a paper of English Phonology

UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLISH PHONOLOGY

ARRANGED BY:

Name         : Ratnasari Simanjuntak              12120452

                     Agnes Novita Pakpahan            12120454

                     Ade Putri Pasaribu

                     Hendra Gunawan Sinaga

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND TEACHER TRAINING HKBP UNIVERSITY

PEMATANGSIANTAR

2013

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Praise and gratitude we say the presence of almighty God upon His grace one because we can complete the preparation of this paper. Do not forget we like to thank our lecturers Yanti Kristina Sinaga, S. Pd for the opportunity and the time given to us to prepare this paper.

            The title that we gave our paper is the Understanding of English Phonology. The paper is organized as the final project of the semester and at the same time as a material consideration.

            In preparing this paper we realize that there are many faults and shortcomings. Therefore we accept criticism and suggestions from readers for future perfection of this paper. This book would be useful for a deeper understanding of learning english phonology.

Pematangsiantar,         Juli 2013

Editor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INRODUCTION

Whereas syntax is about sentence formation, and semantics about sentence interpretation, phonetics and phonology cover the field of sentence utterance. Phonetics is concerned with how sounds are produced, transmitted and perceived (we will only look at the production of sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in relation to each other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about sounds of language, phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool necessary to the study of the phonological aspects of a language.

Phonetics and phonology are worth studying for several reasons. One is that as all study of language, the study of phonology gives us insight into how the human mind works. Two more reasons are that the study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a much better ability both to hear and to correct mistakes that we make, and also to teach pronunciation of the foreign language (in this case English) to others. As phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling and English pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that you keep in mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. For instance, English has not 5 or 6 but 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u, y". The orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please, and the phonetic transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the word please consists of three consonants, [p,l,z], and one vowel, [i:]. And sounds considered from the phonological point of view are put between slashes.

CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND

This paper is arranged to introductory on English phonology of the sort taught in the first year of The English Language. The students on such courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology ; it is sometimes difficult to see past the new symbols and terminology, and the apparent assumption that we can immediately become consciously aware of movements of the vocal organs which we have been making almost automatically for the last eighteen or more years. This paper attempts to show us why we need to know about phonetics and phonology, if we are interested in language and our knowledge of it, as well as introducing the main units and concepts we require to describe speech sounds accurately. The study of language in general is called linguistic. Which may be subdivided into phonology and grammar.

Phonology is the study of phones or speech sounds while grammar is the study of the meaningful units of sound and their arrangement into phonology and grammar. The study of speech sound may be carried out from different. When we study pitch sounds : as sound without regard to regard to their function as signaling units of language science is called “ phonetics”. Study speech sounds with a view to finding out the significant units of sounds in a given language. The science is called “phonemics”. the significant units of sounds distinguish utterances and are called phonemes. Phonetics is druid into two kinds namely Articulator phonetics and acoustics. Articulator phonetics stress speech sounds from the point of view of their ways of production by the speech organs. Acoustics on the other hand, studies speech sound from the point of view of their physical attributes and deal among other with measuring the loudness, pitches and natural characteristics of sounds.

CHAPTER 2

DISCUSSION

1.                 Phonetic and Phonology

Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbased signalling systems, and can communicate with other members of the same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching danger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leaving aside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.

There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound, namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book, which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accents and how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will need aspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing and analysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of the world’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physics of speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and the effect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics and neurology. However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle make and use is part of understanding what makes us human, each person grows up learning and speaking only a particular human language or languages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full range of possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it specifically English, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection and organisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of those languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology. Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarily access and talk about in detail: we often have intuitions about language without knowing where they come from, or exactly how to express them. But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of English will tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word, whereas *fnil is not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In the usual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while *fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English sound system.

