From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Thu Jul 3 16:57:15 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:57:15 EDT Subject: Professor Werner Winter Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Madam/Sir, As some of you are undoubtedly aware, Professor Werner Winter - scholar, linguist, polyglot, mentor - will celebrate his 80th birthday on October 25th of this year. Werner Winter has been closely associated with Mouton de Gruyter, formerly Mouton/The Hague, for more than three decades, starting his work as chief editor of the linguistic series Trends in Linguistics in the early 1970s. Brigitte Bauer and Georges-Jean Pinault are currently editing a Festschrift (including a Tabula Gratulatoria) which will be presented to Werner Winter to mark the occasion of his birthday, as well as to celebrate this long and fruitful cooperation. In addition, a special "book of personal congratulations" will be prepared. We are approaching you today because we would like to invite you to contribute to these two projects. First of all, we kindly ask you to send your name, current address and current affiliation to Ms. Regina Trüb at prakmou1 at degruyter.com by July 15th. For the special "book of personal congratulations", individual hand-written letters will be collected and bound into book form. To this end, we have ordered special sheets of paper, obtainable from us upon request. Please indicate in your message to Regina Trüb whether you would like to contribute a personal note. Once we have received your order along with your current address, we will send you the paper, along with more detailed information on technical details, layout, etc. Please note that your personal congratulations should be returned to us by August 25th. Those of you wishing to have their names mentioned in the Tabula Gratulatoria in the Festschrift should also mention this explicitly in the message to Regina Trüb. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you soon! Best regards, Mouton de Gruyter A Division of Walter de Gruyter Publishers Berlin/New York __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at Thu Jul 3 16:58:13 2003 From: muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at (Rudolf Muhr) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:58:13 EDT Subject: Invitation - Conf. "The Unifying Aspects of Cultures - Standardvariations" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (This mail is particularly addressed to scholars working on fields like sociolinguistics, pluricentric languages, language policy, foreign language teaching, discourse analysis, political discourse, pragmatics, language ideologies, lexicology of BE/AE/AUE etc. I apologize, if this mail is unsolicited.) Dear Colleague, I would like to draw your attention to the international conference "The Unifying aspects of Cultures" which will be held from Nov. 7-9th 2003 in Vienna (Austria) and in particular to the section "Standard Variations and Conceptions of Language in Various Language Cultures" which is organized by myself. If these topics are part of your working areas, I would like to invite you to present a paper (30 Min.) or a statement (15 Min.). The papers will be published in the proceedings of the conference (TRANS ). Papers from the Americas, from Asia and Australasia about aspects of pluricentric languages and language ideologies are particularly welcomed as it is in my intention to achieve a broad overview on different approaches to concepts like "mother tongue", "our common language", "language attitudes of dominating varieties vs. attitudes of the "other varieties", "standard variation", "one language-different norms" etc. The title of your paper + abstract should be sent to me: muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at The details of the registration are found under: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/org_anm_teilnehmerinnen_e.htm The conference is hosted by the "Research Institute for Austrian and International Literature and Cultural Studies" (INST-Vienna) (http://www.inst.at) and will take place in the Austria Conference Centre. General information about the conference can be found under: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/index_e.htm. A details description of the section can be found below or under the following internet address: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr_e.htm (English) http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr.htm (German) http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr_f.htm (French) Yours sincerly R. Muhr ***** Standard Variations and Concepts of Language in Various Language Cultures Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Papers to: Email: Rudolf Muhr (Graz) The aim of this section is to discuss differences and commonalities in the ideas about language and language norms in various language cultures. These differences concern, for example, one's openness to "foreign" elements (purist versus integration), one's attitude to one's own language (language pride versus language shame), one's attitudes toward variants of one's own language (multilingualism vs. monolingualism) as well as association with stigmatisation or prestige of languages and language variations. Another topic could be the differences in the association with language norms in mono- and pluricentric languages and their effects on the concerned language cultures. In the "smaller" variants a discrepancy always exists between the norms of one's own country and the norms of the entire language, which are normally determined by the largest country. How to deal with these uncertainties and the differences in the standard norms can also be one of the many additional themes! of this section. *********************************************** Das Verbindende der Kulturen SEKTION: Standardvariationen und Sprachauffassungen in verschiedenen Sprachkulturen Email: Rudolf Muhr (Graz) muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at Inhalt: Die Sektion hat das Ziel, Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in den Vorstellungen von Sprache und Sprachnorm in verschiedenen Sprachkulturen zu diskutieren. Diese Unterschiede betreffen z.B. die Offenheit gegenüber "fremden" Elementen (Purismus versus Integrismus), die Einstellungen zur eigenen Sprache (Sprachstolz versus Sprachscham), die Einstellungen gegenüber Varianten der eigenen Sprache (innersprachliche Mehrsprachigkeit vs. Einsprachigkeit) sowie den Umgang mit Stigmatisierung bzw. Prestige von Sprachen und Sprachvarianten. Ein weiteres Thema könnten die Unterschiede im Umgang mit Sprachnormen in mono- und plurizentrischen Sprachen und ihre Auswirkungen auf die jeweiligen Sprachkulturen sein. In den "kleineren" Varianten besteht stets eine Diskrepanz zwischen den Eigennormen des Landes und den Normen der Gesamtsprache, die in der Regel vom größten Land bestimmt werden. Der Umgang mit diesen Unsicherheiten und den Unterschieden in den Standardnormen kann eines von vielen! weiteren Themen dieser Sektion sein. ************************** Rudolf Muhr. Projekt Österreichisches Deutsch Austrian German Project Dept. of German, University of Graz Heinrichstr. 22/2 A-8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43-316-380-8176 www.oedeutsch.at / www.oewort.at Rudolf Muhr. Projekt Österreichisches Deutsch Austrian German Project Dept. of German, University of Graz Heinrichstr. 22/2 A-8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43-316-380-8176 www.oedeutsch.at / www.oewort.at From tam_lindstrom at HOTMAIL.COM Wed Jul 16 00:05:40 2003 From: tam_lindstrom at HOTMAIL.COM (=?iso-8859-1?B?VGhlcmVzZSBMaW5kc3Ry9m0=?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:05:40 EDT Subject: personal endings Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all Could anyone tell me what the latest theory regarding the personal endings on verbs in Indo-European languages is? I would be very grateful for any ideas or references with regards to this subject. (I will post a summary.) Best regards, Therese Lindström PhD student, University of Sheffield _________________________________________________________________ Hitta rätt köpare på MSN Köp & Sälj http://www.msn.se/koposalj From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Wed Jul 16 20:19:44 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:19:44 EDT Subject: Rong Chen: English Inversion. A Ground-before-Figure Construction (2003) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- New from Mouton de Gruyter! >From the Series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH Series Editors: René Dirven, Ronald W. Langacker, and John R. Taylor Rong Chen ENGLISH INVERSION A Ground-before-Figure Construction 2003. xi, 333 pages. Cloth. Euro 78.00 / sFr 125.00 / approx. US$ 86.00 ISBN 3-11-017810-9 (Cognitive Linguistics Research 25) The author provides an account of English inversion, a construction that displays perplexing idiosyncrasies at the level of semantics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. Basing his central argument on the claim that inversion is a linguistic