Consonants and vowel January 20 2003
Review where we’ve been
• We’ve listened to the sounds of “our” English, and assigned a set of symbols to them.
• We abstracted away from pitch, loudness, and duration.
• We hope to better understanding our language’s sounds by analyzing them as being composed of a sequence of identifiable sounds, each of which occurs frequently in words of the language.
• Frequently? If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3 words, we don’t take it seriously (glottal stop, velar fricative)
• We do this against the background knowledge that the inventory of sounds in English is not necessary as human languages go: they are what they are against a much wider backdrop of possible linguistic sounds.
• We also attempt to physically characterize these sounds: acoustically and articulatorily. Consonants are easier to characterize articulatorily, vowels acoustically.
• We are particularly interested in those ways in which the English of Speaker 1 is different from the English of Speaker 2: again, working against the background knowledge of variation.
• We also characterize differences of sounds across sound contexts: we say, notice the different sound that occurs in front of a voiceless consonant in height.
• Looking ahead to phonology, we will attempt to get a handle on variation in sounds in two ways:– 1. Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can
characterize one of them as a variant of the other used in a particular context (“under the influence of that context,” so to speak)
– Two sounds are distinct (hence, different) if two distinct words differ only with regard to these two sounds, in otherwise identical positions
• We try to characterize the inventory of sounds in a language, knowing that that language chose one set of sounds when a vast range of other possibilities might have been chosen.
Symbols
• We assign symbols to these sounds; in addition, we want to characterize them as best we can articulatorily and acoustically.
Sounds can be divided into two major groups, consonants and vowels; or set along a continuum known as the sonority hierarchy:
Sonority hierarchy
• Vowels
• Glides
• Liquids
• Nasals
• Obstruents: – Fricatives– Affricates– Stops
Consonants
• Consonants = obstruents + sonorants– Obstruents: (oral) stops, affricates, and
fricatives– Sonorants: nasals and liquids (l,r)
Consonants have a point of articulation
The crucial points of articulation for English consonants are:
• Labial• Labio-dental• Dental• Alveolar• Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal• Retroflex (r only)• Palatal (y, ñ)• Velar• Laryngeal
Obstruents:
• 6 stops
• 9 fricatives
• 2 affricates
Nasals (4)
4 other sonorants (what are they?)
2 glides
Vowels
• Vowels are harder to characterize articulatorily, but we try!
• The fact that it’s harder is reflected in the fact that there is more than one way in which it’s done. IPA is one way; American is another.