Приазовський Державний Технічний Університет

Abstract

What is a sonorant? State the difference between sonorants and noise

consonants. What is assimilation? Give 3 examples illustrating
different degrees of assimilation.

РП-21-2
Dmitrenko Victoria
What is a sonorant? State the difference between sonorants and noise
consonants. What is assimilation? Give 3 examples illustrating
different degrees of assimilation.

PLAN:
-Sonorant
-State the difference between sonorants and noise consonants.
-Assimilation
-Degrees of assimilation

Sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that
is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the
manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's
languages. Vowels are sonorants, as
are nasals like [m] and [n], liquids like [l] and [r], and semivowels like [j] and [w].
This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives).
For some authors, only the term resonant is used with this broader meaning,
while sonorant is restricted to consonants, referring to nasals and liquids but
not vocoids (vowels and semivowels).

Whereas obstruents are frequently voiceless, sonorants are almost

always voiced. A typical sonorant consonant inventory found in
many languages comprises the following: two nasals /m/, /n/,
two semivowels /w/, /j/, and two liquids /l/, /r/.[citation needed]
In the sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than fricatives are
sonorants. They can therefore form the nucleus of a syllable in
languages that place that distinction at that level of sonority;
see Syllable for details.
Sonorants contrast with obstruents, which do stop or cause
turbulence in the airflow. The latter group
includes fricatives and stops (for example, /s/ and /t/).
Among consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth or in the
throat, the distinction between an approximant and a voiced
fricative is so blurred that no language is known to contrast them.
[citation needed] Thus, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal fricatives
never contrast with approximants.
Voiceless sonorants are rare; they occur as phonemes in only about 5% of the world's languages.[3] They tend to be extremely quiet and difficult to
recognise, even for those people whose language have them.

In every case of a voiceless sonorant occurring, there is a contrasting voiced sonorant. In other words, whenever a language contains a phoneme such
as /r̥/, it also contains a corresponding voiced phoneme such as /r/.[citation needed]

Voiceless sonorants are most common around the Pacific Ocean (in Oceania, East Asia, and North and South America) and in certain language families
(such as Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut).

One European language with voiceless sonorants is Welsh. Its phonology contains a phonemic voiceless alveolar trill /r̥/, along with three voiceless nasals:
velar, alveolar and labial.

Another European language with voiceless sonorants is Icelandic, with [l̥ r̥ n̥ m̥ ɲ̊ ŋ̊] for the corresponding voiced sonorants [l r n m ɲ ŋ].

Voiceless [r̥ l̥ ʍ] and possibly [m̥ n̥] are hypothesized to have occurred in various dialects of Ancient Greek. The Attic dialect of the Classical period likely
had [r̥] as the regular allophone of /r/ at the beginning of words and possibly when it was doubled inside words. Hence, many English words from Ancient
Greek roots have rh initially and rrh medially: rhetoric, diarrhea.

Voiceless sonorants have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo fortition, for example to form a fricative like /ç/ or /ɬ/.
[example needed]

In connected, continuous speech in North American English, /t/ and /d/ are usually flapped to [ɾ] following sonorants, including

vowels, when followed by a vowel or syllabic /l/.[6]

English  has the following sonorant consonantal phonemes:  /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ɹ/,
/w/, /j/.[4]

A sonorant is a type of consonant. Consonants have

different types, such as frictives, plosives, affricates, flaps,
trills, and of course, sonorants. They are a sub-category
of consonants. Sonorant consonants are defined by being
able to pronounce the sound continuously without other
sounds surrounding it, such as “r”, “l”, “m”, “n”, etc.
The division between consonant and vowel runs along two axes. First, the purely physical one, is whether the sound in question
obstructs the airflow, regardless of whether the obstruction produces ‘noise’. In this sense sonorants count as consonants in the sense
that they are (with the exception of the English/Chinese /r/ sound) produced with some kind of obstruction in the vocal tract. Nasals
have a complete closure of the mouth, laterals have a complete closure in the center of the mouth and most r-type sounds involve
some other kind of closure. But these sounds also involve an alternate airway path that is completely open, allowing free airflow and
thus voicing.

