John Cunnison Catford A practical Introduction to Phonetics Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6op Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Pending Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York (c) J. C. Catford 1988 First published 1988 Reprinted 1989, 1990 All rights reserved. No part oj this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Catford, J. C. (John Cunnison), 1917- A Practical introduction to phonetics. 1. Phonetics I. Title 414 ISBN 0-19-824218-2 ISBN 0-19-824217-4 (pbk.) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Catford, J. C. (John Cunnison), 1917- A practical introduction to phonetics. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Phonetics. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general-Phonology. I. Title. P22/.C33 1988 414 88-12546 ISBN 0-19-824218-2 ISBN 0-19-324217-4 (pbk.) Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd Guildford and King's Lynn Preface It may be worth drawing attention to the fact that the title of this book is, designedly, 'A Practical Introduction to Phonetics' and not 'An Introduction to Practical Phonetics', for it is, indeed, an introduction to general, or theoretical, phonetics, though it proceeds towards that goal in a highly practical way. Readers are introduced to the phonetic classification of the sounds of speech by means of a series of simple introspective experiments carried out inside their own vocal tracts, their own throats and mouths. By actually making sounds (very often silently) and attending to the muscular sensations that accompany their production one can discover how they are produced and learn how to describe and classify them. At first sight 'making sounds silently' may appear contradictory, but, as Abercrombie (1967) has aptly pointed out, speech is 'audible gesture' and the principal aim of this book is to enable the reader to discover and to analyse the gestural aspect of speech (upon which most phonetic classification is based) and to bring it under conscious control. This must be done, to a large extent, in silence, since the auditory sensations of loud speech tend to mask the motor sensations, which are the perceptual accompaniment of the gestural aspect of speech. That this kind of experimentation is an effective means of acquiring a knowledge of the categories and principles of general phonetics I know from personal experience, for this was precisely how I learned phonetics as a boy, without a teacher, eagerly reading Sweet's Primer of Phonetics and constantly experimenting in my own vocal tract. Although, as this reference to boyhood experience suggests, phonetics is a fascinating hobby for young people, it is primarily an indispensable tool for all those adults who have to work with language: students of linguistics, teachers and students of languages, teachers of the deaf, the hearing-impaired themselves who may be striving to acquire intelligible speech, actors, and many others. Armed with the understanding of the basic Preface VI principles of phonetics which this book seeks to inculcate, they should be able to read and fully understand any specialist work on whatever aspect of phonetics is of special interest to them. Much of the material of the book has been used for some years past at the University of Michigan, in teaching phonetics to large groups of students of linguistics, speech pathology, anthropology, languages, education, drama, and many other fields. I am grateful to all those students who contributed comments and suggestions, and I should also like to thank Dr Harriet Mills who read most of the text and made numerous valuable criticisms. J.C.C. Ann Arbor, February 1988 Acknowledgements The International Phonetic Association has kindly given permission for the use of the IPA chart. Permission to reproduce figs. 1,19,21,22,23,24,25,35, which originally appeared in Fundamental Problems in Phonetics, has kindly been granted by Edinburgh University Press. Contents LIST OF FIGURES Xll 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1. Uses of phonetics 1 2. The phases of speech 3 3. The vocal tract 7 4. The functional components of speech 10 2. BASIC COMPONENTS OF SPEECH 1 1 1. Initiation and articulation 1 1 2. Fricative and stop articulation 1 7 3. Pulmonic pressure and suction initiation 19 4. Glottalic initiation 23 5. Velaric initiation 28 6. Review of initiation types 30 7. Initiator velocity, and initiator