Language acquisition plays a significant role in historical linguistics today. After Chomsky’s insistence that there is an inborn aptitude for the use of language systems, linguists began to investigate what elements comprise language acquisition and which parts within the process could help describe how and why language changes.
It would be interesting to cite the part of Steven Pinker’s discussion on why language is only partially learned. He explains that children acquire just bits of the language and how this is related to the universal grammar (Pinker 242-243). The first reason is obvious: it would be difficult for the brain during the evolution to develop a neuronal structure that would store an immense number of words. The second reason for partial learning, somewhat more interesting in the light of historical linguistics, is that “language inherently involves sharing a code with other people”:
An innate grammar is useless if you are the only one possessing it: it is a tango of one, the sound of one hand clapping. But the genomes of other people mutate and drift and recombine when they have children. Rather than selecting for a completely innate grammar, which would soon fall out of register with everyone else’s, evolution may have given children an ability to learn the variable parts of language as a way of synchronising their grammars with that of the community (Pinker 243).
This “sharing” is immensely important, not only because of the obvious reasons (a language dies with its speakers), but also because of acquisition/transfer of language, or, as already noted “a grammar” in Hale’s terminology. Hale refers to “grammar” as a knowledge state, shaped in acquirer’s mind when the acquirer is exposed to primary linguistic data (PLD, provided by E-Language). The data interacts with the acquirer’s hardcoded linguistic ability (“initial state of knowledge of language”), or universal grammar. We can label the steps of “grammar” acquisition as S1, S2 and so on. At an Sn stage we can claim that acquisition is over.
There are several interesting conclusions related to the acquisition process. The first is in defining the steps of acquisition and answering why the definition is important in the context of “grammar” and E-language. The answer is that acquirers adopt a grammar by rejecting the S1 stage in favour of the S2 to reach the level when they can generate the PLD to which they were initially exposed (Hale 13). What exactly happens between the stages, and whether there are some key elements regarding the language change, or whether there are conditions that influence the change – are rather interesting questions that Hale addresses, too. However, they are out of the scope of this Paper, so it would suffice to state that children in their mature states of language acquisition speak like people to whose language they were exposed, effectively updating PLD for the future acquirers.
The second important conclusion is that in this model there must be a terminal state of acquisition. The absence of it would cause a serious problem: if the acquirers continue to modify their knowledge state, if they continue to learn the “grammar” throughout their life, there would be no stage in the language definable as “synchronic state”. Without synchronous states of language, linguists could not set the markers for the study of the differences between the states, or, in other words, there would be no valid empirical framework for the diachronic study (Hale 14).
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Eric Armstrong’s voice & speech course is a website with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) charts and recorded pronunciation. It allows visitors to hear how IPA symbols sound when articulated by clicking on particular “sound”. It is created in Flash and can be used online.
IPA phonetic notation is easy to read for linguists, but to those less experienced it can be confusing. Luckily, Mr Armstrong created multimedia IPA charts, containing consonants (pulmonic and non-pulmonic), vowels, diacritics, suprasegmentals, diphtongs and triphtongs.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is used in many well-know dictionaries, such as Oxford’s, so students of English language will find Suprasegmentals Table extremely useful: it shows and plays the recorded speech that demonstrate stress, vowel length, syllable break, linking, as well as tones and word accents (level and contour).
IPA is a system for phonetic notation. It was created by the International Phonetic Association and represents sounds of spoken language. Many thanks to Mr Anderson for creating his website that is very useful to all interested in fascinating world of language and phonetics.
This text lists three sources (Daniel Jones, J. D. O’Connor and A. C. Gimson) about the English diphthongs in British English/Received Pronunciation. This is a simplified classification and it is by no means complete.
The most detailed is Jones (1975), who lists the important and less important diphthongs. The “essential diphthongs” (98) are: ei, ou, ai, au, ɔi, iə, ɛə, ɔə, uə; including “rising” ones: ĭə, ŭə, ŭi. Jones than continues with the note that two of those diphthong can be ignored by foreign speakers: ɔə and ŭi. The diphthong ɔə because it is replaced by ɔ: and ŭi since “it can always be replaced by disyllabic u-i”. “(…) [N]ine further non-essential diphthongs”, according to Jones, are: oi, ui, eə, aə, aə, oə, ŏi, ĕə, ŏə. They can be replaced by their “fuller forms”.
Spectrogram of the diphthong /ai/ as pronounced by a famous British actress.
Thus Jones gives 10 important diphthongs: ei, ou, ai, au, ɔi, iə, ɛə, uə, ĭə and ŭə. (They are not in slash parentheses; they are left as in the original text).
The next author is J. D. O’Connor (1973), who list 9 diphthongs (153): /eɪ/, /əʊ/, /ɑɪ/, /aʊ/, /ɔɪ/, /ɪə/, /ɛə/, /ɔə/ and /ʊə/. He then continues with the explanation that /ɔ:/ and /ɔə/ are not separated in pronunciation (“relatively few RP speakers make a contrast”) , so /ɔə/ is not essential.
In O’Connor’s division there are 8 essential diphthongs in British English (RP), as shown above.
Gimson (1970) refers to diphthongs as “diphthongal vowel glides” (126), and lists 8 of them (pp. 127 – 144): /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /ɔɪ/, /əʊ/, /ɑʊ/, /ɪə/, /ɛə/ and /ʊə/. Gimson goes at great depths and analyses each of the diphthongs, further explaining their long and short forms, as well as the variants.
Thus, according to Gimson, there are 8 significant diphthongs in RP English.
To see the sources for the above, visit Books & References page.