phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, a lateral release is the release of a

plosive consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

into a

lateral consonant A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''Larr ...

. Such sounds are transcribed in the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

with a superscript , for example as in English ''spotless'' . In English words such as ''middle'' in which, historically, the tongue made separate contacts with the alveolar ridge for the and , , many speakers today make only one tongue contact. That is, the is laterally released directly into the : . While this is a minor phonetic detail in English (in fact, it is commonly transcribed as having

no audible release A stop with no audible release, also known as an unreleased stop or an applosive, is a stop consonant with no release burst: no audible indication of the end of its occlusion (hold). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, lack of an audible relea ...

: , ), it may be more important in other languages. In most languages (as in English), laterally-released plosives are straightforwardly analyzed as biphonemic clusters whose second element is . In the Hmong language, however, it is sometimes claimed that laterally-released consonants are unitary

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s. According to

Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book ''A Course ...

and

Ian Maddieson Ian Maddieson (born September 1, 1942 in Watford, United Kingdom) is British-American linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, in the United States. He has served as Vice-President of the International Phone ...

,Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson. ''The Sounds of the World's Languages.'' Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. the choice between one or another analysis is purely based on phonological convenience—there is no actual acoustic or articulatory difference between one language's "laterally-released plosive" and another language's biphonemic cluster.

References

Consonants {{phonetics-stub

See also

References