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Natural phonetic tendencies and social meaning: Exploring the allophonic raising split of price and mouth on the Isles of Scilly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2019

Emma Moore  and
Paul Carter
Emma Moore
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Paul Carter
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Abstract

The existence of an allophonic split between raised onsets before voiceless consonants and more open onsets in other environments is well-established for the vowels in the price lexical set. It has also been observed—less frequently—for the vowels in the mouth lexical set. We provide evidence of this allophonic raising split in the English spoken on the Isles of Scilly (a group of islands off the southwest coast of England) where the pattern is more robust for mouth than price. We propose that the allophonic raising split on Scilly is the outcome of dialect contact and natural phonetic tendencies, as observed elsewhere. However, by reflecting on the specifics of the location studied, and drawing on a perception study, we hypothesise that the trajectory of the pattern may be the consequence of the different social and regional qualities indexed by mouth and price and the interaction of these meanings with ideologies about Scilly and its speakers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 337 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant AH/I026243/1). Many thanks to Amanda Martin and the Isles of Scilly Museum for their collaboration and to all islanders who were interviewed for the archive. Thanks in particular to Mary Bushell, Ray Williams, and Tracy Smith for collecting recordings and to Roger Banfield for historical insight. We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for suggestions that helped to improve this paper. All remaining errors are, of course, our responsibility.

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