Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T05:43:25.749Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Response to Martin Ball & Joan Rahilly, ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’, JIPA 41 (2011), 231–237

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2011

Daniel Recasens*
Affiliation:
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelonadaniel.recasens@uab.es

Extract

In the paper ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’, Martin Ball and Joan Rahilly approach an interesting problem – the phonetic transcription of approximants other than the so-called semivowels. In the absence of special symbols in the IPA chart, they suggest that special characters should be used for the notation of approximant realizations made at the bilabial, dental, alveolar, lamino-postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular and pharyngeal places of articulation. In their view, the introduction of new symbols should render those sounds comparable to other non-semivowel approximants for which special symbols are available, i.e., [ʋ] (labiodental), [ɹ] (apico-postalveolar) and [ɻ] (retroflex), while, at the same time, avoiding having to add the lowered diacritic to the voiced fricative symbols [β ð z ʒ ʁ ʕ].

Type
The International Phonetic Alphabet
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abercrombie, David. 1967. Elements of general phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
IPA [International Phonetic Association]. 1999. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter & Maddieson, Ian. 1996. The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 1984a. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 1984b. Relationship between semivowels and vowels: Cross-linguistic investigation of acoustic differences and coarticulation. Phonetica 42, 163174.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 2008. Glides and gemination. Lingua 118, 19261936.Google Scholar
Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio. 2004. Problems in the classification of approximants. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2), 201210.Google Scholar
Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio & Planas, Ana María Fernández. 2001. Propuesta de transcripción para la africada palatal sonora del español. Estudios de Fonética Experimental 11, 173180.Google Scholar
Navarro Tomás, Tomás. 1972. Manual de pronunciación española, 17th edn. Madrid: CSIC.Google Scholar
Quilis, Antonio. 1981. Fonética acústica de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Recasens, Daniel. 1990. The articulatory characteristics of palatal consonants. Journal of Phonetics 18, 267280.Google Scholar
Recasens, Daniel & Espinosa, Aina. 2005. The role of contextual and prosodic factors on consonantal lenition and elision. The case of intervocalic /j/ in Majorcan Catalan. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 4, 737.Google Scholar
Villafaña, Christina. 2006. Consonant weakening in Florentine Italian: An acoustic study of gradient and variable sound change. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar