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Sonority hierarchy
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{{Short description|Hierarchical ranking of speech sounds}} {{more citations needed|date=January 2012}} {{IPA notice}} A '''sonority hierarchy''' or '''sonority scale''' is a hierarchical ranking of [[speech communication|speech]] [[sound]]s (or [[Phone (phonetics)|phones]]). Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress,<ref name="LadefogedJohnson2010">{{cite book|author1=Peter Ladefoged|author2=Keith Johnson|title=A Course in Phonetics|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FjLc1XtqJUUC|date=1 January 2010|publisher=Cengage Learning|isbn=978-1-4282-3126-9}}</ref> therefore sonority is often related to rankings for phones to their amplitude.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal|last=Ohala|first=John J.|date=1992|title=Alternatives to the sonority hierarchy for explaining segmental sequential constraints|url=http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/alternatives_to_sonor_hier_cls.pdf|journal=Papers on the Parasession on the Syllable|pages=319β338}}</ref> For example, pronouncing the [[fricative]] [v] will produce a louder sound than the [[stop consonant|stop]] [b], so [v] would rank higher in the hierarchy. However, grounding sonority in amplitude is not universally accepted.<ref name=":0" /> Instead, many researchers refer to sonority as the resonance of speech sounds.<ref name=":0" /> This relates to the degree to which production of phones results in vibrations of air particles. Thus, sounds that are described as more sonorous are less subject to masking by ambient noises.<ref name=":0" /> Sonority hierarchies are especially important when analyzing [[syllable]] structure; rules about what [[Segment (linguistics)|segments]] may appear in [[syllable onset|onsets]] or [[syllable coda|codas]] together, such as [[Sonority Sequencing Principle|SSP]], are formulated in terms of the difference of their sonority values. Some languages also have [[assimilation (linguistics)|assimilation]] rules based on sonority hierarchy, for example, the Finnish [[potential mood]], in which a less sonorous segment changes to copy a more sonorous adjacent segment (e.g. ''-tne- β -nne-'').
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