Peter Roach
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any clear was of proving this. This is a matter which depends to some extent on the accent: many BBC speakers pronounce these sequences almost as pure vowels (prolongations of the first element of the triphthong), so that the word 'Ireland', for example, sounds like / lnd /; in Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, on the other hand, the middle vowel ( / / or / /) is pronounced with such a close vowel quality that it would seem more appropriate to transcribe the triphthongs with / j / or / w / in the middle (e.g. 'fire' / faj /), emphasising the disyllabic aspect of their pronunciation.
turn-taking The analysis of conversation has become an important part of linguistic and phonetic research, and one of the major areas to be studied is how participants in a conversation manage to take turns to speak without interrupting each other too much. There are many subtle ways of giving the necessary signals, many of which make use of prosodic features in speech such as a change of rhythm.
utterance The sentence is a unit of grammar, not of phonology, and is often treated as an abstract entity. There is a need for a parallel term that refers to a piece of continuous speech without making implications about its grammatical status, and the term utterance is widely used. uvula The uvula (a little lump of soft tissue that you can observe in the back of your mouth dangling from the end of your soft palate, if you look in a mirror with your mouth open) is something that the human race could probably manage perfectly well without, but one of the few useful things it does is to act as a place of articulation for a range of consonants articulated in the back of the mouth. There are uvular plosives: the voiceless one [ q ] is found as the phoneme / q / in many dialects of Arabic, while the voiced one [ ] is rather more elusive. Uvular fricatives are found quite commonly: German, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish, for example, have voiceless ones, and French, Arabic and Danish have voiced ones. The uvular nasal [ N ] is found in some Inuit languages. The uvula itself is active only when it vibrates in a uvular trill. velum, velar This is another name for the soft palate. As nouns, the two terms can be used interchangeably in most contexts, but only the word velum lends itself to adjective formation, giving words such as velar which