Pre-fortis clipping

 

Pre-fortis clipping

In American English, the length of vowel sound is not an intrinsic feature of a vowel. Rather the length is determined by the neighboring sounds. Specifically, the length is shorter before a voiceless consonant and longer before voiced sound. This phenomenon, in linguistics, is called pre-fortis clipping. The term ‘fortis’ amounts to voiceless sound and ‘clipping’ means shortening. So, ‘pre-fortis clipping’ means the shortening of vowel sound before voiceless consonants. For example, the vowel in bad (/bæd/) is much longer than the vowel in bat (/bæt/). This change in vowel duration subtly helps listeners of English to determine which sound was spoken.

Compare the following sentences. 

He hit me

He hid me 

I have a big pen. 

I have a Bic pen.

The vowel sounds of ‘hit’ and ‘Bic’ are shorter than those of ‘hid’ and ‘big’ due to the pre-fortis clipping.  

These are examples of minimal pairs where two words differ only in the voicing of the ending sound: one is voiced, and the other is not voiced. For this reason, they differ in vowel length. 

Minimal pairs for pre-fortis clipping

phase face 

buzz bus

save safe 

leave leaf 

Ms miss

eyes ice

sing sink

felled felt

lab lap

made mate

said set

lied light

bold bolt

whirs worse

laws loss

pained paint

knead neat

ones once

falls false

 

Now that we have examined the three criteria for consonant classification, we are ready to study individual consonant phoneme sounds. Like vowels, consonants that are pronounced by the same manner or at proximal distance can sound similar and thus can be difficult to discern. So in this course we focus on groups of sounds that are similar in some aspects. We begin with plosives.