Theoretical phonetics. Study guide for second year students. Борискина О.О - 54 стр.

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of comptroller is 'controller' (the one is simply a fancified spelling of the other).
In all of these the sway of spelling is gradually proving irresistible.
         Quite a few of these spelling-induced pronunciation changes are
surprisingly recent. At the time of the American Revolution, husband was
pronounced 'husban', soldier was 'sojur', and pavement was 'payment', according
to Burchfield. Until well into the nineteenth century, zebra was pronounced
'zebber', chemist was 'kimmist', and Negro, despite its spelling, was 'negger'
(hence the insulting term nigger). Burchfield goes on to point out that until the
nineteenth century swore was spoken with a silent w (as sword still is) as were
Edward and upward, giving 'Ed'ard' and 'up'ard'.
         Much of this would seem to fly in the face - indeed, does fly in the face -
of what we were saying earlier, namely that pronunciations tend to become
slurred over time. Although that is generally true, there are constant exceptions.
Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage,
spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. People say
things sometimes because they are easier or more sensible, but sometimes
simply because that's the way everyone else is saying them. Bounteous, for
instance, was in Noah Webster's day pronounced 'bountchus' - a clear case of
evolutionary slurring - but for some reason purists took exception to it and
bountchus quickly became a mark of ignorance. It is for the same reason
precisely that in modern England it is considered more refined to pronounce ate
as 'et'.
         But without doubt the most remarkable example of pronunciation change
arising purely as a whim of fashion was the sudden tendency in eighteenth-
century upper-class southern England to pronounce words like dance, bath, and
castle with a broad a, as if they were spelled dahnce, bahth, and cahstle. In the
normal course of things, we might have expected the pronunciations to drift
back. But for some reason they stuck (at least they have so far), helping to
underscore the social, cultural, and orthoepic differences between not only
Britons and Americans but even between Britons and Britons. The change was
so consequential and far-reaching that it is not so much a matter of
pronunciation as of dialect.

   Celce-Murcia M. Teaching Pronunciation: a Reference for Teachers of
                    English to Speakers of Other Languages.
     Although English grammar limits the syntactic possibilities of an utterance,
prosodic elements interact with syntax to convey a range of meaning and
speaker’s intent in spoken discourse.
     Although there are variations possible in areas based on such factors as rate
of speech and dialect (word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, and adjustments in
connected speech), these phenomena are largely rule-governed and not
particularly sensitive to discourse and speaker's intent. The features of
pronunciation that are quite sensitive to the discourse context and the speaker's
intention are prominence and intonation. In particular, we focus on the pro-