PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects
CLASSIFICATION OF SPEECH SOUNDS
Each language has its own, unique, established set of phonemes manifested in pronunciation as vowels and consonants. They are combined to form syllables, words, utterances. A restricted set of phonemes used in one particular language (accent) is called phonemic inventory.
From the phonetic point of view, vowels are “sounds in which there is no obstruction to the flow of air as it passes from larynx to the lips” (Roach, 1996, p. 10). Consonants are “speech sounds produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream by any of various constrictions of the speech organs” (Webster´s II New Riverside University Dictionary, 1984, p. 302). The obstruction can be realized as a closure (complete closure for plosives, affricates and nasals, and partial closure for laterals), narrowing (for fricatives) or narrowing without friction (for approximants) (in details, see Chapter 7).
Phonological definition provides the information about the position and function of speech sounds in words. Vowels, i.e. monophthongs, diphthongs or triphthongs, function as centres of syllables or, in other words, as syllable nuclei or peaks of sonority in both English and Slovak. In contrast to consonants, vowels can form syllables without any presence of consonants. Consonants function at the edges of syllables, e.g. yes /jes/, write /raɪt/.
Monophthongs do not show any “detectable change in quality during a syllable” (Crystal, 1991, p. 222), while diphthongs are classified as gliding vowels. It means that when pronouncing a diphthong we “glide from one vowel to another” (Roach 1996, p. 20), or from the first to the second segment of a diphthong. Diphthongs are pronounced within one syllable rapidly and without interruption (e.g. may /meɪ/, boy /bͻɪ/, daily /deɪ.li/). This feature differentiates them from a hiatus, a combination of vowels merged into vowel clusters being pronounced in two syllables (e.g. do-ing /dʋ.ɪη/, vi-de-o /vi.de.o/). A hiatus is a combination of vowel sounds often found in words of foreign origin, e.g. neon /ne.on/, aorta /a.or.ta/ (Bázlik, Miškovičová, 2012, p. 99).