The problem of classifying consonants

The 1^st problem arises in connection with sonorants. The point is that sonorants are sounds that differ greatly from all other consonants of the language. This is due to the fact that in their production the air passage between the two organs of speech is much wider than in the production of noise consonants. As a result, the auditory effect is tone, not noise. This peculiarity makes sonorant sound more like vowels than consonants. On this ground some British phoneticians refer some of there consonants to the class of semivowels, r, j, w, for example; sometimes they are treated as vowel glides. According to the Russian phoneticians, consonants are consonants from articulatory, acoustic and phonological point of view.

Another problem is the problem of affricates. The first question here is:

1) Are the English [C],[G] sounds monophonemic or biphonemic combinations?

If they are monophonemic, how many phonemes of the same kind, exist in the system of English consonants? Can such clusters as [tr] –[ dr], [ts] - [dz], [tT] -

[dT] be considerate affricates?

The problem of affricates is point of considerable controversy among phoneticians. Russian specialists in English phonetics single out two affricates: [C], [G], and the rest of the sound clusters refer to sound complexes. D. Jones points out 6 affricates:

[C] -[G], [ts] -[dz], [tr]-[dr].

A.C. Jimson increases their number, adding 2 more affricates: [tT] – [dD].

~ What might account for such a difference in their opinion?

The fact is that Russian phoneticians look at English affricates from the point of view of the phoneme theory, according to which a phoneme has 3 aspects: articulatory, acoustic and functional, the lattes being the most significant one.

As to British phoneticians, their primary concern is the articulatory-acoustic unity of these complexes, because their aim is limited by practical reasons of teaching English.

So, doing credit to articulatory and phonological criteria (which fail in many cases), scholars attach decisive importance to morphological criterion. Accordingly to this criterion, a sound complex is monophonemic if a morpheme boundary can’t post within it. (It is generally accepted that a phoneme is morphologically indivisible).

In the complexes [ts-dz] and [tT - dD] their last elements are separate morphemes, thus they can’t be granted a monophonemic status.

To sum up, Russian phoneticians are consistent in looking on this phenomenon from the morphological and phonological point of view which allows them to refer [tT - dD] to monophonemic units, and the rest of the sound clusters to biphonemic complexes.

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