An Encyclopaedia of Language_01 ppt

[...]... for many speakers of English, particularly in the south of England, an approximant [ɹ] The ‘y’ and ‘w’ sounds ([j] and [w]) in yes and wet can be analysed as approximants; they can also be analysed as vowels —see section 9 above, under Defining Vowels and Consonants This illustrates an important point: certainly in acoustic, but also to an extent in articulatory terms, the category of approximant overlaps... is called an EJECTIVE In many Northern and Scottish accents of English, an ejective realisation of word-final voiceless stops in certain contexts is not uncommon In many African and North American languages, ejectives are phonologically contrastive with plosive sounds If the larynx is lowered, rather than raised, the stop sound will be an IMPLOSIVE AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 11 The back of the tongue... of the ‘r’, ‘s’ and ‘t’ in the word first AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 9 (9) PALATAL The hard palate is one of the articulators; the other is normally the front of the tongue The ‘y’ of yes [j] can be described as a palatal approximant—equally it can be described as a vowel sound Many speakers use a palatal fricative [] for the ‘h’ at the beginning of Hugh In other languages, e.g French and Italian,... shape and size of the hard palate from a plaster cast A more detailed anatomical description of the organs of speech can be found in Hardcastle 1976 X-ray studies of the organs of speech of different individuals show quite clearly that there can be noticeable differences—in the size of the tongue, the soft palate and the hard palate, for example—yet regardless of genetic type, all physically normal human... French and Italian, other palatal manners of articulation can be found: cf the ‘gne’ [ɲ] of Boulogne and the ‘gl’ [ʎ] of figli (10) VELAR The soft palate (or velum) is one of the articulators The other is usually the back of the tongue Examples in English are the initial stop consonants [k] and [g] in catch and get and the nasal consonant [ŋ] in hang The pronunciation of the Scots word loch contains (at... larynx), the [dz] of bids and the [ṱ θ] of eighth (4) NASAL The air is directed into the nasal cavities as a result of the soft palate being lowered away from the back wall of the pharynx In addition, there must be a total obstruction at some point in the mouth Examples in English are the initial consonants [m] and [n] of man and net and the final consonant [ŋ] of hang (Some speakers of English have... is the arrangement within the mouth and pharynx of particular articulators: a constant forward setting of the tip and blade of the tongue and raising of the front of the tongue towards the hard palate will lend a certain ‘effeminate’ quality to a male speaker’s voice; raising and backing of the tongue so that the centre of gravity is higher and further back in the mouth is characteristic of many Northern... a front vowel but be simultaneously ‘coloured’ by retroflexion of the tip and blade Many vowels occurring before /r/ in South Western English and in many American accents of English have this ‘r-coloured’ or retroflexed quality 12 NON-SEGMENTAL FEATURES These can be divided into three sorts: first, those which involve the manipulation of the parameters of loudness, pitch and duration; second, those... in yes and wet are vocoids, but function as consonants The Sanskritic phoneticians, amongst many others, recognised the dual nature of segments of this sort (Allen 1953), and from this has arisen the use for many centuries of the term ‘semi-vowel’ In what follows, vowel and consonant will be retained (on the grounds of greater familiarity), although vocoid and contoid are the actual objects of the... are the ‘short vowels’, and so forth The symbols [ɩ] and [ɷ], for the vowel sounds in big and good, have the free variants [ɪ] and [ʊ] For an account of distinctiveness and of phonological theories founded on that notion, see Hyman (1975:5–9 and chapter 2), and Fischer-Jørgensen (1975: chapter 3) 2.4 Distinctive features and the phonological system These classes of phonemes can be represented as being . PROVINCE OF LANGUAGE 10. Language and mind: psycholinguistics Jean Aitchison 186 11. Language in the brain: neurolinguistics Ruth Lesser 205 12. The breakdown of language: language pathology and. sociolinguistics, semantics and language contact, as well as in invented languages and the legends of non-human speech. Geoffrey Leech has been Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at. child language, and on the characterisation of language impairment. Until 1985 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language, and he has lectured widely in Britain and abroad on language acquisition