Pronouncing English is a textbook for teaching English phonetics and phonology, offering an original "stress-based" approach while incorporating all the standard course topics. Drawing on current linguistic theory, it uniquely analyzes prosody first, and then discusses its effects on pronunciation—emphasizing suprasegmental features such as meter, stress, and intonation, then the vowels and consonants themselves.

Distinguished by being the first work of its kind to be based on an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the lexical entries of an entire dictionary, Pronouncing English is complemented by a list of symbols and a glossary. Richard Teschner and M. Stanley Whitley present an improved description of English pronunciation and conclude each chapter with suggestions on how to do a better job of teaching it. An appendix with a brief introduction to acoustic phonetics—the basis for the perception vs. the production of sounds—is also included. Revolutionary in its field, Pronouncing English declares that virtually all aspects of English pronunciation—from the vowel system to the articulation of syllables, words, and sentences—are determined by the presence or absence of stress.

The accompanying CD-ROM carries audio recordings of many of the volume's exercises, more than 100 text and sound files, and data files on which the statistical observations were based.

Richard V. Teschner is a professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Texas, El Paso.

M. Stanley Whitley is professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the Department of Romance Languages at Wake Forest University.

Contents
Preface		000
1 	The metric foot	000
1.1	The notion of stress: Present stress and absent/null stress 	000
1.2	Metricalism	000
1.3	The five major metric feet: spondees, trochees, iambs, dactyls and anapests 	000
1.4	Weak stress, null stress, and vowels	000
1.5	The English drive toward monosyllabicity	000
1.6	Teaching the topics of chapter 1 to students of ESOL	000
Notes for chapter 1	000
2 	Strong stresses and weak: How to know where they go	000
2.1	Strong stress moves leftward, but only so far	000
2.2	Three main factors in strong-stress position	000
	2.2.1 	Syllable structure	000
	2.2.2 	Part of speech	000
	2.2.3 	Affixation	000
2.3	Strong-stress retention on the same base vowel	000
2.4	Word families with shifting stress	000
2.5	The effect of suffixation on strong-stress position	000
2.6	The shiftless, stress-free life of the prefix	000
2.7	Applying strong-stress rules to bisyllabic words	000
2.8	Applying strong-stress rules to trisyllabic words	000
2.9	Strong-stressing words of four, five and more syllables	000
2.10	Weak stress: Placing the strong, locating the weak	000
2.11	Weak stress on bisyllabic words	000
	2.11.1	Bisyllabics that strong-stress the ult	000
	2.11.2	Bisyllabics that strong-stress the pen	000
2.12	Weak-stressing trisyllabic words	000
2.13	Weak-stressing "four-plus" words	000
	2.13.1 	Ult stress patterns	000
	2.13.2 	Pen stress patterns	000
	2.13.3 	Ant(epenultimate) stress patterns	000
	2.13.4 	Pre(anepenultimate) stress patterns	000
	2.13.5 	Qui stress patterns	000
2.14	Vowel reduction: The price we pay for shifting stress	000
2.15	Teaching the topics of chapter 2 to students of ESOL	000
Notes for chapter 2	000
3		Intonation--the melodic line	000
3.1	"Peak" stress for contrast and emphasis	000
3.2	Some analogies with music	000
3.3	Stressing compound words and phrases	000
	3.3.1	Two-word compounds and phrases	000
	3.3.2	Multiple-word compounds and phrases	000
	3.3.3	Pitch adjustments in compounds' post-peak words	000
3.4	Peak stresses and info units	000
3.5	Melodic lines long and short, falling and rising, etc.	000
	3.5.1	Falls and rises, statements and questions	000
	3.5.2	Fall-rise and rise-fall	000
	3.5.3	Some other melodies	000