power (stress) 32 3. PHONATION: A THIRD BASIC COMPONENT 36 1. Voiceless and voiced fricatives 36 2. Voiced and voiceless m nlr 39 3. Voiced and voiceless vowels 41 4. The three components: initiation, articulation, and phonation 42 5. The production of voiced stops 43 6. Voiced implosives 49 7. Principal phonation types 51 8. Relationship of phonation to initiation 56 9. Aspiration 57 4. ARTICULATION: STRICTURE TYPES 62 1. Articulation-the 'final shaping' of sounds 62 2. Maintainable stricture-types: stop, fricative, approximant, resonant, trill 63 3. Essentially momentary stricture types: tap, flap, semivowel 70 Contents Contents XI 172 172 178 180 182 184 187 187 188 190 191 198 200 202 203 207 210 217 229 231 233 73 76 76 79 83 86 92 96 100 103 104 105 110 113 114 115 116 123 123 124 130 138 138 142 145 149 150 154 159 163 169 4. The transverse dimension: median and lateral articulation 5. ARTICULATION: LOCATIONS 1. The nasal area 2. The oral area: upper and lower articulators 3. Labial articulations: bilabial and labiodental 4. Dentalveolar articulations 5. Retroflex and palatal articulations 6. Velar and uvular articulations 7. Pharyngal and glottal articulations 6. CO-ARTICULATION AND SEQUENCES 1. Co-ordinate or double articulation 2. Primary and secondary articulation 3. Homorganic sound sequences : geminates and affricates 4. Lateral plosion, nasal plosion, and prenasalized stops 5. Heterorganic sequences and contiguous sequences 6. Diphthongs 7. Close and open transition 7. VOWELS: INTRODUCTION 1. Vowels and consonants: importance of silent study of vowels 2. Lip- and tongue-positions for vowels 3. Introduction to Cardinal Vowels 8. THE CARDINAL VOWELS (CVs) 1. General characteristics of CVs: errors to avoid 2. The front CVs 3. The back CVs 4. Types of lip-rounding 5. Secondary CVs 6. Central vowels and other additions to the CVs 7. The acoustics of vowels: vowel formants 8. Making the formants audible 9. Additional vowel modifications 9. PROSODIC FEATURES 1. Initiatory prosodies: initiator power (= stress) 2. The syllable 3. The foot 4. Phonatory prosodies: pitch variations (= intonation and tone) 5. Articulatory prosody: duration of articulation (= length) 10. SOUND SYSTEMS OF LANGUAGES 1. Phonology: the utilization of speech-sounds 2. A continuum of vowel-sounds 3. The vowel continuum differently dissected by English and Spanish 4. Voice-onset-times differently exploited by different languages 5. Phonemes 6. Distinctive features 7. English consonant phonemes 8. Allophones 9. Consonant clusters 10. The English vowels 11. REVIEW FOR FURTHER READING REFERENCES INDEX x 8 13 13 15 16 16 18 21 22 23 29 38 46 48 49 51 54 58 73 75 77 79 80 81 82 87 87 88 90 90 93 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. List of Figures The vocal tract . Basic components of speech-sound production . Experiment 3: Remove initiation . Experiment 4: Remove articulation Experiment 5: Add initiation . Experiment 6: Add articulation '. Experiment 7: Superimpose stop on air-stream Pressure and suction varieties of [1| Pressure and suction varieties of [s| Three stages in the production of glottalic pressure [k'j Experiment 17: Three phases in the production of a velaric suction stop (the click [i|) Experiment 23: Voiceless and voiced fricatives Aerodynamics of a voiced stop Voiceless and voiced stop and fricative Mechanism of voiced glottalic suction stop (voiced implosive) Initiation of voiced plosives and voiced implosives States of the glottis Aspiration and voicing of stops Major stricture types Major stricture types in the transverse dimension The major articulatory areas Some features of the oral cavity Upper articulatory locations Subdivisions of the tongue Lower articulatory locations Two extreme types of alveolar ridge Apico-dentalveolar stop articulations Lamino-dentalveolar stop articulations Apico-dentalveolar fricative articulations Lamino-dentalveolar fricative articulations Retroflex articulations: (a) stop (b) flap 32. Dorso-palatal articulation 93 33. Some postalveolar and (pre)palatal articulations 96 34. Timing relations in co-articulation 107 35. Named homorganic sequences 1 1 1 36. The International Phonetic Alphabet (revised to 1979) 120 37. The vowel limit 132 38. Tongue-configurations for Cardinal Vowels 1 33 39. Error to avoid in pronouncing front CVs 135 40. The Cardinal Vowels " 136 4 1 . Schemati...
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