First Language Acquisition
How children so quickly and as if by magic acquire language has interested people for thousands of years.
Psammeticus, an Egyptian Pharoah during the 7th century BC, believed language was inborn and that children isolated from birth from any linguistic influence would develop the language they had been born with. He isolated two children, who were reported to have spoken a few words of Phyrgian, an IE language of present day Turkey. Psammeticus believed that this was the first, or original, language.
In the 15th century King James V of Scotland performed a similar experiment; the children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew.
These first studies of human language tended to be concerned with the origin of the oldest, or first, language (They were phylogenetic), and were only secondarily concerned with the precise way in which individual infants acquire speech. True studies of language development in the infant (ontogenetic studies) came later.
Akbar, a 16th cent. Mogul emperor of India, desired to learn whether language was innate or acquired through exposure to the speech of adults. He believed that language was learned by people listening to each other and therefore a child could not develop language alone. So he ordered a house built for two infants and stationed a mute nurse to care for them. The children did not acquire speech, which seemed to prove Akbar's hypothesis that language is acquired and does not simply emerge spontaneously in the absence of exposure to speech.
Only in the last 40 years after the invention of the tape recorder was child language recorded carefully and studied in any systematic fashion. Sophisticated recording machinery of all sorts are now used to monitor language proficiency in infants and small children.
Child language acquisition studies often attempt to map out the stages of language acquisition. Such studies are of two types:
longitudinal-- development of speech in the same group over time. Most studies of child language acquisition are of this form.
cross sectional-- search for a certain type of data in a broad spectrum of different children, such as a study of the language of two-year olds across the country.
Since this discipline is so new there is little conclusively known about child language acquisition. One fact is definite: Language acquisition depends upon the child being exposed to language. (Akhbar's experiment was correct.) The language a child acquires is that of his/her surroundings. Children who are deprived of language in their environment simply do not begin to speak spontaneously. (Wolf children, Genie, had no language.)
The main question in all modern studies of child language acquisition involves finding out what in human language is inborm, innate, we say hard-wired, into the infant's brain structure, and what is learned through experience. Although this question hasn't been answered to anyone's complete satisfaction, it seems clear that the basic capacity to learn language is innate, while the particular form/meaning connections of individual languages are acquired through prolonged exposure to a specific speech community.
There are three main theoretical approaches to child language acquisition; all of them have merit but none can fully explain the phenomenon of child language acquisition.
1. Cognitive theory-- Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
Views lang. acq. within the context of the child's broader intellectual development. A child first becomes aware of a concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. Simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more complicated-- Conditional mood is one of the last. (cf. Spanish vs. Russian.)
There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common function morphemes in a language Example from English: first-- -ing, then in and on, then the plural -s, last are the forms of the verb to be. Seems to be conditioned by logical complexity: plural is simple, while forms of the verb to be require sensitivity to both number and tense.
Pros and cons-- clearly there is some link between cognitive development and language acquisiton; Piaget's theory helps explain the order in which certain aspects of language are acquired.
But his theory does not explain why language emerges in the first place. Apes also develop cognitively in much the same way as young children in the first few years of life, but language acquisition doesn't follow naturally from their development. Bees develop the cognitive ability to respond to many shades of color, but bees never develop any communication signals based on shades of color.
2. Imitation and positive reinforcement
Children learn by imitating and repeating what they hear. Positive reinforcement and corrections also play a major role in Language acquisition. Children do imitate adults. Repetition of new words and phrases is a basic feature of children's speech. This is the behaviorist view popular in the 40's and 50's, but challenged, since imitation alone cannot possibly account for all language acquisition.
Con: 1) Children often make grammatical mistakes that they couldn't possibly have heard: Cookies are gooder than bread. Bill taked the toy. We goed to the store, Don't giggle me.
2) This hypothesis would not account for the many instances when adults do not coach their children in language skills. Positive reinforcement doesn't seem to speed up the language acquisition process. Children do not respond to or produce metalanguage until 3 or 4, after the main portion of the grammar has been mastered. (Children don't comprehend discussions about language structure.) Story about Tyler, Kornei Chukovsky: yabloka, tibloka)
3. The final theory we will discuss involves the belief in the innateness of certain linguistic features. This theory is connected with the writings of Noam Chomsky, although the theory has been around for hundreds of years. Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language. Humans are destined to speak. Children discover the grammar of their language based on their own inborn grammar. Certain aspects of language structure seem to be preordained by the cognitive structure of the human mind. This accounts for certain very basic universal features of language structure: every language has nouns/verbs, consonants and vowels. It is assumed that children are pre-programmed, hard-wired, to acquire such things. (The "gavagai" experiment.)
Yet no one has been able to explain how quickly and perfectly all children acquire their native language. Every language is extremely complex, full of subtle distinctions that speakers are not even aware of. Nevertheless, children master their native language in 5 or 6 years regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability. Acquisition must certainly be more than mere imitation; it also doesn't seem to depend on levels of general intelligence, since even a severely retarded child will acquire a native language without special training. Some innate feature of the mind must be responsible for the universally rapid and natural acquisition of language by any young child exposed to speech.
No one has been able to explain just what this mysterious language acquisition device, or LAD, is. Some language acquisition must certainly be due to simple repetition: greetings, swear words; much of it is not. A three year old child generally can recall and use a new word heard once even months afterward.
Chomsky originally believes that the LAD is a series of syntactic universals, structural properties univerally found in all languages. These syntactic structures are inborn. Only the words are learned. Allows us infinite creativity based on a limited number of patterns. Children thus generate sentences based on learned words and innate syntactic patterns. This is why children make grammatical mistakes that they could not be repeating.
And yet, so far, no properties have been discovered that are truly universal in all languages. It seems that the syntactic structures differ from language to language and couldn't be innate. All attempts to construct a universal grammar that would underlie all structures in all languages have come to failure, Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar being a case in point.
Today Chomsky believes that the universal properties are constraints, rules that dictate what cannot be in any language rather than structures which are universal. Some of these apparently universal constraints include the observation that forms a question by reciting words backwards; the subject of a subordinate clause never governs the verb in the main clause, etc. It is assumed that something about the structure of our brain causes languages to be somewhat limited in how they can differ syntactically. This built in limitation aids the child in acquiring the language by narrowing down the possible patterns to a few.
The problem with the theory of innateness, then, is not in deciding whether the theory is correct, since the ability to learn language is certainly innate, but rather in identifying just what the mysterious language acquisition device actually is, what constraints or structural features are hard-wired in the mind. The LAD must be something more than general intelligence. And yet there doesn't seem to be any structural property or set of properties found in all languages that would allow us to identify any purely linguistic skill that is separate from human intelligence.
Let's take up the subject of just how structured the input is in child learning acquisition. Chomsky maintains that children couldn't simply figure out language structure by repetition and analogy because the language they hear is highly irregular. He claims that language spoken around the child extremenly fragmentary, random simplification of adult speech. Speech between adults is often fragmentary or even ungrammatical. Such run on and incomplete sentences must serve as clues to something already in the mind.
More recent studies show that language spoken around child is not as full of random errors, not as fragmented or randomly pidginized as one might believe. It has been found that mothers use a special register of language, dubbed motherese, to talk to their children. Motherese, just like other social registers, is highly structured; it is not random and irregular as Chomsky would have us all believe. There is a set correlation between motherese and adult language and the featurese characteristic of motherese differ across cultures:
Let's look at a few features of Anglo-American motherese:
Pragmatic features: sentences are shorter (4 or fewer words), speed slower, use of more clarificational features than in speech between adults, more questions, attempts at getting feedback from the child. In Samoan these features are lacking.
Grammatical elements found in motherese are even more diverse, but each language group has its own structured set: expressive element (intonation), lip rounding (Latvian palatalizes consonants), reduplication: choo-choo, use of special words, especially for toys, bodily functions: bunny, kaka, poo-poo. Use of special morphemes, like English y/ie: doggy, kitty, ducky, (Berber suffix: sh/sht, Russian -ik, ichiko, itsa). Such 'baby' morphemes often are used in speech between adults to make hypochoristics. Some language apparently lack any special grammatical or lexical markers for motherese: Samoan, Maya.
There is also a social register called fatherese: more demanding of information, using more direct questions and a wider vocabulary than motherese. There is also otherese. Older children and neighbors also talk to infants and very small children using special baby talk. The special social registers that developed from the need to speak to small children have developed into forms that are specific to each language. Very little work has been done to study these types of speech.
It seems increasingly apparent that the language a child hears is not fragmented randomly, but is highly structured and this structure plays a role in language acquisition. This proves, once again, that the structures themselves are not innate but acquired through exposure; the capacity to learn is what is innate.
Stages in child language acquistion--Universal
1. Pre-speech: Much of importance goes on even before the child utters his first word: infants learn to pay attention to speech, pays attention to intonation and the rhythm of speech long before they begin to speak.
Infants respond to speech more keenly than to other sounds. Speech elicits greater electrical activity in the left side of the 2 month old infant's brain than do other sounds. Experiment with microphone and nipple showed that infants suck more vigorously if the action triggers a human voice as opposed to music or other sounds.
Child learn to recognize the distinctive sounds, the phonemes of the language they hear from birth long before they are able to pronounce them. Infants can distinguish between /p/ and /b/ at three or four months (in an experiment with /ba/ played vs. /pa/, a two month infant showed awareness of the change). But children do not learn how to use these sounds until much later-- around the second year or later--as shown by the experiment with /pok/ and /bok/. The same is true for rising vs. falling intonation, which only becomes systematically funtional much later. Infants know the difference between one language and another by recognition of phonological patterns (Story of the Russian fairy tale book.)
2. Babbling stage. Begins at several months of age. Characterized by indiscriminate utterance of speech sounds-- many of which may not be used in the given language but are found in other languages-- clicks. Many native speech sounds may be absent-- some are naturally harder to pronounce-- /r/ /th/. Very few consonant clusters and repeated syllables are common.
3. One word (holophrastic) stage. Infants may utter their first word as early as nine months: usually mama, dada (these words resemble babbling). Deaf babies whose parents use sign language begin making their first word/gestures around eight months. This stage is characterized by the production of actual speech signs. Often the words are simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle. When the child has acquired about 50 words he develops regular pronunciation patterns. This may even distort certain words-- turtle becomes "kurka". Incorrect pronunciations are systematic at this time: all words with /r/ are pronounced as /w/. sick--thick, thick--fick. Children tend to perceive more phonemic contrasts than they are able to produce themselves.
The first 50 words tend to be names of important persons, greetings, foods, highlights of the daily routine such as baths, ability to change their environment-give, take, go, up, down, open.
The meaning of words may not correspond to that of adult language:
overextension-- dog may mean any four legged creature. apple may mean any round object. bird may mean any flying object. Child can still distinguish between the differences, simply hasn't learned that they are linguistically meaningful. Dissimilarities linguistically redundant.
two patterns in child word learning--
referential-- names of objects.
expressive-- personal desires and social interactions: bye-bye, hi, good,
This is a continuum. Child's place on this continuum partly due to parent's style: naming vs. pointing.
The extra-linguistic context provides much of the speech info. Rising and falling intonation may or may not be used to distinguish questions from statements at the one-word stage. Words left out if the contexts makes them obvious. At this stage, utterances show no internal grammatical structure (much like the sentence yes in adult speech, which can't be broken down into subject, predicate, etc.)
4. Combining words-- 18 mo--2 years. By two and a half years most children speak in sentences of several words--but their grammar is far from complete. This stage rapidly progresses into what has been termed a fifth and final stage of language acquisition, the All hell breaks loose stage. By six the child's grammar approximates that of adults.
Children learning any language seem to encode the same limited set of meanings in their first sentences:
Ownership-- Daddy's shoes; describing events-- Me fall; labeling-- That dog; locational relations-- toy in box.
Sentences usually two words. Children can repeat more complex sentences spoken by adults but cannot create them until later (called prefabricated routines) not indicative of the child's grammar.
Other patterns in early speech
The ends of words learned more quickly: -raff for giraff, -mato for tomato, -narna for banana. This is true even in lang. where the stress in always on the first syllable.
Avoidance of exceptions-- overextension of a pattern: go--goed; good--gooder.
The rest of the acquisition of grammar is idiosyncratic-- some children repeat more, others create more. Some children produce a great number of words before beginning to combine them into sentences. Others immediately begin to make sentences. There may be several individual routes to mastering one's native language.
Conclusion. All three theories--the imitation theory, the innateness theory, and the cognitive theory--are probably correct to a degree; each describes particular facets of a complex phenomenon.
1) Cognitive development is an essential prerequisite for linguistic development. But language acquisition doesn't occur spontaneously because of cognitive development (as seems to be the case in animal systems of communication.
2) Repetition, imitation, structured input are all a part of language acquisition. Greater exposure to language might speed language acquisition up but is not essential.
3) Innate learning device. All children exposed to language, regardless of environmental factors and differences in intelligence, are able to acquire very complex grammars at a very early age. Something innate to the child--the LAD--allows for such rapid and successful language acquisition by children.
All of the above studies have revealed a few universally accepted facts about child language acquisition.
1) Child Language acquisition is a natural consequence of human society. All children exposed to language acquire it naturally without deliberate efforts of teaching or learning.
2) The outcome of first language acquisition will be the same regardless of individual differences in intelligence. Two children with quite different intellectual abilities will both acquire a highly complex native language by age six.
3) Although the basic ability to acquire language is innate to the child, no specific structural property of language has yet been proven to be innate. Therefore, any infant is equally capable of acquiring any language. Infants born of different racial stocks will acquire the same form of language if raised in the same linguistic environment. There is no such a thing as a Russian language gene or a Swahili language gene. An infant born of Russian parents and adopted into an American family will acquire the same form of English as his stepbrothers and sisters.
Otherwise, the phenomenon of child language acquisition is just as much a mystery to us as it was to Pharoah Psammeticus.
Sources
ceep.crc.illinois.edu/pubs/katzsym/clark-b.pdf
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Buddhasravaka Bhiksu University-Seminar BA Part-1/2010
Buddhasravaka Bhiksu University
Anuradhapura
External Degree Programme
BA part-1
English Language
2010
Language Acquisition and Language Learning
According to linguists, there is an important distinction between language acquisition and language learning.
As you have noticed, children acquire their mother tongue through interaction with their parents and the environment that surrounds them. Their need to communicate paves the way for language acquisition to take place. As experts suggest, there is an innate capacity in every human being to acquire language. By the time a child is five years old, s/he can express ideas clearly and almost perfectly from the point of view of language and grammar. Although, parents never sit with children to explain to them the workings of the language, their utterances show a superb command of intricate rules and patterns that would drive an adult crazy if s/he tried to memorize them and use them accurately. This suggests that it is through exposure to the language and meaningful communication that a first language is acquired, without the need of systematic studies of any kind.
When it comes to second language learning in children, you will notice that this happens almost identically to their first language acquisition. And even teachers focus more on the communicative aspect of the language rather than on just rules and patterns for the children to repeat and memorize. In order to acquire language, the learner needs a source of natural communication.
The emphasis is on the text of the communication and not on the form. Young students who are in the process of acquiring a second language get plenty of "on the job" practice. They readily acquire the language to communicate with classmates.
In short, we see this tendency in which second language teachers are quite aware of the importance of communication in young learners and their inability to memorize rules consciously.
Unfortunately, when it comes to adult students, a quick look at the current methodologies and language courses available clearly shows that communication is set aside, neglected or even disregarded. In almost all cases, courses revolve around grammar, patterns, repetitions, drillings and rote memorization without even a human interlocutor to interact with.
The very same courses that promise you language independence and the ability to communicate upon completion of the courses do not offer you a single chance to do engage in meaningful conversations. How many times have you bought or read about "the ultimate language course on CD" in which the learner simply has to sit in front of a computer to listen to and repeat words and phrases time and again. That is not communication. That is the way you train a parrot. The animal will definitely learn and repeat a few phrases and amuse you and your friends, but it will never be able to communicate effectively.
How could you be expected to communicate if you are never given the chance to speak with a real person? Language without real communication is as useless as Saint Valentine's Day without lovers or Children's day without kids.
In some other scenarios, in which there is a teacher, the work done in class is mostly grammatically oriented: tenses, rules, multiple choice exercises and so on and so forth. This is similar to the way, in which a child acquires a language. No wonder why so many people fail in acquiring a second language naturally. Simply because whatever they are doing is highly unnatural and devoid of meaning to them. This is the field of language learning.
Language learning as seen today is not communicative. It is the result of direct instruction in the rules of language. And it certainly is not an age-appropriate activity for your young learners_ as it is not for adults either. In language learning, students have conscious knowledge of the new language and can talk about that knowledge.
They can fill in the blanks on a grammar page. Research has shown, however, that knowing grammar rules does not necessarily result in good speaking or writing. A student who has memorized the rules of the language may be able to succeed on a standardized test of English language, but may not be able to speak or write correctly. As teachers, it is our duty to make sure that our students acquire rather than learn the language.
Sources
ezinearticles.com/?Language-Acquisition...Language-Learning-05.10.2010
What is grammar?
Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves. The more we are aware of how it works, the more we can monitor the meaning and effectiveness of the way we and others use language. It can help foster precision, detect ambiguity, and exploit the richness of expression available in English. And it can help everyone--not only teachers of English, but teachers of anything, for all teaching are ultimately a matter of getting to grips with meaning (David Crystal, "In Word and Deed," TES Teacher, April 30, 2004).
It is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test
(William Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938).
During the Middle Ages, grammar was often used to describe learning in general, including the magical, occult practices popularly associated with the scholars of the day. People in Scotland pronounced grammar as "glam-our," and extended the association to mean magical beauty or enchantment.
Descriptive Grammar and Prescriptive Grammar
In our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you’ll find two definitions of grammar:
1. The systematic study and description of a language.
2. A set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and word structures of a language, usually intended as an aid to the learning of that language.
Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used.
Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules--but in different ways. Specialists in descriptive grammar study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as most editors and teachers) lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or “incorrect” use of language.
By their nature, all popular style and usage guides are prescriptive, though to varying degrees: some are fairly tolerant of deviations from Standard English; others can be downright cranky. The most irascible critics are sometimes called "the Grammar Police."
Though certainly different in their approaches to language, both kinds of grammar--descriptive and prescriptive--are useful to students.
Value of Studying Grammar
The study of grammar all by itself will not necessarily make you a better writer. But by gaining a clearer understanding of how our language works, you should also gain greater control over the way you shape words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. In short, studying grammar may help you become a more effective writer.
Descriptive grammarians generally advise us not to be overly concerned with matters of correctness: language, they say, isn't good or bad; it simply is. As the history of the glamorous word grammar demonstrates, the English language is a living system of communication, a continually evolving affair. Within a generation or two, words and phrases come into fashion and fall out again. Over centuries, word endings and entire sentence structures can change or disappear.
Prescriptive grammarians prefer giving practical advice about using language: straightforward rules to help us avoid making errors. The rules may be over-simplified at times, but they are meant to keep us out of trouble--the kind of trouble that may distract or even confuse our readers.
Sources
grammar.about.com-06.10.2010
Transformational-generative grammar (TGG)
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program.
In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely via transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and that these structures would reveal properties, common to all languages, which were concealed by their surface structures. However, this was perhaps not the central motivation for introducing deep structure. Transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:
But the fundamental reason for the inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative", the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Development of basic concepts
Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky's current theories, he has now abandoned the original notion of Deep Structure and Surface Structure. Initially, two additional levels of representation were introduced (LF — Logical Form, and PF — Phonetic Form), and then in the 1990s Chomsky sketched out a new program of research known as Minimalism, in which Deep Structure and Surface Structure no longer featured and PF and LF remained as the only levels of representation.
To complicate the understanding of the development of Noam Chomsky's theories, the precise meanings of Deep Structure and Surface Structure have changed over time — by the 1970s, the two were normally referred to simply as D-Structure and S-Structure by Chomskyan linguists. In particular, the idea that the meaning of a sentence was determined by its Deep Structure (taken to its logical conclusions by the generative during the same period) was dropped for good by Chomskyan linguists when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff had begun to argue that meaning was determined by both Deep and Surface Structure).
Innate linguistic knowledge
Terms such as "transformation" can give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences. Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the most important of Chomsky's ideas is that most of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general, and need only actually learn the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is exposed to. Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who had the same basic idea), but he helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist attitudes towards language. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated.
Grammatical theories
In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g. starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealized version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis (see the "Grammaticality" section below). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy would only come if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other words, real insight into the structure of individual languages could only be gained through the comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.
I-Language and E-Language
In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction. (I-language) refers to Internal language and is contrasted with External Language (or E-language). I-Language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective; most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus, E-Language is not itself a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence, even though they may seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.
Grammaticality
Further information: Grammaticality
Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and useful way. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical". Although few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was at an opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually mentalistic way (for the time). He argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, and when various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. This, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". But, such sentences manifest a linguistic problem distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no native speaker would accept as being well formed.
The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative syntacticians to base their research on a methodology in which studying language through a corpus of observed speech became downplayed, since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered to be appropriate data on which to build a grammatical model.
Minimalism
In the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, much research in transformational grammar was inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of Transformational-generative grammar theory.
Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterruptable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the number of their subject (e.g. "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterruptable.
Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is controversial. An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in "Bare Phrase Structure", an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in "phases". The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.
Mathematical representation
Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an important feature of all transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than context-free grammars.[12] This idea was formalized by Chomsky in the Chomsky hierarchy. Chomsky argued that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context-free grammars.[13] His general position regarding the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak generative capacity were later disproven.[14][15]
Transformations
The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.
For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all mangoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all mangoes?” In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Emonds on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of government and binding theory in the late 1980s, transformations are no longer structure changing operations at all; instead they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents.
The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones. A different transformation raised embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences such as "John seems to have gone"; and yet a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints that was found in the 1970s, these construction specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule of move alpha or Move.
Transformations actually come of two types: (i) the post-Deep structure kind mentioned above, which are string or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs). Generalized transformations were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1957). They take small structures which are either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For example, the generalized transformation of embedding would take the kernel "Dave said X" and the kernel "Dan likes smoking" and combine them into "Dave said Dan likes smoking". GTs are thus structure building rather than structure changing. In the Extended Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules. However, they are still present in tree-adjoining grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction operations and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism as the operations Merge and Move.
In generative phonology, another form of transformation is the phonological rule, which describes a mapping between an underlying representation (the phoneme) and the surface form that is articulated during natural speech.[16]
Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar-2010
Buddhasravaka Bhiksu University
Anuradhapura
External Degree Programme
BA part-1
English Language
2010
Model question paper
Answer only five questions. Select at least one from each part.
Each question carries 20 marks.
__________________________________________________________________
Part-1 Language acquisition
1. “Language acquisition is more effective than language learning.” Stephen Krashan. Discuss.
2. Explain both L1 and L2 acquisition.
3. Critical period effects on second language learning
Part-2 Theories of grammar
4. (1) What is grammar?
(2) Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Discuss.
(3) Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used. Discuss.
5. Transformational -generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Discuss.
Part-3 Varieties of English Language
6. Explain the following.
(1) English as L1.
(2) English as L2
(3) English as FL.
7. No other language is superior to English in the world. Explain the validity of this statement.
Part-4 Semantics
8. Semantics means the branch of linguistics that deals with the study of meaning, changes in meaning, and the principles that govern the relationship between sentences or words and their meaning. Discuss.
Anuradhapura
External Degree Programme
BA part-1
English Language
2010
Language Acquisition and Language Learning
According to linguists, there is an important distinction between language acquisition and language learning.
As you have noticed, children acquire their mother tongue through interaction with their parents and the environment that surrounds them. Their need to communicate paves the way for language acquisition to take place. As experts suggest, there is an innate capacity in every human being to acquire language. By the time a child is five years old, s/he can express ideas clearly and almost perfectly from the point of view of language and grammar. Although, parents never sit with children to explain to them the workings of the language, their utterances show a superb command of intricate rules and patterns that would drive an adult crazy if s/he tried to memorize them and use them accurately. This suggests that it is through exposure to the language and meaningful communication that a first language is acquired, without the need of systematic studies of any kind.
When it comes to second language learning in children, you will notice that this happens almost identically to their first language acquisition. And even teachers focus more on the communicative aspect of the language rather than on just rules and patterns for the children to repeat and memorize. In order to acquire language, the learner needs a source of natural communication.
The emphasis is on the text of the communication and not on the form. Young students who are in the process of acquiring a second language get plenty of "on the job" practice. They readily acquire the language to communicate with classmates.
In short, we see this tendency in which second language teachers are quite aware of the importance of communication in young learners and their inability to memorize rules consciously.
Unfortunately, when it comes to adult students, a quick look at the current methodologies and language courses available clearly shows that communication is set aside, neglected or even disregarded. In almost all cases, courses revolve around grammar, patterns, repetitions, drillings and rote memorization without even a human interlocutor to interact with.
The very same courses that promise you language independence and the ability to communicate upon completion of the courses do not offer you a single chance to do engage in meaningful conversations. How many times have you bought or read about "the ultimate language course on CD" in which the learner simply has to sit in front of a computer to listen to and repeat words and phrases time and again. That is not communication. That is the way you train a parrot. The animal will definitely learn and repeat a few phrases and amuse you and your friends, but it will never be able to communicate effectively.
How could you be expected to communicate if you are never given the chance to speak with a real person? Language without real communication is as useless as Saint Valentine's Day without lovers or Children's day without kids.
In some other scenarios, in which there is a teacher, the work done in class is mostly grammatically oriented: tenses, rules, multiple choice exercises and so on and so forth. This is similar to the way, in which a child acquires a language. No wonder why so many people fail in acquiring a second language naturally. Simply because whatever they are doing is highly unnatural and devoid of meaning to them. This is the field of language learning.
Language learning as seen today is not communicative. It is the result of direct instruction in the rules of language. And it certainly is not an age-appropriate activity for your young learners_ as it is not for adults either. In language learning, students have conscious knowledge of the new language and can talk about that knowledge.
They can fill in the blanks on a grammar page. Research has shown, however, that knowing grammar rules does not necessarily result in good speaking or writing. A student who has memorized the rules of the language may be able to succeed on a standardized test of English language, but may not be able to speak or write correctly. As teachers, it is our duty to make sure that our students acquire rather than learn the language.
Sources
ezinearticles.com/?Language-Acquisition...Language-Learning-05.10.2010
What is grammar?
Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves. The more we are aware of how it works, the more we can monitor the meaning and effectiveness of the way we and others use language. It can help foster precision, detect ambiguity, and exploit the richness of expression available in English. And it can help everyone--not only teachers of English, but teachers of anything, for all teaching are ultimately a matter of getting to grips with meaning (David Crystal, "In Word and Deed," TES Teacher, April 30, 2004).
It is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test
(William Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938).
During the Middle Ages, grammar was often used to describe learning in general, including the magical, occult practices popularly associated with the scholars of the day. People in Scotland pronounced grammar as "glam-our," and extended the association to mean magical beauty or enchantment.
Descriptive Grammar and Prescriptive Grammar
In our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you’ll find two definitions of grammar:
1. The systematic study and description of a language.
2. A set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and word structures of a language, usually intended as an aid to the learning of that language.
Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used.
Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules--but in different ways. Specialists in descriptive grammar study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as most editors and teachers) lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or “incorrect” use of language.
By their nature, all popular style and usage guides are prescriptive, though to varying degrees: some are fairly tolerant of deviations from Standard English; others can be downright cranky. The most irascible critics are sometimes called "the Grammar Police."
Though certainly different in their approaches to language, both kinds of grammar--descriptive and prescriptive--are useful to students.
Value of Studying Grammar
The study of grammar all by itself will not necessarily make you a better writer. But by gaining a clearer understanding of how our language works, you should also gain greater control over the way you shape words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. In short, studying grammar may help you become a more effective writer.
Descriptive grammarians generally advise us not to be overly concerned with matters of correctness: language, they say, isn't good or bad; it simply is. As the history of the glamorous word grammar demonstrates, the English language is a living system of communication, a continually evolving affair. Within a generation or two, words and phrases come into fashion and fall out again. Over centuries, word endings and entire sentence structures can change or disappear.
Prescriptive grammarians prefer giving practical advice about using language: straightforward rules to help us avoid making errors. The rules may be over-simplified at times, but they are meant to keep us out of trouble--the kind of trouble that may distract or even confuse our readers.
Sources
grammar.about.com-06.10.2010
Transformational-generative grammar (TGG)
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program.
In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely via transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and that these structures would reveal properties, common to all languages, which were concealed by their surface structures. However, this was perhaps not the central motivation for introducing deep structure. Transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:
But the fundamental reason for the inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative", the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Development of basic concepts
Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky's current theories, he has now abandoned the original notion of Deep Structure and Surface Structure. Initially, two additional levels of representation were introduced (LF — Logical Form, and PF — Phonetic Form), and then in the 1990s Chomsky sketched out a new program of research known as Minimalism, in which Deep Structure and Surface Structure no longer featured and PF and LF remained as the only levels of representation.
To complicate the understanding of the development of Noam Chomsky's theories, the precise meanings of Deep Structure and Surface Structure have changed over time — by the 1970s, the two were normally referred to simply as D-Structure and S-Structure by Chomskyan linguists. In particular, the idea that the meaning of a sentence was determined by its Deep Structure (taken to its logical conclusions by the generative during the same period) was dropped for good by Chomskyan linguists when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff had begun to argue that meaning was determined by both Deep and Surface Structure).
Innate linguistic knowledge
Terms such as "transformation" can give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences. Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the most important of Chomsky's ideas is that most of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general, and need only actually learn the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is exposed to. Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who had the same basic idea), but he helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist attitudes towards language. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated.
Grammatical theories
In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g. starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealized version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis (see the "Grammaticality" section below). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy would only come if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other words, real insight into the structure of individual languages could only be gained through the comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.
I-Language and E-Language
In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction. (I-language) refers to Internal language and is contrasted with External Language (or E-language). I-Language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective; most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus, E-Language is not itself a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence, even though they may seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.
Grammaticality
Further information: Grammaticality
Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and useful way. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical". Although few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was at an opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually mentalistic way (for the time). He argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, and when various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. This, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". But, such sentences manifest a linguistic problem distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no native speaker would accept as being well formed.
The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative syntacticians to base their research on a methodology in which studying language through a corpus of observed speech became downplayed, since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered to be appropriate data on which to build a grammatical model.
Minimalism
In the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, much research in transformational grammar was inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of Transformational-generative grammar theory.
Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterruptable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the number of their subject (e.g. "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterruptable.
Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is controversial. An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in "Bare Phrase Structure", an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in "phases". The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.
Mathematical representation
Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an important feature of all transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than context-free grammars.[12] This idea was formalized by Chomsky in the Chomsky hierarchy. Chomsky argued that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context-free grammars.[13] His general position regarding the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak generative capacity were later disproven.[14][15]
Transformations
The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.
For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all mangoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all mangoes?” In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Emonds on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of government and binding theory in the late 1980s, transformations are no longer structure changing operations at all; instead they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents.
The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones. A different transformation raised embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences such as "John seems to have gone"; and yet a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints that was found in the 1970s, these construction specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule of move alpha or Move.
Transformations actually come of two types: (i) the post-Deep structure kind mentioned above, which are string or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs). Generalized transformations were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1957). They take small structures which are either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For example, the generalized transformation of embedding would take the kernel "Dave said X" and the kernel "Dan likes smoking" and combine them into "Dave said Dan likes smoking". GTs are thus structure building rather than structure changing. In the Extended Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules. However, they are still present in tree-adjoining grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction operations and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism as the operations Merge and Move.
In generative phonology, another form of transformation is the phonological rule, which describes a mapping between an underlying representation (the phoneme) and the surface form that is articulated during natural speech.[16]
Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar-2010
Buddhasravaka Bhiksu University
Anuradhapura
External Degree Programme
BA part-1
English Language
2010
Model question paper
Answer only five questions. Select at least one from each part.
Each question carries 20 marks.
__________________________________________________________________
Part-1 Language acquisition
1. “Language acquisition is more effective than language learning.” Stephen Krashan. Discuss.
2. Explain both L1 and L2 acquisition.
3. Critical period effects on second language learning
Part-2 Theories of grammar
4. (1) What is grammar?
(2) Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Discuss.
(3) Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used. Discuss.
5. Transformational -generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Discuss.
Part-3 Varieties of English Language
6. Explain the following.
(1) English as L1.
(2) English as L2
(3) English as FL.
7. No other language is superior to English in the world. Explain the validity of this statement.
Part-4 Semantics
8. Semantics means the branch of linguistics that deals with the study of meaning, changes in meaning, and the principles that govern the relationship between sentences or words and their meaning. Discuss.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
American and British English pronunciation differences
American and British English differences
Vocabulary
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom
List of British words not widely used in the United States
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: A–L
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: M–Z
Pronunciation
Accent
Vocabulary
Orthography
American and British English spelling differences
Computing
British and American keyboards
Fiction
List of works with different titles in the UK and US
edit box
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:
differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.
In the following discussion
superscript A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
superscript B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Stress
o 1.1 French stress
o 1.2 -ate and -atory
o 1.3 Miscellaneous stress
• 2 Affixes
o 2.1 -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
o 2.2 -ile
o 2.3 -ine
• 3 Weak forms
• 4 Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
o 4.1 Single differences
o 4.2 Multiple differences
• 5 References
Stress
French stress
For many loanwords from French where AmE has final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. Such words include:
BrE first-syllable stress: adultA2,B2, balletA2, baton, beret, bidet, blasé, brevetA2, brochureB2, buffet, caféA2, canardB2, chagrin,chaletA2, chauffeurA2,B2, chiffon, clichéB2, coupé, croissant, debrisB2, debut, décor, detailA2, détenteB2, flambé, frappé, garageB2,gateau, gourmetA2, lamé, montageA2, parquet, pastel, pastille, pâté, précis, sachet, salon, soupçon, vaccine; matinée, négligée,nonchalant, nondescript; also some French names, including BernardB2, Calais, Degas, Dijon, Dumas, Francoise, ManetA2, Maurice,MonetA2, Pauline, Renault, RenéB2, Renoir, Rimbaud, DelacroixB2.
BrE second-syllable stress: attaché, consommé, décolleté, déclassé, De Beauvoir, Debussy, démodé, denouement, distingué, Dubonnet,escargot, exposé, fiancé(e), retroussé
A few French words have other stress differences:
AmE first-syllable, BrE last-syllable: addressA2 (postal), moustacheA2; cigaretteA2, limousineB2, magazineB2,
AmE first-syllable, BrE second-syllable: liaisonA2, macramé, Renaissance (AmE also final-syllable stress)
AmE second-syllable, BrE last-syllable: New Orleans
ate and -atory
Most 2-syllable verbs ending -ate have first-syllable stress in AmE and second-syllable stress in BrE. This includes castrate, dictateA2,donateA2, locateA2, mandateB2, migrate, placate, prostrate, pulsate, rotate, serrateB2, spectate, striated, translateA2, vacate, vibrate; in the case of cremate, narrate, placate, the first vowel is in addition reduced to /ə/ in BrE. Examples where AmE and BrE match include create,debate, equate, elate, negate, orate, relate with second-syllable stress; and mandate and probate with first-syllable stress. Derived nouns in -ator may retain the distinction, but those in -ation do not. Also, migratoryA2 and vibratory retain the distinction.
