Re: [tied] English "voiced" stops

From: Patrick C. Ryan
Message: 19189
Date: 2003-02-25

Dear Miguel:


----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Carrasquer" <mcv@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 4:14 PM
Subject: [tied] English "voiced" stops


> On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 22:35:32 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...>
> wrote:
>
> >Ladefoged on p. 50 of A Course In Phonetics says "most".
>
> I accidentally confused Ladefoged p. 50 (where he states that most
> speakers of AE have no voicing during closure of initial b-, d-, g-)
> with Ladefoged & Maddieson p. 50, where it is stated that speakers of
> English often fail to vibrate their vocal chords when pronouncing
> intervocalic -b-, -d-, -g-). I give the two passages in question in
> full, as they are well worth studying:

[PCR]
Anyone can make an inadvertent error.

> Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics, p. 50:
>
> Most people have very little voicing going on while the lips are
> closed during either "pie" or "buy."

[PCR]
If this is a sample of Ladefoged, I suggest respectfully that other sources might profitably be consulted.

No one that I know of has ever suggested that there is "little voicing" or any voicing during the closure of English initial /p/. This is either inaccurate or purely poor exposition.

>Both stop consonants are
> essentially voiceless. But in "pie," _after_ the release of the lip
> closure, there is a moment of *aspiration*, a period of voicelessness
> after the stop articulation and before the start of the voicing for
> the vowel. If you put your hand in front of your lips while saying
> "pie," you can feel the burst of air that comes out during the period
> of voicelessness after the release of the stop.
>
> In a narrow transcription, aspiration may be indicated by a small
> raised h, [H] . Accordingly, these words may be transcribed as [pHaI,
> tHaI, kHaI] . You may not be able to feel the burst of air in "tie,
> kye" because these stop closures are made well inside the mouth
> cavity. But listen carefully and notice that you can hear the period
> of voicelessness after the release of the stop closure in each of
> them. It is this interval that indicates the fact that the stop is
> aspirated. The major difference between the words in the first two
> columns is not that one has voiceless stops and the other voiced
> stops.


>It is that the first column has (voiceless) aspirated stops and
> the second column has (partially voiced) unaspirated stops. The amount
> of voicing in each of the stops [b, d, g] depends on the context in
> which it occurs.

[PCR]
This is eaxctly what we have been trying to tell you, and corresponds to what linguists before Ladefoged determined.

> When it is in the middle of a sentence in which a
> voiced sound occurs on either side, voicing may occur throughout the
> stop closure. Most speakers of American English have no voicing during
> the closure of so-called voiced stops in sentence initial position.

[PCR]
Again, "most" needs quantification. When I heard an ignorant cabdriver fail to voice initial /b/ in a commercial recently, it jumped out at me like a pair of dirty underwear.

Ladefoged is simply wrong on "most" though, I admit, it obviously happens in ethnic enclaves.

>
> Ladefoged & Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, pp. 50-51:
>
> Modal voice
>
> We will discuss each phonation type in turn, beginning with modal
> voice. The physiological position for modal voice can be regarded as
> one in which the arytenoid cartilages are in a neutral position for
> speech, neither pulled apart nor pushed together (Stevens 1988). The
> vocal folds would be very slightly apart, if there were no air flow.
> We assume that the same position as occurs in ordinary voiced vowels
> and in voiced continuant consonants such as nasals is normally
> maintained in stops that are phonologically voiced. It is well known
> that in some languages, English being a familar example, the vocal
> folds may not vibrate throughout the closure for a voiced stop. Even
> when surrounded by other voiced sounds, such as vowels, the vocal fold
> vibration often ceases shortly after the closure is made and only
> resumes shortly after the closure is released. Most English speakers
> appear to leave the vocal folds in a constant position throughout such
> a sequence, but passive devoicing occurs as the supralaryngeal
> pressure builds up behind the oral closure. There are a number of
> maneuvers that can be made to assist the continuation of vocal fold
> vibration during an oral stop closure by expanding the size of the
> cavity behind the location of the closure; these include a relaxation
> of the cheeks and other soft tissues around the oropharyngeal cavity
> so that the pressure will passively expand the volume, as well as
> active gestures, such as moving the articulatory constriction forwards
> during the closure, moving the root of the tongue forwards, lowering
> the jaw, or lowering the larynx (Hudgins and Stetson 1935, Bell-Berti
> 1975, Ohala and Riordan 1979, Keating 1984c). Some English speakers
> utilize such gestures to a sufficient degree to produce vocal fold
> vibration during their voiced stop closures (Westbury 1983), but
> similar gestures are often executed by speakers producing intervocalic
> phonologically voiced stops without sustained vocal fold vibration
> (noted by Kent and Moll 1969). Flege (1982) has shown that the
> variation in the time at which vocal fold vibration starts near the
> release of utterance-initial voiced stops in English does not depend
> on how long before the release the vocal folds are adducted. The
> target for voiced stops in English can therefore be said to include
> the maintenance of a position of the vocal folds appropriate for
> voicing, but not to require the employment of other strategies to
> sustain vocal fold vibration.
>
> In contrast to English and several other Germanic languages, a
> considerable number of languages have voiced stops which require more
> energetic efforts to produce sustained vocal fold vibration. Such
> languages include well-known ones such as French and Thai, as well as
> more obscure ones such as Ilwana. In languages of this type, the
> target in the production of voiced stops must be defined as including
> the presence of actual vocal fold vibration through the articulatory
> closure period. Figure 3.1 shows the word budda 'pelican' from Ilwana.
> This word contains an initial voiced stop and an intervocalic geminate
> voiced stop which are both produced with full vocal fold vibration.
> This occurs despite the fact that these are both positions in which
> sustaining voicing requires particular additional effort, as has been
> shown by Westbury and Keating (1986).
Pat

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