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Nānā i ke kumu: Acoustic phonetic research on archival recordings of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi
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Nānā i ke kumu: Acoustic phonetic research on archival recordings of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi
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Diachronically stable, lexically specific variation: The phonological representation of secondary /æ/-lengthening
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Abstract:
Poster ; Secondary /æ/-lengthening, also known as the bad-lad split (bad as [bæːd] and lad as [læd]), is noted in several 20th century impressionistic descriptions of Southern Standard British English (SSBE) [4, 8, 12]. This paper reports results from an acoustic phonetic analysis of the duration of monosyllabic /æ/ (trap) words in SSBE. The apparent stability of this lengthening over the past century indicates that such sub-phonemic lexical variation is not necessarily indicative of a change still in progress. While its sub-phonemic nature is best accounted for with a usage-based phonological framework in which detailed phonetic properties are stored in lexical representations, the appearance of lengthening in higher-frequency words otherwise predicted to undergo reduction points to a more complex interaction of vowel duration and frequency than previously reported [7, 10]. Twenty-one native SSBE-speaking students at the University of Cambridge, aged 18–24, were recorded reading sentences embedded with 73 monosyllabic words containing the stressed vowel /æ/ (token n=1,777). Duration and F1/F2 were measured in Praat [1], with modal, breathy, and preaspirated sections coded separately and vowel duration defined as the modal plus breathy portions. A linear mixed effects model predicting duration with voicing and manner and place of articulation of coda consonants as well as word frequency entered as fixed effects along with by-word and by-speaker random intercepts and their interactions was run. Effects of phonological environment on length were observed as expected; results also indicated significant lengthening of higher-frequency words (p=0.009). The coefficients of the by-word random intercepts offer a window into how ‘unexpectedly’ long or short individual /æ/ words are once the phonological features of the post-tonic consonant(s) are accounted for; words singled out a century ago as being ‘long’ (e.g. bag, that, bad, jam, sad) still top the ranking (Figure 1). The secondary /æ/-lengthening reported here bears a striking resemblance to the reconstructed initial stages of primary /æ/-lengthening (also known as the trap-bath split), a diachronic process that began in Southern England around the 17th century as allophonic length variation in reflexes of the Middle English /æ/ vowel [12]. While Lexical Phonology has been used to analyze primary /æ/-lengthening, such a model predicts that allophonic contrasts, processed post-lexically, should never be involved in lexically selective change [6, 9]. On the other hand, usage-based theories in which people store detailed phonetic properties of individual words allow persistent biases in pronunciation to accumulate into small but consistent sub-phonemic differences [2, 11]. However, while Exemplar Theory has been used to account for vowel reduction in higher-frequency words, the present data indicates that the opposing process of lengthening has in fact occurred some high-frequency words [3, 5]. It appears that just as primary /æ/-lengthening represents an ossified, half completed sound change, secondary /æ/-lengthening seems to have undergone the same lengthening process but lexically ossified at the sub-phonemic level. Phonemic contrastiveness does not seem to be a prerequisite for the stable maintenance of a lexically specified split, even when this directly counteracts an overarching articulatory process. Given this active resistance to the process of phonetic reduction, it is proposed that this in fact represents stable transmission and storage of lexically specified sub-phonemic allophony. In a usage-based framework, it would be predicted that such variation should affect more frequent rather than less frequent words, since a learner would have to encounter such words often enough to consistently store the duration differences in the word memories accessed in speech production. Figure 1. Words investigated, plotted by amount of lengthening unaccounted for by fixed effects. [1] Boersma, P. & D. Weenink. 2015. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.4.07. http://www.praat.org/. [2] Bybee, J. 2000. The phonology of the lexicon: Evidence from lexical diffusion. In M. Barlow & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Usage-based models of language. Stanford: CSLI, pp. 65–85. [3] Bybee, J. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [4] Cruttenden, A. 2001. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, Sixth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [5] Gahl, S. 2007. “Thyme” and “Time” are not homophones. Word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84(3): 474–496. [6] Harris, J. 1989. Towards a lexical analysis of sound change in progress. Journal of Linguistics 25(1): 35–56. [7] Hay, J., J. Pierrehumbert, A. Walker, & P. LaShell. 2015. Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change. Cognition 139: 83–91. [8] Jones, D. J. 1918. An outline of English phonetics. Leipzig: Teubner. [9] Kiparsky, P. 1988. Phonological change, in F. J. Newmeyer (Ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Volume I, Linguistic Theory: Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 363–415. [10] Phillips, B. 2006. Word frequency and lexical diffusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [11] Pierrehumbert, J. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition, and contrast. In J. Bybee & P. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency effects and the emergence of lexical structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 137–157. [12] Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English (Vols. 1-3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Keyword:
English language; English language--Vowels; Phonetics; Vowels
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/55398
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The BAD-LAD split: Secondary /æ/-lengthening in Southern Standard British English
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In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America; Vol 1 (2016): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America; 32:1–14 ; 2473-8689 (2016)
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The Canadian Shift: Its Acoustic Trajectory and Consequences for Vowel Categorization
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In: LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts; Vol 5: LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts 2014; 14:1-5 ; 2377-3367 (2014)
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