Gillian Brown’s views I

I’m a big fan of Gillian Brown’s ‘Listening to Spoken English’ (2nd Edition, Longman, 1990) pictured above. Below are two of my favourite quotations:

…the stretches of obscure acoustic blur often no longer permit representation on a segment-by-segment basis.  (p. 7)

By ‘obscure acoustic blur’ GB is referring to the smudginess of the stream of speech, where segments overlap with segments, syllables are squeezed out of existence, the soundshapes of words are radically changed into a burst or rush of continuous speech. To attempt to represent this continuous flowing substance as a sequence of symbols is close to impossible, or at least  immensely misleading.

This quotation occurs where GB is distinguishing between private speech – ‘relaxed conversations between people who know each other well’  – and the speech heard on BBC news. The ‘obscure acoustic blur’ refers to private speech, but even with the public speech of the BBC news, GB writes:

…we have to strain the conventions of phonetic representation in order to draw attention to features of this type of speech … it is frequently not possible to come up with a satisfactory phonetic representation…

It is my experience, and that of my colleague Sheila Thorn of The Listening Business, that even with what (at first hearing) seems like reasonably careful speech – is revealed to have (on closer inspection) frequent moments of ‘obscure acoustic blur’.

The implications of the fact that we cannot render the acoustic blur of speech into symbols are interesting. Phonetic symbols are essentially instructions in how to recreate the sounds of speech: they are instructions in pronunciation. Thus the symbol ʃ ‘esh’ represents  an unvoiced postalveolar fricative. Because the symbols stand for places and manners of articulation (= what you do, and where you do it in the mouth and throat) they can be turned into instructions for pronunciation: unvoiced = ‘don’t vibrate the vocal cords in your larynx’ postalveolar = ‘position your tongue just behind the ridge in the roof of your mouth’ and fricative = ‘make sure the tongue is almost but not quite touching the roof of your mouth, and force (gently) air through this gap between your tongue and the roof of the mouth’.

But the use of such pronunciation-oriented symbols is close to impossible when we consider the extremes of speech that listeners have to deal with outside the classroom. The implications of this would seem to be that we need to keep the teaching of pronunciation and listening separate: perhaps the drive for correctness of detail in pronunciation work (which symbols encourage), creates the wrong expectations of how words will sound in the acoustic blur of everyday speech.