Fricatives Summary

As with plosives and approximants, we have seen that fricatives form a phonetically rich set of sounds in English. This richness stems in part from the fact that tongue shape, the volume of air flowing through the vocal tract and place of articulation all affect the quality of friction. The way that fricatives are entered and exited is also a linguistically significant feature, distinguishing ‘real’ fricatives from those which arise from the failure to achieve a complete closure to form a plosive. Although the number of fricatives in the words of English (nine) is larger than that of plosives (six), we have also seen that some of these fricatives cannot occur everywhere in words, and sometimes alternate with other fricatives. Fricatives, then, are also a phonologically complex set of sounds.