Sound Variation And Its Pragmatic Implication

This thesis is concerned with sound variation and its pragmatic implication. Itpoints out that, from the angle of acoustic, articulatory and auditory sounds, variationsin pronunciation within a language, minute or gigantic, as in allophone, pitch,intonation, and in terms of standardized regulations such as Received Pronunciation(RP for short), are referred to as sound variation. The thesis also discusses that soundvariation is related to history, geography, social class, sex, ethnic group and age or thesocial relationship between speaker and hearer, public speaking or private talk, thepurposes, style and speaker's mother tongue. Language has its true value only when itis under the process of varying in accordance with social variation. This thesis tries toexplicate the pragmatic implication of sound variation in communication as well asforeign language teaching regarding communicative competence and give an applieddiscussion about objective variation and subjective variation which is given tohighlight the significance of sound variation in language communication and inlanguage learning. Meanwhile, this thesis proposes sound variation as a construct ofcommunicative competence and calls for attention to the construction of EFL withrespect to the factual sound variation among native English speakers and the actualvariation among non-native speakers whose ability to accommodate is critical in thesuccess of EFL.