Coronal

Coronal plosives can be made with either the tongue tip or the tongue blade. This seems to be a matter of individual habit. In using the word coronal, we are recognizing that the tip or the blade of the tongue can be used to make closures at a number of different places. The main ones are dental, alveolar and postalveolar.

Dental plosives occur in a number of places in English: before the sounds [θ] and [ð], as in ‘width’, ‘breadth’; and often as an alternative production of [ð] in utterance-initial position. The IPA does not provide special symbols for dental plosives, so the diacritic  is added below the symbol to mark a dental place of articulation, as in  for ‘breadth’ or  for ‘eighth’

The voiceless alveolar plosive and the voiced alveolar plosive ([t d] respectively) have slightly different tongue shapes in many varieties. For [t], the tongue tip tends to have a little slit in it, so that on release, there is often a short period of friction (affrication), which we could transcribe as . [d] on the other hand usually does not have this tongue shape, so its release is less affricated and sounds ‘flatter’.

Postalveolar plosives occur as part of affricates  (which we will discuss too), and in clusters before [ɹ], as in ‘train’, ‘drain’. If you compare the tongue postures for the initial plosives of ‘tie’ and ‘try’, you will notice that for ‘try’ the tongue tip or blade is making contact a bit behind the alveolar ridge; you may also notice that the sides of the tongue are curled up a little and the part of the tongue that makes contact with the roof of the mouth might be different from the part for ‘tie’: in my own production, the frontmost underside of the tongue makes contact for the postalveolar plosive. Postalveolar plosive can be transcribed [t d]; the diacritic  means ‘retracted’ (i.e. further back).