representation of a Ground-before-Figure model, the author develops an elegant solution to a hitherto unsolved multidimensional linguistic puzzle and, in the process, supports the theoretical position that a cognitive approach best suits the multidimensionality of language itself. Engagingly written, the book appeals to linguists of all persuasions and to any reader curious about the relationship between language and cognition. Rong Chen is Professor at California State University, San Bernardino, USA. FROM THE CONTENTS: Chapter 1: Preliminaries 1. Issues of inversion 2. Previous research 3. Relevant tenets of cognitive linguistics 4. Other issues Chapter 2: Inversion as GbF instantiation 1. The GbF model 2. LOC BE: The prototype 3. PATH Vm: From existence to motion 4. NSPAT BE: From spatiality to nonspatiality 5. A radial classification 6. The phonology of inversion: A matter of focus 7. GbF and information packaging: A comparison Chapter 3: Syntactic constraints 1. Polarity 2. Transitivity 3. Embeddedness 4. Auxiliaries 5. Weight 6. Summary Chapter 4: Inversion in discourse 1. Discourse types: A tripartite 2. Inversion in description 3. Inversion in narration 4. Inversion in exposition 5. Summary 6. Inversion in parody Chapter 5: Conclusion 1. Summary 2. GbF representation in other languages To sign up for our FREE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER, please visit our website at www.degruyter.de/newsletter To order, please contact SFG-Servicecenter-Fachverlage GmbH Postfach 4343 72774 Reutlingen, Germany Fax: +49 (0)7071 - 93 53 - 33 E-mail: deGruyter at s-f-g.com For USA, Canada and Mexico: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 200 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA Fax: +1 (914) 747-1326 E-mail: cs at degruyterny.com Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter: http://www.mouton-publishers.com __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Wed Jul 16 20:20:13 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:20:13 EDT Subject: Donald N. Tuten. Koineization in Medieval Spanish (2003) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- New from Mouton de Gruyter >From the series CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE Series Editor: Josha A. Fishman Donald N. Tuten KOINEIZATION IN MEDIEVAL SPANISH 2003. iv, 345 pages. Cloth. Euro 78.00 / sFr 125.00 / approx. US$ 86.00 ISBN 3-11-017744-7 (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 88) How and why do changes happen when and where they do? Is it possible to explain changes that occurred centuries ago? These are the central questions addressed in this book, in which the author argues that the development of numerous features of medieval (and modern) Spanish can best be explained as the results of koineization, a process in which mixing among speakers of different dialects leads to the rapid formation of a new mixed and generally simplified variety. The book includes a complete introduction to koineization and detailed study of three stages of dialect mixing in medieval Spanish. Donald N. Tuten is Assistant Professor at Emory University, Georgia, USA. >From the Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Koines and koineization 3. The Burgon phase 4. The Toledo phase 5. The Seville phase 6. Conclusions For a list of reduced titles published in this series, please visit our website at www.mouton-publishers.com. To sign up for our FREE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER, please visit our website at www.degruyter.de/newsletter To order, please contact SFG-Servicecenter-Fachverlage GmbH Postfach 4343 72774 Reutlingen, Germany Fax: +49 (0)7071 - 93 53 - 33 E-mail: deGruyter at s-f-g.com For USA, Canada and Mexico: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 200 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA Fax: +1 (914) 747-1326 E-mail: cs at degruyterny.com Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter: http://www.mouton-publishers.com ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Thu Jul 17 16:41:34 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:41:34 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in unstressed syllables to /I/ (should be /ɪ/ - small-cap-I) in English in England. Recent examples heard on the BBC, spoken by reporters and newsreaders :- kImju:nIkeit "communicate" sIdæm "Saddam Hussein" Perhaps someone would be kind enough could point me some references? Does anyone know anything about the time-development of this phenomenon. Is this a very recent development? Has it strengthened noticeably in the last few decades? Does anyone know if this development is known in English outside England? The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? I'm not sure what the conditioning factors are. Cecil Ward. From lass at IAFRICA.COM Fri Jul 18 12:54:52 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:54:52 EDT Subject: 'Raising' of unstressed vowels in English Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A couple of points. 1. This phenomenon is not at all uncommon in English across the world. To take one example of a fairly typical sort, my own New York City dialect has [I] before /t, d/ in weak syllables (e.g. weak pasts and past participles), and often before velars as in 'communicate'. Impressionistically, what is *not* common is to have a 'schwa' type of vowel in these environments, at least in England and the eastern US. One of the more striking low-level phonetic characters of much South African English is precisely the lack of two weak vowels of different heights. 2. The existence of a higher weak vowel especially before coronals has been attested as a regularity in southern and South Midland English dialects since late Middle English. Chaucer for instance apparently rhymes the regular noun plural in /-Vs/ with 'is', and it is common later Middle English MS practice to spell this ending with rather than . My impression (needs checking, but this is a quick answer) is that spellings for noun plural are rather late: the earliest example I've found in a quick look at the samples in the corpus for the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English currently being prepared in Edinburgh is from the Lambeth Homilies (c. 1200). If anybody is interested I can run a more detailed check, and it would be worth looking at the sections on unstressed vowels in these environments in some of the more detailed histories of English. From jhewson at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA Fri Jul 18 12:55:29 2003 From: jhewson at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA (John Hewson) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:55:29 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Cecil Ward wrote: (snippet) > The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? Not true. Remember AA Milne's They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; Christopher Robin went down with Alice. I've often heard Canada pronounced Canida by British speakers. And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. The first vowel in _disaster_ is reduced to schwa in American English, as is the last vowel in _Latin_; is the [i] that is heard in British English in these words a reduced vowel? The American pronunciation [latn] has a syllabic [n] in the last syllable and no vowel. (The converse happens in _pattern_, where BE has [patn], but in AE, where there is r-colouring, the second vowel is clearly heard). The question is further complicated by the fact that American schwa is often barred [i]. ******************************************************************************* John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 Henrietta Harvey Professor Emeritus fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 ******************************************************************************* From rankin at KU.EDU Fri Jul 18 12:55:06 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:55:06 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in unstressed syllables to /I/ (should be /ɪ/ - small-cap-I) in English in England. >Does anyone know if this development is known in English outside England? >The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? I'm not sure what the conditioning factors are. In the US it was a feature of some rural dialects, and still is to an extent, but the environment is different. Word-final schwa (the one that picks up an -r in much of the world) is [I] (the same small-cap i) in these dialects. You see it reflected orthographically as in attempts to reproduce rustic, period pronunciation: Arizona --> Arizony, sasparilla --> sasparilly, umbrella --> umbrelly, Alabama --> Alabamy, and such. All the cases I can think of are at least trisyllabic. Doing this with "Cuba, sofa, panda" seems very strange to me. There is also an [ae] "ash" that raises to [I] in words like Arkansas --> ArkInsas; this may be the sort of thing your SIddam is showing. I tend to think of these as a 19th century phenomenon, but I'm not an Anglicist and could be corrected on that. Nor can I picture how someone who says "umbrelly" might pronounce "communicate", so these may be entirely unrelated phenomenoa. Bob Rankin U. of Kansas From erickson at PIERCINGSUIT.COM Fri Jul 18 12:56:06 2003 From: erickson at PIERCINGSUIT.COM (Blaine Erickson) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:56:06 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to...? Message-ID: Cecil Ward wrote: > I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in > unstressed syllables to /I/ Although I am not familiar with the current state of BBC English, I strongly suspect that the vowel in question is not small-cap I, but is the high central vowel barred i. In many varieties of North American English, the word 'just' is often realized with barred i, though when stressed or in slower speech it comes out with schwa. This same change may affect other unstressed schwas, though not necessarily all of them (i.e., I don't know or understand all the conditions for this change). Part of why I am skeptical of the change schwa to small-cap I is that this would require the change of two features--the addition of palatality ([-pal] -> [+pal]) and the changing of the height ([-hi] -> [+hi]), and I see no motivation for the former. On the other hand, the change schwa -> barred i requires only a change in height ([-hi] -> [+hi]). In English, this change appears to preferentially affect schwas in syllables that are not only unstressed but have been further reduced for prosodic reasons (your 'Saddam' example illustrates this nicely). The motivation here is obvious: barred i is even "less" of a vowel than schwa (i.e., shorter duration and less sonorant, all else being equal), and we all know how much English likes to reduce its unstressed vowels. Furthermore, the change schwa -> barred i appears to have occurred historically in Vietnamese. Perhaps the best reference on how vowels change is: Donegan, Patricia J. 1985 [1978]. On the Natural Phonology of Vowels. New York: Garland. This is the published version of her Ohio State University dissertation. Sorry I can't help you with more references. Best wishes, Blaine Erickson erickson at piercingsuit.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cecil at cecilward.com Fri Jul 18 12:56:42 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:56:42 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Hewson wrote: > Remember AA Milne's > They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; > Christopher Robin went down with Alice. This development seems to me to be patchy. I was asking myself the question whether the spread of this phenomenon is due to analogy. It seems to me that there are two possibilities, one is that this is a "phonetic" development, by which I mean that the conditioning factors are predictable from the phonetic environment. Maybe, but I don't see it. The second possibility is that speakers have come to have certain words stored in their lexicon as containing an //I//, whereas the "correct", written form has a different vowel. If this is the case, selective analogy could be responsible on a case-by-case basis, analogy with other "legitimate" word-elements, and this might involve "knowledge" of morphology. Possible candidates that I might expect to find, off the top of my head, would be things like pre- /pri/- vs pro- giving forms like *"pretect" (=protect), *"previde" (=provide) by analogy with "prevent", "pretend" for example. John's example of "palice" = "Alice" is another good candidate, because -ice (pronounced with non-schwa) is a legitimate suffix, and so is -ace. Although I can't think of a great number of examples right now -ace Horace terrace menace solace -ice lattice malice crevice avarice For example, one might expect there to be pressure on "Eustace", because of Doris, Phyllis, Eunice, Norris, Morris, Willis, Harris, Davies. If forms like disagreeable or igreeable or even igree (=agree) are heard, then I would consider that as a problem for this "analogy" theory. John Hewson wrote: > And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. Good point. Are these forms then sources for analogical spread? Cecil Ward. -----Original Message----- From: John Hewson [mailto:jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca] Sent: 18 July 2003 01:47 To: Cecil Ward Cc: HISTLING at LISTSERV.SC.EDU On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Cecil Ward wrote: (snippet) > The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? Not true. Remember AA Milne's They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; Christopher Robin went down with Alice. I've often heard Canada pronounced Canida by British speakers. And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. The first vowel in _disaster_ is reduced to schwa in American English, as is the last vowel in _Latin_; is the [i] that is heard in British English in these words a reduced vowel? The American pronunciation [latn] has a syllabic [n] in the last syllable and no vowel. (The converse happens in _pattern_, where BE has [patn], but in AE, where there is r-colouring, the second vowel is clearly heard). The question is further complicated by the fact that American schwa is often barred [i]. **************************************************************************** *** John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 Henrietta Harvey Professor Emeritus fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 **************************************************************************** *** From lass at IAFRICA.COM Sat Jul 19 14:06:14 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:14 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I'd like to add a few more points and some queries to the discussion. 1. What exactly is meant by 'schwa', and where does the notion come from that the vowel was 'once' lower and has been raised? The neutralisation of unstressed Vs that began to occur in late OE can be interpreted as merger in [e], and the evidence for 'schwa' in the usual sense (a middish central vowel that nobody wants to transcribe too closely) for any period before the 17th century is at least ambiguous. The first descriptions of central vowels in the voluminous phonetic literature of the 16th-17th century comes after 1650, and only in stressed syllables. See my discussion in Cambridge History of the English Language, III. 2. I think some of us raised in different traditions may be talking past each other. As an American raised in the SOAS tradition of transcription, 'barred-i' means not whatever Smith & Trager thought it might be, but a high central unrounded vowel, and that we certainly do not get in these environments. The IPA transcription I think is meant (would someobdy clarify?) is a further centralised version of small-cap I (which is itself a centralised [e]). 3. The 'rural' pronunciations of words like 'China' etc. with a final vowel other than 'schwa' normally do not have small cap I (that would sound very North English), but in fact [i] or [Ii] - at least they did in S Indiana in the 1970s, where I was exposed to them. If sung versions are evidence, this vowel is [i] in some Virginia lects of the earlier parts of this century, as witnessed by 'Virginia' and similar forms in the recordings of the Carter Family. Roger Lass From roger.wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Sat Jul 19 14:06:35 2003 From: roger.wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (roger wright) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:35 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The [-is] written "-ace" in Terrace, "-ice" in "malice" and "-is" in "Doris" can't really be called a suffix, though, not being a separate morpheme ..... > John's example of "palice" = "Alice" is another good candidate, because > -ice (pronounced with non-schwa) is a legitimate suffix, and so is -ace. > Although I can't think of a great number of examples right now > -ace Horace terrace menace solace > -ice lattice malice crevice avarice > > For example, one might expect there to be pressure on "Eustace", because > of Doris, Phyllis, Eunice, Norris, Morris, Willis, Harris, Davies. From jrader at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Sat Jul 19 14:06:54 2003 From: jrader at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Jim Rader) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:54 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: <6CFE0AAEA0B7E84A9E6292B3A056A68D164CE0@meadowlark2.home.ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > In the US it was a feature of some rural dialects, and still is to an > extent, but the environment is different. Word-final schwa (the one > that picks up an -r in much of the world) is [I] (the same small-cap > i) in these dialects. You see it reflected orthographically as in > attempts to reproduce rustic, period pronunciation: Arizona --> > Arizony, sasparilla --> sasparilly, umbrella --> umbrelly, Alabama --> > Alabamy, and such. All the cases I can think of are at least > trisyllabic. Doing this with "Cuba, sofa, panda" seems very strange > to me. There is also an [ae] "ash" that raises to [I] in words like > Arkansas --> ArkInsas; this may be the sort of thing your SIddam is > showing. > > I tend to think of these as a 19th century phenomenon, but I'm not an > Anglicist and could be corrected on that. Nor can I picture how > someone who says "umbrelly" might pronounce "communicate", so these > may be entirely unrelated phenomenoa. > > Bob Rankin > U. of Kansas Final schwa is perhaps a different category entirely. It has distinctive permutations in varieties of English on both sides of the Atlantic, such as hyperrhotacism and "Bristol l," that may have to do with constraints on final schwa or may have some completely different origin. There is also a batch of American toponyms/ethnonyms, most acquired from North American French, that have final [O] or less often [A] and sometimes [ey] where one might have expected reduction to schwa. The original vowel in French was presumably usually [a] or [A], which after English stress placement on a non-final syllable was not reduced. >From the top of my head, examples of ethnonyms: Chickasaw, Choctaw, Quapaw, Chippewa; ethnonyms and toponyms: Arkansas, Omaha, Ioway (though usually Iowa with schwa), Utah (from Spanish, presumably), Wichita. There must be many others. As for the final vowel of , note that in some more traditional "rural" varieties of American English and I believe still in Southern American English the suffix <-y> was pronounced [I]. I've wondered if [I] for schwa doesn't involve morphologizing in some cases. Of course, [i] in "General American" pronunciation (a convenient fiction, I know) has traditionally been realized as [I]/schwa in "Missouri" or "Cincinnati" in "folk speech." The "proper" pronunciation of , i.e., whether final schwa, [I], or [i] was once the subject of furious debate. There is a well-known article on the matter by the late Allan Walker Read in the 1933 volume of _American Speech_. Jim Rader From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Sat Jul 19 14:07:30 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:07:30 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to...? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, I'm afraid I can't offer any extra data on this, except to say that to my phonetician's way of thinking, the unstressed vowels in my Southern British English 'communicate' and 'Saddam' are definitely not identical in quality. In the former, the potential schwa is much closer to schwa, and in the latter it does have a raised quality somewhere between barred [i] and [I]. Although I'm not sure that a) the following comment applies in all cases, or that b) some kind of phonological change can be ruled out for all speakers of all varieties, I wonder whether this is actually sometimes just a phonetic effect due to the high front position of the tongue with coronals. That would certainly take care of the quality difference in my own speech. I'm not able to offer an acoustic analysis of formants right now, but I will do. all the best Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Sun Jul 20 16:28:46 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:28:46 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >As for the final vowel of , note that in some more traditional "rural" varieties of American English and I believe still in Southern American English the suffix <-y> was pronounced [I]. I've wondered if [I] for schwa doesn't involve morphologizing in some cases. Of course, [i] in "General American" pronunciation (a convenient fiction, I know) has traditionally been realized as [I]/schwa in "Missouri" or "Cincinnati" in "folk speech." The "proper" pronunciation of , i.e., whether final schwa, [I], or [i] was once the subject of furious debate. There is a well-known article on the matter by the late Allan Walker Read in the 1933 volume of _American Speech_. The schwa > [I] change is also discussed by Edgar Sturtevant in his book _Linguistic Change_ from before 1920. He recognizes two kinds of sound change, what he calls "primary sound change", i.e., regular Lautgesetz, and what he calls "secondary sound change", his way of talking about borrowing and analogy ("lexical diffusion" for some). Our schwa to [I] change is one of his examples of secondary sound change. His split treatment of sound change is well worth reading since he presages developments that didn't recur until the '60's. Bob Rankin From lass at IAFRICA.COM Mon Jul 21 12:31:59 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:31:59 EDT Subject: schwa-raising, lexical diffusion &c. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- 1. One of the contributions to this discussion raises some interesting problems, in attempting to distinguish between 'proper' neogrammarian change and 'secondary' change. I think this is a distinction without a difference: any historian who works with large-scale corpora covering long time-periods ought to be aware that neogrammarian change is not a 'kind' of change, but simply the result of completed lexical diffusion. Attempts have been made (notably by Labov) to distinguish the two, but they do not really succeed: see the discussion in Joan Bybee's 2001 book on phonology and language use for some good arguments. Neogrammarian change is an artifact of the way historians intersect the time-lines of languages, and the result in part of looking primarily at institutionalised 'standard' or 'focussed' languages as the main data sources. This is often forced on us by the textual record: but if one has good corpora at one's disposal it seems to be the case that the normal state for any language is to be constantly varying and constantly undergoing change, which I suppose nobody would deny. But the standard shall we say 'Wang/Chen S-curve' of diffusing change can abort at any time, leaving residue; it can go to completion, leaving neogrammarian Ausnahmslosigkeit; or it can reverse, giving what Wolfgang Dressler once called 'lexical fading', which is distinguishable from lexical diffusion only if (contingently) you happen to know the vectoral properties of the time-line you are intersecting. I would suggest that neogrammarian change is the same kind of artifact as speciation in palaeontology: it is the paucity of the record and the lack of 'intermediate stages' in so many textual traditions that creates the illusion that 'transformative' change is even possible. Textual historians generally have a rather different view, because their data is of the kind that - if the traditions are rich enough - typically show only very old changes 'complete', and most of the classical ones 'in progress', or in mess, which is a better description. Most important, if you can catch changes that later turn out to be neogrammarian in progress and track them, they often turn out to be not 'events' at all, but very long term trends, which look like X > Y only if you restrict your vision to the X and Y portions of the trajectory, or if this is what's available, in which case faute de mieux you get neogrammarian change. As a simple example, the (now) neogrammarian loss of postvocalic /r/ in non-rhotic dialects of English actually took over four centuries to complete, starting very slowly indeed in the 14th century in some isolated lexical items, but only picking up steam after 1700, and still not complete even in 'proto-RP' in the 1870s and 80s. The same thing is true of the lengthening of Middle English /a/ (early Modern /ae/) before voiceless fricatives in Southern British English and its descendants (giving the contrast in these dialects and their descendants between the vowels of 'cat' and 'pass'): the first sporadic evidence of lengthening comes from the 1680s, but the change is still not completed even in the London 'standards' in the 1870s, and there is still variation even in single speakers, as well as between speakers. (On both these developments see the discussions and data in AJ Ellis' Early English pronunciation, vol.V.) Roger Lass From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Tue Jul 22 16:46:04 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 12:46:04 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Formant measurements were made of single FFT and LPC spectra at the vowel midpoint (128 sample window at 11025 sample rate - lowpass filtered at 5000 Hz). The words used were 'Saddam' with coronal consonants either side of the unstressed schwa, 'Copernicus' with non-coronal consonants flanking the unstressed schwa, and 'Sidney, with coronals flanking a stressed /I/ for comparison. Three tokens each recorded in a carrier sentence "Say X again" by me - 31 yr old male speakers of Southern British English. The vowels were all of extremely short duration and in the case of 'Copernicus' showed extensive F2 transitions (the vowel in 'communicate' was investigated but was nasalised and so no reliable measures could be made of F2 and F3). No F2 transitions were seen in 'Saddam' or 'Sidney'. The unstressed vowel of 'Saddam' had an average duration of 49.3 ms (range 47-53 ms) and of 'Copernicus' had an average duration of 31.3 ms (range 28-36 ms). The stressed vowel of 'Sidney' had an average duration of 56.7 ms (range 