There’s a neglected little article in Wikipedia’s phonetics area called Basis of Articulation. It gives a very sketchy outline (referring only to a couple of articles written in German) of a topic that’s always struck me as interesting but elusive. For an old-school phonetician like me, the classic article is the one by Beatrice Honikman entitled ‘Articulatory Settings’ in In Honour of Daniel Jones, ed. David Abercrombie et al, 1964. (Honikman was for a long time a member of the Phonetics Department at the University of Leeds). The general idea is one which has a lot to offer the teacher of pronunciation, but is explained in rather difficult terms. The learner must acquire not only the vowels, consonants, stresses and pitches of the target language, but also acquire something much more complex (the articulatory setting) that relates to all the typical positions of lips, tongue, jaw etc that native speakers use. Evidence for the existence of such settings can be seen if you look at video of someone speaking a language that is foreign to you, with the sound turned off. Many English speakers reckon they can spot a French speaker through vision alone. Honikman suggests thinking of it in terms of having a “gear” for English, another for French, and so on depending on which language you are learning; in the classroom, when working on pronunciation, the first thing the learner must do is to think themselves into the right gear before starting on pronunciation exercises. For me, this seems intuitively right, but it’s almost impossible to think of a way in which we could study articulatory settings scientifically, and I feel it will for ever have to remain part of the traditional articulatory-auditory imitation-label phonetics repertoire.
Other people have written on or near this topic. For example, John Laver, in Principles of Phonetics (1994) postulates a neutral articulatory setting (pp 402-3) and goes on to set up a very detailed framework for describing all non-neutral articulatory settings, and on p. 424 acknowledges the relevance of Honikman’s work. Celce-Murcia et al (1996) Teaching Pronunciation have a section (pp 27-8) on Voice Quality which is clearly related, especially in respect of the supralaryngeal settings. In Cruttenden’s Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (2014) there is a short mention: “The articulatory setting of a language or dialect may differ from GB [General British]. So some languages like Spanish may have a tendency to hold the tongue more forward in the mouth, while others like Russian may have a tendency to hold it further back in the mouth. Nasalization may be characteristic of many speakers of American English, while denasal voice … is frequently said to occur in Liverpool" (p. 302). I remember that in the phonetic framework of Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English (1968) some features are defined in terms of deviation from a hypothesized neutral position (unfortunately I can’t go into detail on this, as many years ago I lent my copy of this bizarre book to someone who never returned it). A similar account is seen in D. Odden’s Introducing Phonology (2005) “…some features are characterized in terms of the ‘neutral position’ which is a configuration that the vocal tract is assumed to have immediately prior to speaking. The neutral position, approximately that of the vowel [ɛ], defines relative movement of the tongue” (p 136). (Presumably we are to take this, as with Chomsky and Halle, as referring to English rather than to the world’s languages in general).
I would really like to breathe some life into this skeletal WP article, but I would like first to appeal for additional references or quotations that I could use, since I feel I may well be missing some interesting material in the literature. Please help!
Other people have written on or near this topic. For example, John Laver, in Principles of Phonetics (1994) postulates a neutral articulatory setting (pp 402-3) and goes on to set up a very detailed framework for describing all non-neutral articulatory settings, and on p. 424 acknowledges the relevance of Honikman’s work. Celce-Murcia et al (1996) Teaching Pronunciation have a section (pp 27-8) on Voice Quality which is clearly related, especially in respect of the supralaryngeal settings. In Cruttenden’s Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (2014) there is a short mention: “The articulatory setting of a language or dialect may differ from GB [General British]. So some languages like Spanish may have a tendency to hold the tongue more forward in the mouth, while others like Russian may have a tendency to hold it further back in the mouth. Nasalization may be characteristic of many speakers of American English, while denasal voice … is frequently said to occur in Liverpool" (p. 302). I remember that in the phonetic framework of Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English (1968) some features are defined in terms of deviation from a hypothesized neutral position (unfortunately I can’t go into detail on this, as many years ago I lent my copy of this bizarre book to someone who never returned it). A similar account is seen in D. Odden’s Introducing Phonology (2005) “…some features are characterized in terms of the ‘neutral position’ which is a configuration that the vocal tract is assumed to have immediately prior to speaking. The neutral position, approximately that of the vowel [ɛ], defines relative movement of the tongue” (p 136). (Presumably we are to take this, as with Chomsky and Halle, as referring to English rather than to the world’s languages in general).
I would really like to breathe some life into this skeletal WP article, but I would like first to appeal for additional references or quotations that I could use, since I feel I may well be missing some interesting material in the literature. Please help!
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