The course aims at helping students develop their competence in English with reference to phonetics and morphology; the basics of the history of English from its origins to the present day will also be illustrated.
Pre-requisite: B2 level
1. PHONETICS
- The International Phonetic Alphabet
- speech organs
- vowels and consonants
- voicing
- place of articulation
- manner of articulation
- intonation and prosody
2. MORPHOLOGY
- functional and lexical words
- morphemes
- inflectional morphology
- derivational morphology
- common affixes in English
3. HISTORY OF ENGLISH
- Mediterraneans, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans
- Old English, Middle English, Modern English
- Main varieties of Present-day English
| Author | Title | Publisher | Year | ISBN | Note |
| Kuiper, Koenraad and W. Scott Allan | An Introduction to English Language: Word, Sound and Sentence (Edizione 4) | Palgrave Macmillan | 2016 | 978-0-230-20801-8 | |
| Facchinetti, Roberta | English Phonetics and Morphology. A Reader for First Year University Students (Edizione 3) | QuiEdit | 2016 | 9788864642314 | |
| Cruttenden, Alan | Gimson's Pronunciation of English (Edizione 8) | Routledge | 2014 | 978-0-4441-8309-2 | |
| Plag, Ingo | Word-Formation in English (Edizione 1) | Cambridge University Press | 2003 | 978-0-521-52563-3 |
WRITTEN EXAM: 30 items on phonetics, morphology and on the basics of the history of English.
Here follow the most important topics covered by the exam:
- phonetic transcription / English spelling of a set of words/phrases;
- articulatory description (voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation) of a set of phonetic symbols;
- assimilation, t-voicing, dark l, clipped syllables;
- stressed/unstressed syllables, content words, nucleus;
- British English vs American English spelling and pronunciation;
- inflectional morphology;
- derivational morphology;
- prefixes and suffixes;
- Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and their languages;
- Old English, Middle English, Modern English: basic aspects;
- Standardization of English and Present-day English.
FOR NON-ATTENDERS: Students who cannot attend the lessons are required to contat the teacher in order to agree on the exam programme.