Most longer -ate verbs are pronounced the same in AmE and BrE, but a few have first-syllable stress in BrE and second-syllable stress in AmE: elongate, infiltrateA2, remonstrate, tergiversate. However, some derived adjectives ending -atory have a difference, as stress shifting to -at- can occur in BrE with the final vowel sound being omitted, in this case, the 'o'. Among these cases are regulatoryB2, celebratoryA2,participatoryB2, where AmE stresses the same syllable as the corresponding -ate verb; and compensatory, where AmE stresses the second syllable.
A further -atory difference is laboratory: AmE /ˈlæbrɪtɔriː/ and BrE /ləˈbɒrət(ə)riː/.
Miscellaneous stress
There are a number of cases where same-spelled noun, verb and/or adjective have uniform stress in one dialect but distinct stress in the other (e.g. alternate, prospect): see initial-stress-derived noun.
The following table lists words where the only difference between AmE and BrE is in stress (possibly with a consequent reduction of the unstressed vowel). Words with other points of difference are listed in a later table.
BrE AmE words with relevant syllable stressed in each dialect
1st 2nd caffeine, cannotA2, casein, Kathleen, SuezA2, communal, escalopeB2, harass, omega, paprikaB2, patina, subaltern, stalactite, stalagmite, ThanksgivingB2, transference, aristocratA2,B2, kilometre/kilometerB2
2nd 1st defense (sport), guffawA2, ice creamA2,B2, guru, mama, papa, pretense, princessA2,B2, weekendB2, Canton, anginaA2,Augustine, Bushido, Ghanaian, LofotenB2, marshmallow, patronal, spread-eagle, controversy, formidableB2, hospitableB2, miscellany, predicative, saxophonistB2, submariner, ancillary, capillary, catenary, corollary, fritillary, medullary
1st 3rd ParmesanB2, partisan, premature, opportune, carburet(t)or
3rd 1st margarine, PyreneesB2, cockatoo
2nd 3rd advertisement
3rd 2nd arytenoidA2, oregano, obscurantist
Affixes
-ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
Where the syllable preceding -ary,-ery or -ory is stressed, AmE pronounce all these endings /əriː/, while BrE pronounce these endings without the vowel sound, similar to that of atory, where the 'o' isn't pronounced. Where the preceding syllable is unstressed, however, AmE has a full vowel rather than schwa: /ɛri/ for -ary and -ery and /ɔri/ for -ory. BrE retains the reduced vowel /əriː/, or even elides it completely to /riː/. (The elision is avoided in carefully enunciated speech, especially with endings -rary,-rery,-rory.) So military is AmE /ˈmɪlɪtɛriː/ and BrE /ˈmɪlɪtəriː/ or/ˈmɪlɪtriː/.
Note that stress differences occur with ending -atory (explained above) and a few others like capillary (included above). A few words have the full vowel in AmE in the ending even though the preceding syllable is stressed: library, primaryA2, rosemary. Pronouncing library as /ˈlaɪbɛriː/rather than /ˈlaɪbrɛriː/ is highly stigmatized in AmE, whereas in BrE, /ˈlaɪbriː/ is common in rapid or casual speech.
Formerly the BrE-AmE distinction for adjectives carried over to corresponding adverbs ending -arily, -erily or -orily. However, nowadays most BrE speakers adopt the AmE practice of shifting the stress to the antepenultimate syllable: militarily is thus /ˌmɪlɪˈtɛrɪliː/ rather than /ˈmɪlɪtrɪliː/.
The placename component -bury (e.g. Canterbury) has a similar difference after a stressed syllable: AmE /bɛri/ and BrE /brɪː/ or /bərɪː/. The ending -mony after a stressed syllable is AmE /moʊni/ but BrE /mənɪː/. The word -berry in compounds has a slightly different distinction: in BrE, it is reduced (/bəriː/ or /briː/) after a stressed syllable, and may be full /bɛriː/ after an unstressed syllable; in AmE it is usually full in all cases. Thus, strawberry is BrE /ˈstrɔːbəriː/ but AmE /ˈstrɔbɛriː/, while whortleberry is BrE /ˈwɔːtlbɛriː/ and similarly AmE /ˈwɔrtlbɛriː/.
-ile
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending -ilis are mostly pronounced with a full vowel (/aɪl/) in BrE but a reduced vowel /ɪl/ or syllabic /l/ in AmE (e.g. fertile rhymes with fur tile in BrE but with turtle in AmE). This difference applies:
generally to agile, docile, facile, fertile, fissile, fragile, futile, infertile, missile, nubile, octile, puerile, rutile, servile, stabile, sterile, tactile,tensile, virile, volatile;
usually to ductile, hostile, (im)mobile (adjective), projectile, textile, utile, versatile;
not usually to decile, domicile, infantile, juvenile, labile, mercantile, pensile, reptile, senile;
not to crocodile, exile, gentile, percentile, reconcile; nor to compounds of monosyllables (e.g. turnstile from stile).
Related endings -ility, -ilize, -iliary are pronounced the same in AmE as BrE. The name Savile is pronounced with (/ɪl/) in both BrE and AmE.Mobile (sculpture), camomile and febrile are sometimes pronounced with /il/ in AmE and /aɪl/ in BrE. Imbecile has /aɪl/ or /iːl/ in BrE and often /ɪl/ in AmE.
ine
The suffix -ine, when unstressed, is pronounced sometimes /aɪn/ (e.g. feline), sometimes /iːn/ (e.g. morphine) and sometimes /ɪn/ (e.g.medicine). Some words have variable pronunciation within BrE, or within AmE, or between BrE and AmE. Generally, AmE is more likely to favour /iːn/ or /ɪn/, and BrE to favour /aɪn/: e.g. adamantineA2, carbine, crystallineA2, labyrinthine, philistine, serpentineA2, turbineA2. However, sometimes AmE has /aɪn/ where BrE has /iːn/; e.g. iodineB2, strychnineA2.
Weak forms
Some function words can has a weak form in AmE, with a reduced vocal used when the word is unstressed, but always use the full vowel in RP. These include: or [ɚ]; you [jə]; your [jɚ].
On the other hand, the titles Saint and Sir before a person's name have "weak forms" in BrE but not AmE: before vowels, [snt] and [sər]; before consonants, [sn] and [sə].
Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
These tables list words pronounced differently but spelled the same. See also the table of words with different pronunciation reflected in the spelling.
Single differences
Words with multiple points of difference of pronunciation are in the table after this one. Accent-based differences are ignored. For example,Moscow is RP /ˈmɒskəʊ/ and GAm /ˈmɑskaʊ/, but only the /əʊ/-/aʊ/ difference is highlighted here, since the /ɒ/-/ɑ/ difference is predictable from the accent. Also, tiara is listed with AmE /æ/; the marry-merry-Mary merger changes this vowel for many Americans. Some AmE types are listed as /ɒ/ where GAm merges to /ɑ/ .
BrE
AmE
Words
/æ/ /ɑ/ annato, BangladeshA2, Caracas, chiantiA2, Galapagos, GdańskA2, grappaA2, gulagA2, HanoiA2, JanA2 (male name, e.g. Jan Palach), KantA2, kebab, Las (placenames, e.g. Las Vegas), Mafia, mishmashA2, MombasaA2, Natasha, Nissan, Pablo, pasta, PicassoA2, ralentando, SanA2 (names outside USA; e.g. San Juan), SlovakA2, Sri LankaA2, Vivaldi, wigwamA2, YasserA2 (and A in many other foreign names and loanwords)
/iː/ /ɛ/ aesthete, anaesthetize, breveA2, catenaryA2, Daedalus, devolutionA2,B2, ecumenicalB2, epochA2, evolutionA2,B2, febrileA2, Hephaestus, KenyaB2, leverA2, methane, OedipusA2, (o)estrus, penalizeA2, predecessorA2, pyrethrinA2, senileA2, hygienic
/ɒ/ /oʊ/ Aeroflot, compost, homosexualB2, Interpol, Lod, pogrom, polkaB2, produce (noun), Rosh Hashanah, sconeA2,B2, shone, sojourn, trollB2, yoghurt
/ɑː/ /æ/ (Excluding trap-bath split words) banana, javaA2, khakiA2, morale, NevadaA2, scenarioA2, sopranoA2, tiaraA2, Pakistani
/ɛ/ /i/ CecilA2,B2, crematoriumA2, cretin, depot, inherentA2,B2, leisureA2, medievalA2, reconnoitreA2, zebraB2, zenithA2,B2
/æ/ /eɪ/ compatriot, patriotB2, patronise, phalanx, plait, repatriate, Sabine, satrapA2, satyrA2, basilA2 (plant)
/ɪ/ /aɪ/ dynasty, housewifery, idyll, livelongA2, long-livedA2, privacyB2, simultaneous, vicariousA2, vitamin. Also the suffix -ization. See also -ine.
/z/ /s/ AussieA2, blouse, complaisantA2, crescent, diagnoseA2, erase, GlasgowA2, parse, valise, trans-A2,B2 (in some words)
/ɑː/ /eɪ/ amenA2, charadeB2, cicada, galaA2, promenadeA2, pro rata, tomato, stratum
/əʊ/ /ɒ/ codify, goffer, ogleA2, phonetician, processor, progress (noun), slothA2,B2, wont A2, wroth
/ʌ/ /ɒ/ accomplice, accomplish, colanderB2, constableB2, Lombardy, monetaryA2, -mongerA2
/ɒ/ /ʌ/ hovelA2,B2, hover. Also the strong forms of these function words: anybodyA2 (likewise every-, some-, and no-),becauseA2,B2 (and clipping 'cos/'cause), ofA2, fromA2, wasA2, whatA2
(sounded) (silent)
Beethoven, chthonic, herbA2 (plant), KnossosB2, phthisicB2, salve, solder
/ɑː(r)/ /ɚ/ Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, Hertford. (The only AmE word with = [ɑr] is sergeant).
/aɪ/ /i/ eitherA2,B2, neitherA2,B2, Pleiades. See also -ine.
/iː/ /aɪ/ albino, migraineB2. Also the prefixes anti-A2, multi-A2, semi-A2 in loose compounds (e.g. in anti-establishment, but not in antibody). See also -ine.
/ə/ /ɒ/ Amazon, hexagon, octagon, paragon, pentagon, phenomenon, python
/iː/ /eɪ/ eta, beta, quayA2, theta, zeta
/aɪ/ /ɪ/ butylB2, diverge, minorityA2,B2, primer (schoolbook). See also -ine.
/ɛ/ /eɪ/ ateB2 ("et" is nonstandard in America), mêlée, chaise longue
/ɜːz/ /us/ Betelgeuse, chanteuse, chartreuseA2, masseuse
/eɪ/ /æ/ apricotA2, dahlia, digitalis, patentA2,B2, comrade
(silent)
(sounded) medicineB2. See also -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry
/ɒ/ /ə/ Amos, condom, Enoch
/ʃ/ /ʒ/ AsiaB2, PersiaB2, versionB2
/ə/ /oʊ/ borough, thorough, also place names such as Edinburgh (see also -ory and -mony)
/ɪr/ /ɚ/ chirrupA2, stirrupA2, sirupA2, squirrel
/siː/ /ʃ/ cassia, CassiusA2, hessian
/tiː/ /ʃ/ consortium
/uː/ /ju/ couponA2, fuchsine, HoustonB2
/uː/ /ʊ/ boulevard, snooker, woofA2 (weaving)
/ɜː(r)/ /ʊr/ connoisseurA2, entrepreneurA2
/ɜː/ /oʊ/ föhnB2, MöbiusB2
/ə/ /eɪ/ DraconianA2, hurricaneB2
/eɪ/ /i/ deityA2,B2, Helene, IsraelB2
/juː/ /w/ iguana, jaguar, Nicaragua
/ɔː(r)/ /ɚ/ record (noun), stridorA2,B2
/ziː/ /ʒ/ Frasier, Parisian, Malaysia
/æ/ /ɒ/ twatB2
/ɒ/ /æ/ wrath
/ɑː/ /ət/ nougat
/ɑː/ /ɔ/ UtahA2,B2
/ɑː/ /ɔr/ quarkA2,B2
/æ/ /ɛ/ femme fataleA2
/aɪ/ /eɪ/ Isaiah
/aʊ/ /u/ nousA2
/ð/ /θ/ boothB2
/diː/ /dʒi/ cordiality
/dʒ/ /ɡdʒ/ suggestA2
/eɪ/ /ə/ template
/eɪ/ /ət/ tourniquet
/ə(r)/ /ɑr/ MadagascarA2
/ə(r)/ /jɚ/ figureA2 for the verb
/ə/ /ɛ/ nonsense
/ɛ/ /ɑ/ envelopeA2,B2
/ɛ/ /ə/ Kentucky
/ə/ /æ/ trapeze
/ɜː(r)/ /ɛr/ errA2
/əʊ/ /ɒt/ Huguenot
/əʊ/ /aʊ/ MoscowA2
/əʊ/ /u/ broochA2
/ɪ/ /i/ pi(t)taB2
/iː/ /ɪ/ beenB2
/iːʃ/ /ɪtʃ/ nicheA2,B2
/jɜː/ /ju/ milieu
/juː/ /u/ (Excluding words with predictable yod-dropping) barracuda, puma
/ɔː/ /æ/ falconA2
/s/ /z/ asthma
/ʃ/ /sk/ scheduleB2
/t/ /θ/ AnthonyA2,B2
/ts/ /z/ piazzaA2
/ʊ/ /ɪ/ kümmel
/ʊ/ /u/ BuddhaA2
/ʊ/ /ʌ/ brusque, hummus
/uː/ /aʊ/ routeA2
/uː/ /oʊ/ cantaloup(e)
/ʌ/ /oʊ/ covertA2,B2
/z/ /ʃ/ Dionysius
/ziː/ /ʃ/ transientA2, nausea
Multiple differences
The slashes normally used to enclose IPA phonemic transcriptions have been omitted from the following table to improve legibility.
Spelling BrE IPA AmE IPA Notes
barrage
ˈbær.ɑːʒ (1) bəˈrɑʒ
(2) ˈbær.ɪdʒ The AmE pronunciations are for distinct senses (1) "sustained weapon-fire" vs (2) "dam, barrier" (Compare garage below.)
boehmite
(1) ˈbɜːmaɪt
(2) ˈbəʊmaɪt (1) ˈbeɪmaɪt
(2) ˈboʊmaɪt The first pronunciations approximate German [ø] (spelled <ö> or) ; the second ones are anglicized.
bouquet ˈbuːkeɪ (1) boʊˈkeɪ
(2) buˈkeɪ
boyar
(1) ˈbɔɪ.ɑː
(2) bəʊˈjɑː (1) boʊˈjɑr
(2) ˈbɔɪ.jɚ
buoy
ˈbɔɪ ˈbu.i The U.S. pronunciation would be unrecognised in the UK. The British pronunciation occurs in America, more commonly for the verb than the noun, still more in derivatives buoyant, buoyancy.
cadre (1) ˈkæd.ə(r)
(2) ˈkæd.rə (1) ˈkæd.ri
(2) ˈkɑd.ri
(3) ˈkæd.reɪ
(4) ˈkɑd.reɪ
canton kænˈtuːn (1) kænˈtɑn
(2) kænˈtoʊn difference is only in military sense "to quarter soldiers"
dilettante dɪləˈtænti (1) ˈdɪlətɑnt
(2) ˌdɪləˈtɑnt BrE reflects the word's Italian origin; AmE approximates more to French.
enquiry/inquiry ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri (1) ˈɪŋ.kwə.ri
(2) ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri BrE uses two spellings and one pronunciation. In AmE the word is usually spelled inquiry.
febrile ˈfiːb.raɪl (1) ˈfɛb.ril
(2) ˈfɛb.rəl The BrE pronunciation occurs in AmE
fracas ˈfrækɑː (1) ˈfreɪkəs
(2) ˈfrækəs The BrE plural is French fracas /ˈfrækɑːz/; the AmE plural is anglicized fracases
garage
(1) ˈɡærɪdʒ
(2) ˈɡærɑːʒ ɡəˈrɑ(d)ʒ The AmE reflects French stress difference. The two BrE pronunciations may represent distinct meanings for some speakers; for example, "a subterranean garage for a car" (1) vs "a petrol garage" (2). (Compare barrage above.)
glacier
(1) ˈɡlæsiə
(2) ˈɡleɪsiə ˈɡleɪʃər
jalousie
(1) ʒælʊˈziː
(2) ˈʒælʊziː ˈdʒæləsi
lapsang souchong
ˈlæpsæŋ suːʃɒŋ ˌlɑpsɑŋ ˈsuʃɑŋ
lasso
ləˈsuː ˈlæsoʊ The BrE pronunciation is common in AmE
lieutenant
(1) lɛfˈtɛnənt
(2) ləˈtɛnənt luˈtɛnənt The 2nd British pronunciation is restricted to the Royal Navy. Standard Canadian pronunciation is the same as the British.
lychee
laɪˈtʃiː ˈliːtʃiː Spelling litchi has pronunciation /ˈlɪtʃiː/
Molière
ˈmɒl.i.ɛə moʊlˈjɛr
oblique əbˈliːk əbˈlaɪk AmE is as BrE except in military sense "advance at an angle"
penchant pãˈʃã ˈpɛntʃənt The AmE pronunciation is anglicized; the BrE is French.
penult pɛˈnʌlt (1) ˈpinʌlt
(2) pɪˈnʌlt
premier (1) ˈprɛmjə
(2) ˈprɛmɪə (1) ˈprimɪr
(2) prɪmˈɪr
première ˈprɛmɪɛə (1) prɪmˈɪr
(2) prɪmˈjɛr
provost
ˈprɒvəst (1) ˈproʊvoʊst
(2) ˈproʊvəst The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
quinine
ˈkwɪniːn (1) ˈkwaɪnaɪn
(2) ˈkwɪnaɪn
resource (1) rɪˈzɔːs
(2) rɪˈsɔːs ˈrisɔrs
respite ˈrɛspaɪt (1) ˈrɛspət
(2) rɪˈspaɪt
reveille
rɪˈvæliː ˈrɛvəli
slough slaʊ slu sense "bog"; in metaphorical sense "gloom", the BrE pronunciation is common in AmE.Homograph "cast off skin" is /slʌf/ everywhere.
