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Handout on Consonants

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Handout on Consonants Ling 411 Consonants Consonants 2 Place of articulation Ling 411 Jonah Katz All consonants are made with a constriction: • some impediment to airflow 1 Primary dimensions of consonant contrast • =some change in the shape of the vocal tract • =some change in the acoustic resonances of the tract Consonants basically have three dimensions of contrast: • place of articulation As the English chart suggests (although it’s missing a few o corresponds to which articulators are making the articulators), these consonant constrictions can happen just about constriction(s) anywhere in the vocal tract: • manner of articulation o corresponds to what kind of constrictions exist in the sound • laryngeal properties (including voicing) o corresponds to what the glottis/larynx is doing There are various secondary kinds of contrast that exist (many of them written with diacritics), but if you learn just these three, you’re a long way towards understanding how consonants work. We can distinguish various levels of place of articulation, from major to minor: 1 Ling 411 Consonants Lingual Labial Coronal Dorsal Guttural/Radical Major place Bilabial Labiodental (inter)Dental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal ‘Minor’ place Anterior 3 Manner of articulation 3.1 Approximants There are many different degrees and kinds of constriction. The Approximants: sounds for which two articulators form a least constricted sounds are vowels. We can map out a continuum constriction, but not one narrow enough to cause turbulent, noisy as well from vowels to the least vowel-like consonants: airflow (frication). • glides and liquids Approximant • English: /r/, /l/, /w/, /j/ Obstruent Sonorant Glides: essentially the consonant ‘version’ of vowels. • may be characterized as such for phonetic reasons: Stop Fricative Affricate Nasal Vowel Liquid Glide o shorter duration than vowel counterparts o not as loud • more likely for phonological reasons: Continuant o form that vowels take when they are not the heads (nuclei) of their own syllables o when two vowel-like sounds are adjacent, predictable which one is the nucleus 2 Ling 411 Consonants Most common are also those present in English: palatal /j/, labiovelar (two places of articulation!) /w/. Liquids: approximants with no immediately obvious vowel ‘counterparts’, and which often involve complex secondary articulations. English /l/: alveolar lateral approximant • tongue-tip closure near the alveolar ridge • sides of tongue-blade (behind tip) lowered • air escapes over sides of blade around the tip • (mid-back dorsal constriction) Most varieties of American English feature (at least) two fairly different kinds of /l/: • ‘clear’ or ‘light’ [l]: word-initially (e.g. ‘loot’) • ‘dark’ [ɫ]: word-finally (e.g. ‘tool’) Other common lateral approximants: palatal /ʎ/, retroflex /ɭ/ Portuguese: [fiʎa] ‘daughter’ [fila] ‘row’ Note: although I generally use /r/ for the English sound, in this English /ɹ/: coronal approximant (as notated): section it will be important to distinguish it from other liquids, so • lots of variability here I’ll go to the upside-down /ɹ/ notation. o tongue shape: retroflex or ‘bunched’ o lip rounding possible o functions as post-alveolar or palatal in phonology English /ɹ/ can also function as a vowel: /ə˞/, /ɜ˞/ as in ‘butter’, ‘bird’ • write it as /ɹ/, /r/, /ɻ/ as you please • • like a mid-central vowel but with ‘rhotic coloring’ • several possible articulatory ways to get there 3 Ling 411 Consonants Cross-linguistic fun with rhotics: Fairly common: languages that only allow one place of articulation for nasals at the ends of words. • this type of nasal often has a weak or non-existent oral closure • may be referred to as a ‘nasal glide’ • sounds very similar to [ŋ] and is often transcribed as such • e.g. Caracas Spanish [montoɴ] ‘mountain’, Japanese [ɲipːoɴ] ‘Japan’ 3.3 Fricatives Some of these sounds are in the audio archive ‘RhoticSounds.zip’ on the course site. Fricative: sound produced with a constriction narrow enough to cause turbulent, chaotic, noisy airflow 3.2 Nasals • will generally result in acoustic noise: aperiodic sound, energy spread evenly across a frequency band In a nasal, air flows through the nose, rather than the mouth. • final sound of frication depends on • velum is lowered to allow air to pass into nasal cavity; o velocity of airstream closure with tongue or lips in oral cavity o location of