A Course in Modern Linguistics

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NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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A COURSE IN MODERN LINGUISTICS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • CHICAGO DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO LONDON • MANILA In Canada

BRETT-MACMILLAN LTD. GALT, ONTARIO

A COURSE IM

MODERN LINGUIS TICS CHARLES F. HOCKETT PROFESSOR

OF

LINGUISTICS

AND

ANTHROPOLOGY

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK

© THE MACMILLAN

COMPANY

1958

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED-NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO WTSHES TO QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN CONNECTION WITH A REVIEW WRITTEN FOR INCLUSION IN MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SEVENTH PRINTING.

1964

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:

QNUiP

58-5007

34861

PRU ACI-; 7hi-., ductory . ,

h

intended for those college students v/ho take an intro¬

(/i]: labialized and palatalized, respectively: [kw], [U]. postposed raised dot: comparatively great length: ft-] versus ft], postposed inverted comma: aspiration:

[t£] versus [t]. Sometimes absence of

aspirate release is marked positively as follows: ft-'].

are voiced stops, during the production of which the whole glottis is moved downwards to produce a rarefaction, so that the release of the oral closure is accompanied by a sudden influx of air from outside; these are found in a number of languages of West Africa. Clicks are made by closing the dorsum against the velum and then making also a closure

72

CONTOID

ARTICULATIONS

further forward in the mouth: the air in the small chamber thus estab¬ lished is either compressed or rarefied (usually the latter), and the frontmost closure is released first. We use clicks in one or two interjec¬ tions (tsk-tsk!) and in signals to horses, but not in ordinary speech. A number of South African languages, and two or three in East Africa, have clicks in ordinary speech. Since the mechanism of production of a click involves only the oral cavity, a click may be voiced or voiceless, and oral or nasal. For a coarticulated stop the speaker makes two oral closures simultane¬ ously, one of them apparently always dorso-velar, and releases both at once, but without any compression or rarefaction of the air between the closures. These are most widespread in West Africa, but occur also in New Guinea. Any part of the oral cavity not actively involved in a position of articulation is free to do something which may modify the coloring of the resulting sound. Some languages have a contrast between dorsovelars pronounced with lips spread and with lips rounded; the acoustic result is much like our contrast between /k/ and the cluster /kw/, as in kick versus quick. Many more languages, including Russian, contrast stops pronounced with the middle or rear portion of the tongue lowered and stops pronounced with that portion of the tongue raised towards the roof of the mouth: the latter are called palatalized. Phonetic symbols for stops are displayed in Table 8.1. Note that we do not try to supply a completely distinct symbol for everything; in¬ stead, we use a nuclear stock of letter-like symbols, to which various diacritics (listed and commented on at the bottom of the table) can be added. 8.3. Spirants. Spirants are contoids produced by spirantization, as described in §8.1. In English we have eight phonemes which are normally (or always) spirants: voiceless /f 0 s s/ and voiced /viSzz/. Some people pronounce English /h/ as a glottal spirant, but more typically it is the sort of sound described in §7.4. Of the spirants, /f v/ are labio-dental, /s z/ lamino-alveolar; the other four all apico-alveolar, though with an additional difference about to be described. For the front part of the tongue, certain distinctions have to be made for spirants which are not relevant in discussing stops. Both English /s z/ and English /6 '5/ are normally apico-alveolar, but the former are rill spirants, the latter slit spirants. In a rill spirant, the front edge