But that’s just the purely acoustic/physiological definition. The alternative definition is phonological, as Ivan says in another answer.
In that way of thinking of sounds, consonants occur in the margins of syllables (onset, coda), while vowels occur in nuclei. What
makes this complicated is that sonorants in some languages (English [mɪʔn̩ ] mitten, German [ɡebm̩] geben, Czech Brno, some Bantu
languages) can also be syllable peaks. So sonorants are hybrid sounds that can play either role.

Assimilation
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to
other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or
between words.

It occurs in normal speech but becomes more common in more rapid speech. In some cases, assimilation causes the sound
spoken to differ from the normal pronunciation in isolation, such as the prefix in- of English input pronounced with phonetic [m]
rather than [n]. In other cases, the change is accepted as canonical for that word or phrase, especially if it is recognized in
standard spelling: implant pronounced with [m], composed historically of in + plant.

English "handbag" (canonically /ˈhændbæɡ/) is often pronounced /ˈhæmbæɡ/ in rapid speech because the [m] and [b] sounds are
both bilabial consonants, and their places of articulation are similar. However, the sequence [d]-[b] has different places but
similar manner of articulation (voiced stop) and is sometimes elided, which sometimes causes the canonical [n] phoneme to
assimilate to [m] before the [b]. The pronunciations /ˈhænbæɡ/ or /ˈhændbæɡ/ are, however, common in normal speech.

In contrast, the word "cupboard", although it is historically a compound of "cup" /kʌp/ and "board" /bɔːrd/, is always
pronounced /ˈkʌbərd/, never */ˈkʌpbɔːrd/, even in slow, highly-articulated speech.

Like in those examples, sound segments typically assimilate to a following sound,[note 1] but they may also assimilate to a
preceding one.[note 2] Assimilation most commonly occurs between immediately adjacent-sounds but may occur between sounds
that are separated by others.[note 3]
Assimilation can be synchronic, an active process in a language at a given point in time, or diachronic, a historical sound change.

A related process is coarticulation in which one segment influences another to produce an allophonic variation, such as vowels
becoming nasalized before nasal consonants (/n, m, ŋ/) when the soft palate (velum) opens prematurely or /b/ becoming
labialized as in "boot" [bʷuːt̚] or "ball" [bʷɔːɫ] in some accents. This article describes both processes under the term assimilation.

The physiological or psychological mechanisms of coarticulation are unknown, and coarticulation is often loosely
referred to as a segment being "triggered" by an assimilatory change in another segment. In assimilation, the
phonological patterning of the language, discourse styles and accent are some of the factors contributing to changes
observed.

There are four configurations found in assimilations:

•Between adjacent segments.

•Between segments separated by one or more intervening segments.
•Changes made in reference to a preceding segment
•Changes made in reference to a following segment
Although all four occur, changes in regard to a following adjacent segment account for virtually all assimilatory changes and most
of the regular ones.[citation needed] Assimilations to an adjacent segment are vastly more frequent than assimilations to a
nonadjacent one. Those radical asymmetries might contain hints about the mechanisms involved, but they are not obvious.
If a sound changes with reference to a following segment, it is traditionally called "regressive assimilation". Changes with
reference to a preceding segment are traditionally called "progressive".[1] Many[2] find those terms confusing, as they seem to
mean the opposite of the intended meaning. Accordingly, a variety of alternative terms have arisen, not all of which avoid the
problem of the traditional terms. Regressive assimilation is also known as right-to-left, leading, or anticipatory assimilation.
Progressive assimilation is also known as left-to-right, perseveratory, preservative, lagging, or lag assimilation. The terms
anticipatory and lag are used here.
Occasionally, two sounds (invariably adjacent) may influence each other in reciprocal assimilation. When such a change results in
a single segment with some of the features of both components, it is known as coalescence or fusion.

Assimilation occurs in two different types: complete assimilation, in which the sound affected by assimilation becomes exactly the
same as the sound causing assimilation, and partial assimilation, in which the sound becomes the same in one or more features
but remains different in other features.

Tonal languages may exhibit tone assimilation (in effect tonal umlaut), but sign languages also exhibit assimilation when the
characteristics of neighbouring cheremes may be mixed.
URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonorant
URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)
URL:https://ppt-online.org/161493
URL:https://slideplayer.com/slide/4455064/
URL:https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-consonants-and-
sonorants