terms of phonetics and phonology

nucleus
Usually used in the description of intonation to refer to the most
prominent syllable of
the tone-unit, but also used in phonology to denote
the centre or peak (i.e. vowel) of a
syllable. It is one of the central principles of the “standard British” treatment of
intonation that continuous speech can be broken up into units called tone-units, and
that each of these will have one syllable that can be identified as the most prominent.
This syllable will normally be the starting point of the major pitch movement (nuclear
tone) in the tone unit. Another name for the nucleus is the tonic syllable.
obstruent
Many different labels are used for types of consonant. One very general one that is
sometimes useful is obstruent: consonants of this type create a substantial obstruction
to the flow of air through the vocal tract.
Plosives,
fricatives and
affricates are
obstruents;
nasals
and approximants are not.
occlusion.
onset
This term is used in the analysis of syllable structure (and occasionally in other areas);
generally it refers to
the first part of a syllable. In English this may be zero (when no
consonant
precedes the vowel in a syllable), one consonant, or two, or three. There are
many restrictions on what clusters of consonants may occur in onsets: for example, if
an English syllable has a three-consonant onset, the first consonant must be
s and the
last one must be one of l, w, j, r.
open
One of the labels used for classifying vowels is open. An open vowel is one in which
the tongue is low
in the mouth and the
jaw lowered: examples are cardinal vowel no.
4 [a] (similar to the a sound of French) and cardinal vowel no. 5 [.] (like an
exaggerated and old-fashioned English ._, as in ‘car’). The term ‘low’ is sometimes
used instead of ‘open’, mainly by American phoneticians and phonologists.
palatalisation
It is difficult to give a precise definition of this term, since it is used in a number of
different ways. It may, for example, be used to refer to
a process whereby the place of
an articulation is shifted nearer to (or actually on to) the centre of the hard palate:
the
s at the end of the word ‘this’ may become palatalised to
. when followed by j at the
beginning of ‘year’, giving ði. ji.. (See coalescence.) However, in addition to this
sense of the word we also find palatalisation being described as a secondary
articulation in which the front of the tongue is raised close to the palate while an
articulatory closure is made at another point in the vocal tract: in this sense, it is
possible to find a palatalised p or b. Palatalisation is widespread in most Slavonic
languages, where there are pairs of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants. The
release of a palatalised consonant typically has a j-like quality.
palate, palatal
The palate is sometimes known as the “roof of the mouth” (though the word “ceiling”
would seem to be more appropriate). It can be divided into the hard palate, which runs
from the alveolar ridge at the front of the mouth to the beginning of the soft palate at
the back, and the soft palate itself, which extends from the rear end of the hard palate
almost to the back of the throat, terminating in the uvula, which can be seen in a
mirror if you look at yourself with your mouth open. The hard palate is mainly
composed of a thin layer of bone (which has a front-to-back split in it in the case of
people with cleft palate), and is dome-shaped, as you can feel by exploring it with the
tip of your tongue. The soft palate (for which there is an alternative name, velum) can
be raised and lowered; it is lowered for normal breathing and for nasal consonants,
and raised for most other speech sounds.
Consonants in which the tongue makes contact with the highest part of the hard palate
are labelled palatal. These include the English
j sound.
peak
In the phonological study of the syllable it is conventional to give names to its
different components.
The centre of the syllable is its peak; this is normally a vowel,but it is possible for a consonant to act as a peak instead. (See syllabic consonant.)
phatic communion
This is a rather pompous name for an interesting phenomenon: often when people
appear to be
using language for social purposes
it seems that the actual content of
what they are saying has virtually no meaning. For example,
greetings containing anapparent enquiry about the listener’s health
or a comment on the weather are usually
not expected to be treated as a normal enquiry or comment. What is interesting from
the pronunciation point of view is that such interactions only work if they are said in a
prosodically appropriate way: it has been claimed that when welcoming a guest to a
lively party one could announce (without anyone noticing anything wrong) that one
had just finished murdering one’s grandmother, as long as one used the appropriate
intonation and facial expression for a greeting.