Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

The [t] in words such as butter is, in fact, subject to further variation. For instance, in many varieties of American English, it is pronounced a bit like a ‘d’. More precisely, the sound in question is a little shorter than [d] and is produced by very quickly flapping the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (or the front of the hard palate). Such a sound is called a flap (or a tap) and its IPA symbol is [ɾ].

Sounds and suprasegmentals

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Finally, we must mention an important aspect of English pronunciation that is quite hard to discern. If you listen carefully to the pronunciation of ‘p’ in pit and spit, you should be able to hear that the ‘p’ of pit is followed by a puff of breath that is absent in spit. This puff of breath is called aspiration, and you can detect it by holding your hand in front of your mouth as you say the words. The same

difference is observed in the ‘t’ of tar/star and the ‘k’ of car/scar; ‘t’ and ‘k’ are aspirated in tar and car but not in star and scar. We transcribe aspiration by means of a raised ‘h’: [ph th kh]. If we wish to make it clear that a given sound is unaspirated, we use a raised ‘equals’ sign, as in [p= t= k=], though when there is no possibility of confusion, it is customary to omit this. Transcriptions for pit and spit including this difference in aspiration are thus [phɪt] and [sp=ɪt]. In transcriptions, additional symbols such as the raised ‘h’ or ‘equals’, added to a basic symbol to create another symbol for a related sound are called diacritics. There are a good many diacritics used by phoneticians (see the IPA chart on p. 411 for additional examples).

So far, we have restricted our attention to English consonants, but of course other languages use additional consonantal sounds. In table 2, we see the English consonants from table 1 along with various other IPA symbols for sounds which occur in other languages:

As we can see, it is possible to fill a good many of the cells in table 2 with symbols representing sounds in the world’s languages. Without special training, you won’t be able to pronounce many of these sounds, but you should have some idea of how they are produced. For instance, a retroflex ‘l’ [ɭ] is made in the same place as the English retroflex [ɹ] but with the lateral manner of articulation characteristic of [l]. Retroflex sounds are found in a large number of languages of the Indian subcontinent and in Australia amongst other places. Uvular and pharyngeal sounds are made with places of articulation not found in English.

Uvular sounds are like velars, except that the tongue body moves further back and a little lower to articulate against the uvula. Pharyngeal sounds are common in Arabic (although they are encountered in languages throughout the world). They are made by bringing the tongue root back towards the back of the throat, often with constriction of the throat (exercises 1, 2 and 3).

Table 2 Consonantal sounds arranged by place and manner of articulation

PLACE

labio-

inter-

palato-

MANNER bilabial dental

dental

alveolar alveolar

palatal retroflex velar uvular pharyngeal

plosive

p b

t d

c

ʈ ɖ

k g

q g

fricative

ɸ β

f v

θ ð

s z

ʃ ʒ

ç j

ʂ ʐ

x ɣ

χ r

ħ ʕ

affricate

ʧ ʤ

tʂ dʐ

nasal

m

ɱ

n

ɲ

ɳ

ŋ

n

liquid

l r

ʎ

ɭ ɹ

ʁ

glide

w

ʋ

j

ɰ

36

sounds

Vowels

Having considered consonants, we now turn to vowels. Here the

description is a little more complex because the dialects of a language tend to differ most in their vowel sounds, and this is certainly true for English. Indeed, even within one country where English is spoken such as Britain, the United

States or Australia, there are considerable differences in vowel sounds. We will present a description of the basic system found in standard British English, making some observations about other varieties, most notably General

American, as we proceed. You may find that your own pronunciation differs in interesting ways from what is described below.

Firstly we will introduce some symbols used for transcribing English vowels, then we will ask how the vowels are produced. We’ll start with the vowels

appearing, with their accompanying transcriptions, in the words in (17) (the reason for the words being arranged in this way will soon become apparent):

(17)

pit

put

[pɪt]

[pʊt]

pet

pitta

putt

[pɛt]

[pɪtə]

[pʌt]

pat

pot

[pæt]

[pɒt]

We will refer to these vowels as short vowels. The final vowel in pitta [ə], which is also found as the first vowel in a word like apart, is often called schwa.

How are these short vowels produced? There are two main articulators used in the production of vowel sounds, the tongue body and the lips. Of these, the tongue body is the more important. By pulling the body of the tongue back towards the velar region of the mouth, we get the vowels [ʊ ʌ ɒ]. These are back vowels.

Alternatively, by raising the tongue body and pushing it forward to the palatal region (where we produce [j]), we get the vowels [ɪ ɛ æ]. These are front vowels.

With the tongue body in an intermediate position on the front/back axis, we

produce the central vowel [ə]. Another central vowel is [a], which is the usual pronunciation of the vowel in pat for many British speakers of English, the [æ]

which appears in (17) being a feature of a conservative variety of British English, so-called Received Pronunciation (RP), and of General American. Now, as well as considering the position of the body of the tongue in terms of whether it is forward or backward in the mouth, we can also consider its relative height. The vowels [ɪ ʊ]

are formed with the tongue body relatively high in the mouth and they are therefore called high vowels; for the low vowels [æ ɒ], the tongue body is relatively low, and for the mid vowels [ɛ ə ʌ], it is in an intermediate position on the high/low axis. We can represent these positions in a quadrilateral, as in figure 12.

Figure 12 is based entirely on the position of the body of the tongue, but there is an important difference between the sounds [ʊ ɒ] and all the others in this figure.

They are accompanied by a rounding of the lips, whereas [ɪ ɛ æ ə ʌ] are all made

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37

Figure 12 The vowel quadrilateral (including only short vowels)

without such lip rounding, and, as noted above, the lips are the second articulator involved in the production of vowels. In most English dialects, there are no sounds which are distinguished by lip rounding and nothing else, but there are many languages in which this is not the case. We shall return to this presently.

The next set of vowels to consider appears with accompanying transcriptions in the words in (18):

(18)

me

moo

[miː]

[muː]

mare

myrrh

more

[mɛː]

[məː]

[mɔː ]

mar

[mɑː]

One thing to note immediately about these transcriptions is that there is nothing corresponding to the ‘r’ in mare, myrrh, more and mar. In fact, for a good many speakers of British, Australian or New Zealand English, such occurrences of ‘r’

are not pronounced, although this is not the case for most speakers of North American English and some speakers of British English. Dialects in which the ‘r’

is pronounced are called rhotic dialects; those in which it is not are non-rhotic.

We shall ignore this ‘r’-colouring or rhoticity for now, adopting the transcriptions in (18) (but see below).