Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

We conclude this section with an example of intonational change which is

affecting the varieties of English spoken in Australia, New Zealand and North America. In these localities, some people are acquiring a rising, question-like intonation contour in declarative (i.e. non-questioning) utterances.

Consider the small dialogue in (50), which involves a young New Zealander recounting an experience on a Pacific cruise – italics mark the clauses with rising intonation.

(50)

frank: These guys I met were in a fairly cheap sort of cabin – all they had

was a porthole and I looked out of this porthole and it was black.

And a fish swam past. [laughs]

hugh: [laughs]

frank: They were actually that low down.

Research has shown that these patterns of rising intonation are found most

frequently, as in the example above, when telling stories and giving explanations

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and descriptions, and are found rarely in the expressing of opinions. The change appears to have begun in Australasia just after the Second World War and is now being heard in parts of the UK (exercises 4 and 5).

Exercises

1.

Consider the data in table 11 from a dialect of English. The table shows the pronunciations of a number of changing vowels and provides representative examples of words in which these vowels occur.

What can you conclude about the initial stages of the changes that took

place? How are they related to each other? What happened subse-

quently? You may need to look at a vowel chart to help you answer

these questions.

Table 11 Vowel changes in an English dialect

Pronunciation of

Pronunciation of

Pronunciation

the vowel before

the vowel during

of the vowel

Word

the change

the change

today

time

[iː]

[əɪ]

[aɪ]

sweet

[eː]

[iː]

[iː]

clean

[ɛː]

[eː]

[iː]

name

[aː]

[ɛː]

[ɛɪ]

hope

[ɔː]

[oː]

[ou]

goose

[oː]

[uː]

[uː]

south

[uː]

[əu]

[au]

2.

Are the following examples of sound changes, discussed in this sec-

tion, cases of ‘regular sound change’ or of ‘lexical diffusion’? How do

you know?

(a) the ʊ/ʌ split?

(b) the shift to syllable-initial stress?

3.

In many varieties of English, [t] is changing into a glottal stop [ʔ]. The

linguistic contexts in which glottalisation can occur differs from place

to place, and nowhere has [t] been completely replaced by [ʔ]. Below

are some data illustrating the extent of glottalisation in one variety of

English. Try to describe phonologically the contexts in which glotta-

lisation can and cannot occur.

Glottalisation possible

Glottalisation not possible

data

deter

Peter

pester

Sound change

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let me

left me

let us

left us

bet

best

call tomorrow

call Tony

salt

soft

want

washed /wɒʃt/

button

return

enter

wrapped /ræpt/

bottle

act

4.

As well as being spoken in the Netherlands, varieties of Dutch are

also used in northern Belgium (where they are often called Flemish).

Belgian and Dutch linguists have been researching the extent to which

the standard varieties of Dutch in the Netherlands and in Belgium are

becoming more similar or more different. Figure 27 (based on the work of van de Velde, van Hout and Gerritsen), shows the results of

an analysis of radio commentaries on royal and sporting events in

Belgium and the Netherlands at regular periods between 1935 and

1993. The feature investigated here is the devoicing of /v/ to [f] in

words such as those immediately below

(a) vuur

[vyːr]

→ [fyːr]

fire

(b) lever [leˑvər] →

[leˑfər] liver

(c) aanval [ˈaˑnval] →

[ˈaˑnfal] attack

What has happened to /v/ over the past seventy years? How might we

account for the patterns found?

50

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

% use of voiceless [f] for /v/

5

0

1935

1950

1965

1980

1993

Year sample of data taken

Belgian Dutch

Netherlands Dutch

Figure 27 The devoicing of /v/ to [f] in Netherlands and Belgian Dutch between 1935 and 1993 (no Belgian data in 1950 and 1980) (based on Van de Velde, Van Hout and Gerritsen 1996: 161)

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5.

Collecting data on variation and change in language involves under-

standing the way the speech community is structured socially as well

as linguistically. If you were to conduct research in your own neigh-

bourhood, what sociological factors do you think you would need to

take into account and why?

5

Phonemes, syllables and phonological

processes

We began section 2 by asking how many sounds there are in English, but we found there were various practical difficulties in responding to this question and never arrived at an answer. There is a further reason why the question can’t be answered straightforwardly, and understanding this is our first concern in this section. In fact, speech sounds can differ from each other in a non-discrete, continuous fashion. We can see this particularly easily in the vowel system. One of the main differences between the [iː] of read [ɹiːd] and the [ɪ] of rid [ɹɪd] is length.

But just how long is a long vowel? An emphatic pronunciation of read, say in a plaintive ‘Leave me alone – I’m trying to READ’, has a much longer vowel than a non-emphatic pronunciation. The precise length of any vowel will depend on the rate of speaking, degree of emphasis and so on. A similar case is presented by the aspirated plosives. In any dialect, a [ph] sound, as in the word pit, will be aspirated to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of emphasis. We see, therefore, that there is a sense in which sounds form a continuum; from this perspective, there is an infinite number of speech sounds in any language.

Phonemes

Fortunately, there is another perspective from which sounds are

discrete units or segments, and we can come to terms with this by asking what is the difference between the words pit and bit? From section 2, we can say that pit starts with a voiceless bilabial plosive and bit starts with a voiced bilabial plosive. Otherwise, the words are identical. A pair of this kind, in which everything except the portion under consideration is identical, is called a minimal pair.

This pair shows that voicing can distinguish one word from another, and that the pair of sounds [p b] can distinguish words. However, when we consider different types of [p], with different degrees of aspiration or no aspiration at all, we get a different picture. There are no words in English which differ solely in whether they contain an unaspirated or an aspirated plosive. That is, English does not have distinct words like, say, [phɪt] and [pɪt]. In fact, [pɪt], with totally unaspirated

[p], is unpronounceable without explicit training for most English speakers.

Conversely, we could never find pairs such as [spɪt] and [sphɪt] in English –

following initial [s], the only ‘p’ sound we find is the unaspirated [p]. The same is true of [t th] and [k kh], as in the pairs of words star, tar and scar, car. In other 75

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words, the distribution of the sounds [p ph] is governed by a rule or principle according to which we never find [p] in the positions reserved for [ph] and we never find [ph] in the positions reserved for [p]. This type of patterning is called complementary distribution (the positions in which we find the two sounds