NASALS

73

of the tongue closes against the upper teeth or the gum on both sides, leaving only a tiny median opening through which the air stream can pass. In the second type, instead of this tiny opening there is a trans¬ verse slit. Some speakers of English produce /s z/ as rill spirants with a laminoalveolar position instead of apico-alveolar: the tip of the tongue hangs down behind the lower teeth and does not participate. In some lan¬ guages this difference in position of articulation is distinctive. A third variety of tongue-front spirant is the surface spirant: English /s z/ are neither slit nor rill, but involve close approximation of a whole area, from side to side and from front to back, of the blade of the tongue to a comparable area behind the upper teeth, perhaps including the backs of the teeth. British English /s z/ are also surface spirants, but are lamino-domal rather than lamino-alveolar. A fourth variety is the lateral spirant: a complete closure (apicoalveolar or other), is made medially, but the air is allowed to pass at one or both sides, between the edge of the tongue and the upper teeth. Such sounds are common in American Indian languages, especially of the Northwest Coast (Nootka, Kwakiutl, Salishan), and in some of the languages of the Caucasus; there is a voiceless lateral spirant in Welsh. Not all laterals are spirants, and it is only nonspirantal laterals that occur in English and other generally familiar languages (§8.5). Spirants are subject to some of the same classification as to manner as are stops: voicing contrasts, pharyngealization (§7.5), labialization (rounding of lips), palatalization. Glottalized spirants are rare, if they occur at all, and there are no known instances of nasalized spirants. Table 8.1 also shows phonetic symbols for spirants. 8.4. Nasals. Nasals or nasal continuants are not clear-cut contoids, but belong rather on the boundary between contoid and vocoid. They are produced exactly like stops, except that the velic is open. English has three such phonemes: /m n q/. The first is bilabial, the second apicoalveolar, and the third dorso-velar. As just illustrated, nasals can be classified by position of articulation just as are stops. Contrasts of manner are rare, but not unknown: some languages have both voiced and voiceless nasals; and even glottalized nasals are possible, though the mechanism of production is different from that for glottalized stops. In the glottalized nasals of Nootka and Kwakiutl, one begins with a glottal closure, and releases it into the

74

CONTOID

ARTICULATIONS

nasal continuant. Some languages have more consonant phonemes of the nasal continuant type than does English, and some have fewer Quileute, and a very few other languages, have none at all. Phonetic symbols for nasals are included in Table 8.1. 8.5. Lateral Vocoids. Our English /l/ is produced with the position of articulation described earlier for lateral spirants, but with a key difference: there is no local turbulence as the air passes the sides of the tongue, so that the sound is marked primarily by a certain coloring. Such lateral vocoids, usually voiced, are quite common. Various posi¬ tions of articulation are found—one can even produce a bilabial lateral, by opening both sides of the lips and keeping the center closed. Alany languages, including Castilian Spanish and Italian, contrast two lateral vocoids, one apico-alveolar (or apico-dental) and one lamino-alveolar. Some of the languages of India contrast an apico-dental lateral and an apico-domal (retroflex). Some speakers of English use a dorso-velar pronunciation for English /l/, instead of the more ordinary apical variety. Apical lateral vocoids can be made to differ quite widely in color by the position in which the rest of the tongue is held: with the middle and back of the tongue held down, the result is usually called dark, while with the middle and back of the tongue held up, the result is clear. British English has a relatively clear lateral before vowels, and a rela¬ tively dark one finally, so that the two /l/’s of little sound quite different. In most American English the difference is far less striking. In some languages such a difference is distinctive. 8.6. Retroflex Vocoids and Trills. American English /r/ is pro¬ duced in one of two ways: by curling the tip of the tongue back and up towards the dome of the mouth, or by placing it behind the lower teeth and bunching the central part up against the dome. In either case the sound is usually voiced. The first produces a retroflex vocoid. The second, while not retroflex in the strict sense, produces the same acoustic effect, so that the difference is usually ignored except in the closest articulatory description. Retroflex vocoids are not common, but Mandarin Chinese has one, differing from that in American English in two ways: the lips are not rounded as they are for the English sound; often the airstream is forced through fast enough to produce a buzz in addition to the retroflex coloring. Trilling is achieved by holding some flexible bit of flesh in the passing