Tunisia
tjuːˈnɪziə (1) tuˈniʒə
(2) tuˈniʃə
untoward ˌʌn.tʊˈwɔːd[1]
(1) ʌnˈtɔrd
(2) ˌʌn.təˈwɔrd
vase
vɑːz (1) veɪs
(2) veɪz The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
z (the letter)
zɛd ziː The spelling of this letter as a word corresponds to the pronunciation: thus Commonwealth (including, usually, Canada) zed and U.S. (and, occasionally, Canada) zee.
References
1. ^ "untoward". Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Cambridge University Press.
2. Wells, John C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. 2nd ed. Longman. ISBN 0-582-36468-X.
Sources
en.wikipedia.org/.../American_and_British_English_pronunciation_differences
Vocabulary
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom
List of British words not widely used in the United States
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: A–L
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: M–Z
Pronunciation
Accent
Vocabulary
Orthography
American and British English spelling differences
Computing
British and American keyboards
Fiction
List of works with different titles in the UK and US
edit box
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:
differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.
In the following discussion
superscript A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
superscript B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Stress
o 1.1 French stress
o 1.2 -ate and -atory
o 1.3 Miscellaneous stress
• 2 Affixes
o 2.1 -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
o 2.2 -ile
o 2.3 -ine
• 3 Weak forms
• 4 Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
o 4.1 Single differences
o 4.2 Multiple differences
• 5 References
Stress
French stress
For many loanwords from French where AmE has final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. Such words include:
BrE first-syllable stress: adultA2,B2, balletA2, baton, beret, bidet, blasé, brevetA2, brochureB2, buffet, caféA2, canardB2, chagrin,chaletA2, chauffeurA2,B2, chiffon, clichéB2, coupé, croissant, debrisB2, debut, décor, detailA2, détenteB2, flambé, frappé, garageB2,gateau, gourmetA2, lamé, montageA2, parquet, pastel, pastille, pâté, précis, sachet, salon, soupçon, vaccine; matinée, négligée,nonchalant, nondescript; also some French names, including BernardB2, Calais, Degas, Dijon, Dumas, Francoise, ManetA2, Maurice,MonetA2, Pauline, Renault, RenéB2, Renoir, Rimbaud, DelacroixB2.
BrE second-syllable stress: attaché, consommé, décolleté, déclassé, De Beauvoir, Debussy, démodé, denouement, distingué, Dubonnet,escargot, exposé, fiancé(e), retroussé
A few French words have other stress differences:
AmE first-syllable, BrE last-syllable: addressA2 (postal), moustacheA2; cigaretteA2, limousineB2, magazineB2,
AmE first-syllable, BrE second-syllable: liaisonA2, macramé, Renaissance (AmE also final-syllable stress)
AmE second-syllable, BrE last-syllable: New Orleans
ate and -atory
Most 2-syllable verbs ending -ate have first-syllable stress in AmE and second-syllable stress in BrE. This includes castrate, dictateA2,donateA2, locateA2, mandateB2, migrate, placate, prostrate, pulsate, rotate, serrateB2, spectate, striated, translateA2, vacate, vibrate; in the case of cremate, narrate, placate, the first vowel is in addition reduced to /ə/ in BrE. Examples where AmE and BrE match include create,debate, equate, elate, negate, orate, relate with second-syllable stress; and mandate and probate with first-syllable stress. Derived nouns in -ator may retain the distinction, but those in -ation do not. Also, migratoryA2 and vibratory retain the distinction.
Most longer -ate verbs are pronounced the same in AmE and BrE, but a few have first-syllable stress in BrE and second-syllable stress in AmE: elongate, infiltrateA2, remonstrate, tergiversate. However, some derived adjectives ending -atory have a difference, as stress shifting to -at- can occur in BrE with the final vowel sound being omitted, in this case, the 'o'. Among these cases are regulatoryB2, celebratoryA2,participatoryB2, where AmE stresses the same syllable as the corresponding -ate verb; and compensatory, where AmE stresses the second syllable.
A further -atory difference is laboratory: AmE /ˈlæbrɪtɔriː/ and BrE /ləˈbɒrət(ə)riː/.
Miscellaneous stress
There are a number of cases where same-spelled noun, verb and/or adjective have uniform stress in one dialect but distinct stress in the other (e.g. alternate, prospect): see initial-stress-derived noun.
The following table lists words where the only difference between AmE and BrE is in stress (possibly with a consequent reduction of the unstressed vowel). Words with other points of difference are listed in a later table.
BrE AmE words with relevant syllable stressed in each dialect
1st 2nd caffeine, cannotA2, casein, Kathleen, SuezA2, communal, escalopeB2, harass, omega, paprikaB2, patina, subaltern, stalactite, stalagmite, ThanksgivingB2, transference, aristocratA2,B2, kilometre/kilometerB2
2nd 1st defense (sport), guffawA2, ice creamA2,B2, guru, mama, papa, pretense, princessA2,B2, weekendB2, Canton, anginaA2,Augustine, Bushido, Ghanaian, LofotenB2, marshmallow, patronal, spread-eagle, controversy, formidableB2, hospitableB2, miscellany, predicative, saxophonistB2, submariner, ancillary, capillary, catenary, corollary, fritillary, medullary
1st 3rd ParmesanB2, partisan, premature, opportune, carburet(t)or
3rd 1st margarine, PyreneesB2, cockatoo
2nd 3rd advertisement
3rd 2nd arytenoidA2, oregano, obscurantist
Affixes
-ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
Where the syllable preceding -ary,-ery or -ory is stressed, AmE pronounce all these endings /əriː/, while BrE pronounce these endings without the vowel sound, similar to that of atory, where the 'o' isn't pronounced. Where the preceding syllable is unstressed, however, AmE has a full vowel rather than schwa: /ɛri/ for -ary and -ery and /ɔri/ for -ory. BrE retains the reduced vowel /əriː/, or even elides it completely to /riː/. (The elision is avoided in carefully enunciated speech, especially with endings -rary,-rery,-rory.) So military is AmE /ˈmɪlɪtɛriː/ and BrE /ˈmɪlɪtəriː/ or/ˈmɪlɪtriː/.
Note that stress differences occur with ending -atory (explained above) and a few others like capillary (included above). A few words have the full vowel in AmE in the ending even though the preceding syllable is stressed: library, primaryA2, rosemary. Pronouncing library as /ˈlaɪbɛriː/rather than /ˈlaɪbrɛriː/ is highly stigmatized in AmE, whereas in BrE, /ˈlaɪbriː/ is common in rapid or casual speech.
Formerly the BrE-AmE distinction for adjectives carried over to corresponding adverbs ending -arily, -erily or -orily. However, nowadays most BrE speakers adopt the AmE practice of shifting the stress to the antepenultimate syllable: militarily is thus /ˌmɪlɪˈtɛrɪliː/ rather than /ˈmɪlɪtrɪliː/.
The placename component -bury (e.g. Canterbury) has a similar difference after a stressed syllable: AmE /bɛri/ and BrE /brɪː/ or /bərɪː/. The ending -mony after a stressed syllable is AmE /moʊni/ but BrE /mənɪː/. The word -berry in compounds has a slightly different distinction: in BrE, it is reduced (/bəriː/ or /briː/) after a stressed syllable, and may be full /bɛriː/ after an unstressed syllable; in AmE it is usually full in all cases. Thus, strawberry is BrE /ˈstrɔːbəriː/ but AmE /ˈstrɔbɛriː/, while whortleberry is BrE /ˈwɔːtlbɛriː/ and similarly AmE /ˈwɔrtlbɛriː/.
-ile
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending -ilis are mostly pronounced with a full vowel (/aɪl/) in BrE but a reduced vowel /ɪl/ or syllabic /l/ in AmE (e.g. fertile rhymes with fur tile in BrE but with turtle in AmE). This difference applies:
generally to agile, docile, facile, fertile, fissile, fragile, futile, infertile, missile, nubile, octile, puerile, rutile, servile, stabile, sterile, tactile,tensile, virile, volatile;
usually to ductile, hostile, (im)mobile (adjective), projectile, textile, utile, versatile;
not usually to decile, domicile, infantile, juvenile, labile, mercantile, pensile, reptile, senile;
not to crocodile, exile, gentile, percentile, reconcile; nor to compounds of monosyllables (e.g. turnstile from stile).
Related endings -ility, -ilize, -iliary are pronounced the same in AmE as BrE. The name Savile is pronounced with (/ɪl/) in both BrE and AmE.Mobile (sculpture), camomile and febrile are sometimes pronounced with /il/ in AmE and /aɪl/ in BrE. Imbecile has /aɪl/ or /iːl/ in BrE and often /ɪl/ in AmE.
ine
The suffix -ine, when unstressed, is pronounced sometimes /aɪn/ (e.g. feline), sometimes /iːn/ (e.g. morphine) and sometimes /ɪn/ (e.g.medicine). Some words have variable pronunciation within BrE, or within AmE, or between BrE and AmE. Generally, AmE is more likely to favour /iːn/ or /ɪn/, and BrE to favour /aɪn/: e.g. adamantineA2, carbine, crystallineA2, labyrinthine, philistine, serpentineA2, turbineA2. However, sometimes AmE has /aɪn/ where BrE has /iːn/; e.g. iodineB2, strychnineA2.
Weak forms
Some function words can has a weak form in AmE, with a reduced vocal used when the word is unstressed, but always use the full vowel in RP. These include: or [ɚ]; you [jə]; your [jɚ].
On the other hand, the titles Saint and Sir before a person's name have "weak forms" in BrE but not AmE: before vowels, [snt] and [sər]; before consonants, [sn] and [sə].
Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
These tables list words pronounced differently but spelled the same. See also the table of words with different pronunciation reflected in the spelling.
Single differences
Words with multiple points of difference of pronunciation are in the table after this one. Accent-based differences are ignored. For example,Moscow is RP /ˈmɒskəʊ/ and GAm /ˈmɑskaʊ/, but only the /əʊ/-/aʊ/ difference is highlighted here, since the /ɒ/-/ɑ/ difference is predictable from the accent. Also, tiara is listed with AmE /æ/; the marry-merry-Mary merger changes this vowel for many Americans. Some AmE types are listed as /ɒ/ where GAm merges to /ɑ/ .
BrE
AmE
Words
/æ/ /ɑ/ annato, BangladeshA2, Caracas, chiantiA2, Galapagos, GdańskA2, grappaA2, gulagA2, HanoiA2, JanA2 (male name, e.g. Jan Palach), KantA2, kebab, Las (placenames, e.g. Las Vegas), Mafia, mishmashA2, MombasaA2, Natasha, Nissan, Pablo, pasta, PicassoA2, ralentando, SanA2 (names outside USA; e.g. San Juan), SlovakA2, Sri LankaA2, Vivaldi, wigwamA2, YasserA2 (and A in many other foreign names and loanwords)
/iː/ /ɛ/ aesthete, anaesthetize, breveA2, catenaryA2, Daedalus, devolutionA2,B2, ecumenicalB2, epochA2, evolutionA2,B2, febrileA2, Hephaestus, KenyaB2, leverA2, methane, OedipusA2, (o)estrus, penalizeA2, predecessorA2, pyrethrinA2, senileA2, hygienic
/ɒ/ /oʊ/ Aeroflot, compost, homosexualB2, Interpol, Lod, pogrom, polkaB2, produce (noun), Rosh Hashanah, sconeA2,B2, shone, sojourn, trollB2, yoghurt
/ɑː/ /æ/ (Excluding trap-bath split words) banana, javaA2, khakiA2, morale, NevadaA2, scenarioA2, sopranoA2, tiaraA2, Pakistani
/ɛ/ /i/ CecilA2,B2, crematoriumA2, cretin, depot, inherentA2,B2, leisureA2, medievalA2, reconnoitreA2, zebraB2, zenithA2,B2
/æ/ /eɪ/ compatriot, patriotB2, patronise, phalanx, plait, repatriate, Sabine, satrapA2, satyrA2, basilA2 (plant)
/ɪ/ /aɪ/ dynasty, housewifery, idyll, livelongA2, long-livedA2, privacyB2, simultaneous, vicariousA2, vitamin. Also the suffix -ization. See also -ine.
/z/ /s/ AussieA2, blouse, complaisantA2, crescent, diagnoseA2, erase, GlasgowA2, parse, valise, trans-A2,B2 (in some words)
/ɑː/ /eɪ/ amenA2, charadeB2, cicada, galaA2, promenadeA2, pro rata, tomato, stratum
/əʊ/ /ɒ/ codify, goffer, ogleA2, phonetician, processor, progress (noun), slothA2,B2, wont A2, wroth
/ʌ/ /ɒ/ accomplice, accomplish, colanderB2, constableB2, Lombardy, monetaryA2, -mongerA2
/ɒ/ /ʌ/ hovelA2,B2, hover. Also the strong forms of these function words: anybodyA2 (likewise every-, some-, and no-),becauseA2,B2 (and clipping 'cos/'cause), ofA2, fromA2, wasA2, whatA2
(sounded) (silent)
Beethoven, chthonic, herbA2 (plant), KnossosB2, phthisicB2, salve, solder
/ɑː(r)/ /ɚ/ Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, Hertford. (The only AmE word with
/aɪ/ /i/ eitherA2,B2, neitherA2,B2, Pleiades. See also -ine.
/iː/ /aɪ/ albino, migraineB2. Also the prefixes anti-A2, multi-A2, semi-A2 in loose compounds (e.g. in anti-establishment, but not in antibody). See also -ine.
/ə/ /ɒ/ Amazon, hexagon, octagon, paragon, pentagon, phenomenon, python
/iː/ /eɪ/ eta, beta, quayA2, theta, zeta
/aɪ/ /ɪ/ butylB2, diverge, minorityA2,B2, primer (schoolbook). See also -ine.
/ɛ/ /eɪ/ ateB2 ("et" is nonstandard in America), mêlée, chaise longue
/ɜːz/ /us/ Betelgeuse, chanteuse, chartreuseA2, masseuse
/eɪ/ /æ/ apricotA2, dahlia, digitalis, patentA2,B2, comrade
(silent)
(sounded) medicineB2. See also -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry
/ɒ/ /ə/ Amos, condom, Enoch
/ʃ/ /ʒ/ AsiaB2, PersiaB2, versionB2
/ə/ /oʊ/ borough, thorough, also place names such as Edinburgh (see also -ory and -mony)
/ɪr/ /ɚ/ chirrupA2, stirrupA2, sirupA2, squirrel
/siː/ /ʃ/ cassia, CassiusA2, hessian
/tiː/ /ʃ/ consortium
/uː/ /ju/ couponA2, fuchsine, HoustonB2
/uː/ /ʊ/ boulevard, snooker, woofA2 (weaving)
/ɜː(r)/ /ʊr/ connoisseurA2, entrepreneurA2
/ɜː/ /oʊ/ föhnB2, MöbiusB2
/ə/ /eɪ/ DraconianA2, hurricaneB2
/eɪ/ /i/ deityA2,B2, Helene, IsraelB2
/juː/ /w/ iguana, jaguar, Nicaragua
/ɔː(r)/ /ɚ/ record (noun), stridorA2,B2
/ziː/ /ʒ/ Frasier, Parisian, Malaysia
/æ/ /ɒ/ twatB2
/ɒ/ /æ/ wrath
/ɑː/ /ət/ nougat
/ɑː/ /ɔ/ UtahA2,B2
/ɑː/ /ɔr/ quarkA2,B2
/æ/ /ɛ/ femme fataleA2
/aɪ/ /eɪ/ Isaiah
/aʊ/ /u/ nousA2
/ð/ /θ/ boothB2
/diː/ /dʒi/ cordiality
/dʒ/ /ɡdʒ/ suggestA2
/eɪ/ /ə/ template
/eɪ/ /ət/ tourniquet
/ə(r)/ /ɑr/ MadagascarA2
/ə(r)/ /jɚ/ figureA2 for the verb
/ə/ /ɛ/ nonsense
/ɛ/ /ɑ/ envelopeA2,B2
/ɛ/ /ə/ Kentucky
/ə/ /æ/ trapeze
/ɜː(r)/ /ɛr/ errA2
/əʊ/ /ɒt/ Huguenot
/əʊ/ /aʊ/ MoscowA2
/əʊ/ /u/ broochA2
/ɪ/ /i/ pi(t)taB2
/iː/ /ɪ/ beenB2
/iːʃ/ /ɪtʃ/ nicheA2,B2
/jɜː/ /ju/ milieu
/juː/ /u/ (Excluding words with predictable yod-dropping) barracuda, puma
/ɔː/ /æ/ falconA2
/s/ /z/ asthma
/ʃ/ /sk/ scheduleB2
/t/ /θ/ AnthonyA2,B2
/ts/ /z/ piazzaA2
/ʊ/ /ɪ/ kümmel
/ʊ/ /u/ BuddhaA2
/ʊ/ /ʌ/ brusque, hummus
/uː/ /aʊ/ routeA2
/uː/ /oʊ/ cantaloup(e)
/ʌ/ /oʊ/ covertA2,B2
/z/ /ʃ/ Dionysius
/ziː/ /ʃ/ transientA2, nausea
Multiple differences
The slashes normally used to enclose IPA phonemic transcriptions have been omitted from the following table to improve legibility.
