Phonological classes of vowels

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

The Department of Foreign Languages Practice and Teaching Methodology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLASSIFICATION OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS AND VOWELS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prepared:

Maryna Olegivna Korolenko

Checked:

Maryna Volodymyrivna Goroshko

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Khmelnitskyi 2010

CONTENTS

 

 

1. CLASSIFICATION OF CONSONANTS……………………………………………3

1.1 What is consonant…………………………………………………………….3

1.2 Features of spoken consonants……………………………………………….3

1.3 Manners of articulation……………………………………………………….4

1.4 Places of articulation………………………………………………………….7

1.5 Phonation……………………………………………………………………..8

1.6 Voice onset time……………………………………………………………...9

1.7 Airstream mechanism………………………………………………………..11

 

2. CLASSIFICATION OF VOWELS………………………………………………….14

2.1 What is vowel………………………………………………………………..14

2.2 Phonetic classes of vowels…………………………………………………..14

2.3 Phonological classes of vowels……………………………………………...17

 

CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………………….19

 

LITERATURE…………………………………………………………………………20

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. CLASSIFICATION OF CONSONANTS

 

1.1 What is consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

Since the number of consonants in the world's languages is marginally greater than the number of consonant letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to each attested consonant. In fact, the Latin alphabet, which is used to write English, has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so digraphs like "ch", "sh", "th", and "zh" are used to extend the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled "th" in "this" is a different consonant than the "th" sound in "thin". (In the IPA they are transcribed [ð] and [θ], respectively.)

 

1.2 Features of spoken consonants

 

Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features:

• The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant (vowel like) sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives and nasals.
• The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). Additionally, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation.
• The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it's voiceless.
• The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature of VOT.
• The airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most languages have exclusively pulmonic egressive consonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but ejectives, clicks and implosives use different mechanisms.
• The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline distinctive in English, as in "wholly" [hoʊlli] vs. "holy" [hoʊli], but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries. Unrelated roots are differentiated in various languages such as Italian, Japanese and Finnish, with two length levels, "single" and "geminate". Estonian and some Sami languages have three phonemic lengths: short, geminate, and long geminate, although the distinction between the geminate and overlong geminate includes suprasegmental features.
• The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated.

All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop consonant" [t]. In this case the airstream mechanism is omitted.

Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction.

 

1.3 Manners of articulation

 

In linguistics (articulatory phonetics), manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound make contact. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners, and therefore severalhomorganic consonants.

One parameter of manner is stricture, that is, how closely the speech organs approach one another. Parameters other than stricture are those involved in the r-like sounds (taps and trills), and the sibilancy of fricatives. Often nasality and laterality are included in manner, but phoneticians such as Peter Ladefoged consider them to be independent.

 

