A Critical Review of English Education (32)

Since 31 days ago, we have picked out and been discussing the following sentence,

　This is a pen.

which unfortunately has long been stigmatized as a typical one of the most unexpected utterances in daily spoken English.

However, isn’t this kind of statement a mere echo of others―perhaps? What’s more, isn’t it possibly just a unilateral blanket opinion?

With this awareness of the issue, we have been executing “factor decomposition” as follows in pursuit of acquiring a more penetrating vision to locate the latent problems involved:

　imagination　usefulness　grammar　pronunciation

Since twenty days ago, we have mainly concentrated on the pronunciation factors.

　pronunciation (21)

First, there is often a “discrepancy” between a sentence’s “phonetic configuration” and its “syntactic structure.”

Today, we will continue to consider the [n] sound in “pen.”

Watch the following video:
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JpX5yHw_MCJ7fQwHEOLXk5AI6St-nm41/view?usp=sharing>

Cross-sectional diagrams of the cavity therein are borrowed (with some adaptions) from:
John Laver (1994) Principles of Phonetics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Cambridge University Press.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.