Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

people continue to speak dialects with a low prestige?

2.

Design a small linguistic survey appropriate for your own town, city or

rural area similar to William Labov’s Department Store research.

Which variable would you study and why? What question(s) could

you ask to ensure that you got a reply that contained your variable?

Which groups in your local speech community would you study?

3.

Think about the school you went to and how teenagers at the school

formed peer groups. Were there groupings like the Jocks and Burnouts

in Detroit or did a different system of grouping prevail? What were the

characteristics of each group? Did the different groups speak differ-

ently? How?

4.

In order to demonstrate the effects of audience design, a lecturer was

recorded in large lectures, small seminars and in one-to-one meetings

with students. Four linguistic variables were analysed: (T), examining

levels of /t/ glottalisation; (L), focusing on /l/ vocalisation; (H), look-

ing at whether /h/ was dropped; and (A), investigating whether the /a/

in words such as ‘bath’ and ‘glass’ was fronter [aː] or backer [ɑː]. The

results are displayed in figure 23.

How would you explain the findings? Are they what you would

expect?

60

sounds

90

80

70

60

50

vocalisation of / l/

40

dropping of /h /

30

fronting of /a/

20

glottalisation of /t /

10

% use of non-standard phonological variant

0

lecture

seminar

tutorial

Setting of speech analysed

Figure 23 Stylistic shifts in the speech of a lecturer

250

[u])

=

200

[o], 400= 150

Men

Women

100

50

Raising of (o) to [u] (0

0

Mountain agriculture

Lowland dairy farming

Industrial

Gender and employment type

Figure 24 The pronunciation of (o) in Ucieda Spanish by speaker occupation

(from Holmquist 1986)

5.

Jonathan Holmquist examined the pronunciation of Spanish (o) in

Ucieda in the Spanish Pyrenees. His research showed that some speak-

ers pronounced this sound as [u] as opposed to the Standard Castillian

Spanish [o]. When he examined the occupations of different people

in the village and their use of (o), he found the results in figure 24.

How would you explain the differences in the use of (o) by the

workers from different employment types? And why do you think

there is a gender difference among the agricultural workers and not

among the industrial workers?

4

Sound change

Linguistic change is a process which pervades all human languages. The extent of this change can be so radical that the intelligibility of former states of the language can be jeopardised. The language of Shakespeare causes some problems for the early twenty-first-century reader, but these are not insurmountable. However, if we go further back to the writings of Chaucer, we are faced with a much more alien, less easily recognised form of English. If we observe language change on a much smaller timescale, say that of the average life span of a human being, comprehension difficulties such as those confronting the reader of Chaucer do not arise. Languages actually change quite slowly, and hence the ability to communicate successfully with all generations of speakers of our own language variety is maintained. In this section, we will look at how the sounds of languages can change over time, both from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Diachronic research on sound change has enabled us to chart changes that have taken place in earlier historical periods, while synchronic approaches allow us to observe language changes in progress today. In addition, we will examine sound change from the perspective of one of the principal problems of language change, namely the transition problem – what is the route by which sounds change?

Consonant change

In section 2, we saw that consonants can be largely classified accord-

ing to a simple three-term description:

(a)

voicing: do the vocal cords vibrate?

(b)

place of articulation: where is the flow of air obstructed?

(c)

manner of articulation: how is the flow of air obstructed?

Consonant changes often involve a shift in one or more of these terms. One

example of a consonant changing from voiceless to voiced is the so-called

flapping mentioned in section 2 (p. 34) as common in the English spoken in

North America – it also occurs frequently in Australasia. It will be recalled that a flap involves tapping the tip of the tongue quickly against the alveolar ridge and it occurs when the ‘t’ sound is surrounded by two vowels. From our point of view, the important thing is that a flap is voiced, whereas [t] is unvoiced, so here we have an instance where a voiceless sound has changed into a voiced sound, 61

62

sounds

i.e. a change with respect to (a) above. Some examples from Australian English appear in (31):

(31)

litter:

[lɪtə]

→ [liɾɐ]

bitter:

[bɪtə]

→ [biɾɐ]

get off: [ɡɛtɒf] → [ɡeɾɒf]

(Note: [ɐ] is an unrounded central low vowel, somewhat lower than [ə], cf.

figure 16).

There are a number of place of articulation changes currently under way in

southern British English. Each of these is a change with respect to (b). One well-known example is the change from [t] to [ʔ], as illustrated in (32): (32)

butter: [bʌtə] → [bʌʔə]

plot: [plɒt] → [plɒʔ]

In this example, both the old and the new sounds are voiceless and have the same manner of articulation (they are both plosives). The place of articulation, however, has changed from being alveolar to glottal.

A second example is affecting [ɹ] when it occurs prevocalically. In these

contexts, we often hear [ʋ] as in the examples in (33):

(33)

rob: [ɹɒb] → [ʋɒb]

brown: [bɹaʊn] → [bʋaʊn].

Here, both the old and new sounds are voiced approximants. They differ in that the older [ɹ] is retroflex whereas the newer [ʋ] is labiodental; that is, the new form has the same place of articulation as [v], but the manner of articulation of [w].

A final example illustrating a change in place of articulation concerns the loss, in certain environments, of the interdental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, which are merging with the labiodental fricatives /f/ and /v/ respectively. Examples illustrating these changes appear in (34) and (35). The change in (35) applies only to non-initial /ð/:

(34)

thumb: [θʌm] → [fʌm]

nothing: [nʌθɪŋ] → [nʌfɪŋ]

(35)

bother: [bɒðə] → [bɒvə]

breathe: [briːð] → [briːv]

Again, there is no change in voicing – [θ] and [f] are both voiceless, while [ð] and

[v] are both voiced – and no change in manner of articulation – old and new sounds are fricatives. What has changed is the place of articulation, from interdental to labiodental.

It is also possible to identify changes in manner of articulation. Included in this category is the process of spirantisation – a change from plosive to fricative (‘spirant’ was the nineteenth-century term for ‘fricative’, which today survives only in the form ‘spirantisation’, showing that even linguistic jargon undergoes historical change!). A classic example of spirantisation can be found in the accent

Sound change

63

Table 8 Spirantisation in Liverpool

bilabial

alveolar

velar

voiceless

pepper

better

locker

[pɛpə] → [pɛɸə]

[bɛtə] → [bɛsə]

[lɒkə] → [lɒxə]