Individual manners

• Plosive, or oral stop, where there is complete occlusion (blockage) of both the oral and nasal cavities of the vocal tract, and therefore no air flow. Examples include English /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced). If the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion; if it is voiceless, a plosive is completely silent. What we hear as a /p/ or /k/ is the effect that the onset of the occlusion has on the preceding vowel, as well as therelease burst and its effect on the following vowel. The shape and position of the tongue (the place of articulation) determine the resonant cavity that gives different plosives their characteristic sounds. All languages have plosives.
• Nasal stop, usually shortened to nasal, where there is complete occlusion of the oral cavity, and the air passes instead through the nose. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different nasal stops their characteristic sounds. Examples include English /m, n/. Nearly all languages have nasals, the only exceptions being in the area of Puget Sound and a single language on Bougainville Island.
• Fricative, sometimes called spirant, where there is continuous frication (turbulent and noisy airflow) at the place of articulation. Examples include English /f, s/ (voiceless), /v, z/ (voiced), etc. Most languages have fricatives, though many have only an /s/. However, the Indigenous Australian languages are almost completely devoid of fricatives of any kind.
• Sibilants are a type of fricative where the airflow is guided by a groove in the tongue toward the teeth, creating a high-pitched and very distinctive sound. These are by far the most common fricatives. Fricatives at coronal (front of tongue) places of articulation are usually, though not always, sibilants. English sibilants include /s/ and /z/.
• Lateral fricatives are a rare type of fricative, where the frication occurs on one or both sides of the edge of the tongue. The "ll" of Welsh and the "hl" of Zulu are lateral fricatives.
• Affricate, which begins like a plosive, but this releases into a fricative rather than having a separate release of its own. The English letters "ch" and "j" represent affricates. Affricates are quite common around the world, though less common than fricatives.
• Flap, often called a tap, is a momentary closure of the oral cavity. The "tt" of "utter" and the "dd" of "udder" are pronounced as a flap in North American English. Many linguists distinguish taps from flaps, but there is no consensus on what the difference might be. No language relies on such a difference. There are also lateral flaps.
• Trill, in which the articulator (usually the tip of the tongue) is held in place, and the airstream causes it to vibrate. The double "r" of Spanish "perro" is a trill. Trills and flaps, where there are one or more brief occlusions, constitute a class of consonant called rhotics.
• Approximant, where there is very little obstruction. Examples include English /w/ and /r/. In some languages, such as Spanish, there are sounds which seem to fall between fricativeand approximant.
• One use of the word semivowel, sometimes called a glide, is a type of approximant, pronounced like a vowel but with the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth, so that there is slight turbulence. In English, /w/ is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /u/, and /j/ (spelled "y") is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /i/ in this usage. Other descriptions usesemivowel for vowel-like sounds that are not syllabic, but do not have the increased stricture of approximants. These are found as elements in diphthongs. The word may also be used to cover both concepts.
• Lateral approximants, usually shortened to lateral, are a type of approximant pronounced with the side of the tongue. English /l/ is a lateral. Together with the rhotics, which have similar behavior in many languages, these form a class of consonant called liquids.

 

Broader classification

Manners of articulation with substantial obstruction of the airflow (plosives, fricatives, affricates) are called obstruents. These are prototypically voiceless, but voiced obstruents are extremely common as well. Manners without such obstruction (nasals, liquids, approximants, and also vowels) are called sonorants because they are nearly always voiced. Voiceless sonorants are uncommon, but are found in Welsh and Classical Greek (the spelling "rh"), in Tibetan (the "lh" of Lhasa), and the "wh" in those dialects of English which distinguish "which" from "witch".

Sonorants may also be called resonants, and some linguists prefer that term, restricting the word 'sonorant' to non-vocoid resonants (that is, nasals and liquids, but not vowels or semi-vowels). Another common distinction is between stops (plosives and nasals) and continuants (all else); affricates are considered to be both, because they are sequences of stop plus fricative.

 

Other airstream intitations

All of these manners of articulation are pronounced with an airstream mechanism called pulmonic egressive, meaning that the air flows outward, and is powered by the lungs (actually the ribs and diaphragm). Other airstream mechanisms are possible. Sounds that rely on some of these include:

• Ejectives, which are glottalic egressive. That is, the airstream is powered by an upward movement of the glottis rather than by the lungs or diaphragm. Plosives, affricates, and occasionally fricatives may occur as ejectives. All ejectives are voiceless.
• Implosives, which are glottalic ingressive. Here the glottis moves downward, but the lungs may be used simultaneously (to provide voicing), and in some languages no air may actually flow into the mouth. Implosive oral stops are not uncommon, but implosive affricates and fricatives are rare. Voiceless implosives are also rare.
• Clicks, which are velaric ingressive. Here the back of the tongue is used to create a vacuum in the mouth, causing air to rush in when the forward occlusion (tongue or lips) is released. Clicks may be oral or nasal, stop or affricate, central or lateral, voiced or voiceless. They are extremely rare in normal words outside Southern Africa. However, English has a click in its "tsk tsk" (or "tut tut") sound, and another is often used to say "giddy up" to a horse.

 

1.4 Places of articulation

 

In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is the point of contact where anobstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an active (moving) articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive (stationary) articulator (typically some part of the roof of the mouth). Along with the manner of articulation and phonation, this gives the consonant its distinctive sound.

A place of articulation is defined as both the active and passive articulators. For instance, the active lower lip may contact either a passive upper lip (bilabial, like [m]) or the upper teeth (labiodental, like [f]). The hard palate may be contacted by either the front or the back of the tongue. If the front of the tongue is used, the place is called retroflex; if the back of the tongue ("dorsum") is used, the place is called "dorsal-palatal", or more commonly, just palatal.

