At the end of the course, students will have both theoretical and practical knowledge useful for understanding and analyzing phonetic and phonological aspects of a language or language variety. In particular, students will have notions of articulatory phonetics and will be able to produce phonetic transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
Course Prerequisites
This introductory course does not require prior knowledge on the topic.
Teaching Methods
The course will take place in the classroom and will include lectures and practical exercises using slides and multimodal materials.
Assessment Methods
Written exam with multiple-choice questions, including phonetic transcription of words.
Texts
Reference textbook: Strik Lievers, Francesca. (2020). La linguistica e le lingue. Rome: Carocci. Recommended textbook for further reading: Gagliardi, Gloria. (2019). Linguistica per le professioni sanitarie. Bologna: Pàtron Editore. Additional bibliographic material will be indicated during the lectures.
Contents
The course includes both a theoretical part and a more practical part with exercises of phonetic transcriptions. The phonetic sciences will be introduced, with an explanation of the distinction between phonetics and phonology, as well as an overview of articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory (perceptual) phonetics. In particular, articulatory phonetics and the speech production apparatus will be examined in detail. The distinction between phones and phonemes and the concept of minimal pairs will be presented. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) will be introduced, along with the features of the phonological system of Italian: the phoneme inventory and phonological rules of Italian will be described. Finally, the course will introduce dimensions of linguistic variation, with a focus on phonetic and phonological variation in regional varieties of Italian.
Course Language
Italian
More information
The slides used during the course as well as other educational material will be uploaded on KIRO – the E-Learning platform of the University of Pavia.
