Vocoids and contoids.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 570.

A syllable can be defined as a phonetic unit, which is pronounced by one articulatory effort accompanied by one muscular contraction, which results acoustically and auditorily in one uninterrupted arc of loudness.

Voiceless plosive consonants

Sounds are grouped around the most sonorous ones, which form the peaks of sonority in a syllable. Two points of lower sonority constitute the beginning and the end of one syllable.

Compare melt and metal: in the first word /e/ is the most sonorous sound, the only peak of sonority; it is a one-syllable word. In the word metal there are two peaks of sonority /e/ and /i/, it is a two-syllable word.

The experiments carried out by N.Zhinkin showed that it is the pharynx, which is responsible for the variations in the loudness of the syllable. Perceptually the peak, or the crest of the syllable, is louder and higher in pitch than the slopes.

On the acoustic level it is characterized by a higher intensity than the slopes, and in many cases by a higher fundamental frequency.

None of the theories mentioned above are reliable in the definition of the syllabic boundary.

Electroacoustic analysis makes it possible to formulate the following rules of syllable divisionin English:

1. In affixal words the syllabic boundary coincides with the morphological boundary: dis-place, be-come, un-able, count-less.

2. In words with CVC structure the syllabic boundary is after the long accented vowel: far-mer;

3. In words of CVCV structure the syllabic boundary is within the intervocal consonant, which terminates the short accented syllabic: cit-y, pit-y.

4. In words of CVSVS structure the syllabic boundary is within the intervocal sonorant: cin-e-ma, en-e-my.

5. English diphthongs are unisyllabic, they consist of one vowel phoneme, English triphthongs are disyllabic, because they consist of two vowel phonemes: science, flower.

Syllables in writing are called syllabographs and are closely connected with the morphemic structure of words.

Words can be divided in writing according to their syllabic structure, e.g. un-kind-li-ness. They can also be divided according to their meaning, e.g. spot-light.

There are 5 rules to help with dividing a word in writing:

1. Never divide a word of one syllable;
2. Never divide an ending (a suffix) of two syllables such as –able, -ably, -fully;
3. With the exception of –ly, never divide a word so that an ending of two letters such as –ed, -er, -ic begins the next line;
4. Never divide a word so that one of the parts is a single letter;
5. Never divide a word of less than five letters.

In the formation of a syllable the consonants are marginal whereas a

vowel is centralornucleus.

The generalized formula of a syllable is CVC: seas, did. But many

other syllables in English are different from this in various ways. All the segments of speech are divided into vowels and consonants. But these terms prove to be quite ambiguous. The name “vowel” and “consonant” are defined according to the general phonetic form of the segment. “Vowels” then are sounds that involve no closure, friction or contact of the tongue or lips (phonetic definition). “Consonants”are all the rest of the segments.

Difficulties arise when the same words ‘vowel” and “consonant” are used to refer to the phonological function of segmentsin the syllable, because as we have seen the term “vowel” is used as a syllabic element, and the term “consonant” is used for the marginal elements.

But this is not always the fact. Let us regard, for example, such sounds as [w, j, r]. They have no closure or contact of the tongue, their friction is very slight. In this respect they may be called semi-vowels. Yet, they are never syllabic. They are called vocoids.

At the same time such consonants as [l, m, n, ] have a closure, but in them voice prevails over noise and they are syllabic, when preceded by a consonant. They are sometimes called semi-consonants, or contoids.

To avoid this ambiguity the sounds were called vocoidsand contoidsby an American phonetician Pike. Vocoid is a segment with a structure of open approximation and with central passage of the air-stream The rest sounds are contoids. Thus, we have non-syllabic vocoids [w, r, j] , and a syllabic contoids [l, m, n].

Questions for self-control:

1. What is the place of the syllable in the spoken chain?

2. What are the functions of the syllable from the phonological point of

view?

3. What do the types of syllables depend on?

4. Which above-mentioned theory of syllable formation can we apply to the Enlish language?

5. What are vocoids and contoids?