Spelling BrE IPA AmE IPA Notes
barrage
ˈbær.ɑːʒ (1) bəˈrɑʒ
(2) ˈbær.ɪdʒ The AmE pronunciations are for distinct senses (1) "sustained weapon-fire" vs (2) "dam, barrier" (Compare garage below.)
boehmite
(1) ˈbɜːmaɪt
(2) ˈbəʊmaɪt (1) ˈbeɪmaɪt
(2) ˈboʊmaɪt The first pronunciations approximate German [ø] (spelled <ö> or
bouquet ˈbuːkeɪ (1) boʊˈkeɪ
(2) buˈkeɪ
boyar
(1) ˈbɔɪ.ɑː
(2) bəʊˈjɑː (1) boʊˈjɑr
(2) ˈbɔɪ.jɚ
buoy
ˈbɔɪ ˈbu.i The U.S. pronunciation would be unrecognised in the UK. The British pronunciation occurs in America, more commonly for the verb than the noun, still more in derivatives buoyant, buoyancy.
cadre (1) ˈkæd.ə(r)
(2) ˈkæd.rə (1) ˈkæd.ri
(2) ˈkɑd.ri
(3) ˈkæd.reɪ
(4) ˈkɑd.reɪ
canton kænˈtuːn (1) kænˈtɑn
(2) kænˈtoʊn difference is only in military sense "to quarter soldiers"
dilettante dɪləˈtænti (1) ˈdɪlətɑnt
(2) ˌdɪləˈtɑnt BrE reflects the word's Italian origin; AmE approximates more to French.
enquiry/inquiry ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri (1) ˈɪŋ.kwə.ri
(2) ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri BrE uses two spellings and one pronunciation. In AmE the word is usually spelled inquiry.
febrile ˈfiːb.raɪl (1) ˈfɛb.ril
(2) ˈfɛb.rəl The BrE pronunciation occurs in AmE
fracas ˈfrækɑː (1) ˈfreɪkəs
(2) ˈfrækəs The BrE plural is French fracas /ˈfrækɑːz/; the AmE plural is anglicized fracases
garage
(1) ˈɡærɪdʒ
(2) ˈɡærɑːʒ ɡəˈrɑ(d)ʒ The AmE reflects French stress difference. The two BrE pronunciations may represent distinct meanings for some speakers; for example, "a subterranean garage for a car" (1) vs "a petrol garage" (2). (Compare barrage above.)
glacier
(1) ˈɡlæsiə
(2) ˈɡleɪsiə ˈɡleɪʃər
jalousie
(1) ʒælʊˈziː
(2) ˈʒælʊziː ˈdʒæləsi
lapsang souchong
ˈlæpsæŋ suːʃɒŋ ˌlɑpsɑŋ ˈsuʃɑŋ
lasso
ləˈsuː ˈlæsoʊ The BrE pronunciation is common in AmE
lieutenant
(1) lɛfˈtɛnənt
(2) ləˈtɛnənt luˈtɛnənt The 2nd British pronunciation is restricted to the Royal Navy. Standard Canadian pronunciation is the same as the British.
lychee
laɪˈtʃiː ˈliːtʃiː Spelling litchi has pronunciation /ˈlɪtʃiː/
Molière
ˈmɒl.i.ɛə moʊlˈjɛr
oblique əbˈliːk əbˈlaɪk AmE is as BrE except in military sense "advance at an angle"
penchant pãˈʃã ˈpɛntʃənt The AmE pronunciation is anglicized; the BrE is French.
penult pɛˈnʌlt (1) ˈpinʌlt
(2) pɪˈnʌlt
premier (1) ˈprɛmjə
(2) ˈprɛmɪə (1) ˈprimɪr
(2) prɪmˈɪr
première ˈprɛmɪɛə (1) prɪmˈɪr
(2) prɪmˈjɛr
provost
ˈprɒvəst (1) ˈproʊvoʊst
(2) ˈproʊvəst The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
quinine
ˈkwɪniːn (1) ˈkwaɪnaɪn
(2) ˈkwɪnaɪn
resource (1) rɪˈzɔːs
(2) rɪˈsɔːs ˈrisɔrs
respite ˈrɛspaɪt (1) ˈrɛspət
(2) rɪˈspaɪt
reveille
rɪˈvæliː ˈrɛvəli
slough slaʊ slu sense "bog"; in metaphorical sense "gloom", the BrE pronunciation is common in AmE.Homograph "cast off skin" is /slʌf/ everywhere.
Tunisia
tjuːˈnɪziə (1) tuˈniʒə
(2) tuˈniʃə
untoward ˌʌn.tʊˈwɔːd[1]
(1) ʌnˈtɔrd
(2) ˌʌn.təˈwɔrd
vase
vɑːz (1) veɪs
(2) veɪz The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
z (the letter)
zɛd ziː The spelling of this letter as a word corresponds to the pronunciation: thus Commonwealth (including, usually, Canada) zed and U.S. (and, occasionally, Canada) zee.
References
1. ^ "untoward". Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Cambridge University Press.
2. Wells, John C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. 2nd ed. Longman. ISBN 0-582-36468-X.
Sources
en.wikipedia.org/.../American_and_British_English_pronunciation_differences
American and British English pronunciation differences
American and British English differences
Vocabulary
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom
List of British words not widely used in the United States
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: A–L
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: M–Z
Pronunciation
Accent
Vocabulary
Orthography
American and British English spelling differences
Computing
British and American keyboards
Fiction
List of works with different titles in the UK and US
edit box
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:
differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.
In the following discussion
superscript A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
superscript B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Stress
o 1.1 French stress
o 1.2 -ate and -atory
o 1.3 Miscellaneous stress
• 2 Affixes
o 2.1 -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
o 2.2 -ile
o 2.3 -ine
• 3 Weak forms
• 4 Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
o 4.1 Single differences
o 4.2 Multiple differences
• 5 References
Stress
French stress
For many loanwords from French where AmE has final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. Such words include:
BrE first-syllable stress: adultA2,B2, balletA2, baton, beret, bidet, blasé, brevetA2, brochureB2, buffet, caféA2, canardB2, chagrin,chaletA2, chauffeurA2,B2, chiffon, clichéB2, coupé, croissant, debrisB2, debut, décor, detailA2, détenteB2, flambé, frappé, garageB2,gateau, gourmetA2, lamé, montageA2, parquet, pastel, pastille, pâté, précis, sachet, salon, soupçon, vaccine; matinée, négligée,nonchalant, nondescript; also some French names, including BernardB2, Calais, Degas, Dijon, Dumas, Francoise, ManetA2, Maurice,MonetA2, Pauline, Renault, RenéB2, Renoir, Rimbaud, DelacroixB2.
BrE second-syllable stress: attaché, consommé, décolleté, déclassé, De Beauvoir, Debussy, démodé, denouement, distingué, Dubonnet,escargot, exposé, fiancé(e), retroussé
A few French words have other stress differences:
AmE first-syllable, BrE last-syllable: addressA2 (postal), moustacheA2; cigaretteA2, limousineB2, magazineB2,
AmE first-syllable, BrE second-syllable: liaisonA2, macramé, Renaissance (AmE also final-syllable stress)
AmE second-syllable, BrE last-syllable: New Orleans
ate and -atory
Most 2-syllable verbs ending -ate have first-syllable stress in AmE and second-syllable stress in BrE. This includes castrate, dictateA2,donateA2, locateA2, mandateB2, migrate, placate, prostrate, pulsate, rotate, serrateB2, spectate, striated, translateA2, vacate, vibrate; in the case of cremate, narrate, placate, the first vowel is in addition reduced to /ə/ in BrE. Examples where AmE and BrE match include create,debate, equate, elate, negate, orate, relate with second-syllable stress; and mandate and probate with first-syllable stress. Derived nouns in -ator may retain the distinction, but those in -ation do not. Also, migratoryA2 and vibratory retain the distinction.
Most longer -ate verbs are pronounced the same in AmE and BrE, but a few have first-syllable stress in BrE and second-syllable stress in AmE: elongate, infiltrateA2, remonstrate, tergiversate. However, some derived adjectives ending -atory have a difference, as stress shifting to -at- can occur in BrE with the final vowel sound being omitted, in this case, the 'o'. Among these cases are regulatoryB2, celebratoryA2,participatoryB2, where AmE stresses the same syllable as the corresponding -ate verb; and compensatory, where AmE stresses the second syllable.
A further -atory difference is laboratory: AmE /ˈlæbrɪtɔriː/ and BrE /ləˈbɒrət(ə)riː/.
Miscellaneous stress
There are a number of cases where same-spelled noun, verb and/or adjective have uniform stress in one dialect but distinct stress in the other (e.g. alternate, prospect): see initial-stress-derived noun.
The following table lists words where the only difference between AmE and BrE is in stress (possibly with a consequent reduction of the unstressed vowel). Words with other points of difference are listed in a later table.
BrE AmE words with relevant syllable stressed in each dialect
1st 2nd caffeine, cannotA2, casein, Kathleen, SuezA2, communal, escalopeB2, harass, omega, paprikaB2, patina, subaltern, stalactite, stalagmite, ThanksgivingB2, transference, aristocratA2,B2, kilometre/kilometerB2
2nd 1st defense (sport), guffawA2, ice creamA2,B2, guru, mama, papa, pretense, princessA2,B2, weekendB2, Canton, anginaA2,Augustine, Bushido, Ghanaian, LofotenB2, marshmallow, patronal, spread-eagle, controversy, formidableB2, hospitableB2, miscellany, predicative, saxophonistB2, submariner, ancillary, capillary, catenary, corollary, fritillary, medullary
1st 3rd ParmesanB2, partisan, premature, opportune, carburet(t)or
3rd 1st margarine, PyreneesB2, cockatoo
2nd 3rd advertisement
3rd 2nd arytenoidA2, oregano, obscurantist
Affixes
-ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
Where the syllable preceding -ary,-ery or -ory is stressed, AmE pronounce all these endings /əriː/, while BrE pronounce these endings without the vowel sound, similar to that of atory, where the 'o' isn't pronounced. Where the preceding syllable is unstressed, however, AmE has a full vowel rather than schwa: /ɛri/ for -ary and -ery and /ɔri/ for -ory. BrE retains the reduced vowel /əriː/, or even elides it completely to /riː/. (The elision is avoided in carefully enunciated speech, especially with endings -rary,-rery,-rory.) So military is AmE /ˈmɪlɪtɛriː/ and BrE /ˈmɪlɪtəriː/ or/ˈmɪlɪtriː/.
Note that stress differences occur with ending -atory (explained above) and a few others like capillary (included above). A few words have the full vowel in AmE in the ending even though the preceding syllable is stressed: library, primaryA2, rosemary. Pronouncing library as /ˈlaɪbɛriː/rather than /ˈlaɪbrɛriː/ is highly stigmatized in AmE, whereas in BrE, /ˈlaɪbriː/ is common in rapid or casual speech.
Formerly the BrE-AmE distinction for adjectives carried over to corresponding adverbs ending -arily, -erily or -orily. However, nowadays most BrE speakers adopt the AmE practice of shifting the stress to the antepenultimate syllable: militarily is thus /ˌmɪlɪˈtɛrɪliː/ rather than /ˈmɪlɪtrɪliː/.
The placename component -bury (e.g. Canterbury) has a similar difference after a stressed syllable: AmE /bɛri/ and BrE /brɪː/ or /bərɪː/. The ending -mony after a stressed syllable is AmE /moʊni/ but BrE /mənɪː/. The word -berry in compounds has a slightly different distinction: in BrE, it is reduced (/bəriː/ or /briː/) after a stressed syllable, and may be full /bɛriː/ after an unstressed syllable; in AmE it is usually full in all cases. Thus, strawberry is BrE /ˈstrɔːbəriː/ but AmE /ˈstrɔbɛriː/, while whortleberry is BrE /ˈwɔːtlbɛriː/ and similarly AmE /ˈwɔrtlbɛriː/.
-ile
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending -ilis are mostly pronounced with a full vowel (/aɪl/) in BrE but a reduced vowel /ɪl/ or syllabic /l/ in AmE (e.g. fertile rhymes with fur tile in BrE but with turtle in AmE). This difference applies:
generally to agile, docile, facile, fertile, fissile, fragile, futile, infertile, missile, nubile, octile, puerile, rutile, servile, stabile, sterile, tactile,tensile, virile, volatile;
usually to ductile, hostile, (im)mobile (adjective), projectile, textile, utile, versatile;
not usually to decile, domicile, infantile, juvenile, labile, mercantile, pensile, reptile, senile;
not to crocodile, exile, gentile, percentile, reconcile; nor to compounds of monosyllables (e.g. turnstile from stile).
Related endings -ility, -ilize, -iliary are pronounced the same in AmE as BrE. The name Savile is pronounced with (/ɪl/) in both BrE and AmE.Mobile (sculpture), camomile and febrile are sometimes pronounced with /il/ in AmE and /aɪl/ in BrE. Imbecile has /aɪl/ or /iːl/ in BrE and often /ɪl/ in AmE.
ine
The suffix -ine, when unstressed, is pronounced sometimes /aɪn/ (e.g. feline), sometimes /iːn/ (e.g. morphine) and sometimes /ɪn/ (e.g.medicine). Some words have variable pronunciation within BrE, or within AmE, or between BrE and AmE. Generally, AmE is more likely to favour /iːn/ or /ɪn/, and BrE to favour /aɪn/: e.g. adamantineA2, carbine, crystallineA2, labyrinthine, philistine, serpentineA2, turbineA2. However, sometimes AmE has /aɪn/ where BrE has /iːn/; e.g. iodineB2, strychnineA2.
Weak forms
Some function words can has a weak form in AmE, with a reduced vocal used when the word is unstressed, but always use the full vowel in RP. These include: or [ɚ]; you [jə]; your [jɚ].
On the other hand, the titles Saint and Sir before a person's name have "weak forms" in BrE but not AmE: before vowels, [snt] and [sər]; before consonants, [sn] and [sə].
Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
These tables list words pronounced differently but spelled the same. See also the table of words with different pronunciation reflected in the spelling.
Single differences
Words with multiple points of difference of pronunciation are in the table after this one. Accent-based differences are ignored. For example,Moscow is RP /ˈmɒskəʊ/ and GAm /ˈmɑskaʊ/, but only the /əʊ/-/aʊ/ difference is highlighted here, since the /ɒ/-/ɑ/ difference is predictable from the accent. Also, tiara is listed with AmE /æ/; the marry-merry-Mary merger changes this vowel for many Americans. Some AmE types are listed as /ɒ/ where GAm merges to /ɑ/ .
BrE
AmE
Words
/æ/ /ɑ/ annato, BangladeshA2, Caracas, chiantiA2, Galapagos, GdańskA2, grappaA2, gulagA2, HanoiA2, JanA2 (male name, e.g. Jan Palach), KantA2, kebab, Las (placenames, e.g. Las Vegas), Mafia, mishmashA2, MombasaA2, Natasha, Nissan, Pablo, pasta, PicassoA2, ralentando, SanA2 (names outside USA; e.g. San Juan), SlovakA2, Sri LankaA2, Vivaldi, wigwamA2, YasserA2 (and A in many other foreign names and loanwords)
/iː/ /ɛ/ aesthete, anaesthetize, breveA2, catenaryA2, Daedalus, devolutionA2,B2, ecumenicalB2, epochA2, evolutionA2,B2, febrileA2, Hephaestus, KenyaB2, leverA2, methane, OedipusA2, (o)estrus, penalizeA2, predecessorA2, pyrethrinA2, senileA2, hygienic
/ɒ/ /oʊ/ Aeroflot, compost, homosexualB2, Interpol, Lod, pogrom, polkaB2, produce (noun), Rosh Hashanah, sconeA2,B2, shone, sojourn, trollB2, yoghurt
/ɑː/ /æ/ (Excluding trap-bath split words) banana, javaA2, khakiA2, morale, NevadaA2, scenarioA2, sopranoA2, tiaraA2, Pakistani
/ɛ/ /i/ CecilA2,B2, crematoriumA2, cretin, depot, inherentA2,B2, leisureA2, medievalA2, reconnoitreA2, zebraB2, zenithA2,B2
/æ/ /eɪ/ compatriot, patriotB2, patronise, phalanx, plait, repatriate, Sabine, satrapA2, satyrA2, basilA2 (plant)
/ɪ/ /aɪ/ dynasty, housewifery, idyll, livelongA2, long-livedA2, privacyB2, simultaneous, vicariousA2, vitamin. Also the suffix -ization. See also -ine.
/z/ /s/ AussieA2, blouse, complaisantA2, crescent, diagnoseA2, erase, GlasgowA2, parse, valise, trans-A2,B2 (in some words)
/ɑː/ /eɪ/ amenA2, charadeB2, cicada, galaA2, promenadeA2, pro rata, tomato, stratum
/əʊ/ /ɒ/ codify, goffer, ogleA2, phonetician, processor, progress (noun), slothA2,B2, wont A2, wroth
/ʌ/ /ɒ/ accomplice, accomplish, colanderB2, constableB2, Lombardy, monetaryA2, -mongerA2
/ɒ/ /ʌ/ hovelA2,B2, hover. Also the strong forms of these function words: anybodyA2 (likewise every-, some-, and no-),becauseA2,B2 (and clipping 'cos/'cause), ofA2, fromA2, wasA2, whatA2
(sounded) (silent)
Beethoven, chthonic, herbA2 (plant), KnossosB2, phthisicB2, salve, solder
/ɑː(r)/ /ɚ/ Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, Hertford. (The only AmE word with = [ɑr] is sergeant).
/aɪ/ /i/ eitherA2,B2, neitherA2,B2, Pleiades. See also -ine.
/iː/ /aɪ/ albino, migraineB2. Also the prefixes anti-A2, multi-A2, semi-A2 in loose compounds (e.g. in anti-establishment, but not in antibody). See also -ine.
/ə/ /ɒ/ Amazon, hexagon, octagon, paragon, pentagon, phenomenon, python
/iː/ /eɪ/ eta, beta, quayA2, theta, zeta
/aɪ/ /ɪ/ butylB2, diverge, minorityA2,B2, primer (schoolbook). See also -ine.
