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[bɪt] by [bɪʔ]: Variation in T-glottaling in Scottish Standard English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024

Zeyu Li  and
Ulrike Gut
Zeyu Li*
Affiliation:
School of Languages and Culture, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, China
Ulrike Gut
Affiliation:
Department of English Linguistics, University of Münster, Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Zeyu Li. Email: zeyu.li@tjut.edu.cn
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Abstract

The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.

Keywords

Scottish Standard EnglishT-glottalingsociophoneticsICE-Scotland
Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 49 - 72
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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