Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
2 - The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Derived phonological contrasts (DPCs) occur when the set of distinctions in polymorphemic forms is greater than the set found in monomorphemic lexical items (Harris 1990). For instance, the past morpheme <ed> causes the vowel in the word ‘brewed’ to be appreciably longer than its counterpart in ‘brood’ in many speakers of Scottish English (Rathcke and Stuart-Smith 2016).
In structuralist phonological parlance, ‘brood’ and ‘brewed’ constitute a minimal pair; therefore, both vowels – were we to adopt this view – should qualify as fullyfledged phonemes. This option is probably not desirable because it misses at least two points. First, quite often, DPCs give rise to a very scarce functional load, which often correlates with unstable phonemicity. Second, many vowels involved in DPCs have a complementary distributional nature which would not be adequately captured if we allowed them to share the same status as vowel contrasts elicited with monomorphemic items. Now, turning to the generativist paradigm, it should be noted that, in the SPE framework, DPCs are analysed in exactly the same way as allophones: a rule including information on morpheme boundaries generates two different surface realisations from a single underlying entity. This approach is not entirely satisfactory either. As Harris (1990) explains, the historical behaviour of DPCs has been shown to closely resemble that of genuine phonemic contrasts. Once DPCs have emerged, an additional lexical category is potentially available for inclusion in underived morphemes, and the contrast can eventually penetrate the phonemic inventory. In this chapter, I adopt an intermediate view, according to which DPCs have a status of their own, sometimes called quasi-phonemic (Scobbie and Stuart-Smith 2008; Hall 2013).
My goal is to examine acoustic and perceptual data from various locations in the British Isles – Enniskillen (Ulster), Glasgow and Hull – in order to better understand the production and perception of certain DPCs found in English. This research falls within a broader framework that I call the Gradient Phonemicity Hypothesis (GPH), according to which a whole range of cognitive statuses is assumed to exist between allophony and phonemicity, and a difference between two sounds can be described by some measure of how typically allophonic or phonemic their relation is.
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- Information
- The Corpus Phonology of EnglishMultifocal Analyses of Variation, pp. 30 - 49Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020