/ɛ/ /eɪ/ ateB2 ("et" is nonstandard in America), mêlée, chaise longue
/ɜːz/ /us/ Betelgeuse, chanteuse, chartreuseA2, masseuse
/eɪ/ /æ/ apricotA2, dahlia, digitalis, patentA2,B2, comrade
(silent)
(sounded) medicineB2. See also -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry
/ɒ/ /ə/ Amos, condom, Enoch
/ʃ/ /ʒ/ AsiaB2, PersiaB2, versionB2
/ə/ /oʊ/ borough, thorough, also place names such as Edinburgh (see also -ory and -mony)
/ɪr/ /ɚ/ chirrupA2, stirrupA2, sirupA2, squirrel
/siː/ /ʃ/ cassia, CassiusA2, hessian
/tiː/ /ʃ/ consortium
/uː/ /ju/ couponA2, fuchsine, HoustonB2
/uː/ /ʊ/ boulevard, snooker, woofA2 (weaving)
/ɜː(r)/ /ʊr/ connoisseurA2, entrepreneurA2
/ɜː/ /oʊ/ föhnB2, MöbiusB2
/ə/ /eɪ/ DraconianA2, hurricaneB2
/eɪ/ /i/ deityA2,B2, Helene, IsraelB2
/juː/ /w/ iguana, jaguar, Nicaragua
/ɔː(r)/ /ɚ/ record (noun), stridorA2,B2
/ziː/ /ʒ/ Frasier, Parisian, Malaysia
/æ/ /ɒ/ twatB2
/ɒ/ /æ/ wrath
/ɑː/ /ət/ nougat
/ɑː/ /ɔ/ UtahA2,B2
/ɑː/ /ɔr/ quarkA2,B2
/æ/ /ɛ/ femme fataleA2
/aɪ/ /eɪ/ Isaiah
/aʊ/ /u/ nousA2
/ð/ /θ/ boothB2
/diː/ /dʒi/ cordiality
/dʒ/ /ɡdʒ/ suggestA2
/eɪ/ /ə/ template
/eɪ/ /ət/ tourniquet
/ə(r)/ /ɑr/ MadagascarA2
/ə(r)/ /jɚ/ figureA2 for the verb
/ə/ /ɛ/ nonsense
/ɛ/ /ɑ/ envelopeA2,B2
/ɛ/ /ə/ Kentucky
/ə/ /æ/ trapeze
/ɜː(r)/ /ɛr/ errA2
/əʊ/ /ɒt/ Huguenot
/əʊ/ /aʊ/ MoscowA2
/əʊ/ /u/ broochA2
/ɪ/ /i/ pi(t)taB2
/iː/ /ɪ/ beenB2
/iːʃ/ /ɪtʃ/ nicheA2,B2
/jɜː/ /ju/ milieu
/juː/ /u/ (Excluding words with predictable yod-dropping) barracuda, puma
/ɔː/ /æ/ falconA2
/s/ /z/ asthma
/ʃ/ /sk/ scheduleB2
/t/ /θ/ AnthonyA2,B2
/ts/ /z/ piazzaA2
/ʊ/ /ɪ/ kümmel
/ʊ/ /u/ BuddhaA2
/ʊ/ /ʌ/ brusque, hummus
/uː/ /aʊ/ routeA2
/uː/ /oʊ/ cantaloup(e)
/ʌ/ /oʊ/ covertA2,B2
/z/ /ʃ/ Dionysius
/ziː/ /ʃ/ transientA2, nausea
Multiple differences
The slashes normally used to enclose IPA phonemic transcriptions have been omitted from the following table to improve legibility.
Spelling BrE IPA AmE IPA Notes
barrage
ˈbær.ɑːʒ (1) bəˈrɑʒ
(2) ˈbær.ɪdʒ The AmE pronunciations are for distinct senses (1) "sustained weapon-fire" vs (2) "dam, barrier" (Compare garage below.)
boehmite
(1) ˈbɜːmaɪt
(2) ˈbəʊmaɪt (1) ˈbeɪmaɪt
(2) ˈboʊmaɪt The first pronunciations approximate German [ø] (spelled <ö> or) ; the second ones are anglicized.
bouquet ˈbuːkeɪ (1) boʊˈkeɪ
(2) buˈkeɪ
boyar
(1) ˈbɔɪ.ɑː
(2) bəʊˈjɑː (1) boʊˈjɑr
(2) ˈbɔɪ.jɚ
buoy
ˈbɔɪ ˈbu.i The U.S. pronunciation would be unrecognised in the UK. The British pronunciation occurs in America, more commonly for the verb than the noun, still more in derivatives buoyant, buoyancy.
cadre (1) ˈkæd.ə(r)
(2) ˈkæd.rə (1) ˈkæd.ri
(2) ˈkɑd.ri
(3) ˈkæd.reɪ
(4) ˈkɑd.reɪ
canton kænˈtuːn (1) kænˈtɑn
(2) kænˈtoʊn difference is only in military sense "to quarter soldiers"
dilettante dɪləˈtænti (1) ˈdɪlətɑnt
(2) ˌdɪləˈtɑnt BrE reflects the word's Italian origin; AmE approximates more to French.
enquiry/inquiry ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri (1) ˈɪŋ.kwə.ri
(2) ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri BrE uses two spellings and one pronunciation. In AmE the word is usually spelled inquiry.
febrile ˈfiːb.raɪl (1) ˈfɛb.ril
(2) ˈfɛb.rəl The BrE pronunciation occurs in AmE
fracas ˈfrækɑː (1) ˈfreɪkəs
(2) ˈfrækəs The BrE plural is French fracas /ˈfrækɑːz/; the AmE plural is anglicized fracases
garage
(1) ˈɡærɪdʒ
(2) ˈɡærɑːʒ ɡəˈrɑ(d)ʒ The AmE reflects French stress difference. The two BrE pronunciations may represent distinct meanings for some speakers; for example, "a subterranean garage for a car" (1) vs "a petrol garage" (2). (Compare barrage above.)
glacier
(1) ˈɡlæsiə
(2) ˈɡleɪsiə ˈɡleɪʃər
jalousie
(1) ʒælʊˈziː
(2) ˈʒælʊziː ˈdʒæləsi
lapsang souchong
ˈlæpsæŋ suːʃɒŋ ˌlɑpsɑŋ ˈsuʃɑŋ
lasso
ləˈsuː ˈlæsoʊ The BrE pronunciation is common in AmE
lieutenant
(1) lɛfˈtɛnənt
(2) ləˈtɛnənt luˈtɛnənt The 2nd British pronunciation is restricted to the Royal Navy. Standard Canadian pronunciation is the same as the British.
lychee
laɪˈtʃiː ˈliːtʃiː Spelling litchi has pronunciation /ˈlɪtʃiː/
Molière
ˈmɒl.i.ɛə moʊlˈjɛr
oblique əbˈliːk əbˈlaɪk AmE is as BrE except in military sense "advance at an angle"
penchant pãˈʃã ˈpɛntʃənt The AmE pronunciation is anglicized; the BrE is French.
penult pɛˈnʌlt (1) ˈpinʌlt
(2) pɪˈnʌlt
premier (1) ˈprɛmjə
(2) ˈprɛmɪə (1) ˈprimɪr
(2) prɪmˈɪr
première ˈprɛmɪɛə (1) prɪmˈɪr
(2) prɪmˈjɛr
provost
ˈprɒvəst (1) ˈproʊvoʊst
(2) ˈproʊvəst The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
quinine
ˈkwɪniːn (1) ˈkwaɪnaɪn
(2) ˈkwɪnaɪn
resource (1) rɪˈzɔːs
(2) rɪˈsɔːs ˈrisɔrs
respite ˈrɛspaɪt (1) ˈrɛspət
(2) rɪˈspaɪt
reveille
rɪˈvæliː ˈrɛvəli
slough slaʊ slu sense "bog"; in metaphorical sense "gloom", the BrE pronunciation is common in AmE.Homograph "cast off skin" is /slʌf/ everywhere.
Tunisia
tjuːˈnɪziə (1) tuˈniʒə
(2) tuˈniʃə
untoward ˌʌn.tʊˈwɔːd[1]
(1) ʌnˈtɔrd
(2) ˌʌn.təˈwɔrd
vase
vɑːz (1) veɪs
(2) veɪz The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
z (the letter)
zɛd ziː The spelling of this letter as a word corresponds to the pronunciation: thus Commonwealth (including, usually, Canada) zed and U.S. (and, occasionally, Canada) zee.
References
1. ^ "untoward". Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Cambridge University Press.
2. Wells, John C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. 2nd ed. Longman. ISBN 0-582-36468-X.
Vocabulary
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom
List of British words not widely used in the United States
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: A–L
List of words having different meanings in British and American English: M–Z
Pronunciation
Accent
Vocabulary
Orthography
American and British English spelling differences
Computing
British and American keyboards
Fiction
List of works with different titles in the UK and US
edit box
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:
differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.
In the following discussion
superscript A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
superscript B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Stress
o 1.1 French stress
o 1.2 -ate and -atory
o 1.3 Miscellaneous stress
• 2 Affixes
o 2.1 -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
o 2.2 -ile
o 2.3 -ine
• 3 Weak forms
• 4 Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
o 4.1 Single differences
o 4.2 Multiple differences
• 5 References
Stress
French stress
For many loanwords from French where AmE has final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. Such words include:
BrE first-syllable stress: adultA2,B2, balletA2, baton, beret, bidet, blasé, brevetA2, brochureB2, buffet, caféA2, canardB2, chagrin,chaletA2, chauffeurA2,B2, chiffon, clichéB2, coupé, croissant, debrisB2, debut, décor, detailA2, détenteB2, flambé, frappé, garageB2,gateau, gourmetA2, lamé, montageA2, parquet, pastel, pastille, pâté, précis, sachet, salon, soupçon, vaccine; matinée, négligée,nonchalant, nondescript; also some French names, including BernardB2, Calais, Degas, Dijon, Dumas, Francoise, ManetA2, Maurice,MonetA2, Pauline, Renault, RenéB2, Renoir, Rimbaud, DelacroixB2.
BrE second-syllable stress: attaché, consommé, décolleté, déclassé, De Beauvoir, Debussy, démodé, denouement, distingué, Dubonnet,escargot, exposé, fiancé(e), retroussé
A few French words have other stress differences:
AmE first-syllable, BrE last-syllable: addressA2 (postal), moustacheA2; cigaretteA2, limousineB2, magazineB2,
AmE first-syllable, BrE second-syllable: liaisonA2, macramé, Renaissance (AmE also final-syllable stress)
AmE second-syllable, BrE last-syllable: New Orleans
ate and -atory
Most 2-syllable verbs ending -ate have first-syllable stress in AmE and second-syllable stress in BrE. This includes castrate, dictateA2,donateA2, locateA2, mandateB2, migrate, placate, prostrate, pulsate, rotate, serrateB2, spectate, striated, translateA2, vacate, vibrate; in the case of cremate, narrate, placate, the first vowel is in addition reduced to /ə/ in BrE. Examples where AmE and BrE match include create,debate, equate, elate, negate, orate, relate with second-syllable stress; and mandate and probate with first-syllable stress. Derived nouns in -ator may retain the distinction, but those in -ation do not. Also, migratoryA2 and vibratory retain the distinction.
Most longer -ate verbs are pronounced the same in AmE and BrE, but a few have first-syllable stress in BrE and second-syllable stress in AmE: elongate, infiltrateA2, remonstrate, tergiversate. However, some derived adjectives ending -atory have a difference, as stress shifting to -at- can occur in BrE with the final vowel sound being omitted, in this case, the 'o'. Among these cases are regulatoryB2, celebratoryA2,participatoryB2, where AmE stresses the same syllable as the corresponding -ate verb; and compensatory, where AmE stresses the second syllable.
A further -atory difference is laboratory: AmE /ˈlæbrɪtɔriː/ and BrE /ləˈbɒrət(ə)riː/.
Miscellaneous stress
There are a number of cases where same-spelled noun, verb and/or adjective have uniform stress in one dialect but distinct stress in the other (e.g. alternate, prospect): see initial-stress-derived noun.
The following table lists words where the only difference between AmE and BrE is in stress (possibly with a consequent reduction of the unstressed vowel). Words with other points of difference are listed in a later table.
BrE AmE words with relevant syllable stressed in each dialect
1st 2nd caffeine, cannotA2, casein, Kathleen, SuezA2, communal, escalopeB2, harass, omega, paprikaB2, patina, subaltern, stalactite, stalagmite, ThanksgivingB2, transference, aristocratA2,B2, kilometre/kilometerB2
2nd 1st defense (sport), guffawA2, ice creamA2,B2, guru, mama, papa, pretense, princessA2,B2, weekendB2, Canton, anginaA2,Augustine, Bushido, Ghanaian, LofotenB2, marshmallow, patronal, spread-eagle, controversy, formidableB2, hospitableB2, miscellany, predicative, saxophonistB2, submariner, ancillary, capillary, catenary, corollary, fritillary, medullary
1st 3rd ParmesanB2, partisan, premature, opportune, carburet(t)or
3rd 1st margarine, PyreneesB2, cockatoo
2nd 3rd advertisement
3rd 2nd arytenoidA2, oregano, obscurantist
Affixes
-ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry, -mony
Where the syllable preceding -ary,-ery or -ory is stressed, AmE pronounce all these endings /əriː/, while BrE pronounce these endings without the vowel sound, similar to that of atory, where the 'o' isn't pronounced. Where the preceding syllable is unstressed, however, AmE has a full vowel rather than schwa: /ɛri/ for -ary and -ery and /ɔri/ for -ory. BrE retains the reduced vowel /əriː/, or even elides it completely to /riː/. (The elision is avoided in carefully enunciated speech, especially with endings -rary,-rery,-rory.) So military is AmE /ˈmɪlɪtɛriː/ and BrE /ˈmɪlɪtəriː/ or/ˈmɪlɪtriː/.
Note that stress differences occur with ending -atory (explained above) and a few others like capillary (included above). A few words have the full vowel in AmE in the ending even though the preceding syllable is stressed: library, primaryA2, rosemary. Pronouncing library as /ˈlaɪbɛriː/rather than /ˈlaɪbrɛriː/ is highly stigmatized in AmE, whereas in BrE, /ˈlaɪbriː/ is common in rapid or casual speech.
Formerly the BrE-AmE distinction for adjectives carried over to corresponding adverbs ending -arily, -erily or -orily. However, nowadays most BrE speakers adopt the AmE practice of shifting the stress to the antepenultimate syllable: militarily is thus /ˌmɪlɪˈtɛrɪliː/ rather than /ˈmɪlɪtrɪliː/.
The placename component -bury (e.g. Canterbury) has a similar difference after a stressed syllable: AmE /bɛri/ and BrE /brɪː/ or /bərɪː/. The ending -mony after a stressed syllable is AmE /moʊni/ but BrE /mənɪː/. The word -berry in compounds has a slightly different distinction: in BrE, it is reduced (/bəriː/ or /briː/) after a stressed syllable, and may be full /bɛriː/ after an unstressed syllable; in AmE it is usually full in all cases. Thus, strawberry is BrE /ˈstrɔːbəriː/ but AmE /ˈstrɔbɛriː/, while whortleberry is BrE /ˈwɔːtlbɛriː/ and similarly AmE /ˈwɔrtlbɛriː/.
-ile
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending -ilis are mostly pronounced with a full vowel (/aɪl/) in BrE but a reduced vowel /ɪl/ or syllabic /l/ in AmE (e.g. fertile rhymes with fur tile in BrE but with turtle in AmE). This difference applies:
generally to agile, docile, facile, fertile, fissile, fragile, futile, infertile, missile, nubile, octile, puerile, rutile, servile, stabile, sterile, tactile,tensile, virile, volatile;
usually to ductile, hostile, (im)mobile (adjective), projectile, textile, utile, versatile;
not usually to decile, domicile, infantile, juvenile, labile, mercantile, pensile, reptile, senile;
not to crocodile, exile, gentile, percentile, reconcile; nor to compounds of monosyllables (e.g. turnstile from stile).
Related endings -ility, -ilize, -iliary are pronounced the same in AmE as BrE. The name Savile is pronounced with (/ɪl/) in both BrE and AmE.Mobile (sculpture), camomile and febrile are sometimes pronounced with /il/ in AmE and /aɪl/ in BrE. Imbecile has /aɪl/ or /iːl/ in BrE and often /ɪl/ in AmE.
ine
The suffix -ine, when unstressed, is pronounced sometimes /aɪn/ (e.g. feline), sometimes /iːn/ (e.g. morphine) and sometimes /ɪn/ (e.g.medicine). Some words have variable pronunciation within BrE, or within AmE, or between BrE and AmE. Generally, AmE is more likely to favour /iːn/ or /ɪn/, and BrE to favour /aɪn/: e.g. adamantineA2, carbine, crystallineA2, labyrinthine, philistine, serpentineA2, turbineA2. However, sometimes AmE has /aɪn/ where BrE has /iːn/; e.g. iodineB2, strychnineA2.
Weak forms
Some function words can has a weak form in AmE, with a reduced vocal used when the word is unstressed, but always use the full vowel in RP. These include: or [ɚ]; you [jə]; your [jɚ].
On the other hand, the titles Saint and Sir before a person's name have "weak forms" in BrE but not AmE: before vowels, [snt] and [sər]; before consonants, [sn] and [sə].
Miscellaneous pronunciation differences
These tables list words pronounced differently but spelled the same. See also the table of words with different pronunciation reflected in the spelling.
Single differences
Words with multiple points of difference of pronunciation are in the table after this one. Accent-based differences are ignored. For example,Moscow is RP /ˈmɒskəʊ/ and GAm /ˈmɑskaʊ/, but only the /əʊ/-/aʊ/ difference is highlighted here, since the /ɒ/-/ɑ/ difference is predictable from the accent. Also, tiara is listed with AmE /æ/; the marry-merry-Mary merger changes this vowel for many Americans. Some AmE types are listed as /ɒ/ where GAm merges to /ɑ/ .
