glottal stops

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Jules Levin wrote:

> At 12:20 PM 4/22/2007, you [that would be me -- pbg] wrote:
> 
>> What I meant by saying that a glottal stop is pure silence is that the 
>> stop itself (the closure phase) is silent (by definition). What we 
>> hear -- and this is obviously more true for oral plosives -- is the 
>> transitions to and from the stop. Based on those transitions, we 
>> subconsciously calculate how the silence must have been accomplished 
>> -- in other words, the point of articulation.
> 
> This is accurate linguistically, but not acoustically. Just as one can 
> hear the click of fingernails on ivory, or ivory on wood when a piano is 
> being played, if one is close enough, the articulations that make up 
> voiceless stops do produce sound in the oral cavity that can in 
> principle be heard, especially by the speaker, if attention is paid. It 
> certainly can be recorded. Of course, the sound produced has no, and 
> can have no linguistic (communicative) function.

If you mean to say that there is audible sound during the closure, I 
would say yes only for voiced stops. As it happens, we were discussing 
glottal stops and /t/, which are both voiceless, and I defy you or 
anyone else with an unaided ear to detect any sound /during their 
closure phases/.

But if you mean to say that there is audible sound as the closure is 
being made or released, I would count that as part of the transition to 
or from the stop, and then my previous remarks apply. And I would agree 
that the size and shape of the oral (and nasal) cavity do affect the 
frequency distribution of the resulting sound, even for the spike within 
10 ms of the release. This is part of how we know it was a /t/ and not a 
/k/ or a /p/ or a [ʔ].

There is a tradition in linguistics of using the term "transition" in a 
narrow sense to refer to the bending of vowel formants that occurs near 
consonants, but as you can see, I was using the term in a somewhat 
broader sense, including the release spike, any aspiration that may 
follow, and so forth -- any direct influence the stop may have on 
immediately surrounding sounds, which offers the listener clues as to 
the stop's identity.

In the case of a glottal stop, the very absence of vowel transitions 
tells the listener that the point of articulation must be the glottis.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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