49-69 ms). Note the similarity of this to the unstressed schwa durations in 'Saddam' even though it is stressed. F1 values for 'Saddam' ranged between 330 Hz and 400 Hz (average 373.3 Hz) whereas F1 for 'Copernicus' showed values between 435 Hz and 460 Hz (average 446 Hz) - F1 was therefore lower for the 'Saddam' vowel. For 'Sidney', F1 was 384 Hz on average (range 360-408 Hz). F2 values were average of 1601 Hz for 'Saddam' (1541-1641 Hz range) and 1621.3 Hz for 'Copernicus' (range 1600 - 1643 Hz). F2 was therefore also lower on average, if very slightly, though the range for 'Saddam' was greater, and F2 was moving in the case of 'Copernicus'. The fall in F2 throughout the vowel in 'Copernicus' was 394.7 Hz on average (range 172 - 603, Hz values between 1809 and 1206). This obviously makes the idea of an F2 'value' for the 'Copernicus' vowel more or less problematic depending on your view of how vowel quality is perceived. For 'Sidney', F2 moved little and was 1865.7 Hz on average (range 1813-1910 Hz). F3 values were more or less static throughout. The average for 'Saddam' was 2577.7 Hz (range 2541 - 2571), and for 'Copernicus' 2400.3 Hz (range 2400 - 2401). F3 was therefore higher for the 'Saddam' vowel. In 'Sidney', F3 was also static and at 2546 Hz on average (range 2498-2594 Hz). These results are only from 3 repetitions of 1 speaker, but they do indicate that there are quality variations in the static F1 and F3 targets of schwa vowels. Quality differences are also likely on the basis of F2, though it is unclear how a general F2 target should be identified. A higher jaw position in 'Saddam' and relatively little lingual movement away from a high front position for the coronals may cause the lowering of F1 and possibly also raise F3 according to perturbation theory. In a standard vowel plot, the 'Saddam' vowel will be higher than the 'Copernicus' vowel, but the problem of identifying a good F2 value for 'Copernicus' schwa and the lack of representation of F3 means that it is not possible to locate this latter vowel accurately. Relative to stressed /I/ of 'Sidney', the 'Saddam' vowel shows a greater similarity in terms of F1 and F3 values, but F2 is much higher for /I/, suggesting that the 'Saddam' vowel is more located more centrally than /I/, and higher then 'Copernicus' schwa within my vowel space. It is not the case that all schwas are subject to raising (at least in my British English speech), and the effect appears to be a phonetic one due to coronal consonants. Mark Mark J. Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Thu Jul 24 12:22:35 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:22:35 EDT Subject: phonological change as lexical diffusion. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > 1. One of the contributions to this discussion raises some interesting problems, in attempting to distinguish between 'proper' neogrammarian change and 'secondary' change. I think this is a distinction without a difference: any historian who works with large-scale corpora covering long time-periods ought to be aware that neogrammarian change is not a 'kind' of change, but simply the result of completed lexical diffusion. (truncated) This has certainly been the position of many text historians and sociolinguists (including creolists) since Schuchardt. But while extensive corpora can provide insight into many aspects of language, they are unreliable as a guide to sound change type and chronology, because of the strong tendency for written language to preserve the spellings of individual words. Even corpora supposedly based on transcription (e.g., Bloomfield's Algonquian texts or James Dorsey's Siouan ones) are poor at these tasks as they have nearly always undergone normalization. In other words, lexical diffusion is certainly a good way to describe spelling change, but it leaves open the question of phonological change, and especially its actuation phase. Practicing historical linguists have always found that they can routinely distinguish among (1) change of articulatory habit, (2) borrowing, including dialect borrowing or imitation, and (3) change effected in imitation of some already-existing model. These are not distinctions without a difference nor do they depend exclusively on when the time line is intercepted: they are simply different sorts of human activity, some cognitive and some not. The first of them can often be seen in its clearest form in regular distribution of allophonic features, something that is hard to show is the result of lexical diffusion (tho' one might additionally insist on change in distinctive features as a part of a definition of real sound change). The second, borrowing, is a conscious or quasi-conscious process and may rely on social factors. The third matches what we traditionally call analogy and may be stimulated by the first and/or second. Historical linguists also generally insist, quite rightly, on dealing with change in langue, not just parole. The boundary between the two became a bit muddy in the early generative phonologies of the '60's and then again with attempts to make phonetics more relevant to phonology in more recent times. But the langue/parole distinction is still an important part of understanding language change. Those specializing in language usage may well wish to ignore what virtually all practicing historical linguists have traditionally seen as three different sorts of change. For them, these may not be interesting distinctions, and they may wish to use a cover term like "lexical diffusion" for some or all of them. So be it, but lack of interest in individual mechanisms or occasional difficulty in separating their effects does not make them any less real. That the three traditionally recognized origins for change in pronunciation interact comes as no surprise either. Labov's recent work (since his 1980 LSA presidential address) does handle this in depth, but it was discussed prominently not only by Sturtevant but by Bloomfield in 1933:365ff. In fact, one seldom has to go beyond Bloomfield to find most of the points dealt with that many linguists have debated with much sound and fury since. But, as Bloomfield made clear, interaction among mechanisms does not legitimize either confusing or deliberately lumping them. Bob Rankin Linguistics Dept. University of Kansas From rankin at KU.EDU Thu Jul 24 12:23:23 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:23:23 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sensitized to this question by the recent correspondence I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucette (sorry if I misspell her name) say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim. Her male colleague said the same word a moment later with a phonemic schwa. Whatever their etic makeup, phonologically these things are lax high front vowels. It was very striking. It also seemed to me that the fronted variant of /k/ was used with the /I/. Bob Rankin -----Original Message----- From: Mark J. Jones [mailto:mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK] Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:46 AM To: HISTLING at LISTSERV.SC.EDU Subject: Re: schwa-raising - formants ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Formant measurements were made of single FFT and LPC spectra at the vowel midpoint (128 sample window at 11025 sample rate - lowpass filtered at 5000 Hz). The words used were 'Saddam' with coronal consonants either side of the unstressed schwa, 'Copernicus' with non-coronal consonants flanking the unstressed schwa, and 'Sidney, with coronals flanking a stressed /I/ for comparison. Three tokens each recorded in a carrier sentence "Say X again" by me - 31 yr old male speakers of Southern British English. The vowels were all of extremely short duration and in the case of 'Copernicus' showed extensive F2 transitions (the vowel in 'communicate' was investigated but was nasalised and so no reliable measures could be made of F2 and F3). No F2 transitions were seen in 'Saddam' or 'Sidney'. The unstressed vowel of 'Saddam' had an average duration of 49.3 ms (range 47-53 ms) and of 'Copernicus' had an average duration of 31.3 ms (range 28-36 ms). The stressed vowel of 'Sidney' had an average duration of 56.7 ms (range 49-69 ms). Note the similarity of this to the unstressed schwa durations in 'Saddam' even though it is stressed. F1 values for 'Saddam' ranged between 330 Hz and 400 Hz (average 373.3 Hz) whereas F1 for 'Copernicus' showed values between 435 Hz and 460 Hz (average 446 Hz) - F1 was therefore lower for the 'Saddam' vowel. For 'Sidney', F1 was 384 Hz on average (range 360-408 Hz). F2 values were average of 1601 Hz for 'Saddam' (1541-1641 Hz range) and 1621.3 Hz for 'Copernicus' (range 1600 - 1643 Hz). F2 was therefore also lower on average, if very slightly, though the range for 'Saddam' was greater, and F2 was moving in the case of 'Copernicus'. The fall in F2 throughout the vowel in 'Copernicus' was 394.7 Hz on average (range 172 - 603, Hz values between 1809 and 1206). This obviously makes the idea of an F2 'value' for the 'Copernicus' vowel more or less problematic