BrE
AmE
Words
/æ/ /ɑ/ annato, BangladeshA2, Caracas, chiantiA2, Galapagos, GdańskA2, grappaA2, gulagA2, HanoiA2, JanA2 (male name, e.g. Jan Palach), KantA2, kebab, Las (placenames, e.g. Las Vegas), Mafia, mishmashA2, MombasaA2, Natasha, Nissan, Pablo, pasta, PicassoA2, ralentando, SanA2 (names outside USA; e.g. San Juan), SlovakA2, Sri LankaA2, Vivaldi, wigwamA2, YasserA2 (and A in many other foreign names and loanwords)
/iː/ /ɛ/ aesthete, anaesthetize, breveA2, catenaryA2, Daedalus, devolutionA2,B2, ecumenicalB2, epochA2, evolutionA2,B2, febrileA2, Hephaestus, KenyaB2, leverA2, methane, OedipusA2, (o)estrus, penalizeA2, predecessorA2, pyrethrinA2, senileA2, hygienic
/ɒ/ /oʊ/ Aeroflot, compost, homosexualB2, Interpol, Lod, pogrom, polkaB2, produce (noun), Rosh Hashanah, sconeA2,B2, shone, sojourn, trollB2, yoghurt
/ɑː/ /æ/ (Excluding trap-bath split words) banana, javaA2, khakiA2, morale, NevadaA2, scenarioA2, sopranoA2, tiaraA2, Pakistani
/ɛ/ /i/ CecilA2,B2, crematoriumA2, cretin, depot, inherentA2,B2, leisureA2, medievalA2, reconnoitreA2, zebraB2, zenithA2,B2
/æ/ /eɪ/ compatriot, patriotB2, patronise, phalanx, plait, repatriate, Sabine, satrapA2, satyrA2, basilA2 (plant)
/ɪ/ /aɪ/ dynasty, housewifery, idyll, livelongA2, long-livedA2, privacyB2, simultaneous, vicariousA2, vitamin. Also the suffix -ization. See also -ine.
/z/ /s/ AussieA2, blouse, complaisantA2, crescent, diagnoseA2, erase, GlasgowA2, parse, valise, trans-A2,B2 (in some words)
/ɑː/ /eɪ/ amenA2, charadeB2, cicada, galaA2, promenadeA2, pro rata, tomato, stratum
/əʊ/ /ɒ/ codify, goffer, ogleA2, phonetician, processor, progress (noun), slothA2,B2, wont A2, wroth
/ʌ/ /ɒ/ accomplice, accomplish, colanderB2, constableB2, Lombardy, monetaryA2, -mongerA2
/ɒ/ /ʌ/ hovelA2,B2, hover. Also the strong forms of these function words: anybodyA2 (likewise every-, some-, and no-),becauseA2,B2 (and clipping 'cos/'cause), ofA2, fromA2, wasA2, whatA2
(sounded) (silent)
Beethoven, chthonic, herbA2 (plant), KnossosB2, phthisicB2, salve, solder
/ɑː(r)/ /ɚ/ Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, Hertford. (The only AmE word with
/aɪ/ /i/ eitherA2,B2, neitherA2,B2, Pleiades. See also -ine.
/iː/ /aɪ/ albino, migraineB2. Also the prefixes anti-A2, multi-A2, semi-A2 in loose compounds (e.g. in anti-establishment, but not in antibody). See also -ine.
/ə/ /ɒ/ Amazon, hexagon, octagon, paragon, pentagon, phenomenon, python
/iː/ /eɪ/ eta, beta, quayA2, theta, zeta
/aɪ/ /ɪ/ butylB2, diverge, minorityA2,B2, primer (schoolbook). See also -ine.
/ɛ/ /eɪ/ ateB2 ("et" is nonstandard in America), mêlée, chaise longue
/ɜːz/ /us/ Betelgeuse, chanteuse, chartreuseA2, masseuse
/eɪ/ /æ/ apricotA2, dahlia, digitalis, patentA2,B2, comrade
(silent)
(sounded) medicineB2. See also -ary -ery -ory -bury, -berry
/ɒ/ /ə/ Amos, condom, Enoch
/ʃ/ /ʒ/ AsiaB2, PersiaB2, versionB2
/ə/ /oʊ/ borough, thorough, also place names such as Edinburgh (see also -ory and -mony)
/ɪr/ /ɚ/ chirrupA2, stirrupA2, sirupA2, squirrel
/siː/ /ʃ/ cassia, CassiusA2, hessian
/tiː/ /ʃ/ consortium
/uː/ /ju/ couponA2, fuchsine, HoustonB2
/uː/ /ʊ/ boulevard, snooker, woofA2 (weaving)
/ɜː(r)/ /ʊr/ connoisseurA2, entrepreneurA2
/ɜː/ /oʊ/ föhnB2, MöbiusB2
/ə/ /eɪ/ DraconianA2, hurricaneB2
/eɪ/ /i/ deityA2,B2, Helene, IsraelB2
/juː/ /w/ iguana, jaguar, Nicaragua
/ɔː(r)/ /ɚ/ record (noun), stridorA2,B2
/ziː/ /ʒ/ Frasier, Parisian, Malaysia
/æ/ /ɒ/ twatB2
/ɒ/ /æ/ wrath
/ɑː/ /ət/ nougat
/ɑː/ /ɔ/ UtahA2,B2
/ɑː/ /ɔr/ quarkA2,B2
/æ/ /ɛ/ femme fataleA2
/aɪ/ /eɪ/ Isaiah
/aʊ/ /u/ nousA2
/ð/ /θ/ boothB2
/diː/ /dʒi/ cordiality
/dʒ/ /ɡdʒ/ suggestA2
/eɪ/ /ə/ template
/eɪ/ /ət/ tourniquet
/ə(r)/ /ɑr/ MadagascarA2
/ə(r)/ /jɚ/ figureA2 for the verb
/ə/ /ɛ/ nonsense
/ɛ/ /ɑ/ envelopeA2,B2
/ɛ/ /ə/ Kentucky
/ə/ /æ/ trapeze
/ɜː(r)/ /ɛr/ errA2
/əʊ/ /ɒt/ Huguenot
/əʊ/ /aʊ/ MoscowA2
/əʊ/ /u/ broochA2
/ɪ/ /i/ pi(t)taB2
/iː/ /ɪ/ beenB2
/iːʃ/ /ɪtʃ/ nicheA2,B2
/jɜː/ /ju/ milieu
/juː/ /u/ (Excluding words with predictable yod-dropping) barracuda, puma
/ɔː/ /æ/ falconA2
/s/ /z/ asthma
/ʃ/ /sk/ scheduleB2
/t/ /θ/ AnthonyA2,B2
/ts/ /z/ piazzaA2
/ʊ/ /ɪ/ kümmel
/ʊ/ /u/ BuddhaA2
/ʊ/ /ʌ/ brusque, hummus
/uː/ /aʊ/ routeA2
/uː/ /oʊ/ cantaloup(e)
/ʌ/ /oʊ/ covertA2,B2
/z/ /ʃ/ Dionysius
/ziː/ /ʃ/ transientA2, nausea
Multiple differences
The slashes normally used to enclose IPA phonemic transcriptions have been omitted from the following table to improve legibility.
Spelling BrE IPA AmE IPA Notes
barrage
ˈbær.ɑːʒ (1) bəˈrɑʒ
(2) ˈbær.ɪdʒ The AmE pronunciations are for distinct senses (1) "sustained weapon-fire" vs (2) "dam, barrier" (Compare garage below.)
boehmite
(1) ˈbɜːmaɪt
(2) ˈbəʊmaɪt (1) ˈbeɪmaɪt
(2) ˈboʊmaɪt The first pronunciations approximate German [ø] (spelled <ö> or
bouquet ˈbuːkeɪ (1) boʊˈkeɪ
(2) buˈkeɪ
boyar
(1) ˈbɔɪ.ɑː
(2) bəʊˈjɑː (1) boʊˈjɑr
(2) ˈbɔɪ.jɚ
buoy
ˈbɔɪ ˈbu.i The U.S. pronunciation would be unrecognised in the UK. The British pronunciation occurs in America, more commonly for the verb than the noun, still more in derivatives buoyant, buoyancy.
cadre (1) ˈkæd.ə(r)
(2) ˈkæd.rə (1) ˈkæd.ri
(2) ˈkɑd.ri
(3) ˈkæd.reɪ
(4) ˈkɑd.reɪ
canton kænˈtuːn (1) kænˈtɑn
(2) kænˈtoʊn difference is only in military sense "to quarter soldiers"
dilettante dɪləˈtænti (1) ˈdɪlətɑnt
(2) ˌdɪləˈtɑnt BrE reflects the word's Italian origin; AmE approximates more to French.
enquiry/inquiry ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri (1) ˈɪŋ.kwə.ri
(2) ɪŋˈkwaɪ.(ə)ri BrE uses two spellings and one pronunciation. In AmE the word is usually spelled inquiry.
febrile ˈfiːb.raɪl (1) ˈfɛb.ril
(2) ˈfɛb.rəl The BrE pronunciation occurs in AmE
fracas ˈfrækɑː (1) ˈfreɪkəs
(2) ˈfrækəs The BrE plural is French fracas /ˈfrækɑːz/; the AmE plural is anglicized fracases
garage
(1) ˈɡærɪdʒ
(2) ˈɡærɑːʒ ɡəˈrɑ(d)ʒ The AmE reflects French stress difference. The two BrE pronunciations may represent distinct meanings for some speakers; for example, "a subterranean garage for a car" (1) vs "a petrol garage" (2). (Compare barrage above.)
glacier
(1) ˈɡlæsiə
(2) ˈɡleɪsiə ˈɡleɪʃər
jalousie
(1) ʒælʊˈziː
(2) ˈʒælʊziː ˈdʒæləsi
lapsang souchong
ˈlæpsæŋ suːʃɒŋ ˌlɑpsɑŋ ˈsuʃɑŋ
lasso
ləˈsuː ˈlæsoʊ The BrE pronunciation is common in AmE
lieutenant
(1) lɛfˈtɛnənt
(2) ləˈtɛnənt luˈtɛnənt The 2nd British pronunciation is restricted to the Royal Navy. Standard Canadian pronunciation is the same as the British.
lychee
laɪˈtʃiː ˈliːtʃiː Spelling litchi has pronunciation /ˈlɪtʃiː/
Molière
ˈmɒl.i.ɛə moʊlˈjɛr
oblique əbˈliːk əbˈlaɪk AmE is as BrE except in military sense "advance at an angle"
penchant pãˈʃã ˈpɛntʃənt The AmE pronunciation is anglicized; the BrE is French.
penult pɛˈnʌlt (1) ˈpinʌlt
(2) pɪˈnʌlt
premier (1) ˈprɛmjə
(2) ˈprɛmɪə (1) ˈprimɪr
(2) prɪmˈɪr
première ˈprɛmɪɛə (1) prɪmˈɪr
(2) prɪmˈjɛr
provost
ˈprɒvəst (1) ˈproʊvoʊst
(2) ˈproʊvəst The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
quinine
ˈkwɪniːn (1) ˈkwaɪnaɪn
(2) ˈkwɪnaɪn
resource (1) rɪˈzɔːs
(2) rɪˈsɔːs ˈrisɔrs
respite ˈrɛspaɪt (1) ˈrɛspət
(2) rɪˈspaɪt
reveille
rɪˈvæliː ˈrɛvəli
slough slaʊ slu sense "bog"; in metaphorical sense "gloom", the BrE pronunciation is common in AmE.Homograph "cast off skin" is /slʌf/ everywhere.
Tunisia
tjuːˈnɪziə (1) tuˈniʒə
(2) tuˈniʃə
untoward ˌʌn.tʊˈwɔːd[1]
(1) ʌnˈtɔrd
(2) ˌʌn.təˈwɔrd
vase
vɑːz (1) veɪs
(2) veɪz The BrE pronunciation also occurs in AmE
z (the letter)
zɛd ziː The spelling of this letter as a word corresponds to the pronunciation: thus Commonwealth (including, usually, Canada) zed and U.S. (and, occasionally, Canada) zee.
References
1. ^ "untoward". Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Cambridge University Press.
2. Wells, John C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. 2nd ed. Longman. ISBN 0-582-36468-X.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Mending Wall by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across 25
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45
An Analysis of Robert Frost's Mending Wall
Mending Wall, by Robert Frost portrays the routines of two neighbors who are constantly mending the fence, or wall, that separates their properties. If a stone is missing from the fence, you can bet that the two men are out there putting it back together piece by piece.
Frost's description of every detail in this poem is quite interesting, very pleasant to read, and extremely imaginable. He leaves the reader to decide for himself what deductions he is to make from the reading. On one hand, Frost makes literal implications about what the two men are doing. For instance, they are physically putting the stones back, one by one. Their dedication, commitment, and constant drive shines through when reading how persistence these men seem about keeping the wall intact. Quite the contrary however, is the inferences that something even deeper is going on. There is a sharing experience taking place here. Indeed, by laboring so hard, each man is experiencing physical repercussions, but they are also using this time as a "meet and greet" period.
We can gather from the beginning of the poem that the wall has many forces that keep's it in shambles. For instance, Frost writes;
"...that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun...", and "I have come after them (hunters) and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone..."
The man and his neighbor don't seem to have time for anything else, for it sounds as if they are constantly making repairs. Is there a reason for this?
It is important to note that not only are these men completing a manly task, but they are also "building" some type of relationship. If this were not an issue, the neighbor would not repeat;
"Good fences make good neighbors."
As the man tells his story, we find that even though the two men may be conversing and interacting, there is some distance between them at all times. The man says;
"...on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again."
It seems to show that even though there is a need for friendship in each of us; it is equally as necessary for us to have our own space.
As the poem continues we see that what is taking place is almost like a game. In fact, he says;
"Oh, just another kind of outdoor game." And the narrator continues by saying, "We keep the wall between us as we go". This is almost like there is this game of leapfrog taking place!
"He is all pine and I am apple orchard,"
This seems to indicate that each of us is different. Having different likes, dislikes, etc. One of the men farms "apples", while the other just has "pines". Nonetheless, each is special and both of them contain separate, yet endearing qualities.
Now let's reflect on Frost's use of the "stone" itself. What could he have meant by this poem?
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned".
He is speaking to the stones. In other words he is telling them that if they are going to fall, please wait until he is not looking. This seems to be an odd touch to this poem. It almost appears that the man is so bored at times that he would talk about or to anything. Maybe the neighbor is not as much of a talker as one might have imagined. Maybe the man only has himself and these inanimate objects to converse with. After all, the only quote by the neighbor in this poem is;
"Good fences make good neighbors."
In another light however, there is the idea of separation, or segregation. I have briefly touched on the idea that the two men are consistently kept apart by this wall. In addition though, the author contrasts his "wall" of separation with the idea of segregation in our world. We are left with the impression that if two people have differences, no matter the extent, they are not considered equals by society.
Finally, there is the recurring idea that the wall should not be there in the first place.
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
This sentence infers that the wall separating us as a people needs to come down. It is virtually impossible for us to build lasting relationships while we are still possessed with hatred and discrimination.
Sources
www.123helpme.com-24.09.2010
Summary
A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
Form
Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verse’s characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing,stone, mean, line, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel.
Commentary
I have a friend who, as a young girl, had to memorize this poem as punishment for some now-forgotten misbehavior. Forced memorization is never pleasant; still, this is a fine poem for recital. “Mending Wall” is sonorous, homey, wry—arch, even—yet serene; it is steeped in levels of meaning implied by its well-wrought metaphoric suggestions. These implications inspire numerous interpretations and make definitive readings suspect. Here are but a few things to think about as you reread the poem.
The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is arresting: two men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit. Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their task Sisyphean. Sisyphus, you may recall, is the figure in Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. These men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or sprites, or the frost and thaw of nature’s invisible hand, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless.
But, as we so often see when we look closely at Frost’s best poems, what begins in folksy straightforwardness ends in complex ambiguity. The speaker would have us believe that there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on building superfluous walls (with clichés as their justification) and those who would dispense with this practice—wall-builders and wall-breakers. But are these impulses so easily separable? And what does the poem really say about the necessity of boundaries?
The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the act of making a wall.
This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists and transports a boulder. Well, wall-building is ancient and enduring—the building of the first walls, both literal and figurative, marked the very foundation of society. Unless you are an absolute anarchist and do not mind livestock munching your lettuce, you probably recognize the need for literal boundaries. Figuratively, rules and laws are walls; justice is the process of wall-mending. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of other individuals’ rights. And it demonstrates another benefit of community; for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor. Wall-building is social, both in the sense of “societal” and “sociable.” What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement can, thus, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture? Perhaps the speaker does believe that good fences make good neighbors— for again, it is hewho initiate the wall-mending.
Of course, a little bit of mutual trust, communication, and goodwill would seem to achieve the same purpose between well-disposed neighbors—at least where there are no cows. And the poem says it twice: “something there is that does not love a wall.” There is some intent and value in wall-breaking, and there is some powerful tendency toward this destruction. Can it be simply that wall-breaking creates the conditions that facilitate wall-building? Are the groundswells a call to community- building—nature’s nudge toward concerted action? Or are they benevolent forces urging the demolition of traditional, small-minded boundaries? The poem does not resolve this question, and the narrator, who speaks for the groundswells but acts as a fence-builder, remains a contradiction.
Many of Frost’s poems can be reasonably interpreted as commenting on the creative process; “Mending Wall” is no exception. On the basic level, we can find here a discussion of the construction-disruption duality of creativity. Creation is a positive act—a mending or a building. Even the most destructive-seeming creativity results in a change, the building of some new state of being: If you tear down an edifice, you create a new view for the folks living in the house across the way. Yet creation is also disruptive: If nothing else, it disrupts the status quo. Stated another way, disruption is creative: It is the impetus that leads directly, mysteriously (as with the groundswells), to creation. Does the stone wall embody this duality? In any case, there is something about “walking the line”—and building it, mending it, balancing each stone with equal parts skill and spell—that evokes the mysterious and laborious act of making poetry.
