4. The presence or absence of voice:

voiced voiceless

b, d, , v, z, , , d p, t, k, f, s, , , t

5. The force of articulation:

lenis fortis

b, d, , v, z, , , d p, t, k, f, s, , , t

6. the position of the soft palate: oral nasal

b, d, , v, z, , , d, p, t, k, f, s, , , t, j, w, r , l m, n, 

English Consonants

According to the place of articulation			Labial		Forelingual			Medio­lingual	Back­lingual	Pharyn­gal
According to the manner of articulation			bilabial	labiodental	dental	alveolar	postalveolar	palatal	velar
Occlusive	plosives		p b			t d			k g
	nasal resonants		m			n
Constrictive	fricatives			f v		s z			h
	resonants	medial	w				r
		lateral				l
Occlusive-constrictive	affricates							t d

The oppositions based on the force of articulation:

fortis vs. lenis (two – do, back – bag, etc.)

The oppositions based on the active organ of speech:

bilabial vs. forelingual (pen – ten, mat – sat, wet – let)

bilabial vs. mediolingual (wail – Yale)

bilabial vs.backlingual (bay – gay)

forelingual vs. mediolingual (less – yes)

forelingual vs. backlingual (take – cake)

forelingual vs. pharyngal (they – hay, see – he )

labiodental vs. forelingual (fat – sat, van – than)

The oppositions based on the type of obstruction:

plosive vs. fricative (pen – when, berry – very)

plosive vs. affricate (till – chill, do – Jew)

plosive vs. sonorant (bad – mad, desk – neck)

fricative vs. sonorant (vine – wine)

fricative vs. affricate (share – chair)

constrictive sonorant vs. occlusive sonorant (we – me, low – no)

flat narrowing vs. round narrowing (thing – sing)

unicentral vs. bicentral (see – she, thing – shy)

Problems of phonemic analysis: consonants. There exists an opinion that the affricates  and are, phonetically, composed of a plosive followed by a fricative. It is possible to treat each of the part ,  as a single consonant phoneme (one-phoneme analysis of ,  according to which these sounds have distributions similar to other consonants, while other combinations of plosive plus fricative do not.  and can be found initially, medially, and finally; and no other combination (e.g. /pf, dz, t/) has such a wide distribution ).

It is possible to say that they are composed of two phonemes each – either /t/ plus / or /d/ plus / – all of which are already established as independent phonemes of English (two-phoneme analysis of  and according to which there are no separate  and phonemes). N.Trubezkoy worked out the rules to determine whether a sound of a complex nature is monophonemic. They are as follows: (1) a phoneme is indivisible, since no syllabic division can occur within a phoneme; (2) a phoneme is produced by one articulatory effort; (3) the duration of a phoneme should not exceed that of other phonemes in the language. Thus  and are monophonemic since they are pronounced by one articulatory effort, their duration does not exceed the duration of /t/ or /d/ and there is no syllabic division within these sounds.

As for /tr/ and /dr/ their phonemic status remains undecided. Prof. D.Jones called them affricates. Still most phoneticians regard /tr/ and /dr/ as biphonemic clusters.

The nasal // also raises a lot of analysis problems: a) // is the allophone of /n/ that occurs when it precedes the phoneme //, e.g. meeting. But in the word hungry both sounds // and // are pronounced. It means that the // cannot be the allophone of /n/. Besides this phoneme also appears when it is followed by the phoneme /k/.

The problem with syllabic consonants.

The problem of neutralization. //