to xxx (= aspirate) or not to xxx (= aspirate)
I'd like to come back to my blog entry of the 3rd of April in which I asked followers of my blog to tell me what they hear at the beginning of Patricia Hughes's pronunciation of the word particular. Three persons (my thanks to them!) responded. All of them (and yours truly, by the way) heard something like this: [phˈthɪkhlə]. Does this result mean there are syllabic voiceless plosives in English, or does it mean that aspiration can represent the peak of a syllable? Be that as it may, it underpins the statement made by Peter Roach in his book of 2009 entitled English Phonetics and Phonology, in which he writes on page 114: "In words like 'potato', 'tomato', canary', 'perhaps', 'today', the vowel in the first syllable may disappear; the aspiration of the initial plosive takes up the whole of the middle portion of the syllable [...]."
I'm aware of the fact that Jack Windsor Lewis is not convinced of this interpretation of the data. In his blog no. 171 of the 4th of April 2009 he describes his "feeling" for a "preference for categorising such items as containing voiceless schwa."
What you see here is the sound trace of Patricia Hughes's pronunciation of particular. My humble 'feeling' is that what follows the closure for /p/ is aspiration rather than a voiceless schwa.
Petr, I've just listened to your example. I don't hear any vowel after the initial p, and your waveform record doesn't show one. Further, I hear the word pronounced as trisyllabic. I don't hear this example as rapid, so I'm not sure you can say the vowel was eroded by tempo. I suspect instead that this is a conventionalized reduction.
ReplyDeleteYou also raise a further theoretical issue, the possibility of syllabic stops, as in this example. This is controversial. Phoneticians have always seen vowels and consonants as different creatures. The Prague phonologists made a doctrine of it, a language has to have a consonant system and a vowel system, and a system has to have a minimum of three elements to avoid predictability. I haven't yet seen a watertight criterion for distinguishing vowels from consonants, syllabic sonorants are generally accepted, syllabic fricatives are common enough, and here's an example of a syllabic stop. I'm sure I had the same word and same pronunciation the other day. If I can find it again I'll be back.
Hi again. This has been nagging me all evening. What is happening in the /k/? I hear only aspiration there, is there evidence of a vowel? I don't hear a syllable there, yet a hint of [u] in the aspiration. This reminds me of a Swedish example: så att [so(:) at], technically two words but frequently reduced to [sat], sometimes with a dark [s] hinting at rounding from the dropped [o].
ReplyDeleteSidney, I'm going to put a pic of the rest of the waveform online to soothe your brain lobes ;-)
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