You know that -s which you add to the end of some words? Guess what? It’s not always pronounced the same! Just like the past-tense and past-participle suffix which we add to bare infinitives to generate the regular past tense and past participles (see post), the suffix -s is a representation of a meaningful unit which is pronounced according to the phonetic features of the segment it is being attached to. Simple put, it is not always an ‘s’ sound because the qualities of this sound change depending on the sound that is before it. So, you don’t say ‘play’ then robotically say ‘s’ to get ‘plays’.
First step is to come to the acceptance that the letters we use to spell words do not have a one to one correspondence to a sound. Once you have understood this, you can go beyond this surface form to see the underlying rule governing the choice of one sound segment instead of another.
Grammatically the suffix -s can be used to create regular plurals, third-person present tense, possessive ‘s’, and contracted forms of ‘is’ or ‘has’. Here are some examples: hats, plays, the butcher’s, it’s green, and she’s got. Phonologically, however, the same rules governs the pronunciation of this -s regardless of its grammatical function. These rules are shown in the image above.
To correctly apply the rules given in the image you need to know what sibilant, voiced and voiceless sounds are. Simple. Sibilants are sounds that are hissing or hushing sound like ‘s’ in bus, ‘z’ in buzz, ‘sh’ in bush, ‘ch’ in crunch, and ‘g’ as in smudge (not as in big). Voiceless sounds are those produced with no vibration in your vocal cords. You can test this be placing a finger on your Adam’s apple and sounding just that sound—if there’s no vibration, it’s a voiceless sound. Try it with ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘p’ and ‘f’. Now, with your finger still on your Adam’s apple, contrast the previous sounds with these sounds: ‘d’, ‘g’ (as in big), ‘b’, and ‘v’. They should vibrate. These vibrating sounds are called voiced. By they way, all vowels are voiced, so when a word ends in a vowel sound, you know it’s voiced and the ‘s’ just after it is pronounced /z/.
Now that you understand the terminology, you can apply the rule. Note that /əs/ in some varieties of English is pronounced /ɪz/. Whichever you choose is correct as long as there is one of those vowel sounds inserted between the sibilant sound and /z/.
And you thought the correspondence between English spelling and pronunciation was (/z/) chaotic, right? Wrong. It’s (/s/) governed by rules (/z/). How cool’s (/z/) that?
Which words would you like to pronounce better in English?
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