several factors. The most important of these factors are: 1. the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract (manner of articulation);
2. where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of the air (place of articulation). 2.4.3 Manners of articulation
8. Velar: A speech sound which is made with the back of the tongue and the soft palate. 2.4.5 The consonants of English
Received Pronunciation (RP): The type of British Standard English pronunciation which has been regarded as the prestige variety and which shows no regional variation. It has often been popularly referred to as “BBC English” or “Oxford English” because it is widely used in the private sector of the education system and spoken by most newsreaders of the BBC network.
A chart of English consonants
Manner of articulation Place of articulation Bilabial Labio-
dental Dental Alveolar Post- alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop ??? ??? ??? ??? Nasal ? ? ?
Fricative ??? ??? ??? ??? ? Approximant ? ? ? Lateral ?
Affricate ?????
In many cases there are two sounds that share the same place and manner of articulation. These pairs of consonants are distinguished by voicing, the one appearing on the left is voiceless and the one on the right is voiced.
Therefore, the consonants of English can be described in the following way:
[p] voiceless bilabial stop [b] voiced bilabial stop [s] voiceless alveolar fricative [z] voiced alveolar fricative
[m] bilabial nasal [n] alveolar nasal [l] alveolar lateral [j] palatal approximant [h] glottal fricative [r] alveolar approximant 2.5 Vowels
2.5.1 The criteria of vowel description
1. The part of the tongue that is raised – front, center, or back.
2. The extent to which the tongue rises in the direction of the palate. Normally, three or four degrees are recognized: high, mid (often divided into mid-high and mid-low) and low. 3. The kind of opening made at the lips – various degrees of lip rounding or spreading.
4. The position of the soft palate – raised for oral vowels, and lowered for vowels which have been nasalized. 2.5.2 The theory of cardinal vowels
[Icywarmtea doesn’t quite understand this theory.] Cardinal vowels are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intending to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.
By convention, the eight primary cardinal vowels are numbered from one to eight as follows: CV1[?], CV2[?], CV3[?], CV4[?], CV5[?], CV6[?], CV7[?], CV8[?]. A set of secondary cardinal vowels is obtained by reversing the lip-rounding for a give position: CV9 – CV16. [I am sorry I cannot type out many of these. If you want to know, you may consult the textbook p. 47. – icywarmtea] 2.5.3 Vowel glides
Pure (monophthong) vowels: vowels which are produced without
any noticeable change in vowel quality.
Vowel glides: Vowels where there is an audible change of quality.
Diphthong: A vowel which is usually considered as one distinctive vowel of a particular language but really involves two vowels, with one vowel gliding to the other. 2.5.4 The vowels of RP
[??] high front tense unrounded vowel [?] high back lax rounded vowel [?]
central
lax
unrounded
vowel
[?] low back lax rounded vowel
2.6 Coarticulation and phonetic transcription 2.6.1 Coarticulation
Coarticulation: The simultaneous or overlapping articulation of two successive phonological units.
Anticipatory coarticulation: If the sound becomes more like the following sound, as in the case of lamp, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation.
Perseverative coarticulation: If the sound displays the influence of the preceding sound, as in the case of map, it is perseverative coarticulation.
Nasalization: Change or process by which vowels or consonants
become nasal.
Diacritics: Any mark in writing additional to a letter or other basic elements.
2.6.2 Broad and narrow transcriptions
The use of a simple set of symbols in our transcription is called a broad transcription. The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription. The former was meant to indicate only these sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language while the latter was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the minutest shades of pronunciation.
2.7 Phonological analysis
Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. It includes three main areas: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. On the other hand, phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. There is a fair degree of overlap in what concerns the two subjects, so sometimes it is hard to draw the boundary between them. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds while phonology studies the way in which speakers of a language