A Syllabus for Listening - Decoding (Fixed format layout) by Richard Cauldwell

Author:Richard Cauldwell [Cauldwell, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

17 Streamlining I – Consonant death

In this and the following chapter we will identify, describe and give examples of a number of streamlining processes that speakers apply to words as they seek to achieve their communicative purposes. The speaker’s application of these streamlining processes results in the wide variety of soundshapes that we hear in the Jungle. We have already encountered examples of some of these processes in our description of the soundshapes of word clusters in Chapter 16 (‘consonant death’, and the ‘hiss effect’).

In this chapter we focus on the processes of blurring and dropping of consonants, which we investigate under the general heading ‘consonant death’. There is insufficient room to demonstrate all the possibilities for all consonants, so in this chapter we will focus on a few key consonants.

In the literature, of which Johnson (2004) and Shockey (2003) are key publications, streamlining processes are referred to as ‘reduction processes’ and terms for these processes which are common in our teacher-training materials include ‘elision’ and ‘assimilation’. In what follows, I have suggested some new, more teacher- and classroom-friendly terminology whenever I believe an easy-to-remember term suggests itself.

It is essential to know about these processes, and to be able to apply them and mimic them in operation, whenever you demonstrate the relationship between Greenhouse, Garden and Jungle forms in the classroom activities introduced in Part 4.

We begin with two reminders.

17.1 Reminders: streamlining, practical not theoretical

R E M I N D E R N U M B E R 1

By ‘streamlining process’, I mean the way speakers re-shape words in order to fit them smoothly, or force them roughly, into the quasi-rhythmic units of the stream of speech. Many of these processes apply to a range of clusters, words, syllables and speech sounds, and so they are generalisable to a wide range of circumstances. They are therefore useful items in a syllabus for listening. Being able to hear them in recordings is an important skill for a teacher of listening/decoding.

R E M I N D E R N U M B E R 2

The purpose is a practical one: it is to open your ears to the world of the learners who have difficulty recognising the soundshapes which are caused by streamlining processes. The processes identified here do not claim to be a coherent phonetic or phonological theory. The categories overlap, and there may be causal relationships between them which I have not written about, and which would be given fuller treatment in an academic treatise. It would be a mistake to try to find an exact match between the processes that are described here with those of phonetics or phonology textbooks.

A syllabus for listening 109

17.2 Consonant death

The term ‘consonant death’ refers to the fate of consonants which are either bullied out of existence by neighbouring sounds (actually by the speaker) or are partly on the way out of existence. For the former case we will use terms such as ‘t-drop’ (elision of |t|), and for the latter case, we will

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