English Literature - Phonetics and Linguistics: 4 MCQs with Answers

The word ‘cuisine’ is a French loan word and its accepted Received Pronunciation transcription is /kwɪˈziːn/. The initial letter ‘c’ is realised as the voiceless velar plosive /k/, which is immediately followed by the labio-velar approximant /w/, so the cluster is /kw/. The middle vowel is the short lax /ɪ/, while the stressed second syllable carries the long close front vowel /iː/ followed by the alveolar nasal /n/. The primary stress falls on the second syllable, which is typical of many French borrowings retained in English.

Received Pronunciation is usually described as having twenty vowel sounds, made up of twelve pure vowels or monophthongs and eight diphthongs. A monophthong keeps a single steady quality throughout, as in the vowels of ‘sit’, ‘cat’ or ‘book’. A diphthong is a glide within one syllable from one vowel quality towards another, as in the vowels of ‘day’, ‘boy’ or ‘house’. The eight diphthongs are conventionally grouped into three closing to /ɪ/, two closing to /ʊ/ and three centring towards /ə/. Together with twenty-four consonants they give the forty-four phonemes of English.

Phonetics studies speech sounds as physical events, that is how they are articulated by the organs of speech, how they travel as sound waves and how they are perceived, and it is therefore concerned with articulation. Phonology studies how those sounds function as a system within a particular language, dealing with phonemes, allophones, syllable structure and stress. Morphology studies the internal structure of words, examining morphemes, roots, affixes and word formation. Syntax studies how words combine into phrases, clauses and sentences. Semantics, which is not listed here, studies meaning.

Semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies meaning in language: the meanings of individual words, the sense relations between them such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and polysemy, and the way the meanings of words combine to give the meaning of phrases and sentences. Syntax deals with the arrangement of words into grammatical structures, and morphology with the internal structure of words. Linguistics is the general name for the scientific study of language as a whole, of which semantics is only one branch. Pragmatics, a related field, studies meaning in context.