constriction • dual nature: loud like approximants, but complete closure • fricatives occur at virtually every place of articulation like stops • may be called ‘nasal stops’ as opposed to ‘oral stops’ English: /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /h/ English: /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ Post-alveolar fricatives /ʃ/, /ʒ/ differ from /s/, /z/ mainly in • can take on other places of articulation before consonants tongue shape: • e.g. [tɛnθ̪ ] ‘tenth’, [sɪɱfəni] ‘symphony’ (hard to hear) • ‘dome’ shape for post-alveolars • less so for alveolars Other common places of articulation: retroflex /ɳ/, palatal /ɲ/ • more lip rounding for post-alveolars E.g. Spanish [peɲa] ‘crag, rock’ [pena] ‘trouble’ 4 Ling 411 Consonants 3.4 Stops In a stop: • airflow is completely blocked (closure) • voicing may continue, but not airflow • pressure builds up • eventually, it is released • result is a transient o rapid change in pressure o perceived as a click, pop, or tap You’ll see the place of articulation of post-alveolars described in o or, at higher amplitudes than speech, a boom many different ways: post-alveolar, alveo-palatal, palatal, etc. As • referred to as the stop burst you can see above, the constriction extends through the alveolar and part of the palatal region. So these are all correct, in a sense. Unlike most of the other sounds we’ve discussed, stops are inherently complex and dynamic: These four fricatives are referred to as sibilants: • if a fricative or liquid sounds a particular way at time t, it • phonetically: more noise at higher frequencies than others will sound roughly the same at t – 1 or t + 1 phonologically: pattern differently than non-sibilants • • not true at all for a stop: e.g. plural of ‘cuff’, ‘booth’, ‘dose’, ‘push’? o o begins as silence or ‘voice bar’ o proceeds to burst Some other common fricatives: bilabial [ɸ], [β]; velar [x], [ɣ]; o proceeds to short period of frication and uvular [χ], [ʁ] transition to next segment • also inherently asymmetrical in time o beginning is very different from end Japanese [ɸudʑi] ‘Fuji’; Russian [xatʲetʲ] ‘to want’; Modern Standard Arabic [ɣaɾaba] ‘to set (sun)’ English: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /ɡ/, ([ʔ]) 5 Ling 411 Consonants Generally voiced/voiceless pairs, but there is a lot of complexity Russian [lʲit͜sa] ‘face (gen.)’ vs. [lʲisa] ‘fox (nom.)’ in the actual phonetic realization: 4 Vowel-like consonants and consonant-like vowels Voiceless #__ V__V __# /t/ [tʰ] [ɾ] [t]~[ˀt]~[ʔ]~[t̚] English consonants /l/, /r/, /n/, /m/ are sometimes described /p/, /k/ [pʰ] [kʰ] [p] [k] [p]~[ˀp]~[p̚] etc. as having ‘syllabic’ versions. This is indicated with a diacritic “ ̩”. Voiced #__ V__V __# [ɡuɡl]̩ ‘google’ [wɪkr]̩ ‘wicker’ [tʃɪkn]̩ ‘chicken’ [rɪðm̩ ] ‘rhythm’ /d/ [d]~[t] [ɾ] [d]~[ˀd]~[d̚] What does this mean? /b/ /ɡ/ [b]~[p] [ɡ]~[k] [b] [ɡ] ([β] [ɣ]) [b]~[ˀb]~[b̚] etc. • hard to hear/see a second vowel in these words • but nonetheless ‘count’ as having two syllables Other common stop places: retroflex /ʈ/, /ɖ/; palatal /c/, /ɟ/; • could be thought of as a [ə] that’s ‘overlapped’ with the uvular /q/, /ɢ/. consonant (feel free to write as [əl], [ən], etc. if you want) ʕ e.g. MS Arabic [kataba] ‘to write’ [qat aɾ] ‘Qatar’ Just to make things a bit more complicated, the syllabic /r/ sound is sometimes thought of as a different type of vowel in 3.5 Affricates English, a rhotic vowel. • unlike syllabic consonants, can occur in either stressed or Can be thought of as a combination of stop and fricative unstressed syllables • closure of a stop • like a (mid central) vowel, but with some ‘/r/ flavoring • but released into a fricative constriction [fɜ˞st] ‘first’ [wɪkə˞] ‘wicker’ • written as a combination of stop and fricative characters For this class, you can use any one of these notation options: I English: [t͜ʃ], [d͜ʒ] usually use [ə] followed by the consonant for unstressed syllables, The argument that these are really one segment (rather than just a sequence of a stop and a fricative) will need to wait until we talk and [ɜ˞] for the stressed rhotic vowel. about phonotactics shortly. While the English-like pattern of restricting syllabic consonants to only sonorants (nasals, liquids, (glides)) is fairly common, other Other common affricates: [p͜f], [k͜x], [t͜s] languages allow much more leeway in this regard. E.g. (hyper-correct?) German: [p͜fɑɪl] ‘arrow’ vs. [fɑɪl] ‘venal, fell’ 6 Ling 411 Consonants Tashlhiyt Berber (Ridouane 2008): 7 .
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