depending on your view of how vowel quality is perceived. For 'Sidney', F2 moved little and was 1865.7 Hz on average (range 1813-1910 Hz). F3 values were more or less static throughout. The average for 'Saddam' was 2577.7 Hz (range 2541 - 2571), and for 'Copernicus' 2400.3 Hz (range 2400 - 2401). F3 was therefore higher for the 'Saddam' vowel. In 'Sidney', F3 was also static and at 2546 Hz on average (range 2498-2594 Hz). These results are only from 3 repetitions of 1 speaker, but they do indicate that there are quality variations in the static F1 and F3 targets of schwa vowels. Quality differences are also likely on the basis of F2, though it is unclear how a general F2 target should be identified. A higher jaw position in 'Saddam' and relatively little lingual movement away from a high front position for the coronals may cause the lowering of F1 and possibly also raise F3 according to perturbation theory. In a standard vowel plot, the 'Saddam' vowel will be higher than the 'Copernicus' vowel, but the problem of identifying a good F2 value for 'Copernicus' schwa and the lack of representation of F3 means that it is not possible to locate this latter vowel accurately. Relative to stressed /I/ of 'Sidney', the 'Saddam' vowel shows a greater similarity in terms of F1 and F3 values, but F2 is much higher for /I/, suggesting that the 'Saddam' vowel is more located more centrally than /I/, and higher then 'Copernicus' schwa within my vowel space. It is not the case that all schwas are subject to raising (at least in my British English speech), and the effect appears to be a phonetic one due to coronal consonants. Mark Mark J. Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at cam.ac.uk Thu Jul 24 21:20:17 2003 From: mjj13 at cam.ac.uk (Mark J. Jones) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:20:17 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Bob Rankin comments on the pronunciation of 'communication' by the BBC's Lise Doucett (see appended text). He states that the pronunciation involved a lax high front vowel /I/, with a fronted realisation of /k/ preceding it. He concludes that regardless of phonetics, this realisation is a phonological /I/. Firstly, I would like to point out that some speakers may indeed have phonologised this pattern, though it remains a moot point whether /I/ or /@/ would be the target of closest auditory similarity. There is also the issue of a fronted /u/, normal in many varieties of British English. I find this an easier alternative than /I/ for 'communication' on auditory grounds, but there may be variation here too. Further, in 'communication' (which in my speech has a schwa-like unstressed vowel), the nasalisation may play a perceptual role: nasalisation will make the bandwidth of F1 broader, and also affect the higher formants. The untressed vowels in question are very short, and if in addition formant transitions are moving throughout (as in the case of F2 i reported for schwa in 'Copernicus'), quality variation in perception is likely. So it seems that a great deal of variation is heard. The same comment is made for schwa realisations of the STRUT vowel in Cardiff (Mees and Collins, p. 189, in Urban Voices, eds. Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty, Arnold, 1999) and for schwa in Californian English by Peter Ladefoged in his description for the IPA Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 1999). I'm not sure on what grounds Bob Rankin makes the claim that these vowels are phonologically /I/. If it is on the basis of fronted /k/, the articulation of /k/ before /@/ in 'Copernicus' or the /^/ vowel in 'cud', or the reverse epsilon/long schwa in 'curd' is definitely more similar in auditory terms to /k/ in 'kid' than /k/ in 'card', as it will have a relatively front articulation. In other words, /k/ sounds fronted for many central vowels. I would venture to say that the degree of fronting of /k/ proves nothing in this case, and that the phonological status of IPA reverse E as an allophone of a particular vowel remains to be demonstrated. >From the phonetic point of view, the two are non-identical in my own speech. Clearly more instrumental work is needed. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge Bob Rankin's original comments: > Sensitized to this question by the recent correspondence I was listening > to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucette (sorry if I > misspell her name) say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with > a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim. Her > male colleague said the same word a moment later with a phonemic schwa. > Whatever their etic makeup, phonologically these things are lax high > front vowels. It was very striking. It also seemed to me that the fronted > variant of /k/ was used with the /I/. > > Bob Rankin > From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Thu Jul 24 21:21:15 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:21:15 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap In-Reply-To: <6CFE0AAEA0B7E84A9E6292B3A056A68D164CEC@meadowlark2.home.ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It really does seem that these phenomena are not simply (or solely) "phonetic environment-governed". One further example heard today from a news reporter on the BBC in England, /fælkIn/ ="falcon" so not in contact with a syllable containing /i/ or /j/. The vowel in question was clearly audible albeit fleeting. But then a minute afterwards the same speaker said /falk at n/ twice, and continued with the schwa-type pronunciation afterwards. Clearly above the "phonemic quantum level", if I mix metaphors. Indeed "falkin" is a possible word of English. Cecil Ward. From rankin at KU.EDU Fri Jul 25 16:27:16 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:16 EDT Subject: schwa-raising. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I'm not sure on what grounds Bob Rankin makes the claim that these vowels are phonologically /I/. It's my phonological identification of it as a native speaker of English, albeit one of the US varieties. I take it that native speaker reaction is really the only factor that enters into such identification. Personally, I find the acoustics of such things interesting and appreciate those who go to the trouble to take the measurements, but let's face it, the relationship between what is "really" there phonetically and the phonology of the situation is rather indirect with lots of factors in play. People perceive things all the time that aren't even there objectively, and they completely miss or misidentify things that are clearly present objectively. I like to use the example [dlaes] 'glass' in introductory courses. Students who speak languages that permit initial /dl/ clusters always get it right, but all my English-speaking students swear up and down they heard a /g/. But they didn't. They just perceive it that way. Actually, if anyone is curious, it is possible you can still get a playback on the BBC website. The quotation in question was on the version of Newshour carried in the States by some NPR stations around local noon on July 23 -- early evening in Britain. Bob Rankin From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Fri Jul 25 16:27:31 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:31 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- To clarify; when I raised this matter in my original post, I was very much concerned only with deviation which is sufficiently marked that it "crosses the gap between phonemes", if you understand me, from the viewpoint of an albeit sensitized hearear who is a native speaker of some English dialect. So my litmus test is the very hearer's "phonemic reading" of it, if you like. That's how Bob Rankin _heard_ his particular word, so that instance passes my test, regardless of the precise phonetic realisation of Lise Doucett's pronunciation. And a "phonemic-level distinction is possible in that case, just as **"pritect" /prI/- and "protect" /pr@/- are distinct possible words. I first noticed this phenomenon because when only _half listening_ to the news, hearing a "wrong vowel" (phonemically distinct) made me start, as if the speaker had selected a non-existent though possible word of English. Certainly there are some instances of /I/ or /i/ where English orthography would suggest some other vowel, possibly with an unstressed "schwa-class" realisation. In my dialect "diprive" and "diny", possibly with /d'i/ rather than /dI/) seems to be predominant. Similarly -age-words, with /I/ such as villige, tonnage, footage, storage. However, these don't count for my purposes, because there is no "deviance" from the norm, that _is_ the norm. Taking Bob on trust on the cimunicate example, I don't see it as being clearly be predictable by rule though, and so can't see it as an allophone. Cecil Ward. From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Fri Jul 25 16:27:42 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:42 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, Cecil Ward comments that: > It really does seem that these phenomena