3.6	Melodic lines and compound melodies	000
	3.6.1	Enumeration	000
	3.6.2	Selection questions	000
	3.6.3 	Tags	000
	3.6.4	Complex sentences	000
3.7	Approaches to intonation	000
3.8	Teaching the topics of chapter 3 to students of ESOL	000
Notes for chapter 3	000
4 	From orthography to pronunciation	000
4.1	Even English spelling can be reduced to rules	000
4.2	Consonants: the (somewhat) easy part	000
	4.2.1	The fairly easy equivalencies: phonemes /?? ????? ?????/	000
	4.2.2	The tough equivalencies: phonemes /? ??????????/	000
	4.2.3	Grapheme 'i' and the consonants that precede it	000
	4.2.4	When is 's(s)' /s/ and when is it /z/, /?/ or even /?/?	000
	4.2.5	Grapheme 's' and /s/, /z/, /?/	000
	4.2.6	Grapheme 'x' and the five things it renders	000
4.3	Vowels: which are easy and which are tough to spell	000
	4.3.1	Vowels that are fairly easy to spell	000
	4.3.2	Vowels that are tough to spell	000
	4.3.2.1	The four tense vowels /i e o u/	000
	4.3.2.2	Diphthong /ai/	000
	4.3.2.3	The mid lax vowels /?/ and /?/	000
	4.3.3	Vowel phonemes and graphemes: an encapsulated review	000
4.4	Vowel reduction redux	000
	4.4.1	General guidelines for spelling the schwa	000
	4.4.2	How to spell unstressed final /??/	000
	4.4.3	The three ways to spell stressed /??/	000
4.5 	Teaching the topics of chapter 4 to students of ESOL	000
Notes for chapter 4	000
5		Vowels	000
5.1 	Vowels, broadly and narrowly	000
5.2 	How to make vowels: Tongue and lip position	000
5.3 	Other vowels, other languages	000
5.4 	Stressed vowels	000
	5.4.1 	Low /?/ and /?/	000
	5.4.2 	Mid and high vowels: Tense /???????/ vs. lax /???????/ 	000
	5.4.3 	Full diphthongs: /????????/ 	000
	5.4.4 	Uh, er...: The lax vowels /?/ and /??/	000
5.5 	Unstressed vowels: The schwa zone	000
5.6 	Shifting vowels make the dialect	000
	5.6.1 	Low back problems	000
	5.6.2 	Vowel breaking	000
	5.6.3 	Diphthongs on the move	000
	5.6.4	Smoothed diphthongs	000
	5.6.5	Lexical incidence: "You say tomayto and I say tomahto..."	000
5.7 	Rules and regularities	000
5.8 	Other analyses of English vowels	000
5.9	Teaching English vowels and consonants	000
Notes for chapter 5	000
6 	Consonants	000
6.1	Consonants and syllable position	000
6.2	Types of consonants	000
	6.2.1	Voicing	000
	6.2.2	Place of articulation	000
	6.2.3	Manner of articulation	000
	6.2.4	Secondary modifications	000
6.3	English consonant phonemes	000
6.4	Consonants that behave like vowels	000
	6.4.1	Liquids: l's and r's	000
	6.4.2	Nasals	000
	6.4.3	Goin' s'llabic	000
6.5	Stops	000
	6.5.1	Stops and VOT	000
	6.5.2	Stops that flap	000
6.6	All those sibilants	000
6.7	Slits up front	000
6.8	/h/: A sound that can get lost	000
6.9	Glides /j/ and /w/	000
6.10	Syllable reprise: How to build an English word	000
6.11	Teaching pronunciation: Error analysis	000
Notes for chapter 6	000
7		Sounds and forms that change and merge
7.1	English phonemes in (con)text	000
7.2	When words change their pronunciation	000
7.3	Changes due to word linkage	000
7.4	Changes due to stress	000
	7.4.1	Speaking metrically	000
	7.4.2	Crushed words: Weak forms and contractions	000
7.5	Changes due to grammar: Morphemes and allomorphs 	000
7.6	Phonology in grammar	000
	7.6.1	Inflectional morphology	000
	7.6.2	A case study: English plural formation	000
7.7	The phoneme exchange	000
	7.7.1	Vowel alternations	000
	7.7.2	Consonant alternations	000
	7.7.3	Rules, constraints, alternations: How deep does phonology go?	000
7.8	English spelling revisited	000
7.9	Teaching pronunciation: sounds in context	000
Notes for chapter 7	000
Appendix	000
8.1	Acoustic phonetics	000
8.2	The International Phonetic Alphabet	000
8.3	PEASBA's CD: Recordings and database	000
Notes for appendix	000
List of symbols	000
Glossary 	000
References 	000
Index	000
 

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: English language Pronunciation