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<strong>LG204</strong>-5-FY ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Background out that all the other obstruents of English may occur in most positions of the word (initial, medial and final), although, again, there may be gaps in certain contexts – a matter I shall also take up in the second term. Missing ‘obstruents’ and states of the glottis I remarked at the beginning that the basic definition of ‘consonant’ would seem to preclude the inclusion of the sounds [h] and [] (glottal stop) from the category. As we know, the type of sound made with no oral obstruction is known as a vowel. We shall be looking at these in a few weeks. The two sounds in question, then, leave us with a characterisation problem. It’s clear that [h] must be included in the inventory of English consonants, since it occurs in minimal contrast with other true obstruents (for example hot vs. cot and got). One wouldn’t normally want to include [] in this inventory, although it is a very common sound in the language. This is because it never contrasts with any other consonant, but is generally recognised as a contextual variant of a voiceless stop phoneme, in particular [t]. The reason for its inclusion in this list is that it helps to exemplify a certain state of the glottis. The phoneme [h] is described in much of the literature, including CP and the IPA chart, as a voiceless glottal fricative. It is possible that some frication does occur at the glottis, since there appears to be more sound emitting than would occur if this were merely produced by opening the glottis and letting air pass through. However, another way of describing this sound is to characterise it as a burst of aspiration similar to that we shall be discussing with regard to voiceless stops. This involves what is known as a ‘spread glottis’. It has also been described in the literature as a ‘voiceless vowel’. This is because, [h] is always followed by a vowel and the mouth will be formed into the shape of the vowel which is to follow it, but a puff of air will be released, to introduce the vowel. Clearly, [h] is voiceless, since the vocal folds remain open. It does, however, have a voiced counterpart, which isn’t phonemic, merely contextual. When /h/ occurs between two vowels, as in behind or ahead, then vocal fold vibration does take place. This feat is accomplished by allowing vibration to take place in one part of the glottis whilst the other part remains open (see fig. 1.14 in CP). The phonetic symbol is []. The glottal stop involves a momentary total closure of the glottis, with the vocal folds tight rather than slack as for voicing. A term used for this state of affairs is ‘constricted glottis’. This can also refer to the situation where we get creaky voice, where the total closure would occur at one end and a slacker closure at the other. Creaky voice isn’t a distinctive feature of English, although it occurs in some circumstances for certain types of effect. We won’t be discussing this in this course. Fricatives that don’t usually appear in the basic inventory In some dialects of English (in particular Scottish and perhaps American), there is a contrast between the words which and witch. In other dialects, these words are homophones. The second of these starts with [w], which will be discussed in due course, but the first has a fricative initially. This sound is a labio-velar fricative. The 4
<strong>LG204</strong>-5-FY ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Background labial part is a rounding of the lips whilst the velar part is where the frication occurs. The sound is, of course, voiceless. Another fricative, with restricted use, is the voiceless velar fricative [x]. For many speakers this sound, occurring in a few words of non-English origin like Scots loch or German Bach, is, in any case, replaced by the equivalent stop [k]. Finally, for many speakers, a word like huge is pronounced, not with [h] followed by the glide [j], but with a voiceless palatal fricative []. None of the sounds featured in this section is generally considered to be phonemic in English. English sonorant consonants As we saw, obstruents are defined as sounds where the air pressure behind an obstruction if greater than that outside. This build up of air is achieved by ensuring that the only point at which air can escape is that of what we call the ‘primary constriction’. This entails ensuring that the velum is raised to that air cannot escape through the nasal cavity. In order to articulate a sonorant consonant, a primary constriction will still be formed at some point in the oral tract (since that’s the definition of a consonant) but air is allowed to escape elsewhere. This escape of air ensures that the air pressure behind and beyond the constriction is roughly equal. Nasals All the nasal consonants of English involve a primary stop constriction (indeed it is hard to imagine how a nasal fricative could possibly exist). Vowels may be inherently nasal (although not in English) or contextually nasalized – we shall discuss this in a week or so’s time. The basic articulatory difference between oral stops and nasal stops is the position of the velum. For oral stops there is a velic closure, as mentioned above, and for nasal stops the velum is lowered so that air can escape into the nasal cavity. Thus the difference between [b] and [m] is fundamentally the difference in the position of the velum, whilst the difference between [m] and [n] comes from the relative places where the primary constriction occurs. English has three phonemically relevant nasal stops: Bilabial: [m] as in ram [rm] Alveolar: [n] as in ran [rn] Velar: [] as in rang [r] (this does not have the same distribution as the other two, as we shall see in the second term) In addition, there is also a phonetic symbol [] which denotes a labio-dental nasal. This sound does, indeed, occur in English but, as we shall see in a week or so, this can be viewed as an allophone either of [m] or [n], occurring only before [f] or [v] (e.g. triumph [taf]. 5
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