are not simply (or solely) > "phonetic environment-governed". and gives the example of the pronunciation [fælkIn] ="falcon" on the BBC. The claim for a phonological process is apparently supported by the comment that the schwa vowel here is "not in contact with a syllable containing /i/ or /j/", i.e. this is the conditioning environment. Thereafter, the speaker apparently said [falk at n]. I would like to make clear that my own instrumental study identified surrounding coronal consonants (not therefore /i/ or /j/) as the phonetic conditioning factor, in which case 'falcon' could qualify, having a final /n/. There will also be some nasalisation of the vowel, which could also contribute to differences. There may be other phonetic factors which contribute. I determined a lower jaw height to be crucial in 'raising' schwa. When speaking loudly there is a tendency to open the mouth more. This can have the effect of lowering the vowels, especially the central ones. When teaching a practical phonetics class demonstrating the IPA transcription of vowels, it is hard to get [@] and not RP /^/ (IPA turned A) if projecting the voice in a large room. Cecil Ward's speaker may therefore have varied this aspect of speech (particularly if involved in a 'performance' of some sort for broadcast), but the very fact that the same speaker said [@] thereafter suggests that for them, this vowel is underlyingly /@/. I've already alluded to the possibility of there being variation between speakers here, and hinted that as the unstressed vowels are so short, their quality may be hard to determine precisely. This goes as much for perception as for instrumental analysis. Vowel perception is a tricky business at the best of times, with issues like normalisation across speakers and environments, and the utility (or not) of coarticulatory features to surrounding consonants playing a role. At the end of the day these impressionistic comments are all very well, but as anyone who has done any acoustic analysis will confirm, the gulf between what we think we hear and what is there in the signal can be immense. Speech perception is for this very reason a complex subject. By this, I do not mean to suggest that Bob Rankin (who commented on [I]-like realisations previously) and Cecil Ward are wrong, merely that they may have, under certain conditions, attributed a vowel showing a particular phonetic effect to the vowel /I/. This is arguably how sound change happens, and so there is nothing surprising in it, but I feel, as I have said before, that a larger instrumental production study, possibly involving perceptual identification and discrimination experiments on vowels, is the best way to resolve this matter. I end by saying once again that the only (relatively) objective data on this issue so far, on my own speech, shows that 'raised schwa' is not phoentically equivalent to /I/, but is probably best transcribed IPA reverse E (secondary cardinal 19). Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Sat Jul 26 17:01:44 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:01:44 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, more on raised schwa, I'm afraid. Bob Rankin and Cecil Ward have both said basically the same thing: they hear these vowels as /I/, and so they are /I/. I take this point, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny on a wider basis. There are really two major aspects to the phonological identification of any sound on which we can carry out phonetic investigations: production, and perception. It's clear that for both Bob and Cecil, the raised schwa counts as /I/, i.e. perceptually they identify the vowel with /I/. I'm not sure what Cecil's linguistic background is, but Bob is not a native speaker of the same variety as me, and therefore his analysis is like saying that because a speaker of a particular variety of English cannot hear the difference between alveolar /t/ and dental /t/ in Tamil, there is no distinction in Tamil. Or that because s/he hears French /t/ as English /d/, that is what is French /d/ is phonologically. Clearly these comments are untenable for the Tamil or French and maybe also therefore for differences between varieties of English. Production-wise, we can claim that if two things have a consistently measurable difference (acoustic or otherwise) which cannot be attributed to passive effects of surrounding segments etc., then they do not have the same input to the speech production mechanism, i.e. for that speaker two separate entities exist at the level of motor programming. It would be normal to regard these as separate phonemes. Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. For many speakers, raised schwa may be identified as /I/, and this would lead presumably to a merger of raised schwa and /I/. But for others (like me) these two things are not only acoustically, but also perecptually, distinct. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From lass at IAFRICA.COM Sat Jul 26 17:02:31 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:02:31 EDT Subject: schwa-raising and related Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This discussion is wandering off into some rather interesting byways. I'd like to make some observations and raise a few questions. 1. Why does a token have to 'belong' to some specific phoneme at all? Are phoneme inventories necessarily exhaustive? Couldn't it be the case that in noisy or obscure environments you can get values that hover between what might in other environments be norms for other phonemes, and that are simply not assignable? It could be a kind of structuralist error to assume that every utterance token belongs exhaustively to some determinate class. Perhaps, since hearers are looking for meaning, a lot of detail is simply allowed to be fudged, as long as context gives enough clues for interpretation? There are alternative models of phonological structure (like the one in Bybee 2001) that don't in fact have fully determinate inventories. Perhaps worth thinking about. 2. On 'falcon'. I wonder what the background of the speaker who started all this was, and how much of the word was actually listened to as carefully as the unstressed vowel. What follows is impressionistic, but perhaps no less relevant for that. I was brought up in New York and am married to a speaker whose dialect is a kind of 'mixed' E Pennsylvania and New York. But I have lived in 'British' environments for the past 30 years, 11 years in Edinburgh and 20 in Cape Town. In other words, my primary exposure to other speakers of English over this time has been to dialects other than my own, and I have been teaching in these environments. One thing I've observed over the past few years is that I have two quite distinct versions of /ae/; a lower one, which is native, and a higher one, which is distinctly not, but more like an RP /ae/ than a New York one. The higher version is not 'native', but adopted. I also have, like any New Yorker, and here I have not changed, a dark /l/ in all positions pretty much, though the coarticulation varies with the surrounding vowels. Looking at my own pronunciations of 'falcon', I find that if I use the higher /ae/, the following /l/ is palato-velarised ('barred-i' vocalic quality), and the unstressed final vowel is distinctly [I]-like. If I use the slightly lower native /ae/, which may be a bit retracted as well, the /l/ is uvularised, and the unstressed vowel is [@] quality. I don't know to what extent there's a literature in English on the effect of preceding vowels on /l/-quality, but my system appears to be rather sensitive to even rather small distinctions, rather more like Finnish than the usual descriptions of English. If I go totally 'Brit' and have my 'bought' vowel (approximately IPA 'backward c') in the first syllable of 'falcon', the /l/ is pharyngealised, and the unstressed final vowel rather a centralised [^]. So it looks as if at least words containing /l/ may be 'harmonic' to a certain extent. It would be nice to know what kind of /ae/ the speaker who started this all had, and how complex the substrate of his speech was. From colkitto at SPRINT.CA Mon Jul 28 10:07:31 2003 From: colkitto at SPRINT.CA (colkitto) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:07:31 EDT Subject: anecdotal stuff Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I seem to remember hearing, on an anecdotal level, that the form mensarum (genitive plural of mensa, recited by possibly millions of schoolchildren, Sir Winston Churchill being only the most famous example) is nowhere actually attested in Classical Latin. Any references? Thanks in advance, Robert Orr From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Mon Jul 28 10:14:29 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:14:29 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - common samples In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am very grateful to Mark Jones for his insightful remarks, and for bringing some sanity to this discussion. Unfortunately, I am not able to hear Mark's subjects' speech, nor has Mark had access to the speakers I