However, English speakers are not consciously aware of those rules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those words that the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initial consonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likely answer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informant will produce similar words like sniff or snip to back up her argument), but that *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the phonologist to express generalisations of this sort in precise terms: after all, just because knowledge is not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or not worth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciously think ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus, right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely to make any conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go downstairs in the first place; and relatively few people will know the names of the muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individual activities involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process: think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. All of this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. We decide to speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech production are beyond our conscious reach; and thinking deliberately about what we are saying, and how we are saying it, is likely to cause selfconsciousness and hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speech rather than improving matters. Both language and mobility (crawling, walking, running downstairs) emerge in developing children by similar combinations of mental and physical maturation, internal abilities, and input from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learned becomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of what complexity lies behind our actions when we realise we have made a speech error, or see and hear a child struggling to say a word or take a step. Phonologists, like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help us understand the nature of that underlying complexity, and to describe fully and formally what we know in a particular domain, but don’t know we know. The relationship between phonetics and phonology is a complex one, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-down phonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the whole range of possible human sounds, including some which they never hear from parents or siblings: a baby in an English-speaking environment will spontaneously make consonants which are not found in any European language, but are to be found closest to home in an African language, say, or one from the Caucasus.

However, that child will then narrow down her range of sounds from the full human complement to only those found in the language(s) she is hearing and learning, and will claim, when later trying to learn at school another language with a different sound inventory, that she cannot possibly produce unfamiliar sounds she made perfectly naturally when only a few months old. Or within a language, subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utterance of the same word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fraction different from every other; yet hearers who share that language will effortlessly identify the same word in each case. In this sense, phonetics supplies an embarrassment of riches, providing much more information than speakers seem to use or need: all those speakers, and every utterance different! Phonology, on the other hand, involves a reduction to the essential information, to what speakers and hearers think they are saying and hearing. The perspective shifts from more units to fewer, from huge variety to relative invariance, from absolutely concrete to relatively abstract; like comparing the particular rose I can see from my window, or roses generally in all their variety (old-fashioned, bushy, briar; scented or not; red, yellow, shocking pink), to The Rose, an almost ideal and abstract category to which we can assign the many different actual variants. A white dog-rose, a huge overblown pink cabbage rose, and a new, genetically engineered variety can all be roses with no contradiction involved. In linguistic terms, it’s not just that I say tomahto and you say tomayto; it’s that I say tomahto and tomahto and tomahto, and the three utterances are subtly different, but we both think I said the same thing three times.

2.                 The phoneme

Children do not learn the rules of spoken language by explicit instruction,but rather by a combination of copying what they hear, and building up mental generalisations based on their experiences. How much they are helped in this by some internal structure in the brain dedicated to language acquisition, which linguists call a Language Acquisition Device or Language Faculty, is still a matter of debate. Nonetheless, aspects of spoken language show very strong similarities to the types of patterns outlined above for writing. Again, some differences between units matter, because replacing one with another will cause a different meaning to be conveyed in the language in question: replace the initial sound [k] in call with [t], and you have tall, an entirely different English word. Correspondingly, English speakers perceive [k] and [t] as entirely separate sounds, and find them rather easy to distinguish. In other cases, two sounds which phoneticians can equally easily tell apart will be regarded as the same by native speakers. For instance, say the phrase kitchen cupboard to yourself, and think about the first sounds of the two words. Despite the difference in spelling (another case where orthography, as we saw also in the last chapter, is not an entirely reliable guide to the sounds of a language), native speakers will tend to think of those initial consonants as the same – both are [k]s. However, if you say the phrase several times, slowly, and think uncharacteristically carefully about whether your articulators are doing the same at the beginning of both words, you will find that there is a discernible difference. For the first sound in kitchen, your tongue will be raised towards the roof of your mouth, further forward than for the beginning of cupboard; and for kitchen, your lips will be spread apart a little more too, while for cupboard your mouth will be more open. Unless you are from Australia or New Zealand, this difference is even clearer from the phrase car keys, this time with the first word having the initial sound produced further back in the mouth, and the second further forward.

