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<strong>LG204</strong>-5-FY ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Background narrow gap for the air to escape, resembling a fricative. Crucially, the two elements of the affricate are articulated at the same point in the mouth. Try the palato-alveolar affricate [] to see what happens. Place of articulation As I’ve said, obstructions can be made between articulators at any point in the oral cavity. It’s most likely that the contact will be made between two articulators that are reasonably near to each other. One of these is described as ‘active’ in that it moves and the other is described as ‘passive’ and remains static. When we are discussing the phonetic description of an articulation, we tend to describe it by means of both articulators involved or, if the active articulator is the tongue, in terms of the passive articulator. When we come to phonological description, we use the active articulator to characterise place, but that’s for later. Parts of the tongue: the flexible part that can protrude out of the mouth is known as the blade and the bit round the end is the tip. These two are indissoluble as we shall see later. The more fleshy, less flexible bit is the body of the tongue and it is divided into two sections for descriptive purposes: the front and the back. The part of the tongue which adjoins the larynx is known as the tongue root. This area isn’t used in the articulation of English consonants although other languages do have sounds using this as an active articulator. Bearing this in mind, we’ll start to see at what point these obstructions are, indeed made. I shall only discuss those places and combinations of manner and place that are relevant to English 1. Bilabial: an obstruction made with the two lips. 2. Labio-dental: the upper teeth and the lower lip 3. Dental: the blade of the tongue and the upper teeth. This could also be called lingua-dental, but since the tongue is responsible for most obstructions, we tend to omit it from descriptions unless a particular tongue area making contact with part of the oral structure that isn’t immediately adjacent to it. 4. Alveolar: the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge (tooth ridge – so called because it contains the tooth sockets or alveoli). 5. Palato-alveolar: the blade of the tongue and the area of the palate which is partially the back part of the alveolar ridge 6. Retroflex: the tip of the tongue and the palato-alveolar area (as above) 7. Palatal: the front of the tongue and the hard palate 8. Velar: the back of the tongue and velum or soft palate Voicing A third phonetic parameter required to provide a complete set of the obstruent sounds of English is ‘voice’. The term ‘voicing’ or ‘voice’ characterises the vibration of the vocal folds or vocal cords. These are located in the larynx (voice box or Adam’s apple). The larynx is a cartilage box located at the top of the trachea (or windpipe), through which the air has to pass on its way to the mouth and to the exterior. In the middle of this box is a hole, known as the glottis and the glottis is bounded by two 2
<strong>LG204</strong>-5-FY ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Background bands of muscle – the vocal folds. These bands of muscle can be configured in a number of ways (some others of which will be discussed later). If voicing is to occur, they have to be configured in such a way as to allow them to vibrate. This means that they must close the gap of the glottis but mustn’t be too tightly together – they must be slack, so that when the air pushes its way through they open, but then are pulled together again. The effect of this is to cause them to vibrate and the result can be heard as extra sound over and above that made by the contact of the articulators in the mouth. Voicing can be heard inside the head if you place your hands over your ears and can be felt at the larynx if the fingers are placed on either side of it. Try sss/zzz to experience the effect. Let’s now see which combinations of place and manner are relevant to a description of the obstruent phonemes of English (each of these pairings may be either voiceless or voiced). I’m using the term ‘phoneme’ here, in spite of the fact that it’s fundamentally a word connected with phonology, because I want to isolate the distinctive sounds of English and, at this juncture, don’t want to talk about any contextual variation that might become apparent. The obstruents of English and the IPA symbols for them I list below the set of obstruent phonemes of English with minimal pairs of words illustrating their use and also demonstrating their phonemic status. Just a reminder of the meaning of ‘minimal pair’. These are a pair of words which have different meanings but differ in only one sound, or, in the current examples, only one feature of one sound. English has 6 phonemic (contrastive) stops, that is voiced and voiceless pairs at three different places of articulation. Bilabial: voiceless [p] and voiced [b] (pan, ban) Alveolar: voiceless [t] and voiced [d] (ton, done) Velar: voiceless [k] and voiced [g] (cot, got) There are 8 phonemic fricatives, that is voiceless and voiced pairs at four different places of articulation. Labio-dental: voiceless [f] and voiced [v] (fat, vat) Dental: voiceless [] and voiced [] (thigh, thy) Alveolar: voiceless [s] and voiced [z] (sip, zip) Palato-alveolar: voiceless [] and voiced [] (ruche, rouge) There are two phonemic affricates, voiced and voiceless at 1 place of articulation. Palato-alveolar: voiceless [] and voiced [] (chin, gin) Note that, with the exception of the palato-alveolar fricatives, I have produced examples of words where the phoneme in question is word initial. The reason for the deviation from this practice in the one particular case is the faulty distribution of the sound [] in English. This is something we will return to in the second term. It turns 3
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