Pharyngeal consonants and the aryepiglottic sphincter

Abstract

Recent laryngoscopic observations suggest that renewed discussion of pharyngeal articulations is warranted. The discussion involves issues of place of articulation — the nature of the category “epiglottal” — and of manner of articulation — whether pharyngeal manners of articulation go beyond approximant and fricative to include trill and stop. In essence, the question is still the old one of how those sounds which are labelled auditorily as “pharyngeal” are produced. The observations reported here suggest that “epiglottal” articulations can be treated as a category of pharyngeal manners of articulation; and that manners of pharyngeal articulation are more closely parallel to uvular manners of articulation than previously assumed. The nature of pharyngeal approximants and pharyngeal fricatives is reexamined, evidence of trilling accompanying friction is presented, and the nature of the pharyngeal (epiglottal) stop is described. It is suggested that all four of these categories share a common place of articulation, and that they can best be described as differing in manner of articulation. The motivation for elaborating the phonetic detail of these distinctions is to facilitate a more precise description of phonemes that have been identified as pharyngeal in the languages of the world, and to provide a clearer explanation of phonetic and phonological processes that may be related to pharyngeal articulations.