consonant,contoid,contour&contraction

consonant,contoid,contour&contraction

There are many types of consonant, but what all have in common is that they obstruct the flow of air through the vocal tract. Some do this a lot, some not very much: those which make the maximum obstruction (i.e. plosives, which form a complete stoppage of the airstream) are the most consonantal. Nasal consonants result in complete stoppage of the oral cavity but are less obstructive than plosives since air is allowed to escape through the nose. Fricatives make a considerable obstruction to the flow of air, but not a total closure. Laterals obstruct the flow of air only in the centre of the mouth, not at the sides, so obstruction is slight. Other sounds classed as approximants make so little obstruction to the flow of air that they could almost be thought to be vowels if they were in a different context (e.g. English w or r).
The above explanation is based on phonetic criteria. An alternative approach is to look at the phonological characteristics of consonants: for example, consonants are typically found at the beginning and end of syllables while vowels are typically found in the middle.

For most practical purposes a contoid is the same thing as a consonant; however, there are reasons for having a distinction between sounds which function phonologically as consonants and sounds (contoids) which have the phonetic characteristics that we look on as consonantal. As an example, let us look at English w (as in ‘wet’) and j (as in ‘yet’). If you pronounce these two sounds very slowly you will hear that they are closely similar to the vowels [i] and [u] – yet English speakers treat them as consonants. How do we know this? Consider the pronunciation of the indefinite article: the rule is to use ‘a’ before consonants and ‘an’ before vowels, and it is the former version which we find before w and j; similarly, the definite article is pronounced ði before a vowel but ðə before a consonant, and we find the ðə form before j and w.
Another interesting case is the normal pronunciation of the r phoneme in the BBC accent – in many ways this sound is more like a vowel than a consonant, and in some languages it actually is found as one of the vowels, yet we always treat it as a consonant.
The conclusion that has been drawn is that since the word ‘consonant’ as used in describing the phonology of a language can include sounds which could be classed phonetically as vowels, we ought also to have a different word which covers just those sounds which are phonetically of the type that produces a significant obstruction to the flow of air through the vocal tract (see consonant above): the term proposed is contoid.

contour

It is usual to describe a movement of the pitch of the voice in speech as a contour. In the intonation of a language like English many syllables are said with a fairly level tone, but the most prominent syllables are said with a tonal contour (which may be continued on following syllables). In the study of tone languages it is usual to make a distinction between register languages which generally use only phonologically level tones (e.g. many West African languages) and those which also use contour tones such as rises, falls, fall–rises and rise–falls (e.g. many East Asian languages, such as Chinese).

contraction

English speech has a number of cases where pairs of words are closely combined into a contracted form that is almost like a single word. For example, ‘that’ and ‘is’ are