Allophones of the English phonemes 1 Allophones of /p
Complex Consonant Articulations
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- Three main types of Complex Articulation
- Simultaneous Articulations
- Co-ordinate or Double Articulation
- Transitional (Sequential) Complex Articulations
- Co-articulation
Complex Consonant ArticulationsDefinition of "Complex Articulation"For the purposes of this course, complex articulations can be considered to belong to two categories:-
In reality, all speech is complex, involving the coordination of the movement of numerous articulators. The articulatory movements of the various articulators can be assumed to be attempting to reach particular articulatory targets for each phoneme in a sequence of speech sounds. The articulatory gestures belonging to one phoneme overlap with the articulatory gestures of other phonemes as each of the articulators attempts to reach its target positions. Because some articulators move slower than others these movements are not synchronised. The key to this concept of "complex articulation" revolves around the notion of the "articulatory target" for each articulator. To determine whether a sound is a complex articulation you should ask the following questions:-
The second question is essential as all phonemes involve more than one articulator with its own particular articulatory target. For example, a low vowel has both a low tongue target position and a low jaw target position. The jaw target articulation does not add to the phonological contrastiveness of the vowel, however, as the low tongue position alone is sufficient to identify this vowel sound as a low vowel. On the other hand, the contrast between /i/ and /y/ in a language such as French depends upon both the target articulation of the tongue (high, front) and the target articulation of the lips (spread or rounded). Changing either target articulation will change the phonemic identity of the sound. In other words the two targets (lingual and labial) are both contrastive. We can now reduce the two questions, above, to a single question:-
If the answer to this question is yes then we can conclude that we have a complex articulation. Three main types of Complex ArticulationIt is useful to divide Complex articulations into three main types:-
Simultaneous ArticulationsPrimary and Secondary ArticulationsComplex simultaneous articulations are usually described in terms of primary and secondary articulations. The primary articulation is the articulation with the greater degree or rank order of stricture. Stricture order, from highest to lowest, is stop, trill, fricative, approximant, resonant. Secondary articulations very often have approximant stricture, especially when the primary and secondary articulators are different parts of the tongue. Lingual (of the tongue) articulations sometimes take precedence over nasal articulations of the same degree of stricture so that the lingual articulation would be primary and the nasal articulation would be secondary. This means that lingual articulations would be considered primary when the other contrastive articulation is nasal. For this reason we have nasalised vowels in numerous languages and contrastive nasalised approximants and fricatives in a small number of languages. Co-ordinate or Double ArticulationWhen a sound has two simultaneous contrastive articulations and these articulations are of the same rank order of stricture (e.g. both have stop stricture or both have fricative stricture) then it is not possible to distinguish between primary and secondary articulations. Both articulations in such a case are considered to be primary and the sound is said to be produced by a co-ordinate or double articulation. The most common double articulations are stop-stop double articulations although fricative-fricative double articulations also exist. Another very common double articulation is the labial-velar approximant-approximant double articulation /w/. Transitional (Sequential) Complex ArticulationsThis type of complex articulation involves "...separate and successive articulatory activities which together can be identified as a single segment" (Clark and Yallop, 1995, p63). Such segments include affricates and diphthongs as well as a number of other classes of segment which will be dealt with below. Co-articulationIt will quickly become clear in the discussion below that many cases of complex articulations are not contrastive but are the result of the modification of the articulation of a particular sound as a consequence of the influence of an adjacent sound. When the pronunciation of a sound is influenced by another sound, co-articulation is said to have occurred. Such co-articulation involves the modification of a particular articulator's gesture so that it is more like the influencing sound. These modifications are usually to non-contrastive gestures as there is a linguistic need to maintain phonological contrasts so that the word can be understood. For this reason, vowels are nasalised when adjacent to nasal consonants and this nasalisation is greatest in languages which do not have an oral-nasal vowel contrast. Co-articulation occurs very strongly for non-contrastive articulators and gestures and is the main contributor to the allophonic richness of many phonemes. When a contrastive gesture is modified this often results in a change in the phoneme. Such changes are usually referred to as assimilation. These assimilations can potentially change the meaning of a word. There are, however, many contexts in English, for example, where such phoneme-changing assimilation does not result in communicative difficulty. These are typically highly predictable contexts, contexts in which the contrast is neutralised, or contexts in which the listener can be reasonably expected to rely upon linguistic context to determine meaning. Directory: newuploads newuploads -> Phonology What is Phonology? First we should know that the study of speech sounds is: 1- phonetics. 2- phonology. Phonetics is concerns with the following newuploads -> Ch. 1 Manufacturing Introduction : Manufacturing Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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