There are five basic active articulators: the lip ("labial consonants"), the flexible front of the tongue ("coronal consonants"), the middle/back of the tongue ("dorsal consonants"), the root of the tongue together with the epiglottis ("radical consonants"), and the larynx("laryngeal consonants"). These articulators can act independently of each other, and two or more may work together in what is calledcoarticulation (see below).

The passive articulation, on the other hand, is a continuum without many clear-cut boundaries. The places linguolabial and interdental, interdental and dental, dental and alveolar, alveolar and palatal, palatal and velar, velar and uvular merge into one another, and a consonant may be pronounced somewhere between the named places.

In addition, when the front of the tongue is used, it may be the upper surface or blade of the tongue that makes contact ("laminal consonants"), the tip of the tongue ("apical consonants"), or the under surface ("sub-apical consonants"). These articulations also merge into one another without clear boundaries.

Consonants that have the same place of articulation, such as the alveolar sounds -- n, t, d, s, z, l -- in English, are said to be homorganic.

A homorganic nasal rule is a case where the point of articulation of the initial sound is assimilated by the last sound in a prefix. An example of this rule is found in language Yoruba, where ba, "hide", becomes mba, "is hiding", while sun, "sleep", becomes nsun, "is sleeping".

 

 

 

List of places where the obstruction may occure

• Bilabial: between the lips
• Labiodental: between the lower lip and the upper teeth
• Dentolabial: between the upper lip and the lower teeth
• Linguolabial: between the front of the tongue and the upper lip
• Dental: between the front of the tongue and the top teeth
• Alveolar: between the front of the tongue and the ridge behind the gums (the alveolus)
• Postalveolar: between the front of the tongue and the space behind the alveolar ridge
• Retroflex: in "true" retroflexes, the tongue curls back so the underside touches the palate
• Palatal: between the middle of the tongue and the hard palate
• Velar: between the back of the tongue and the soft palate (the velum)
• Uvular: between the back of the tongue and the uvula (which hangs down in the back of the mouth)
• (All of the above may be nasalized, and most may be lateralized.)
• Pharyngeal: between the root of the tongue and the back of the throat (the pharynx)
• Epiglotto-pharyngeal: between the epiglottis and the back of the throat
• Epiglottal: between the aryepiglottic folds and the epiglottis (see larynx)
• Glottal: at the glottis (see larynx)

 

1.5 Phonation

 

Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which thevocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology and speech production in general. Other phoneticians, though, call this process quasi-periodic vibration voicing, and they use the term phonation to refer to any oscillatory state of any part of the larynx that modifies the airstream, of which voicing is just one example. As such, voiceless and supra-glottal phonation are included under this definition, which is common in the field of linguistic phonetics.

The phonatory process, or voicing, occurs when air is expelled from the lungs through the glottis, creating a pressure drop across the larynx. When this drop becomes sufficiently large, the vocal folds start to oscillate. The minimum pressure drop required to achieve phonation is called the phonation threshold pressure, and for humans with normal vocal folds, it is approximately 2–3 cm H2O. The motion of the vocal folds during oscillation is mostly in the lateral direction, though there is also some superior component as well. However, there is almost no motion along the length of the vocal folds. The oscillation of the vocal folds serves to modulate the pressure and flow of the air through the larynx, and this modulated airflow is the main component of the sound of most voiced phones.

The sound that the larynx produces is a harmonic series. In other words, it consists of a fundamental tone (called the fundamental frequency, the main acoustic cue for the percept pitch) accompanied by harmonic overtones, which are multiples of the fundamental frequency. According to the Source-Filter Theory, the resulting sound excites the resonance chamber that is the vocal tract to produce the individual speech sounds.

The vocal folds will not oscillate if they are not sufficiently close to one another, are not under sufficient tension or under too much tension, or if the pressure drop across the larynx is not sufficiently large. In linguistics, a phone is called voiceless if there is no phonation during its occurrence. In speech, voiceless phones are associated with vocal folds that are elongated, highly tensed, and placed laterally (abducted) when compared to vocal folds during phonation.

