AEN300_CLASS
DR. ITUMO
SONORITY
Sonority
• What do we mean by sonority?
• How have you used it to account for the definition of a syllable?
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Sonority
•The term was used as early as
1902 by Henry Sweet and had
been associated with ‘fullness’ of
voice, a notion related to the
general audibility of a sound
(Heffner 1950:74)
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Sonority
• The sounds which can occur as a syllable
nucleus are those which have the most
sonority- i.e. those which, other things
being equal have the greatest ‘carrying
power’
• Practical Phonetics and Phonology-
Beverly Collins and Inger M. Mees
(2008:76-77)
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sonority
•The sonority of a sound is closely related to its
acoustic make-up; sounds composed largely of
musical tones, like vowels, are more sonorous
than those which have more significant
acoustic noise elements (plosion and hiss), like
stops and fricatives. One example of an
attempt to construct a sonority scale is shown
in the figure below:
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Tuesday, 24 October 2023 AEN3 Phonetics and Phonological Analysis Joshua Itumo 6
RELATIVE SONORITY SCALE
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• Table B1.2 shows it is possible to classify sounds in terms of sonority.
On this basis; we can consider three types of sounds
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Sonority
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Sonority
• 1. vowels, which typically form the syllable nucleus;
• 2. Obstruents, which are found invariably at the
margins of syllables (onset or coda)
• 3. Those in the intermediate category- the sonorant
consonants (i.e nasals and approximants)- typically
occur at syllable margins but, if there is no vowel in a
syllable, certain of these sounds can function as
nucleus
Tuesday, 24 October 2023 AEN3 Phonetics and Phonological Analysis Joshua Itumo 10
•We then term them syllabic
consonants. Such consonants are
likely to be realized with greater
energy and extra length, giving
them more prominence.
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