Re: Lateral/vowel coarticulation

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:36:55 -0600, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
wrote:

>On Feb 18, 2009, at 5:56 PM, Roger Mills wrote:
>
>>> but it works - you can pronounce [l] simultaneously with
>>> *any* vowel, and you do get an audible difference.
>>
>> Aha, I think I've figured out what y'all are doing?? Put the tongue
>> in position for [l] (tip against the alv.ridge, sides down-- if you
>> just add voicing, you get an [l] but--), then pronounce a vowel
>> sound. Yes it works; the vowel quality is odd (sort of muffled)
>> because, of course, the shape of the oral cavity is different from
>> the shape it has in the usual vowel articulation.  Is that it????
>
>Yes.
>
>(I think that, technically speaking, this is not a "vowel" because of
>the blockage of air flow... so I wonder what it *would* be called?)
I believe that Catford referred to these as lateral resonants, and normal vowels were
central resonants -- or maybe the mid-to-low vowels were resonants and high vowels
were approximants. My copy is in storage at the moment so this is from memory, but the
reference is:
J.C. Catford, The Articulatory Possibilities of Man. In: Bertil Malmberg, Editor , Manual of
Phonetics, North-Holland, London (1968), pp. 309–333
The only other phoneticians I'm aware of who've attempted this exhaustive a cataloging
are John Laver and Luciano Canepari and Kenneth Pike.

> I see. So it appears that in most cases when one sees something transcribed
> [kl], it would be correct (in an even narrower transcription) to write [k_ll]?
It depends - but I think lateral (and nasal) release are typically homorganic, so in English
some instances of /tl/ medially could be transcribed [t_ll] (and likewise /tn/ as [t_nn]),
though in languages that distinguish lateral affricates from sequences of stop plus lateral
/tK)/ could narrowly be transcribed as [t_lK] compared to /t.K/ [t_hK] or [t_=K], though
I've never seen this in practice. And the comment about this release being more typical
before syllabic /l/ (and nasal release before syllabic /n/) feels right. For me, lateral
release is more common in rapid speech than in careful speech.


-Bfowol