Re: CHAT: General Question

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Shreyas Sampat wrote:

> I had also been wondering about the plausibility of a phonemic "rest", a
> pause where no sound is produced.  (or at least the volume of utterance
> falls sharply)  This popped into my head while I was thinking about my
> newest conlanging project, an as-yet-unnamed tonal sort of thing where
> absolute pitches are ...the term is lexical, I think... and some inflections
> impose changes in nearby pitch, or general shifts up or down for the
> duration of the sentence.  I figured, with all this musicality, and three
> phonemic vowel lengths, a phonemic rest would be in order as well.
> Comments? Help? Please?
There are a couple of different answers here. First, it is often
the case that speakers will perceive a pause in connected speech
where there really isn't one. This is a parsing effect induced
by our knowledge of word and phrase boundaries. (Of course,
there are genuine pauses as well.) But I think you mean
something else.

On a strictly phonetic level, there is a short period of silence
every time a voiceless stop is articulated. Take [p] in an
utterance like [apa], for example. From the initial vowel to
[p], the lips come together; this is the closure phase. Between
[p] and the following vowel, the lips separate; this is the
offset phase. Between closure and offset, there is a brief
period of silence where there are no linguistically significant
acoustic events taking place.  So if your language has voiceless
stops, it already has "rests" of this sort.

Otherwise, the kind of pause in running speech that you seem to
be thinking of is not attested, as far as I can tell, in natural
languages. There is occasionally something like it in metered
verse--especially nursery rhymes:

        Hickory, dickory dock [rest],
        The mouse ran up the clock [rest].
        &c.

But this shouldn't deter you from including it in your project.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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