General principiles of vowel formation Contents Introduction

Consonants
Consonants –speech sounds in the articulation of which there is an obstruction(plosion or friction). The muscular tension is concentrated at the place of obstruction. The air stream is strong.There are following types of obstruction in the produc­tion of consonants: complete occlusion; constriction; occlusion—constriction. Classification: acc to the type of obstruction and the manner of articulation: occlusive (plosive – p, b, t, d, k, g; nasal sonorants – m, n, ŋ), constrictive (fricative – f, v, s, z, Ө, ð, ƒ, 3; medial sonorants – w, r, j; lateral sonorant - l), affricates – tƒ, d3; acc to the active organ of speech and place of obstruction: labial (bilabial – p, b, m, w; labio-dental – f, v), lingual (forelingual: apical-alveolar – t, d, n, l, s, z; interdental – Ө, ð; cacuminal – r; palate-alveolar – ƒ, 3, tƒ; midlingual-palatal – j; backlingual-velar – k, g, w, ŋ), glottal – h; acc to the presence or absence of voice: voiced, voiceless; acc to the force of articulation: lenis, fortis; acc to the position of soft palate: oral, nasal (m, n, ŋ).
The phoneme
A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
In connected speech sounds are greatly modified by their phonetic environment, by the place they occupy in a word and by prosodic features (stress, tempo, speech melody). (t)-occlusive, apical-alveolar, fortes, voiceless, oral; ten-without aspiration; pot-non-plosive; two-rounded. In different words [t] can he pronounced differently. Different (t)-sounds in these words differ in the manner of articulation and acoustic qualities, but they do not differ functionally (phonologically) because if we substitute any of them by another the meaning of the word will not change. That's why native speakers don't observe any difference between all variants of t, but it is important for them to distinguish between [t] and [d], [s] and [z]because they distinguish different words; tie-die. Thus t-d. s-z are different elements of the English sound system, we call them phonemes (the shortest functional unit of a language). And the substitution of one phoneme for another influences communication. Every 1-ge has a limited number of phonemes: Bnglish-20 vowel phonemes, cons-24; Russian-6 vowels, 36 cons. Allophones - variants of one and the same phoneme, which never occur in identical position. They do not distinguish words. Their articulatory and acoustic distinguishes are conditioned by the surrounding sounds (dark and clear L). In one l-ge 2 physically different sounds are considered to be allophones, while in a differentl-ge those sounds can belong to different phonemes. Dark and clear 1-allophones in English, while in Russian I and 1' are different phonemes. 3 linguistic functions: constitutive, distinctive and identificatory. Щерба gave the distinction between phonemes and allophones to distinguish between 2 types of mistakes made by foreign 1-ge learners. He classified them as phonological (when an allophone of one phoneme is substitute by an allophone of a different phoneme: think-sink, wine-vine) and phonetic mistakes, when a student uses the wrong allophone of one and the same phoneme (aspiration or non-aspiration).