Query Details
| Query Subject: |
Paralinguistic clicks
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| Author: | Mark Jones | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Query: |
Dear Linguists,
it's common in the phonetic literature (e.g. John Laver (1994) "Principles of Phonetics": 175, Cambridge University Press) to see click consonants (velaric ingressive sounds) described as rare as contrastive units, but common paralinguistically. I'm aware of their phonological distribution, but I don't know of any detailed survey of paralinguistic usage. In (British) English we have two paralinguistic clicks: the dental click ([/]), written as either "tut" or "tsk", and the lateral click ([//]), which as far as I'm aware has no written form. The dental "tut/tsk" usually occurs doubled, i.e. as "tut tut" or "tsk tsk" to indicate disapproval. The lateral click (also doubled) is the sound made to encourage a horse to move. There is, of course, also the bilabial click ([0]) which is a kiss. I don't include this as paralinguistic, because it is what it symbolises. I'd like to conduct as wide a cross-linguistic survey as possible to determine: 1) whether clicks are widely used paralinguistically; 2) which clicks are used paralinguistically; 3) what the click sounds symbolise; 4) whether 'doubling' of the click is common, e.g. as in English "tut tut". I'd also like to hear about writing conventions for the paralinguistic clicks. Does English have a preference for "tut" or "tsk", does [//] have a written form? What do other languages do? I'd be very grateful if list users would contribute any information on their native or near-native languages to me at the following mail address (set up to keep my university mail volume down): paralinguistic_clicks@hotmail.com I'll post a summary, but I'd like to give users a few weeks to respond. Many thanks! Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge mjj13@cam.ac.uk |
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| LL Issue: | 14.762 | |
| Date posted: | 17-Mar-2003 | |
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