RETROFLEX

VOCOIDS

AND

TRILLS

75

air stream with just the right tension to allow the air to set it into rapid vibration. One can do this with the lips, but a bilabial trill is very rare as a speech sound, attested for just one word in one language (Isthmus Zapotec). An apical trill is much commoner (many varieties of French and German, and most Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). A uvular trill is common in Europe: this is the variety of trill used by many prestige speakers of German and French for their respective /r/ phonemes. A trill can be as short as a single tap, or quite long. Our American /1/ in a word like bottle or automobile often comes out as a single voiced apico-alveolar tap. In some languages a shorter trill, or tap, and a longer trill at the same position of articulation, stand in phonemic con¬ trast: so in Spanish pero ‘but’ versus perro ‘dog.’ Phonetic symbols for lateral vocoids, retroflex vocoids, and trills con¬ sist of the letters “r” and “1” and of any convenient typographical modifications—inverted “r” or small caps “r” and “l” or the Greek letters rho and lambda. For all our purposes the two most customary letters will suffice. These sounds are often grouped together under the term liquids; or, together with nasals, they are sometimes called sonorants, in contrast with which stops and spirants are called obstruents.

NOTES New terms: (1) articulators: dorsum, center, blade, and tip of tongue; lower lip; (2) points of articulation: velum, front and back velum, dome, alveolar ridge, upper teeth, upper lip; (2) positions of articulation: dorso-velar, centro-domal, lamino-domal, lamino-alveolar, apico-domal (retroflex), apicoalveolar, apico-dental, apico-interdental, apico-labial, labio-dental = bilabial; (4) manner, (stop) closure, spirantization, stop, spirant; glottalized (stops), injective (stops), clicks, coarticulated (stops), palatalization; rill versus slit versus surface versus lateral(ized) spirants; labialization; dark and clear (laterals); retroflex and lateral vocoids; trills, trilling, tap; nasals = nasal continuants; liquids, sonorants, obstruents; uvula. The anatomist would not be dismayed by the linguist’s use of any of the above terms except dorsum; the anatomist uses this term to refer to the entire upper surface of the tongue which touches the roof of the

76

CONTOID

ARTICULATIONS

mouth when maximum closure is made. Our usage follows that of some contemporary linguists. Problems. (1) Describe each of the English phonemes listed below in articulatory terms, following the model given for the first one: /p/

voiceless bilabial stop

N M N AV /g/

N N hi IV

M N M N /m/

N A)/ M N N

(2) Each of the following purports to be an articulatory description of a possible speech sound, but some of them are in fact impossible. Answer two questions for each: Is such a speech sound possible? Does it occur as a reasonably common representation of some English phoneme? voiced dorso-velar stop voiced dorso-velar spirant voiceless dorso-velar spirant voiceless retroflex apical rill spirant voiced retroflex apical rill spirant voiced bilabial lateral sonorant voiced apico-velar stop voiced labio-dental spirant voiced labio-dental nasal spirant voiceless bilabial glottalized stop voiceless bilabial nasal voiceless lamino-alveolar nasal voiceless apico-labial stop voiced labio-alveolar spirant.

9

•

VOCOID ARTICULATIONS; TIMING and COORDINATION 9.1. Oral Factors in Vocoids. Most pure vocoid articulations in most languages can be described in terms of three factors: lip position, tongue-height, and tongue-advancement. Lip position is described along the scale rounded-unrounded or roundedspread. In English, the lips are spread—or, at least, not actively rounded —in the production of the vowels /i e ae a a ij ej aj/, but more or less rounded in the production of /u o uw ow/. In the last two, most of us increase the amount of rounding during the production of the vowel, and this is one factor which leads some to prefer the analysis under which /uw/ and /ow/ are clusters of a vowel plus /w/ (§3.3). As for /w/ itself, we shall have more to say later. In /oj/, the lips are rounded at the beginning but not at the end; in /aw/, just the reverse. If we compare our articulation of the vowels /i e ae/, as in bit, bet, and bat, we find that the lower jaw is held progressively farther away from the upper jaw, and that at least the front part of the tongue is progressively farther away from the region of the upper teeth and the alveolar ridge. What counts in the production of vocoid sounds is the shape of the oral cavity; thus the position of the tongue is of primary importance, and the position of the jaw is only a matter of convenience in getting the tongue into proper placement. A similar difference appears when we compare /uw ow o/, as in sue, sew, saw, except that in this case it is the back part of the tongue, rather than the front part, which assumes progressively lower positions. In both cases, the scale of contrasts involved is that of tongue-height, from high, through various possible intermediate heights, mid, to low.

