Fricatives, part 2

November 14, 2008

Who’s Next• Today: some leftover notes on vowels

• Then: more fricatives

• Monday: fricative spectrogram matching

Swedish

Five-Vowel Spaces• Many languages have only three or five vowels, separated evenly in the vowel space in a triangle

• Here’s a popular vowel space option:

i u

e o

a

Five-Vowel Spaces

A “Bad” Vowel Space• Five vowels in a vowel system are rarely, if ever, distributed thusly:

[i]

[e]

[æ]

• Why?

Adaptive Dispersion Theory• Developed by Bjorn Lindblom and Johan Liljencrants

• (Swedish speakers)

• Idea: languages tend to maximize the distance between vowels in acoustic space…

• this helps listeners perceive contrasts between vowels

• A phonological phenomenon: “chain shifts”

• If one vowel moves…

• The rest follow suit, to maintain distinctions.

The Great Lakes Shift• One chain shift is currently taking place in the northern United States.

• Prevalent in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and many places in between

• (but not in Toronto or Windsor)

General Great Lakes

fronting

Hod

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

100012001400160018002000

F2

F1

[æ] raising

Had

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

10001500200025003000

F2

F1

backing

“ahead”

Hod

600

700

800

900

1000

1100

7009001100130015001700

F2

F1

Female Talkers

Who'ed

300

400

500

600

8001100140017002000

F2

F1

Female Talkers

New Zealand Vowel Shift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT5AQIlmM0I

Back to Fricatives• Remember: the most common fricatives are alveolars and post-alveolars.

Voiceless Voiced Voiced/Voiceless

[s] 266 [z] 96 0.36

146 51 0.34

[f] 135 [v] 67 0.50

[x] 75 40 0.53

29 13 0.45

21 32 1.52

18 21 1.16

Some More Typology# of Fricatives # of languages % of total

0 21 6.6%

1 37 11.7%

2 62 19.6%

3 47 14.8%

4 37 11.7%

5 26 8.2%

6 28 8.8%

7 19 6.0%

8 20 6.3%

> 8 22 6.4%

Fricative Fun Facts• Of the 21 languages without any fricatives, 15 are Australian languages

• Hawaiian is another example

• Australian languages also tend to lack affricates

• But remember: many Australian languages have five or more place contrasts for stops.

• Kabardian has the most fricatives: 22

• Kabardian also has 2 (count ‘em) vowels

• Languages with one fricative: [s]

• Languages with two fricatives: [s], or [s], [f]

• Languages with three fricatives: [s], , [f]

Sibilants• [s] and are known as sibilant fricatives

• Sibilants have more acoustic energy at higher frequencies than other fricatives

• Two reasons why:

• they are obstacle fricatives

= the back of the upper teeth

louder than other fricatives

• small, short resonating filter

= between constriction and the lips

higher frequencies resonate

[s] vs. [f]

“sigh” “fie”

• Note: acoustic energy for [f] is weaker, and spread more evenly across all frequencies

vs.

“shy” “thigh”

vs.

“sigh” “shy”

[s]

Acoustic Enhancement• Note: is post-alveolar and [s] is alveolar

• more space in vocal tract in front of

• including a “sub-lingual cavity”

• This “filter” of resonates at lower frequencies

• In English, this acoustic distinction is enhanced through lip rounding for

• this extends the vocal tract

• further lowers the resonant frequencies of

• another form of “adaptive dispersion”

The Sub-lingual Cavity

•Let’s check the videotape...

Behind the Constriction

[s]

• Let’s check the ultrasound…

Other Examples• Susie and David say “speech”:

• Also: Where the shtreets have no name

• Note: there are no word-initial /sr/ sequences in English.

• “shriek” *“sreek”

Whistling Fricatives• Shona (spoken in Zimbabwe) has “whistling fricatives”

• = retroflex fricatives produced with lip-rounding

“exp.” “arrive”

“owl” “these”

“to provoke” “to blame”

“to become full” “to give birth”

The Politics of Frication• Denture-wearers often produce whistling fricatives, too.

• Barack Obama

• John McCain

• Excited speakers of English can even produce pharyngeal fricatives…

• like Keith Olbermann:

Polish• Note: lip-rounding can be used to enhance other fricative contrasts

• In Polish, it enhances the contrast between (post-)alveolar and dental fricatives

• the (post-)alveolars have the rounding

Polish, continued• Polish also has what are known as alveolo-palatal fricatives.

• = constriction in the post-alveolar region

• + raised tongue in the palatal region (behind the fricative)

Polish Sibilants

vs.

Palatography

[kasa]

Palatography

Polish Clusters• Just for kicks...

Four Fricatives

Chinese Sibilants• Mandarin Chinese also has dental, post-alveolar and alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives.

• The post-alveolars are sometimes retroflex

Chinese

Affricates

• Affricates are transcribed as stop-fricative sequences

•

• Acoustically, amplitude rises faster in affricates than in plain fricatives

• “rise time”

• Phonologically, affricates are [-continuant]

Affricate Typology• More numbers from the UPSID database:

• 522 affricates in 316 languages

• 141

• [ts] 95

• 80

• [dz] 30

• 485 affricates have sibilant fricatives

• Other affricate types are rarer:

• [pf] (German) [tx] (Navajo)

Fricative vs. Affricate

“shy”

“chime”

Polish, Again

• Polish contrasts affricates with stop + fricative sequences

Stop + Fricative vs. Affricate

Fricative Acoustics Summary• Turbulence provides the source of fricative noise

• Voiced fricatives also have a sound source at the glottis

• Obstacle turbulence tends to be louder than channel turbulence

• Sibilants are particulary high in intensity

• The filter of fricative turbulence noise changes depending on the place of articulation

• sibilants: very short filter, emphasizing high frequencies

• labials: essentially no filter (flat spectrum)

• back fricatives: longer, more vowel-like filter

• Affricates: stop-fricative sequences with shorter rise time

Some Typology• Languages with the following number of fricatives

• From the UPSID database (total of 316 languages)

Voiceless Voiced Voiced/Voiceless

21 32 1.52

18 21 1.16

17 3 0.17

[ç] 16 7 0.43

13 9 0.69