Fundamental frequency, the main acoustic cue for the percept pitch, can be varied through a variety of means. Large scale changes are accomplished by increasing the tension in the vocal folds through contraction of the cricothyroid muscle. Smaller changes in tension can be effected by contraction of the thyroarytenoid muscle or changes in the relative position of the thyroid and cricoid cartilages, as may occur when the larynx is lowered or raised, either volitionally or through movement of the tongue to which the larynx is attached via the hyoid bone. In addition to tension changes, fundamental frequency is also affected by the pressure drop across the larynx, which is mostly affected by the pressure in the lungs, and will also vary with the distance between the vocal folds. Variation in fundamental frequency is used linguistically to produce intonation and tone.

 

1.6 Voice onset time

 

In phonetics, voice onset time, commonly abbreviated VOT, is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between when a stop consonant is released and when voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, begins. Some authors allow negative values to mark voicing that begins during the period of articulatory closure for the consonant and continues in the release, for those unaspirated voiced stops in which there is no voicing present at the instant of articulatory closure.

A graphical representation of the VOT of voiced, voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated plosives

The concept of Voice Onset Time originated from the development in the early 1950s of a mechanical device for converting spectral information to an audio waveform, called the 'pattern-playback' machine. Initially, the term was only applied to schemes for acoustically-based speech synthesis that used the pattern-playback device, in order to create a consistent perceptual differentiation between synthesized voiced and unvoiced stop consonant phonemes, primarily in English. However, the concept was later brought into phonetics research to describe differentiations in stop consonants in actual languages. Positive values of VOT generally measured what in previous articulatory and aerodynamic models of speech was referred to as the duration of the period of aspiration.

However, a number of problems arose in defining VOT in some languages, and there is presently a call for reconsidering whether this speech synthesis parameter should be used to replace articulatory or aerodynamic model parameters which do not have these problems, and which have a stronger explanatory significance. As in the discussion below, any explication of VOT variations will invariably lead back to such aerodynamic and articulatory concepts, and there is no reason presented why VOT adds to an analysis, other than that, as an acoustic parameter, it may sometimes be easier to measure than an aerodynamic parameter (pressure or airflow) or an articulatory parameter (closure interval or the duration, extent and timing of a vocal fold abductory gesture).

According to VOT analysis, the three major phonation types of stops can be analyzed in terms of their voice onset time.

Voice Onset Timing spectrograms for English "tie" and "die". The voiceless gap between release and voicing is highlighted in red. Here the phoneme /t/ has a VOT of 95 ms., and /d/ has one of 25 ms.

• Simple unaspirated voiceless plosives, sometimes called tenuis plosives, have a voice onset time at or near zero, meaning that the voicing of a following sonorant (such as a vowel) begins at or near to when the stop is released. (An offset of 15 ms or less on [t] and 30 ms or less on [k] is inaudible, and counts as tenuis.)
• Aspirated plosives followed by a sonorant have a voice onset time greater than this amount, called a positive VOT. The length of the VOT in such cases is a practical measure of aspiration: The longer the VOT, the stronger the aspiration. In Navajo, for example, which is strongly aspirated, the aspiration (and therefore the VOT) lasts twice as long as it does in English: 160ms vs. 80ms for [kh], and 45ms for[k]. Some languages have weaker aspiration than English. For velar stops, tenuis [k] typically has a VOT of 20-30 ms, weakly aspirated [k] of some 50-60 ms, moderately aspirated [kh] averages 80-90 ms, and anything much over 100 ms would be considered strong aspiration. (Another phonation, breathy voice, is commonly called voiced aspiration; in order for the VOT measure to apply to it, VOT needs to be understood as the onset of modal voicing. Of course, an aspirated consonant will not always be followed by a voiced sound, in which case VOT cannot be used to measure it.)
• Voiced plosives have a voice onset time noticeably less than zero, a negative VOT, meaning the vocal cords start vibrating before the stop is released. With a fully voiced stop, the VOT coincides with the onset of the stop; with a partially voiced stop, such as English [b, d, g] in initial position, voicing begins sometime during the closure (occlusion) of the consonant.