Fricatives and affricates

Production of fricatives and affricates

Fricatives are consonants with the characteristic that air escapes through a narrow passage and makes a hissing sound. Most languages have fricatives, the most commonly- found being something like s. Fricatives are continuant consonants, which means that you can continue making them without interruption as long as you have enough air in your lungs. Plosives, which were described earlier, are not continuants. You can demonstrate the importance of the narrow passage for the air in the following ways:

• Make a long, hissing s sound and gradually lower your tongue so that it is no longer close to the roof of the mouth. The hissing sound will stop as the air passage gets larger.

• Make a long f sound and, while you are producing this sound, use your fingers to pull the lower lip away from the upper teeth. Notice how the hissing sound of the air escaping between teeth and lip suddenly stops.

Affricates are rather complex consonants. They begin as plosives and end as fricatives. A familiar example is the affricate heard at the beginning and end of the word church'. It begins with an articulation practically the same as that for t, but instead of a rapid release with plosion and aspiration as we would find in the word 'tip', the tongue moves to the position for the fricative ʃ that we find at the beginning of the word 'ship'. So the plosive is followed immediately by fricative noise. Since phonetically this affricate is composed of t and ʃ we represent it as tʃ, so that the word 'church' is transcribed as tʃз:tʃ.

However, the definition of an affricate must be more restricted than what has been given so far. We would not class all sequences of plosive plus fricative as affricates; for example, we find in the middle of the word 'breakfast' the plosive k followed by the fricative f. English speakers would generally not accept that kf forms a consonantal unit in the way that tʃ seems to. It is usually said that the plosive and the following fricative must be made with the same articulators - the plosive and fricative must be homorganic. The sounds k, f are not homorganic, but t, d and ʃ, Ʒ, being made with the tongue blade against the alveolar ridge, are homorganic. This still leaves the possibility of quite a large number of affricates since, for example, t, d are homorganic not only with ʃ, Ʒ but also with s, z, so ts, dz would also count as affricates. We could also consider tr, dr as affricates for the same reason. However, we normally only count tʃ, dƷ as affricate phonemes of English.

Although tʃ, dƷ can be said to be composed of a plosive and a fricative, it is usual to regard them as being single, independent phonemes of English. In this way, t is one phoneme, ʃ is another and tʃ yet another. We would say that the pronunciation of the word 'church' tʃз: tʃ is composed of three phonemes, tʃ, з: and tʃ. We will look at this question of "two sounds = one phoneme" from the theoretical point of view.