Unreleased stop

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An unreleased stop or unreleased plosive is a plosive consonant without an audible release burst. That is, the oral tract is blocked to pronounce the consonant, and there is no audible indication of when that occlusion ends. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, unreleased consonants are denoted with an upper-right corner diacritic above the consonant letter: [p̚], [t̚], [k̚].

In English, a plosive is unreleased before a homorganic nasal, as in catnip [ˈkæt ̚nɪp]. Although the first in a cluster of plosives, as in apt or doctor, is also said to be unreleased in the speech of most English speakers, what's actually occurring is cross-articulations from articulatory overlap in consonant clusters that make the release inaudible.^[1][2] This can lead to cross-articulations that seem very much like deletions or complete assimilations. For example, hundred pounds may sound like [hʌndɹɛb pʰaundz] but X-ray^[3] and electropalatographic^[4] studies demonstrate that inaudible and possibly weakened contacts may still be made so that the second /d/ in hundred pounds does not entirely assimilate a labial place of articulation, rather the labial co-occurs with the alveolar one.

In most languages of East and Southeast Asia with final stops, such as Chinese (Cantonese,^{[citation needed]} Taiwanese,^{[citation needed]} etc.), Korean,^[5] Malay,^{[citation needed]} and Thai,^{[citation needed]} the stops are not released: mak [mak̚]. Unreleased final stops lack aspiration, neutralising the aspiration distinction between stop pairs such as p/b, k/g, t/d etc in languages such as Cantonese. Some languages which are reported to have unreleased final stops turn out to have short voiceless nasal releases instead. Vietnamese is an example.

Released plosives, on the other hand, are not normally indicated. If a final plosive is aspirated, the aspiration symbol [ʰ] is sufficient to indicate the release. Otherwise, the 'unaspirated' diacritic from the Extended IPA may be employed for this: apt [æp̚t⁼]. Another convention sometimes seen is to use an upper right corner, the mirror image of [ ̚].

The Formosan languages of Taiwan, such as Tsou and Amis, are unusual in that all obstruents are released, as in Tsou [ˈsip⁼tɨ] "four" and [smuˈjuʔ⁼tsu] "to pierce", or Amis [ts^ətsaj] "one" and [s^əpat⁼] "four".

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Browman, Catherine P.; Goldstein, Louis (1990), "Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech", in Kingston, John C.; Beckman, Mary E., Papers in laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and physics of speech, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 341-376 
• Choo, Miho; O'Grady, William D. (2003), The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 
• Nolan, Francis (1992), "The descriptive role of segments: Evidence from assimilation.", in Docherty, Gerard J.; Ladd, D. Robert, Papers in laboratory phonology II: Gesture, segment, prosody, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 261–280 
• Zsiga, Elizabeth (2003), "Articulatory Timing in a Second Language: Evidence from Russian and English", Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25: 399-432 

[edit] External links

• English unreleased stops