uh-oh. If you pronounce this slowly, you can feel the constriction in the lar- ynx. In other languages, like Hawai’ian, the glottal stop is used as a regu- lar consonant. In the word Hawai’ithe apostrophe stands for a glottal stop.
One English consonant remains to be discussed: the glide [w], as in wear.
This sound combines a narrowing of the vocal tract at the velar place of articulation with rounding of the lips. It is thus a double articulation, a labiovelar glide. While double articulations at various places of articula- tion are not hard to make (given the independence of the active articula- tors), they can be hard for the ear to distinguish, so double articulations other than labiovelars are rare.
In summary, there are eleven common places of articulation – bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, alveopalatal, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and laryngeal – though no single language makes consonants using all of the places of articulation.
The terms we use to classify different vowels refer to the highest point of the tongue during the vowel. The tongue body moves up for the highvow- els [i, I, ˆ, u, U], down for the lowvowels [Q, a], and stays in the middle for the midvowels [e, E, o, ç, √, ´]. The tongue moves forward in the mouth for the frontvowels [i, I, e, E, Q] and backward for the backvowels [u, U, o, ç, a]. The vowels [ˆ, √, ´] are central. Vowels also differ with respect to lip
Table 1.3 IPA symbols for the vowels of English
i bead key he
I bid kit
e bade kate hey
ε bed ketchup
æ bad cat
u booed coot who
U book cook
o bode coat hoe
ø baud caught haw
a body cot ha
√ bud cut
aU bowed count how
øI boy coy ahoy
aI bide kite high
´ about rosa’s [roz´z]
ˆ roses [rozˆz]
front central back
u
a æ
i
I
i
v e
o c U e
ε
high
mid
FIGURE1.5 low English vowels
rounding. In General American English, the back vowels [u, U, o, ç] are round, all other vowels are unround. Finally, English divides its vowels into two sets, tenseand lax. The tense vowels [i, e, o, u] are longer, slightly high- er, and produced with greater stiffening of the tongue root than their lax counterparts [I, E, ç, U]. The tense/lax distinction doesn’t really apply to low vowels. These descriptive terms can be combined to pick out a specific vowel: [I] is high, front, lax, unround; [o] is mid, back, tense, round.
Another sort of vowel is a diphthong, which combines two different posi- tions in sequence. The diphthong [ai], as in General American high, moves from a low central position to high front. The diphthong [aυ], as in General American how, moves from low central to high back. And [çI] moves from mid back to high front.
Two other English vowels are used only in short, unstressed syllables.
(See the discussion of stress below.) The mid-central vowel [´], called schwa, is heard in the first syllable of aboutand the second syllable of rosa’s. The high, central [ˆ] occurs in the second syllable of roses.
As mentioned above, in English, all the nonlow back vowels are round, and all the low vowels and front vowels are unround. Combining lip and tongue position in this way makes it easier for the ear to distinguish the dif- ferent vowel sounds. Any language that has at least three vowels will have front vowels that are unround and back vowels that are round. Some lan- guages (such as French, Dutch, and German) also have front round vowels, and others (such as Japanese and Korean) also have back unround vowels. In linguistics, when a sound is unusual or difficult to hear or to say, we say that that sound is marked. The easier, more common sound is unmarked.
Front round vowels and voiceless sonorants, for example, are marked. Front unround vowels and voiced sonorants are unmarked. If a language uses the marked version of a sound, it also uses the unmarked version.
Box 1.1 Summary of vocal tract choices
The terms and symbols of phonetics describe the choices that a speaker must make in order to produce a linguistic sound:
1. How should I get the air moving? Generally, this will be pulmonic egressive: air forced out of the lungs.
2. Which active articulator should I use: lips, tongue tip, tongue body, tongue root, or larynx?
3. What kind of constriction should I make: stop, fricative, affricate, approximant, vowel?
4. Where should I make the constriction? For consonants, the choices are bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, alveopalatal, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and laryngeal; for vowels, the choices are high/mid/low, front/central/back, tense/lax, and round/unround.
5. Should the velum be open or closed?
6. What should I do with the larynx: voiced or voiceless, aspirated or unaspirated?
Introductory linguistics textbooks often simplify phonology by empha- sizing the role of place and manner of articulation in making sounds, but you can see that there are many more choices involved. Speakers control the airstream mechanism, voicing, and nasality as well as the place and manner of articulation. Every sound is composed of smaller components that can be combined in different ways to make other sounds, and each of these components offers a (typically binary) opposition: voiced or voice- less, nasal or oral, open or closed, front or back, etc. Speakers of English are often biased by its alphabetic writing system; they automatically think of each sound as a letter – an autonomous atomic unit, equally related or unrelated to every other letter, so that /p/ and /b/ are no more closely or distantly related than say /g/ and /s/. But sounds are ‘built’ from lower-level vocal tract ‘choices’, and you change one sound into another by switching parameters for each choice (voiced to voiceless, stop to fricative, etc.).
Think of ‘voiced’, for example, not just as an adjective that describes a sound but as one parameter (a choice, a building block, a specific vocal tract configuration) that, in combination with other parameters, creates the sound. The phonetic symbol representing a given sound isn’t the sound itself, but a ‘cover symbol’ for the set of choices. This also means that the speech sounds of a language are related to each other in impor- tant ways; some sets of sounds differ only by changing a single parameter, while others differ in the settings of several parameters. As we will dis- cover in the section on phonology, it is these parameters (the distinctive features) of a sound or group of sounds, not the individual sounds or sym- bols themselves, that are important in describing sound patterns within a linguistic system.
Thus far, we have learned about individual sounds, but speaking involves stringing sounds together into larger units. Aspects of speech that influ- ence stretches of sound larger than a single segment are called supraseg- mentals. Suprasegmental aspects of speech include length, tone, intona- tion, syllable structure, and stress. Because suprasegmental aspects of speech involve the organization of sounds into larger units, the study of suprasegmentals straddles the domains of phonetics (the study of speech sounds as physical objects) and phonology (the study of how languages organize sounds into different patterns).