Kasianova O. The range of variability of labial consonants in the modern Ukrainian speech (experimental phonetic research)

The issues of language and speech variability are currently studied within sociolinguistics and socially oriented disciplines such as interlinguistics, sociophonetics, social dialectology, experimental sociolinguistics, and so on. New approaches and the tendency to multidimensional study of speech phenomena deepened the interest in studying sound changes which demonstrate greater potential of speech rather than language as a socio-historical and abstract phenomenon does. The thesis is devoted to studying variation of features of individual speech generation which form the structure of speech that is expressed by consonant –vowel unity of the minimal element – a syllable as a unit, which on the one hand demonstrates articulatory limitlessness, and on the other – potentialities of the language system, its historical perspective that lead to revision of the existing classifications of sounds and extension of the concept of the language norm as it is. The material for the study of labial consonants was the oral literary Ukrainian speech of 13 speakers, recorded in an acoustic signal, palatograms and video files. The experimental material was collected in the laboratory of experimental phonetics of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The thesis describes most representative articulatory acoustic pictures (palatograms and video snapshots, spectrograms, oscillograms) for each labial consonant. The scholarly novelty of the thesis refers to the fact that in general phonetics there is no description of labial consonants separately as a group taking into account acoustic, articulatory, perceptual and phonological aspects. Our thesis, for the first time in Ukraine, considers labial consonants in terms of combination of the labial and lingual activity, which has led before to misunderstanding and sometimes misleading description of the nature of the mentioned group of consonants. The paper demonstrates the sound field for each occurrence of the labial which is possible at the level of the norm. Combination of sociophonetic and phonetic methods helped us to define the reasons for variability of the qualitative features of labial sounds, the limits of their range and to trace the direction of their development.