In IPA terms, these can be transcribed as [k], the cupboard sound, and [c], the kitchen one. However, in English [k] and [c] do not signal different meanings as [k] and [t] do in call versus tall; instead, we can always predict that [k] will appear before one set of vowels, which we call back vowels, like the [_] of cupboard or the [ɑ_] a Southern British English speaker has in car, while [c] appears before front vowels, like the [] of kitchen or the [i_] in Southern British English keys. Typically, speakers control predictable differences of this type automatically and subconsciously, and sometimes resist any suggestion that the sounds involved, like [k] and [c] in English, are different at all, requiring uncharacteristically close and persistent listening to tell the two apart. The difference between [k] and [c] in English is redundant; in phonological terms, this means the difference arises automatically in different contexts, but does not convey any new information. Returning to our orthographic analogy, recall that every instance of a hand-written a or A will be different from every other instance, even produced by the same person. In just the same way, the same speaker producing the same words (say, multiple repetitions of kitchen cupboard ) will produce minutely different instances of [k] and [c]. However, a hierarchical organisation of these variants can be made: in terms of spelling, we can characterise variants as belonging to the lower-case or capital set, and those in turn as realisations of the abstract grapheme <a>. The subclasses have a consistent and predictable distribution, with upper-case at the beginnings of proper nouns and sentences, and lower case everywhere else: we can say that this distribution is rule-governed.

Similarly again, we can classify all the variants we hear as belonging to either fronter [c] or backer [k], although we are not, at least without a little phonetic consciousness-raising, aware of that difference in the way we are with a and A; presumably the fact that we learn writing later, and with more explicit instruction, accounts for our higher level of awareness here. In turn, [c] and [k], which native speakers regard as the same, are realizations of an abstract unit we call the phoneme (where the ending -eme, as in grapheme, means ‘some abstract unit’). Phonemes appear between slash brackets, and are conventionally represented by IPA symbols, in this case /k/. As with graphemes, we could in principle use an abstract symbol for this abstract unit, say /§/, or /❂/, or give it a number or a name: but again, it is convenient and clear to use the same symbol as one of its realisations. Those realisations, here [k] and [c], are allophones of the phoneme /k/. To qualify as allophones of the same phoneme, two (or more) phones, that is sounds, must meet two criteria. First, their distribution must be predictable: we must be able to specify where one will turn up, and where the other; and those sets of contexts must not overlap. If this is true, the two phones are said to be in complementary distribution. Second, if one phone is exceptionally substituted for the other in the same context, that substitution must not correspond to a meaning difference. Even if you say kitchen cupboard with the [k] first and the [c] second (and that won’t be easy, because you have been doing the opposite as long as you have been speaking English – it will be even harder than trying to write at your normal speed while substituting small a for capital A and vice versa), another English speaker will only notice that there is something vaguely odd about your speech, if that. She may think you have an unfamiliar accent; but crucially, she will understand that you mean ‘kitchen cupboard’, and not something else. This would not be so where a realisation of one phoneme is replaced by a realisation of another: if the [k] allophone of /k/ is replaced by the [t] allophone of /t/, then tall will be understood instead of call. Finally, just as the orthographic rules can vary between languages and across time, so no two languages or periods will have exactly the same phonology. Although in English [k] and [c] are allophones of the same phoneme, and are regarded as the same sound, in Hungarian they are different phonemes. We can test for this by looking for minimal pairs: that is, pairs of words differing in meaning, where the only difference in sound is that one has one of the two phones at issue where the other has the other (think of tall and call). In Hungarian, we find minimal pairs like kuka [kuka] ‘dustbin’ and kutya [kuca] ‘dog’. It follows that [k] and [c] are not in complementary but in contrastive distribution; that interchanging them does make a meaning difference between words; and hence that [k] and [c] belong to different phonemes, /k/ and /c/ respectively, in Hungarian. Unsurprisingly, speakers of Hungarian find the difference between [k] and [c] glaringly obvious, and would be extremely surprised to find that English speakers typically lump them together as the same sound. As for differences between periods of the same language, it is straightforward to demonstrate that Modern English [f ] and [v] contrast, or are in complementary distribution, since minimal pairs like fat [f ] versus vat [v], leaf versus leave, or safer versus saver are easy to come by. The phoneme system of Modern English therefore contains both /f/ and /v/. However, the situation was very different in Old English, as the examples in (3) show.

(3) Old English

hla[v]ord <hlaford> ‘lord’ heo[v]on <heofon> ‘heaven’

a[f ]ter <after> ‘after’ [f ]isc <fisc> ‘fish’

o[v]er <ofer> ‘over’

heal[f ] <healf> ‘half ’

3.             The Speech Organs

All the organs shown on figure (2) contribute to the production of speech. All the sounds of English are made using air on its way out from the lungs. The lungs pull in and push out air, helped by the diaphragm. The air goes out via the trachea, where the first obstruction it meets is the larynx, which it has to pass through. Inside the larynx the air passes by the vocal folds, which, if they vibrate, make the sound voiced. Afterwards the air goes up through the pharynx, and escapes via either the oral or the nasal cavity.

Figure (3) : production of oral and nasal sounds. (Thomas 1976: 32)

Circle the parts that are modified in B to produce nasal sounds.

Almost all the organs involved in speech production also have other functions. The lungs and the diaphragm are obviously involved in breathing, as is the nasal cavity, which cleans, heats and humidifies the air that is breathed in. The teeth and the tongue play a part in digestion, and in a way, so do the vocal folds, as they have to be closed when swallowing, to keep the food from going down the wrong way. There are 4 places in which a sound can be modified. You have to add to this the fact that the vocal folds can vibrate.

Figure (4): sound modification places. (Thomas 1976:33)

4. Consonants

On the way out the air flow can be more or less obstructed, producing a consonant, or is simply modified, giving a vowel. If you pronounce the first sound of the word paper you close your mouth completely and that is the utmost obstruction, whereas if you pronounce the first sound of the word after the mouth is more open than normal, the air flows as freely as it possibly can. Consonants are often classified by being given a so-called VPM-label. VPM stands for Voicing, Place and Manner:

- voicing means that the vocal folds are used; if they are not, the sound is voiceless (note that vowels always imply the use of vocal folds).

- place of articulation is the place where the air flow will be more or less obstructed.

- manner is concerned with the nature of the obstruction.

5. Voicing

The larynx is in the neck, at a point commonly called Adam's apple. It is like a box, inside which are the vocal folds, two thick flaps of muscle. In a normal position, the vocal folds are apart and we say that the glottis is open (figure a). When the edges of the vocal folds touch each other, air passing through the glottis will usually cause vibration (figure b). This opening and closing is repeated regularly and gives what is called voicing.

 Figure (5): voicing. (Roach 1983:23,25)

The only distinction between the first sounds of sue and zoo for example is that [s] is voiceless, [z] is voiced. The same goes for few and view, [f] is voiceless, [v] is voiced. If you now say [ssssszzzzzsssss] or [fffffvvvvvfffff] you can either hear the vibrations of the [zzzzz] or [vvvvv] by sticking your fingers into your ears, or you can feel them by touching the front of your larynx (the Adam's Apple).

This distinction is quite important in English, as there are many pairs of sounds that differ only in voicing. In the examples below the first sound is voiceless, the other is voiced: pie/buy, try/dry, clue/glue, chew/Jew, thigh/thy. This distinction can also be made in between two vowels: rapid/rabid, metal/medal, or at the end of a word: pick/pig, leaf/leave, rich/ridge. In English the following consonants are voiced: b, d, g, v, ð , z, ʒ, l, r, j, w, dʒ, m, n, ŋ . The following ones are unvoiced: p, t, k, f, θ , s, ʃ , h, tʃ

6. Place of articulation

As we saw above [p,t,k] are all voiceless, so there must be another way to distinguish between them, otherwise we would not be able to tell try apart from pry or cry, or pick from tick or kick . Apart from the behaviour of the vocal folds, sounds can also be distinguished as to where in the oral cavity they are articulated (i.e. where in the mouth there is most obstruction when they are pronounced).

Figure (6): places of articulation.(Roach 1983:8)

Bilabial sounds are produced when the lips are brought together. Examples are [p], which is voiceless, as in pay or [b] and [m] which are voiced, as in bay, may.

                                               

Labiodental sounds are made when the lower lip is raised towards the upper front teeth. Examples are [f] safe (voiceless) and [v] save (voiced).

Dental sounds are produced by touching the upper front teeth withthe tip of the tongue. Examples are [θ] oath (voiceless) and [ð] clothe (voiced).

Alveolar sounds are made by raising the tip of the tongue towards the ridge that is right behind the upper front teeth, called the alveolar ridge.

Examples are [ t,s ] too,sue, both voiceless, and [d,z,n,l,r ] do, zoo, nook, look, rook, all voiced.

Palatoalveolar sounds are made by raising the blade of the tongue towardsthe part of the palate just behind the alveolar  ridge. Examples [ʃ, tʃ] pressure,batch (voiceless) and  [ʒ, dʒ] pleasure, badge (voiced).

Palatal sounds are very similar to palatoalveolar ones, they are just produced further back towards the velum. The only palatal sound in English is [ j ] as in yes, yellow, beauty, new and it is voiced.

Velar sounds are made by raising the back of the tongue towards the soft palate, called the velum. Examples [k] back, voiceless, and [g, ŋ ] both voiced bag, bang. [w] is a velar which is accompanied with lip rounding.

Glottal sounds are produced when the air passes through the glottis as it is narrowed: [h] as in high. (Figure(14):Roach 1983:25)

7.       Manners of Articulation.

We can now distinguish between English consonants from two points of view, that of voicing, and that of place. We can see that [b] and [t] are different in both respects, [b] is voiced and bilabial, and [t] is voiceless and alveolar. [p] differs from [b] only in being voiceless, as both are bilabial, and [p] differs from [t] only in being bilabial, as both are voiceless.

There are still pairs of sounds where we cannot yet describe the difference of one from the other, e.g. [b,m] bend, mend as both are voiced and bilabial, and [t,s] ton, son which both are voiceless and alveolar. As the examples show, we can however tell the words apart, and this is because the sounds are different in a way we have not yet discussed, and that is with respect to their manner of articulation. The manner of articulation has to do with the kind of obstruction the air meets on its way out, after it has passed the vocal folds. It may meet a complete closure (plosives), an almost complete closure (fricatives), or a smaller degree of closure (approximants), or the air might escape in more exceptional ways, around the sides of the tongue (laterals), or through the nasal cavity (nasals).

Plosives are sounds in which there is a complete closure in the mouth, so that the air is blocked for a fraction of a second and then released with a small burst of sound, called a plosion (it sounds like a very small explosion). Plosives may be bilabial [p,b] park, bark, alveolar [t,d] tar, dark or velar [k,g] car, guard. There is a fourth kind of plosive, the glottal stop. The word football can be pronounced without interruption in the middle as in [fTtbN:l] or with a complete closure of the glottis instead of [t]: [fT>bN:l]. In English a voiceless plosive that occurs at the begining of a word and is followed by a vowel, is rather special in the sense that at the release of a plosion one can hear a slight puff of air (called aspiration) before the vowel is articulated. Hence in “pen “we hear [pçen]. These aspirated voiceless plosives are not considered to be different sounds from unaspirated voiceless plosives from the point of view of how they function in the sound system. This difference, which can be clearly heard, is said to be phonetic.

Fricatives have a closure which is not quite complete. This means that the air is not blocked at any point, and therefore there is no plosion. On the other hand the obstruction is big enough for the air to make a noise when it passes through it, because of the friction. This effect is similar to the wind whistling around the corner of a house. Fricatives may be labiodentals [f,v] wife, wives, dental [θ , ð ] breath, breathe, alveolar [s,z] sink, zinc, palato-alveolar [ʃ , ʒ ] nation, evasion, or glottal [h] help. [h] is a glottal fricative. As it has no closure anywhere else, and as all air passes between the vocal folds, this means that [h] is like aspiration unaccompanied by any obstruction.  A distinction may be made between sibilant and non-sibilant fricatives. Sibilant sounds are the fricatives with a clear "hissing" noise, [_s,z, ʃ, ʒ ] and the two affricates [tʃ, dʒ] choke, joke.