77

VOCOID

78

ARTICULATIONS

The third scale of contrasts is harder to describe accurately. If we compare he and who, setting aside the difference of lip-position which we have already noted, we find that in he the whole upper surface of the tongue, from dorsum to blade, is held high, whereas in who only the dorsum is high, the remainder of the tongue curving downwards and away from the roof of the mouth. Both vocoids are called

high , when

the front of the tongue, as well as the back, is high, we speak of a front vocoid, but where the back is high and the front is not we speak of a back vocoid. Intermediate between front and back are (varying degrees of) central. It should be noticed that the term “mid” is arbitrarily assigned to positions intermediate between as Figure

a 9.1.

o

Charting

of

English

Vowels in Terms of Tongue Height

high

and

low,

while

“central” is, equally arbitrarily, assigned to the intermediate range on

the

front-back scale.

Many

speakers of American English use

and Tongue Advancement

Lip-position is ignored. The arrows

a fairly high central unrounded

indicate the direction of tongue-motion

vocoid in their pronunciation ot

during the pronunciation of /ij ej aj oj

the word just as in I just got here

uw ow aw/;

(not as in a just man); this pronun¬

the

extent

of the motion

varies and is not indicated by the length of the arrow.

ciation was not provided for in our phonemic analysis of Middle West-

ern English in §§2-6, since the pronunciation /j6st/ is also common and probably always possible. Figure 9.1 roughly displays the vowels of English in terms of the two dimensions of tongue-position, ignoring lip-position—to include the latter, we would need a three-dimensional model instead of the surface of a sheet of paper. The reader can easily verify the approximate cor¬ rectness of the chart by saying appropriate English words to himself and “feeling” the position of his tongue. In addition to the three scales of contrast which have been described so far, one often hears of a distinction between tense and lax. It is easy to demonstrate this difference in English. Hold the fingers on the bundle of muscles above and in front of the glottis within the frame of the lower jaw, and say bit, beat, bit, beat. For beat, one can feel a bunch¬ ing and tension in the muscles which is either lacking or at least much

ORAL

FACTORS

IN

VOCOIDS

79

TABLE 9.2 Unrounded Vocoids front

central

back

higher

i

i

a

lower

i i

i

ia

higher

e

lower

e

e

e e 9 a

e e a

higher

ae e

A

A

lower

ae a

1 UI

high:

c

e

a

i ui i V a

e

a Y

mid:

low: a a

a a

TABLE 9.3 Rounded Vocoids front

central

back

higher

ii y

u «

U

lower

li u y y

u » u

u U

higher

b

6

o

lower

6 0 o oe

6 o

o 0

D oe

6 a

o a d

high:

0

V

mid:

low:

A number of the symbols appear more than once in the above tables: this is in order to indicate the most customary range of phonetic values for each symbol. Thus “i” is often used for a higher high front unrounded vowel, in contrast to “i” or “i” for a lower one; but if there is no relevant contrast in the high front un¬ rounded range then “i” may itself be used for a lower high front unrounded vocoid.

less prominent for bit. Sometimes the same difference can be detected with could and cooed; it is harder to feel for bet and bate. Just what this bunching of the muscles accomplishes is not clear; presumably it has some effect on the precise positioning of the upper surface of the tongue, and thus bears on the shape of the oral cavity. Basic phonetic symbols for vocoids are displayed in Tables 9.2 and 9.3, the former for unrounded vowels, the latter for rounded ones.

