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.

IPA

Two systems side by side

A phonetic chart based on the first two formants

From: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/vocres.html

/i/ green

/ae/ hat

/u/ boot

graphics thanks to Kevin Russell, Univ of Manitoba

“Hi” /haj/

we were away a year ago FORMANTS