The Articulation of Final Stops in General American Speech

Bibliographic Data

ID8729809
AuthorsHarry A Rositzke, Harry Rositzke (corresponding author)
Year1943
Volume18
Issue1
Pages39-39
Publication date1943-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/487266
OpenAlexW2328705147
LanguageEN
Citations received8

AMONG THE MORE prominent differences between British and General American pronunciation, the lax articulation of stops, both voiced and unvoiced, in final position stands out as a conspicuous and fairly consistent feature in the phonetic pattern of the average General American speaker. Though quite striking to the British and, for example, the German ear, this practice is only occasionally noticed by native speakers. In pronouncing such phrases as 'Hello, Pete!' 'That's too bad,' 'Two peas in a pod,' a British speaker ordinarily articulates the vowel of the final syllable, lifts his tongue to make the closure for the final consonant (applosion), holds it there from eight to twelve hundredths of a second (occlusion), and then breaks the closure with a sharp downward snap of the tongue which produces a clear 'pop' (explosion). With most British speakers it is only occasionally in lexical pronunciation, though more often at the end of a stress-group in fluent speech, that the stop is not exploded. The average GA speaker, on the other hand, in calling out 'Hello, Pete!' will drawl out the vowel of the final syllable and at the end lazily raise the tip of his tongue to the alveolar ridge (applosion), where it is left for from a half to several seconds (occlusion) before it drops inertly down to the neutral position. Since this final movement produces no discernible sound, the only audible expression of the final consonant (where no glottal stop accompanies, or is substituted for, the oral articulation) is the cutting-off of the preceding vowel sound by the raising of the tongue to make the closure and the faint sound produced by the movement of closure itself. The explosive stop here becomes what may most conveniently be termed a simple occlusive. This laxity in the articulation of final stop consonants reduces the distinction between [p]-[t]-[k], [b]-[d]-[g], [p]-[b], [t]-[d], [k]-[g] to a point where these sounds occurring at the end of a stress-group are often impossible to discriminate with certainty.1 In order to measure more precisely than is possible through auditive observation the actual practice of some representative GA speakers in articu

Articulation (sociology · Linguistics · Manner of articulation · Political science · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · History · Law · Philosophy

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