writing, and vice versa) both in Italian and in English.

Conventional lectures; exercises of transcription phonological analysis. . Students are encouraged to participate to class practice.

Italian

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