On a level more specific to the author, the question of boundaries and their worth is directly applicable to Frost’s poetry. Barriers confine, but for some people they also encourage freedom and productivity by offering challenging frameworks within which to work. On principle, Frost did not write free verse. His creative process involved engaging poetic form (the rules, tradition, and boundaries—the walls—of the poetic world) and making it distinctly his own. By maintaining the tradition of formal poetry in unique ways, he was simultaneously a mender and breaker of walls.
Sources
www.sparknotes.com-24.09.2010
Analysis of Mending Wall
In his poem, 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost presents to us the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers. His messages are conveyed using poetic techniques such as imagery, structure and humour, revealing a complex side of the poem as well as achieving an overall light-hearted effect. Robert Frost has cleverly intertwined both a literal and metaphoric meaning into the poem, using the mending of a tangible wall as a symbolic representation of the barriers that separate the neighbours in their friendship.
The theme of the poem is about two neighbours who disagree over the need of a wall to separate their properties. Not only does the wall act as a divider in separating estates, it also acts as a barrier in the neighbours' friendship, separating them. For the neighbour with the pine trees, the wall is of great significance, as it provides a sense of security and privacy. He believes that although two people can still be friendly neighbours, some form of barrier is needed to separate them and 'wall in' the personal space and privacy of the individual. This is shown through his repeated saying, 'good fences make good neighbours' (line 27). The neighbour's property is a representation of his privacy and the wall acts as a barrier against intrusion.
The poem itself is a technique Robert Frost uses to convey his ideas. Behind the literal representation of building walls, there is a deeper metaphoric meaning, which reflects people's attitudes towards others. It reflects the social barriers people build, to provide a sense of personal security and comfort, in the belief that barriers are a source of protection which will make people less vulnerable to their fears. Robert Frost's ideas are communicated strongly through the perspective of the narrator in the poem, the 'I' voice, who questions the need for barriers. The use of conversation and the thoughts of the narrator reflect the poet's own thoughts. In line thirty to line thirty-five, the narrator questions the purpose of a wall. He has an open disposition and does not understand the need to 'wall in' or 'wall out' anything or anyone.
One of the poetic techniques ,that Robert Frost uses in 'Mending Wall' to convey his ideas is imagery. In the first eleven lines of the poem, it is used to describe the degradation of the wall, creating a visual image for the reader. The sentence structure of the first line of the poem places emphasis on 'something'. This, compound with the use of personification, makes 'something' appear alive and even human-like. Animate qualities have been given to 'something' through the use of the words 'love', 'sends', 'spills' and 'makes gaps' (lines 1-4), illustrating a vivid impression of the degradation of the wall. Nature, in the form of cold weather, frost and the activities of small creatures, gradually destroys the wall. The narrator seems to believe that walls are unnatural and suggests that nature dislikes walls. This is portrayed through the phrase 'sends the frozen ground swell under it' (line 2). The poem describes nature making holes in the wall large enough that 'even two can pass abreast'. Literally, this refers to the size of the holes. However, it can also be interpreted that nature wishes the men to 'walk together', side by side, living in harmony where there is no barrier in their friendship that separates them.
Figurative expressions are used in 'Mending Wall' to describe the relationship between the neighbours. Many phrases contain both a literal and metaphoric meaning. For example, the phrases 'to walk the line' and 'set the wall between us' (lines 13,14) refers to the building of a tangible wall that marks the boundary of the neighbours' properties. These phrases are also figurative and represent the setting of a barrier in the neighbours' friendship. When they meet to repair the wall, it could be metaphorically interpreted as repairing their friendship and resolving disputes. 'To each the boulders have fallen to each' (line 16) shows that fault lie on the behalf of both neighbours. The metaphor in line seventeen compares their disputes to loaves and balls - some are small and some are large. Figurative language has been used to convey the meaning and significance of building the wall.
An overall light-hearted tone has been achieved throughout the poem. One of the main techniques used to achieve this is the inclusion of conversation. 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' (line 19) and the metaphor 'spring is mischief in me' (line 28) for example, shows the neighbours having fun in mending the wall together, creating a cheerful, light-hearted atmosphere. The comparison of the repairing of the fence to an outdoor game also contributes to this light-heartedness. Although the narrator does not want the wall, ironically, the mending of the wall brings the neighbours together and literally builds their friendship. In repairing the fence, the neighbours are spending time together, building their friendship and improving the communication between them. Humour has also been used as a technique to achieve a light-hearted atmosphere. Because the fence is important to the neighbour, he treats the matter of repairing it seriously. Imagery is used to describe the neighbour's attitude, illustrating a rather grim, yet comical representation of him shifting the stones and repairing the fence. The narrator sees the stubbornness in his neighbour, and uses the simile 'like an old-stone savage' to compare him to a stone-age man who 'moves in darkness' (lines 40, 41), that is, set in his ways, and who is unlikely to change his views.
The structure of the 'Mending Wall' is a long one-stanza poem. It is written in blank verse and contains a narrative-like style. Repetition is used as a technique to emphasize the main ideas. The line 'something there is that doesn't love a wall' has been repeated in line thirty-five with a new meaning. It refers to the attitudes of the narrator towards the wall - the narrator does not 'love the wall' and wants it down - whereas the 'something' mentioned in the first line of the poem refers to nature. Another example of repetition is the statement 'good fences make good neighbours'. This reflects back to and emphasizes the idea and opinion society adopts: Although people can be good friends, there will always be a barrier standing between them, acting as a boundary that separates their social relations from their personal privacy, 'walling in' what they do not wish to share with others.
In 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost communicates his opinion regarding the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers, through the perspective of the narrator of the poem. Poetic techniques such as imagery, figurative language, irony, and the use of the building of a wall as a symbolic representation of barriers have been utilized to convey these messages through a light-hearted tone, and simultaneously to portray a serious side of the poem.
Sources
www.helium.com/items/1454903-mending-wall-analysis-24.09.2010
D.N. Aloysius
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across 25
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45
An Analysis of Robert Frost's Mending Wall
Mending Wall, by Robert Frost portrays the routines of two neighbors who are constantly mending the fence, or wall, that separates their properties. If a stone is missing from the fence, you can bet that the two men are out there putting it back together piece by piece.
Frost's description of every detail in this poem is quite interesting, very pleasant to read, and extremely imaginable. He leaves the reader to decide for himself what deductions he is to make from the reading. On one hand, Frost makes literal implications about what the two men are doing. For instance, they are physically putting the stones back, one by one. Their dedication, commitment, and constant drive shines through when reading how persistence these men seem about keeping the wall intact. Quite the contrary however, is the inferences that something even deeper is going on. There is a sharing experience taking place here. Indeed, by laboring so hard, each man is experiencing physical repercussions, but they are also using this time as a "meet and greet" period.
We can gather from the beginning of the poem that the wall has many forces that keep's it in shambles. For instance, Frost writes;
"...that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun...", and "I have come after them (hunters) and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone..."
The man and his neighbor don't seem to have time for anything else, for it sounds as if they are constantly making repairs. Is there a reason for this?
It is important to note that not only are these men completing a manly task, but they are also "building" some type of relationship. If this were not an issue, the neighbor would not repeat;
"Good fences make good neighbors."
As the man tells his story, we find that even though the two men may be conversing and interacting, there is some distance between them at all times. The man says;
"...on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again."
It seems to show that even though there is a need for friendship in each of us; it is equally as necessary for us to have our own space.
As the poem continues we see that what is taking place is almost like a game. In fact, he says;
"Oh, just another kind of outdoor game." And the narrator continues by saying, "We keep the wall between us as we go". This is almost like there is this game of leapfrog taking place!
"He is all pine and I am apple orchard,"
This seems to indicate that each of us is different. Having different likes, dislikes, etc. One of the men farms "apples", while the other just has "pines". Nonetheless, each is special and both of them contain separate, yet endearing qualities.
Now let's reflect on Frost's use of the "stone" itself. What could he have meant by this poem?
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned".
He is speaking to the stones. In other words he is telling them that if they are going to fall, please wait until he is not looking. This seems to be an odd touch to this poem. It almost appears that the man is so bored at times that he would talk about or to anything. Maybe the neighbor is not as much of a talker as one might have imagined. Maybe the man only has himself and these inanimate objects to converse with. After all, the only quote by the neighbor in this poem is;
"Good fences make good neighbors."
In another light however, there is the idea of separation, or segregation. I have briefly touched on the idea that the two men are consistently kept apart by this wall. In addition though, the author contrasts his "wall" of separation with the idea of segregation in our world. We are left with the impression that if two people have differences, no matter the extent, they are not considered equals by society.
Finally, there is the recurring idea that the wall should not be there in the first place.
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
This sentence infers that the wall separating us as a people needs to come down. It is virtually impossible for us to build lasting relationships while we are still possessed with hatred and discrimination.
Sources
www.123helpme.com-24.09.2010
Summary
A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
Form
Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verse’s characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing,stone, mean, line, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel.
Commentary
I have a friend who, as a young girl, had to memorize this poem as punishment for some now-forgotten misbehavior. Forced memorization is never pleasant; still, this is a fine poem for recital. “Mending Wall” is sonorous, homey, wry—arch, even—yet serene; it is steeped in levels of meaning implied by its well-wrought metaphoric suggestions. These implications inspire numerous interpretations and make definitive readings suspect. Here are but a few things to think about as you reread the poem.
The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is arresting: two men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit. Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their task Sisyphean. Sisyphus, you may recall, is the figure in Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. These men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or sprites, or the frost and thaw of nature’s invisible hand, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless.
But, as we so often see when we look closely at Frost’s best poems, what begins in folksy straightforwardness ends in complex ambiguity. The speaker would have us believe that there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on building superfluous walls (with clichés as their justification) and those who would dispense with this practice—wall-builders and wall-breakers. But are these impulses so easily separable? And what does the poem really say about the necessity of boundaries?
The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the act of making a wall.
This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists and transports a boulder. Well, wall-building is ancient and enduring—the building of the first walls, both literal and figurative, marked the very foundation of society. Unless you are an absolute anarchist and do not mind livestock munching your lettuce, you probably recognize the need for literal boundaries. Figuratively, rules and laws are walls; justice is the process of wall-mending. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of other individuals’ rights. And it demonstrates another benefit of community; for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor. Wall-building is social, both in the sense of “societal” and “sociable.” What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement can, thus, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture? Perhaps the speaker does believe that good fences make good neighbors— for again, it is hewho initiate the wall-mending.
Of course, a little bit of mutual trust, communication, and goodwill would seem to achieve the same purpose between well-disposed neighbors—at least where there are no cows. And the poem says it twice: “something there is that does not love a wall.” There is some intent and value in wall-breaking, and there is some powerful tendency toward this destruction. Can it be simply that wall-breaking creates the conditions that facilitate wall-building? Are the groundswells a call to community- building—nature’s nudge toward concerted action? Or are they benevolent forces urging the demolition of traditional, small-minded boundaries? The poem does not resolve this question, and the narrator, who speaks for the groundswells but acts as a fence-builder, remains a contradiction.
Many of Frost’s poems can be reasonably interpreted as commenting on the creative process; “Mending Wall” is no exception. On the basic level, we can find here a discussion of the construction-disruption duality of creativity. Creation is a positive act—a mending or a building. Even the most destructive-seeming creativity results in a change, the building of some new state of being: If you tear down an edifice, you create a new view for the folks living in the house across the way. Yet creation is also disruptive: If nothing else, it disrupts the status quo. Stated another way, disruption is creative: It is the impetus that leads directly, mysteriously (as with the groundswells), to creation. Does the stone wall embody this duality? In any case, there is something about “walking the line”—and building it, mending it, balancing each stone with equal parts skill and spell—that evokes the mysterious and laborious act of making poetry.
On a level more specific to the author, the question of boundaries and their worth is directly applicable to Frost’s poetry. Barriers confine, but for some people they also encourage freedom and productivity by offering challenging frameworks within which to work. On principle, Frost did not write free verse. His creative process involved engaging poetic form (the rules, tradition, and boundaries—the walls—of the poetic world) and making it distinctly his own. By maintaining the tradition of formal poetry in unique ways, he was simultaneously a mender and breaker of walls.
Sources
www.sparknotes.com-24.09.2010
Analysis of Mending Wall
In his poem, 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost presents to us the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers. His messages are conveyed using poetic techniques such as imagery, structure and humour, revealing a complex side of the poem as well as achieving an overall light-hearted effect. Robert Frost has cleverly intertwined both a literal and metaphoric meaning into the poem, using the mending of a tangible wall as a symbolic representation of the barriers that separate the neighbours in their friendship.
The theme of the poem is about two neighbours who disagree over the need of a wall to separate their properties. Not only does the wall act as a divider in separating estates, it also acts as a barrier in the neighbours' friendship, separating them. For the neighbour with the pine trees, the wall is of great significance, as it provides a sense of security and privacy. He believes that although two people can still be friendly neighbours, some form of barrier is needed to separate them and 'wall in' the personal space and privacy of the individual. This is shown through his repeated saying, 'good fences make good neighbours' (line 27). The neighbour's property is a representation of his privacy and the wall acts as a barrier against intrusion.
The poem itself is a technique Robert Frost uses to convey his ideas. Behind the literal representation of building walls, there is a deeper metaphoric meaning, which reflects people's attitudes towards others. It reflects the social barriers people build, to provide a sense of personal security and comfort, in the belief that barriers are a source of protection which will make people less vulnerable to their fears. Robert Frost's ideas are communicated strongly through the perspective of the narrator in the poem, the 'I' voice, who questions the need for barriers. The use of conversation and the thoughts of the narrator reflect the poet's own thoughts. In line thirty to line thirty-five, the narrator questions the purpose of a wall. He has an open disposition and does not understand the need to 'wall in' or 'wall out' anything or anyone.
One of the poetic techniques ,that Robert Frost uses in 'Mending Wall' to convey his ideas is imagery. In the first eleven lines of the poem, it is used to describe the degradation of the wall, creating a visual image for the reader. The sentence structure of the first line of the poem places emphasis on 'something'. This, compound with the use of personification, makes 'something' appear alive and even human-like. Animate qualities have been given to 'something' through the use of the words 'love', 'sends', 'spills' and 'makes gaps' (lines 1-4), illustrating a vivid impression of the degradation of the wall. Nature, in the form of cold weather, frost and the activities of small creatures, gradually destroys the wall. The narrator seems to believe that walls are unnatural and suggests that nature dislikes walls. This is portrayed through the phrase 'sends the frozen ground swell under it' (line 2). The poem describes nature making holes in the wall large enough that 'even two can pass abreast'. Literally, this refers to the size of the holes. However, it can also be interpreted that nature wishes the men to 'walk together', side by side, living in harmony where there is no barrier in their friendship that separates them.
Figurative expressions are used in 'Mending Wall' to describe the relationship between the neighbours. Many phrases contain both a literal and metaphoric meaning. For example, the phrases 'to walk the line' and 'set the wall between us' (lines 13,14) refers to the building of a tangible wall that marks the boundary of the neighbours' properties. These phrases are also figurative and represent the setting of a barrier in the neighbours' friendship. When they meet to repair the wall, it could be metaphorically interpreted as repairing their friendship and resolving disputes. 'To each the boulders have fallen to each' (line 16) shows that fault lie on the behalf of both neighbours. The metaphor in line seventeen compares their disputes to loaves and balls - some are small and some are large. Figurative language has been used to convey the meaning and significance of building the wall.
An overall light-hearted tone has been achieved throughout the poem. One of the main techniques used to achieve this is the inclusion of conversation. 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' (line 19) and the metaphor 'spring is mischief in me' (line 28) for example, shows the neighbours having fun in mending the wall together, creating a cheerful, light-hearted atmosphere. The comparison of the repairing of the fence to an outdoor game also contributes to this light-heartedness. Although the narrator does not want the wall, ironically, the mending of the wall brings the neighbours together and literally builds their friendship. In repairing the fence, the neighbours are spending time together, building their friendship and improving the communication between them. Humour has also been used as a technique to achieve a light-hearted atmosphere. Because the fence is important to the neighbour, he treats the matter of repairing it seriously. Imagery is used to describe the neighbour's attitude, illustrating a rather grim, yet comical representation of him shifting the stones and repairing the fence. The narrator sees the stubbornness in his neighbour, and uses the simile 'like an old-stone savage' to compare him to a stone-age man who 'moves in darkness' (lines 40, 41), that is, set in his ways, and who is unlikely to change his views.
The structure of the 'Mending Wall' is a long one-stanza poem. It is written in blank verse and contains a narrative-like style. Repetition is used as a technique to emphasize the main ideas. The line 'something there is that doesn't love a wall' has been repeated in line thirty-five with a new meaning. It refers to the attitudes of the narrator towards the wall - the narrator does not 'love the wall' and wants it down - whereas the 'something' mentioned in the first line of the poem refers to nature. Another example of repetition is the statement 'good fences make good neighbours'. This reflects back to and emphasizes the idea and opinion society adopts: Although people can be good friends, there will always be a barrier standing between them, acting as a boundary that separates their social relations from their personal privacy, 'walling in' what they do not wish to share with others.
In 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost communicates his opinion regarding the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers, through the perspective of the narrator of the poem. Poetic techniques such as imagery, figurative language, irony, and the use of the building of a wall as a symbolic representation of barriers have been utilized to convey these messages through a light-hearted tone, and simultaneously to portray a serious side of the poem.
Sources
www.helium.com/items/1454903-mending-wall-analysis-24.09.2010
D.N. Aloysius
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)