80

TIMING

AND

COORDINATION

9.2. Modifications. For purposes of phonetic description, the speci¬ fication of a vocoid in terms of the three factors mentioned first in §9.1 (excluding tenseness and laxness) is arbitrarily regarded as basic, and anything further that may have to be mentioned in dealing with one or another language is regarded as a modification. (This rough phonetic classification has nothing to do with the relative importance of different factors in specific phonemic systems, but is for convenience only.) A number of modifications are to be found. Some of them were covered in §7: a vocoid, like a contoid, can be either voiced or voiceless, or, indeed, whispered; it can be pharyngealized or nasalized. Also, vocoids can be modified within the oral chamber itself by retroflexion (curling back of the tip of the tongue; §8). The usual Middle Western pro¬ nunciation of the /dr/ of shirt, third, furze is a mid central unrounded retroflexed vocoid: the retroflexion represents the /r/, and the rest represents the /a/. In Badaga, all vocoid phonemes come in sets of three, otherwise identical, differing in the presence of no, slight, or strong retroflexion. 9.3. Timing and Coordination. So far in our discussion of articula¬ tory phonetics we have dealt almost exclusively with static positions of the various parts of the speech tract. But in actual speech all parts of the tract are constantly moving, no single position, as described ideally in the foregoing, lasting more than a brief fraction of a second. Some significant contrasts cannot be described in a purely static survey, since they turn on features of timing and coordination of motions from one articulatory position to another. 9.4. Length. The simplest timing contrast is length. In many lan¬ guages, two utterances may be composed of exactly the same key articulatory motions, yet be distinctively different because some articu¬ latory position is held longer in one of the utterances than in the other. Such a timing distinction may be found for a contoid or for a vocoid. In Italian, fato /fato/ has a relatively long [a] and a short [t], while faito /fatto/ has a shorter [a] and a longer [t]. The phonetic symbol for length is [•] after the symbol for the sound which is prolonged: thus [fa-to] and [fat-o]. 9.5. Transition and Release. Somewhat different is the relative timing of two articulations or changes of articulatory function in two different parts of the speech tract. In English, utterances like big, dig, get begin with stops which are only weakly voiced at the outset (or even

81

AFFRICATES

not voiced at all), but for which the voicing increases during the holding of the stop closure. In French, words like belle, digne, gare begin with stops that are strongly voiced from the outset. This is a subtle difference, but French spoken with the English variety of [b d g] sounds wrong to the native French ear, and this is one of the difficulties which we en¬ counter when we are trying to learn to pronounce French well. Again, French pas, tasse, cas begin with voiceless stops, and voicing begins almost exactly as the stop closure is released. English pass, touch, catch also begin with voiceless stops, but the onset of voicing for the vowels which follow is delayed for a perceptible length of time after the release of the stop closure, and one can clearly hear a brief phase of voicelessness, sometimes involving some local turbulence of the air at the point of articulation of the stop. Such voiceless stops are called aspirated, for which the phonetic symbol is [‘]: thus [p‘]. The English aspirated voiceless stops sound very bad in French, and the French style of unaspirated voiceless stops sounds peculiar in English. 9.6. Timing of Chest Pulses. In many languages, if not in all, the pressure of air from the lungs occurs in a series of pulses. The timing of these pulses relative to other articulatory motions can be important. Speakers of English who pronounce an aim and a name differently prob¬ ably make the difference in just this way, beginning a chest pulse after the /n/ in the first, but with it in the second. 9.7. Affricates. A special way of passing from a stop closure to a following sound or silence involves a single motion of the articulator, which leaves the position of complete closure slowly enough that a con¬ siderable amount of spirantal friction or turbulence is audible. We do not often pronounce English /ptkbgd/ in this way, but /c j/ are regularly so produced; this is the other special feature of /£ j/ men¬ tioned, but not described, in §8.2. Such sounds are called affricates. They differ from simple sequences of a stop and a spirant, in which the articulator goes through two successive motions. Thus, one may often hear the sequence [ts] between the words hit and you in a rapidly spoken Pm gonna hit ya, and this is quite different from the [£] of, say, pitcher. Many languages have affricates at several positions of articulation instead of just a single pair as in English. Affricates are delivered in the same variety of manners as are stops (§8.2). A general way of producing a phonetic symbol for an affricate is to use a “cap”

