// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the nonexplosive stop say? It came to a halt.

Not to be confused with nonexploded stop.

In phonetics and phonology, nonexplosive stops are a broad conception of consonants that resemble (and may include) implosives but that do not necessarily involve implosion or negative oral air pressure. These stop consonants lack the pressure buildup and burst release of pulmonic plosives, and include implosives, glottalized and laryngealized stops, as well as 'certain varieties of "lenis" and labial–velar stops'. According to Clements & Osu (2002) (quoting Ian Maddieson), such consonants occur in around 20% of the world's languages.

Ikwerre has two nonexplosive stops that acoustically resemble implosives, but lack the characteristic glottalic airstream mechanism and lowering of the larynx. They are transcribed as voiced ⟨ḅ⟩ and pre-glottalized ⟨ʼḅ⟩, and written in the language's orthography as ⟨gb⟩ and ⟨kp⟩, respectively. Thus, they correspond to labial–velars /ɡ͡b/ and /k͡p/ in most other Igboid languages, and to implosives /ɓ/ and /ɓ̥/ in some varieties of Igbo; additionally, in some varieties of Ikwerre, they may still have labial–velar realizations. In Ikwerre, they pattern with sonorants as a natural class, both in the sense of being non-obstruent, and in the sense that they have allophonic realizations as nasal consonants when preceding nasal vowels. However, while they pattern with sonorants, they are featurally described as being both non-obstruent and non-sonorant, as they lack both air pressure buildup and sonority.

Murrinh-Patha has two series of stops described as "fortis" and "lenis"; the lenis series are non-explosive:

Visual observation of the Murrinh-Patha speaker [...] confirmed that the larynx is lowered quite substantially during the lenis articulations [...]. This is clearly the reason for the low, fluctuating, and sometimes negative intra-oral pressure[s of] these fully voiced stops (in the case of this speaker's initial lenis stops, more than half the tokens were fully implosive).

References

• Clements, George N.; Osu, Sylvester (2002). "Explosives, implosives, and nonexplosives: Some linguistic effects of air pressure differences in stops". In Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner (ed.). Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 299–350. doi:10.1515/9783110197105.2.299. ISBN 9783110170863.
• Clements, George N.; Osu, Sylvester (2005). "Nasal harmony in Ikwere, a language with no phonemic nasal consonants". Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. 26 (2): 165–200. doi:10.1515/jall.2005.26.2.165. S2CID 144317723.
• Miller, Brett (2012). "Sonority and the Larynx". In Parker, Steve (ed.). The Sonority Controversy. Phonology and Phonetics. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 257–288. ISBN 9783110261516.
• Butcher, Andrew (2004). "'Fortis/lenis' revisited one more time: the aerodynamics of some oral stop contrasts in three continents". Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. 18 (6–8): 547–557. doi:10.1080/02699200410001703565.