Consonants

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 648.

On the articulatory level each consonant may be identified by stating two general facts about it:

1) what sort of articulatory posture it is formed by;

2) whereabout in the mouth (or pharynx) it is produced.

Besides these major characteristics the particular quality of a consonant may depend on a lot of other factors, that is by what articulatory organ (or organs) an obstruction is made, how vocal cords work at the moment of production, what cavity is Used as a resonator, what is the force of articulatory effect and many others. So in our view the particular quality of a consonant would be best thought of as a complex bundle of features. Each sound is known to have three aspects: acoustic, articulatory and auditory and therefore can be studied on these three levels. For the sake of anal­ysis each aspect can be considered and described independently though we should take it reasonably obvious that there is no sharp dividing line between them. Trying to work out a classifica­tion of such complex units as speech sounds an analyst should specify those properties of sounds which are relevant to the sub­ject under discussion, so the attempts to classify sounds should have a theoretical foundation. Besides, each classification should

not only aim at linguistic description but it should be justified from "teaching of a language" point of view. Therefore it should try to include, if possible, both the principal relevant features and the ones that are redundant from phonological point of view but are considerably important for the articulation of the sound. Here we should note that phonological description of sounds will be made in terms of articulatory level.

As to the classification of English consonants there are few ways of seeing the situation.

According to V. A. Vassilyev (79) primary importance should be given to the type of obstruction and the manner of produc­tion of noise. On this ground he distinguishes two large classes of consonants:

a) occlusive, in the production of which a complete obstruc­tion is formed;

b) constrictive, in the production of which an incomplete ob­struction is formed.

The phonological relevance of this feature could be exempli­fied in the following oppositions:

[ti:] — [si:] tea — sea (occlusive — constrictive)

[si:d] — [si:z] seed — seas (occlusive — constrictive)

[pul] _ [ful] pull — full (occlusive — constrictive)

[bɜut] — [vɜut]boat — vote (occlusive — constrictive)

Each of the two classes is subdivided into noise consonants and sonorants. The division is based on the factor of prevailing either noise or tone component in the auditory characteristic of a sound. In their turn noise consonants are divided into plosive consonants (or stops) and affricates. The following scheme might be helpful to understand the system built in accordance with the above-mentioned order of articulatory characteristics: