Re: Lateral/vowel coarticulation

> >> On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:14:54 -0600, Eric
> Christopherson wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi, folks. I've been wondering for a long
> time if any languages
> >>> feature coarticulation of laterals (e.g. /l/)
> and vowels. I seem to
> >>> be able to produce these, and they sound
> somewhat distinct, although
> >>> not as distinct as other vowels; but I've
> searched and never found
> >>> any mention of this occurring in natural
> languages (either phonemicly
> >>> or allophonicly).
Not sure what you're getting at here. Do you mean [l+V] or [V+l]? In Engl. [l+V]
has no audible affect on the V, though the [l] varies ("bright/dental vs.
dark/velarized") depending on front/back V. Could it be that you're velarizing
your [l]s? That might have an affect on the following V quality. In [V+l] there
tend to be off-glides on the vowel, again depending on frontness/backness, and
the [l] also varies. Engl. certainly has what might be called "C with lateral
release" (plan, blade, glue, clay, fly,) but the release has no audible affect
(IMHO) on the vowel--maybe on a spectrogram the formants would be different.
But they're considered clusters in terms of Engl. phonology.

In Engl. a following [r\] does have an affect on the vowel quality (also V+N) as
we've discussed before. But I'm sure there can be retroflexed vowels that could
be "units" not "clusters" in some languages. Maybe what you're hearing is some
slight retroflexion (rather than laterality per se)???
> >>
> >>> However (and this is what prompted me to ask
> this now), I was just
> >>> reading about Hmong, and it has labials and
> dentals with (dental)
> >>> lateral release. I have never heard a
> consonant with lateral release;
> >>> would the vowel following a consonant with
> lateral release sound like
> >>> what I described above?
I know nothing about Hmong, but IIRC _historically_ proto-Tai had clusters e.g.
*pl, *pr that developed in various directions (often > /t/). Maybe Hmong
retains these in some way... but I suspect they should be analyzed as clusters

I think generally, in phonetics, "release" (of affricates) is by definition at
the same place of articulation as the stop-- [ts, tK, tS, pf, kx]-- and it
might then depend on the phonological structure of a language whether these are
considered units or clusters (cf. [ts] in English and German).


Jeff Jones wrote:
> >> Not for the typical /tK)/ type sound.
You:
> >That's not a case of lateral release, AFAIK.
Jeff:
> It isn't? [K] is lateral and it serves as the release
> of [t] here ...
Absolutely. Lots of languages have a /tK/ (contrastive unit phoneme, it may or may not
arise historically from a cluster); while English can have a phonetic [tK] (eg.
in Atlantic, Hitler, Gatling, some versions of "bottling") but phonologically
it's a cluster.

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