This paper presents an empirical analysis of /l/-darkening in English, using ultrasound tongue imaging data from five varieties spoken in the UK. The analysis of near 500 tokens from five participants provides hitherto absent instrumental evidence demonstrating that speakers may display both categorical allophony of light and dark variants, and gradient phonetic effects coexisting in the same grammar. Results are interpreted through the modular architecture of the life cycle of phonological processes, whereby a phonological rule starts its life as a phonetically driven gradient process, over time stabilizing into a phonological process at the phrase level, and advancing through the grammar. Not only does the life cycle make predictions about application at different levels of the grammar, it also predicts that stabilized phonological rules do not replace the phonetic processes from which they emerge, but typically coexist with them, a pattern which is supported in the data. Overall, this paper demonstrates that variation in English /l/ realization has been underestimated in the existing literature, and that we can observe phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic conditioning when accounting for a representative range of phonological environments across varieties.
The foot–strut vowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, where stood–stud remain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between the foot and strut lexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower the strut vowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor of foot–strut in Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction: strut vowels are lower than foot vowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different in foot than in strut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.
Phonological processes that exhibit morphosyntactic sensitivity can provide evidence of historical processes which have ascended through the grammar over time. English /l/-darkening shows such effects. Although syllable-based accounts state that light [l] occurs in onsets (e.g. light) and dark [ɫ] in codas (e.g. dull), several studies report overapplication of darkening to onset /l/ in certain morphosyntactically de ined positions: e.g. word-inally in phrases such as heal it, and stem-inally before a suf ix in words such as healing. Although many phonological theories attempt to account for such opacity, they cannot adequately account for the potential variability in application alongside this. The present paper explores these ideas through modelling data on /l/darkening in English taken from Hayes's (2000) Optimality Theoretic study. It is argued that a combined Stochastic Stratal OT approach to the data is an improvement over a parallel stochastic model (e.g. Boersma & Hayes 2001) because it avoids ixed innate constraint rankings, which are required to prevent the prediction of impossible grammars. Moreover, it is shown that observations about the diachronic life cycle of phonological processes enable us to deduce quantitative predictions about rates: the process should apply with lower frequency in smaller morphosyntactic domains.
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