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Title:
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Say It Right! English Pronunciation Dictionary
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Author:
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Peter Lesetar
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Alberta
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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In Progress
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Applied Linguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Bruce Derwing
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Abstract:
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Lesetar's Say it right! English Pronunciation Dictionary (1997) describes the whole system of English spelling-to-sound correspondences by processing more than 55.000 entries, starting from spelling and giving the phonetic transciption of words as end-product. Though not salient at first sight, it is possible to generalize into rules the changes from written English text to reading. The notable attempts at this, Venezky1s A study of selected spelling-to-sound correspondence patterns (1966), Wijk1s Rules of pronunciation for the English language (1966), Cummings1 American English Spelling: An Informal Description (1988), and Carney1s A survey of English spelling (1994), (not to speak of Payne1s English Guides 8: Spelling (1995), all develop an oversize set of graphemes while often covering only a limited corpus. Lesetar (1993), however, while analyzing a corpus triple the size of Venezky1s offers a set of graphemes numbering 52, less than half of Wijk1s 108 or Carney1s 110 graphemes. A comparison of all the above approaches is given.
Thanks to the rigorous treatment of the whole lexicon, Lesetar1s rule-system surpasses all other efforts in the economy of describing the letter-to-sound correspondences while complying best with the criteria of expliciteness, exhaustiveness, and simplicity. About 115 main rules define stress, morphemic segmentation, sound values corresponding to specific letters and their combinations in all the different environments, with complete lists of all exceptional words ,with reference to the rule(s) to which each word in question is an exception.
Say it right! is a system of rules based on lexical frequency. The whole opus is characterized by a very strong interdependence of rules. The main system of rules consists in the following subsystems: (1) the pronunciation of consonant graphs, (2) stress, (3) the pronunciation of stressed monographic vowels, (4) the pronunciation of unstressed monographic vowels, and (5) the pronunciation of digraphic vowels. It is practical to discuss the consonants before the vowels since they constitute the margins of syllables. What is more, they are not sensitive to stress. Lesetar1s approach, especially in treating stress, heavily uses the type-differences of the two main substrata of English: Germanic and Classical.
Within any block of rules (, the algorithm), we proceed from the general phenomenon to the rarer; consequently, each rule overrides all previous ones within the same batch. Thus, even exceptions have been classified. The appendix gives a detailed analysis of the following: (a) changes in spelling during morphological formation, (b) the pronunciation of conjugational as well as declinational suffixes, and (c) stress-patterns for compounds.
Written for both linguists and learners of English, Lesetar kept the theoretical discussion to the necessary minimum while aiming to provide even the scientist with an exhaustive and handy reference work on the subject. The very strong hierarchy may pose intial difficulties for the user since (s)he must study all the rules before being able to derive the right pronunciation from any input. However, once this system is understood, Say it right! is a safe guide in the the maze of English words.
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Page Updated: 29-Nov-2009
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