(“A”)

as a diacritic

over the symbol for the corresponding spirant. However, a few special

82

TIMING

AND

COORDINATION

symbols are available: [c] and [3] for apical affricates; [c] and [3] (or [j]) for laminal ones; [X] and [X] for affricates with lateral release. To all of these, diacritics used for stops or for consonants in general (see the caption on Table 8.1) can be added. 9.8. Glide and Peak Vocoids. Differences of timing are important in the distinction between glide and peak vocoids. In bird, as pronounced in the Middle West, the retroflex vocoid is of the peak type; it is pre¬ ceded and followed by articulations which last less long and produce less clearly audible acoustic effects. But in red the same retroflex vocoid is pronounced quickly, and with the chest-pulse only half strong, followed by a non-retroflex vocoid which iasts longer and for which the chest-pulse has gained full strength. The initial vocoid, in this case, is a glide vocoid. The same difference applies to the lateral vocoid in the second syl¬ lable of battle (phonemically /al/: /baetal/) and the initial one in let, or to the high front vocoid /i/ in bit and the /j/ of yet. The entire difference between the English phonemes /w j/ and /u i/ is definable only in these terms: where vocoids of the high back rounded or high front un¬ rounded types are the most prominent elements in syllables, they are instances of the phonemes /u i/, but where they occur as marginal ele¬ ments in a syllable with something else as the most prominent part, they are instances of the phonemes /w j/. A convenient way of producing as many symbols for glide vocoids as necessary is to place a small curve under the symbol for the correspond¬ ing peak vocoid: thus [i a u]. But there are also three special symbols: [w] pairing off with [u], [j] pairing off with [i], and [q] going with [y], 9.9. Timing in Longer Stretches. In longer utterances, further types of timing contrasts make their appearance. We saw in §4.3 (Ex¬ amples 31-33) that the same sequence of words can be matched to one and the same intonation in more than one way, depending on where the center of the intonation is placed; phonetically speaking, this is a matter of different timing for sequences of motions in different parts of the speech tract. Languages differ greatly in their characteristic rhythms, and this, also, points to differing types of timing and coordination in longer stretches. One example will suffice.

English has stress-timed rhythm

(§5.4): the length of time it takes to produce an utterance depends roughly on the number of stresses in it, so that unstressed syllables are

TIMING IN LONGER STRETCHES

83

sometimes squeezed together and produced very rapidly, if there are a number of them between two successive stressed syllables. Spanish, on the other hand, has syllable-timed rhythm: regardless of the number and location of stresses, a Spanish utterance of twenty syllables takes ap¬ proximately twice as long to utter as one of ten syllables.

NOTES New technical terms: lip position {rounded, spread or unrounded), tongueheight {high, mid, low), tongue-advancement {front, central, back); tense and lax; retroflexion for vowels; length, timing, coordination, transition, release, aspiration, chest pulse; affricates; peak and glide vocoids; stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythm.

10

-

PHONEMIC ARRANGEMENTS; REDUNDANCY 10.1. If one undertakes to learn a foreign language, a sound in the new language which is unlike anything in one’s own language consti¬ tutes a difficulty. For example, English has no voiceless dorso-velar spirant [x] as a separate phoneme, but German does: ach /ax/ ‘Oh!’ Buck /bu-x/ ‘book,’ lachen /laxon/ ‘to laugh.’ Most speakers of English are inclined at first to substitute their stop /k/ for this spirant, but this will not do, since in German the voiceless spirant and stop at this posi¬ tion of articulation are in contrast: Buck as above, versus buk /bu-k/ ‘(he) baked.’ This source of difficulty in learning to pronounce a foreign language is familiar to most of us. But there is another, often overlooked. German /k/ and /n/ are individually much like English /k/ and /n/, so that one would anticipate no trouble with them. Yet a German word like Knabe /kna-be/ ‘boy’ is troublesome. The difficulty in this case is not due to anything about the individual sounds, but to the particular arrangement in which they must be pronounced. In English, unlike German, we never begin an utterance, nor a word, with /k/ followed immediately by /n/. We see, thus, that the phonological systems of various languages may differ from each other in two ways. They usually differ as to the number of phonemes and the phonetic characteristics of each, but they also often differ as to the arrangements in which the phonemes occur relative to each other. In §11 we shall deal more thoroughly with the ways in which phonemic systems differ. In the present section we shall confine our-

