Stops, Vowels

Palatalization of /s/ and /z/

• before the palatal glide /j/ - miss you (miš you)

Obstruent devoicing

• Loosing voicing at the end of the word (before silence)

• Before a voiceless consonant

• Voiceless fricative following a vowel is longer than a voiced one (=pre-fortis clipping)

Stop epenthetic

• A short voiceless stop is inserted between a nasal and a following voiceless fricative

• Simson – simpson

Sonorants

• Louder than obstruents

• only a partial constriction of the vocal tract

• free flow of air out of the vocal tract (either oral or nasal)

• typically voiced

• resonant sounds

• without noise

• W, j can’t form a syllable, others can (l,r,m,n,ng)

• Their waweforms are regular, without noise

• Voiced

Approximants

Glides (“semivowels)

Liquids

• H - There are as many varieties of h as there are vowels, acts like a consonant

VOWELS

Vowel length

They difference isn’t only in length, they differ in quality, in formants

Because of it => “Adding this symbol (:) to some vowels shows additional phonetic detail but it goes against the principle of showing just the differences between phonemes and will not be used when making phonemic transcriptions of English in this book.”

The length of a vowel in English is very changeable. It responds to:

1. voicing of the following consonant (Vowels are shorter before a voiceless and longer before a voiced obstruent)

2. presence or absence of stress (Vowels are longer in stressed syllables)

3. position of the vowel in a syllable (Vowels are longer in open syllables)

Lax vowel /ae/ is usually longer that other lax vowels. Before voiced obstruents it lengthens more than other lax vowels. It shows a tendency to diphtongization.

Tense and lax

I – low F1, high F2

Peripheral = vowels near the outside of the chart, they are more vowels near the outside of the chart are more distinct from one another than vowels in the middle

Lax vowels must be followed by a constonant, can’t be word-final

OPEN/ CLOSED SYLLABLES

Diphtongs

Diphthong involves a movement from one vowel to another within a single syllable

Categories of diphthongs (according to distribution of prominence within the diphthong)

1. Rising /iu/

2. Falling

Categories of diphthongs (according to the direction of the movement in the vowels space)

1. Closing

2. Centering

3. Opening