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Minimal pairs were an important part of the theory of pronunciation teaching during its development in the period of structuralist linguistics, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, and minimal pair drills were widely used to train students to discriminate among the phonemes of the target language. [14]
There are a few minimal pairs contrasting /ʊə/ and /u:ə/ in conservative Received Pronunciation: dour–doer, sure–shoer and cure-queuer. Furthermore, the hurry–furry merger that occurs in most varieties of North American English results in a merger of /ʌr/ with /ɜr/, removing almost any trace of the historical foot vowel in
However, there are few minimal pairs like that, and their use as such has been criticised by scholars such as Geoff Lindsey because the members of such minimal pairs are structurally different. Even so, pairs of words belonging to the same lexical category exist as well such as append / ə ˈ p ɛ n d / vs up-end / ʌ p ˈ ɛ n d / and aneath ...
For some English speakers in the UK, the vowels of goose and thought may be merged before dark syllable-final /l/ due to the phonetically raised pronunciation of the thought vowel in southern England (rather than [ɔː], the contemporary pronunciation of this vowel in Standard Southern British English is more accurately transcribed as [oː] or ...
That notation was first introduced in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978) by its pronunciation editor, Gordon Walsh, and it was later taken up by Roach (1983), who extended it to u representing the weak vowel found word-medially in situation etc., and by some other dictionaries, including John C. Wells's Longman Pronunciation ...
Cot and caught (along with bot and bought, pond and pawned, etc.) is an example of a minimal pair that is lost as a result of this sound change. The phonemes involved in the cot – caught merger, the low back vowels , are typically represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ or, in North America, as /ɑ/ and /ɔ ...
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Old English phonology is the pronunciation system of Old English, ... [25] whereas Minkova 2011, citing the absence of minimal pairs, ...