April McMahon

DESCRIBING ENGLISH CONSONANTS 29taps or trills. While a plosive is characterised by a complete obstructionof oral airflow, followed generally by release of that airflow, a tap is a veryquick, ballistic movement where the active articulator strikes a glancingblow against the passive one; interruption of the airstream is real, butextremely brief. Many Scots speakers have a tapped allophone [ɾ] ofthe phoneme /r/ between vowels, as in arrow, very; many Americanspeakers have a similar tap as a realisation of /t/ in butter, water. Trillsare repeated taps, where the active articulator vibrates against thepassive one. Trilled [r] is now rather uncommon for speakers of English,although attempts at imitating Scots often involve furious rolling of [r]s.B. FRICATIVESDuring the production of a fricative, the active and passive articulatorsare brought close together, but not near enough to totally block the oralcavity. This close approximation of the articulators means the aircoming from the lungs has to squeeze through a narrow gap at highspeed, creating turbulence, or local audible friction, which is heard ashissing for a voiceless fricative, and buzzing for a voiced one. English [f]five and [s] size are voiceless fricatives, while [v] five and [z] size arevoiced.The subclass of affricates consists of sounds which start as stops andend up as fricatives; but as we shall see in Chapter 5, they behave assingle, complex sounds rather than sequences. Stops generally involvequick release of their complete articulatory closure; but if this release isslow, or delayed, the articulators will pass through a stage of closeapproximation appropriate for a fricative. The two relevant sounds forEnglish are [tʃ], at the beginning and end of church, and its voiced equivalent[dʒ], found at the beginning and end of judge. If you pronouncethese words extremely slowly, you should be able to identify the stop andfricative phases.C. APPROXIMANTSIt is relatively easy to recognise a stop or fricative, and to diagnosethe articulators involved, since these are either touching or so close thattheir location can be felt. In approximants, on the other hand, the activeand passive articulator never become sufficiently close to create audiblefriction. Instead, the open approximation of the articulators alters theshape of the oral cavity, and leads to the production of a particular soundquality.There are four approximant consonant phonemes in English: /j/ yes,/w/ wet, /r/ red (although as we have seen, /r/ may have a tapped allophonefor some speakers) and /l/ let. All these approximants are voiced.