English phonetic and phonological productions of English Philology fourth year students at Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC)

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the phonetic and phonological productions of fourth year students of English Philology at Universidad de Santiago de Compostela while speaking and reading in English in relation to the type of British Standard English pronunciation, also known as Received Pronunciation (RP). In the course of this work, the concepts of phonetics and phonology together will be required in order to comprehend the use of sounds in English speech. Phonetics will be taken into account as the study of the interaction between speech organs in order to articulate a sound as well as the manner in which these sounds are received by students through their hearing organs. When talking about phonology, what matters now is the system elements (e.g. vowels and consonants) that impact meaning (bit differs from pit in just one phoneme, precisely because the difference in the sound causes a difference in meaning), as well as the patterns of sounds of any particular language (in this case, English). Moreover, we have to bear in mind that the English system of sounds is not a one-by-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. As a result, during this work, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) including and representing the different forty-four sounds of English will be taken as a reference to describe the phonetic and phonological productions.