Affricates are a combination of a plosive and a fricative (sometimes they are called "affricated plosives"). They begin like a plosive, with a complete closure, but instead of a plosion, they have a very slow release, moving backwards to a place where a friction can be heard (palatoalveolar). The two English affricates are both palatoalveolar, [tʃ ] which is voiceless, chin, rich, and [dʒ ] which is voiced, gin, ridge. The way an affricate resembles a plosive followed by a fricative is mirrored in the symbols. Both consist of a plosive symbol followed by a fricative one: [ t+ʃ], [d+ʒ].

Nasals resemble plosives, except that there is a complete closure in the mouth, but as the velum is lowered the air can escape through the nasal cavity. Though most sounds are produced with the velum raised, the normal position for the velum is lowered, as this is the position for breathing (your velum is probably lowered right now when you are reading this). The three English nasals are all voiced, and [m] is bilabial, ram, [n] is alveolar, ran, and [M] velar, rang. In the section on places, the dotted line on the pictures of bilabial, alveolar, and velar articulations illustrate the three nasals.

Laterals are sounds where the air escapes around the sides of the tongue. There is only one lateral in English, [l], a voiced alveolar lateral. It occurs in two versions, the socalled "clear l" before vowels, light, long, and the "dark l" in other cases, milk, ball. Words like little, lateral have one of each type. "Dark l" may be written with the symbol [4]. "Clear l" is pronounced with the top of the tongue raised, whereas for "dark l " it is the back of the tongue which is raised. Here again, as with aspirated and unaspirated voiceless plosives, even though "clear l" and "dark l" are phonetically different, they cannot be said to be different sounds from the point of view of how they function in the sound system. If you produce a "dark l" where usually you have a "clear l", for example at the beginning of the word long, your pronunciation will sound odd but nobody will understand a different word.

Figure 15: clear and dark “l”.(Thomas 1976:44)

Approximants are sounds where the tongue only approaches the roof of the mouth, so that there is not enough obstruction to create any friction. English has three approximants, which are all voiced. [r] is alveolar, right, brown, sometimes called post-alveolar, because it is slightly further back that the other alveolar sounds [t,d,s,l]. [j] is a palatal approximant, use, youth, and [w] is a velar approximant, why, twin, square. [w] always has lip-rounding as well, and therefore it is sometimes called labio-velar. [r] only occurs before vowels in southern British English, whereas other accents, e.g. Scottish, Irish, and most American ones, also can have it after vowels. Therefore those accents can make a distinction between e.g. saw and sore, which are pronounced exactly a like in southern British English.

The manners of articulation can be put into two major groups, obtruents and sonorants. The obstruents are plosives, fricatives and affricates, all sounds with a high degree of obstruction. Obstruents usually come in pairs, one voiceless, one voiced, e.g. [p/b, t/d]. Sonorants have much less obstruction and are all voiced and therefore more sonorous. They include nasals, the lateral, and approximants. The manners can be illustrated as in the following diagram:

Consonants

 

Obstruents                            sonorants

 

Plosives         fricatives affricates              nasals lateral                        approximants

Table of the Consonants

The discussion on consonants above can be summarised in the table below (Roach

1983:52). A sound on the left side of a column is voiceless, one on the right side is voiced.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Palato-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	p b			t d			k g
Fricative		f v	θ ð		ʃ  ʒ			h
Affricate				s z	tʃ dʒ
Nasal	m						ŋ
Lateral				n
Approximant	w			l	r	j

Vowels

We shall first have a closer look at the way in which vowels differ from consonants. Then we shall analyze vowels phonetically, i.e. according to:

- tongue position: how high in the mouth is the tongue, and which part of the tongue is the highest?

- length: are the vowels long or short?

- rounding: are the lips rounded or not?

- nasality: is there free passage of air through the nose?

- diphthongs: are they steady, or do they somehow change in character?

The last section is a table of the vowels. (There are other points of view which we shall not deal with here, since they are irrelevant for our study).