84

PHONEMIC ARRANGEMENTS IN ENGLISH

85

selves largely to English, in order to illustrate arrangements and limita¬ tions on arrangements and to show the communicative importance of the latter. 10.2. Phonemic Arrangements in English. The arrangements in which intonational phonemes occur relative to each other were covered in §4, and the accentual phonemes and the junctural phoneme /+/ were treated in §§5 and 6. Here, therefore, we can confine ourselves to the arrangements of segmental (vowel and consonant) phonemes within the bounds of single microsegments (§6.4). The importance of the microsegment in this context is that there seem to be few effective limitations, on the distribution of vowel and consonant phonemes, that operate across the boundaries between suc¬ cessive microsegments. That is, the vowels and consonants which can occur at the beginning of a microsegment are not in any significant way limited by the vowel or consonant at the end of the preceding micro¬ segment, or vice versa. But within the bounds of a single microsegment there are many limitations. A few microsegments are of a special type, occurring only in macro¬ segments that include also one or more microsegments of what we shall call the “normal” type. These special microsegments consist of a single isolated consonant. Examples are the isolated /s/of /s+kuwl/ It's cool (§6.2, example 33), the isolated /j/ of /j+dta/ Ya oughta (§6.2, ex¬ ample 38), and the isolated /z/ of /bij+z-f gowiq/ Bea's going (§6.2, example 44). A microsegment of the “normal” type consists of one or more syllables: boy (said in isolation) is one syllable; butter is two; operate three; operator four; perambulator five; elephantiasis six; honorificabilitudinity eleven. Such long ones are very rare; even six or seven syllables is unusual. The number of syllables in an English microsegment correlates exactly with the number of vowel phonemes: /boj/, /batar/, /apar^jt/, /aparejtar/, /paraembjalejtar/, /elafantajasas/, /anarifakabilatuwdinatij/. Contrari¬ wise, every vowel /i e ae a u o a ij ej aj oj uw ow aw/ in every occur¬ rence, constitutes the peak of a syllable. Any consonant or sequence of consonants at the beginning of a microsegment constitutes the onset of the first syllable. Any consonant or sequence of consonants at the end of a microsegment constitutes the coda of the last syllable. But the consonants and sequences of consonants which occur between successive vowels in a single microsegment are

86

PHONEMIC arrangements;

redundancy

neither onsets nor codas, and cannot be assigned exclusively either to the syllable that includes also the preceding vowel or to the one which includes also the following vowel. Instead, these interludes, as we shall call them, belong structurally with both the preceding and the following vowels. Thus, syllables in English are determined by the number and location of peaks (phonetically the most prominent elements of syl¬ lables), and the exact location of the boundaries between successive syllables—except across an intervening /+/, where the syllables are in successive microsegments—is phonemically irrelevant. In other lan¬ guages syllables have various other types of structure. Onsets, codas, and interludes vary a great deal in complexity. “Zero” onsets occur, as in out, in, end, awful, ooze; likewise zero codas {filly, window, soda, bah), and, more rarely, zero interludes {idea /ajdijo/, reality, naive). Non-zero onsets include from one to three successive con¬ sonants {ray, tray, stray); non-zero codas and interludes from one to four {rim, ramp, ramps, glimpsed; hammer, damsel, entrance, minstrel). However, the limitations on these longer consonant-sequences, in any of the three positions of occurrence, are stringent. If all possible sequences of one, two, or three consonants occurred as onsets, there would be a total of 14,425 different onsets (one zero onset, 24 of a single consonant, 242 = 576 of two consonants and 243 = 13,824 of three consonants). Actually, the total number of onsets of any frequency at all is well under one hundred. We shall list and illustrate these here, but we shall not take the space to do the same for codas and interludes, since our aim is an example rather than an exhaustive coverage of English. All the individual consonant phonemes of the language except /z q/ occur as onsets; pick, take, choose, kick, build, dig, jig, get, find, think, sink, shall, vat, these, zone, man, nut, ride, let, wet, yet, high. A few speakers pro¬ nounce a French name like Jeanne or Giselle with initial /z/, and an extremely small number pronounce the name Ngaio with initial /q/. Sequences, or clusters, of two consonants occurring as onsets often have /r 1 w j/ as the second. The five consonants /z q ” and “ ” or “” directive with director first,

“>” attributive with attribute first, “