have quoted. It would be good if we could compare perceptions of the same material. Bob was good enough to give an example that was recorded and publicly accessible. I'll try to do the same so that Mark can give his opinion on a specific example. Maybe some sound recordings on the Web somewhere? > I'm not sure what Cecil's linguistic background is, I was brought up in England in rural Staffordshire and my parents are farming people, speakers of Derbyshire and North Staffordshire dialects. My dialect of English may differ significantly from that of Mark Jones, which doesn't help. I find great difficulty with many phonetic textbooks that deal with English and refer to "RP" or "Standard English", southern varieties that I don't have a command of. I am certainly no phonetician, and English is not my specialist study. (Scottish Gaelic syntax is, for what its worth.) > Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. Indeed, and we first have to find some common data. I'd like to ask Mark if he can find a speaker in which there is a wide variation _of the same word_, as in my falcin/falcon BBC reporter. Perhaps a researcher could check out hearers' perceptions too by asking them to write down what they hear? Cecil Ward. From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 10:08:15 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:08:15 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Bob Rankin and Cecil Ward have both said basically the same thing: they hear these vowels as /I/, and so they are /I/. I take this point, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny on a wider basis. That depends on whether "wider basis" is intelligible in this context or not. I'm certainly far from certain what it might mean. > It's clear that for both Bob and Cecil, the raised schwa counts as /I/, i.e. perceptually they identify the vowel with /I/. I believe that's about all either of us has really claimed. If it sounds like an English /I/ to us, then to us it's an English /I/. What it might be to someone from NYC or Glasgow is immaterial to our particular identification. What the sound turns out to be spectrographically might be different from phonetic [I], but that is also immaterial to our phonological identification, isn't it. > Bob is not a native speaker of the same variety as me, and therefore his analysis is like saying that because a speaker of a particular variety of English cannot hear the difference between alveolar /t/ and dental /t/ in Tamil, there is no distinction in Tamil. No, it's like another speaker of Tamil saying that *to him* it sounds like the one or the other variety of (apical/laminal) stop. > Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. Again, what's being claimed here is far from clear. Certainly no amount of understanding of formant structure or other etic information constitutes a valid test. Only identification made by one or more speakers would be linguistically valid, and if possible that test should be conducted under normal conditions of "noisy channel", etc. One can conceive of a number of possible experiments, but the "experment" with Bob and Cecil is already conclusive. If Mark hears it differently, it merely shows that he has a slightly different phonology and talks funny. :-) Bob Rankin From cecil at cecilward.com Mon Jul 28 10:14:40 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:14:40 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > in which case 'falcon' could qualify, having a final /n/. There will also be some nasalisation of the vowel, which could also contribute to differences. So would other nasals count - the /m/ in cimunicate ? Wouldn't help with "Siddam", of course. > Cecil Ward's speaker may therefore have varied this aspect of speech (particularly if involved in a 'performance' of some sort for broadcast), I speculated at the time as that pragmatics might be a factor. The reporter was introducing the subject of his report, and the "falcin" was "new, noteworthy" material. He gestured towards the bird and its owner. His intonation said to me that the subject was "something the viewer should be surprised by/marvel at". He then carried on talking having established the context, and used a more even intonation with lower pitch, and fewer words were heavily emphasised. Certainly the first instance of the word was higher pitched and slightly louder, as best I recall. Cecil. From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 10:15:28 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:15:28 EDT Subject: schwa-raising and related Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > 1. Why does a token have to 'belong' to some specific phoneme at all? Are phoneme inventories necessarily exhaustive? Couldn't it be the case that in noisy or obscure environments you can get values that hover between what might in other environments be norms for other phonemes, and that are simply not assignable? It could be a kind of structuralist error to assume that every utterance token belongs exhaustively to some determinate class. Perhaps, since hearers are looking for meaning, a lot of detail is simply allowed to be fudged, as long as context gives enough clues for interpretation? There are alternative models of phonological structure (like the one in Bybee 2001) that don't in fact have fully determinate inventories. There are several different questions here. I suppose everyone would agree that individual tokens can be and are "fudged" (i.e., in production) and/or misperceived because of noisy channels, etc. I take that to be an aspect of "parole", "performance" or whatever, and assume that the underlying or "stored" forms of these same words do have some sort of determinate phonological shape. Beyond that, I suppose one's answer depends on the version of phonological theory one subscribes to. Praguean orthodoxy specified one answer to the neutralization question and American Structuralism another. Various generative phonologies have tried to combine the two to different degrees. But I think all agree on some sort of distinctive (underlying in some sense) phonological representation for all words. And with the exception of some instances of sound symbolism and loanword phonology I think most would agree on an underlying inventory. Interestingly though, in the development of generative phonologies of the '60's and '70's (i.e., before I became bored with them and went back to strictly diachronic work), there was no place in the phonology of a language itself where an inventory of phonemes, underlying or otherwise, was specified. There were only underlying representations and rules that operated on them. The matrices with all the little pluses and minuses in the various textbooks were not, in fact, part of the "phonological grammar" of the language. They were just there for the linguist's reference. This said, I'd be surprised to find a native English dialect where [I] and [schwa] were really allophonic. Neutralization in "parole", yes, but probably not in "langue." I could be corrected on that point however, since, as I've said, I'm not an Anglicist. I just speak the language by accident of history. Bob Rankin Linguistics Dept. University of Kansas Lawrence, KS From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Mon Jul 28 15:14:04 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:14:04 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - common samples Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Cecil and fellow list members, many thanks to Cecil for the latest post on schwa, and the kind comments on my own contributions. We seem agreed that more data is required, but i'd just like to make a comment on the request for variation in the same word. In fact, production variation in repeated utterances of the same word is precisely what we find with acoustic analysis (even if these are consistently related to a single phoneme by our perceptual mechanisms). For example, I've just been measuring some data on voice onset time (VOT = the period between the release of the stop and the onset of vocal fold vibration) in Barnsley English. For one female speaker I have (so far) VOT values of 71 ms, 71 ms, 51 ms, 53.5 ms. This kind of variation is normal and is why phoneticians ask their subjects to repeatedly utter the same phrase or word, so that we can get an average as well as an idea of the range of variation. This speaker has an average VOT for /t/ of 61.6 ms, which is far in excess of her values for /d/ (average around 15 ms). So, I am pretty convinced that *any* utterance of *any* word would show a great deal of variation in its acoustic structure (frequency and amplitude values, and relative timing of events). The real question is, what boundaries is Cecil employing to hear /I/, and do the formant values for raised schwa cross those perceptual boundaries? This is not a question which can be directly answered by acoustic analysis, but requires perceptual testing involving controlled (and so often synthetic) stimuli. Cecil has heard /I/ once, because the vowel possessed the relevant qualities for that vowel in Cecil's perceptual vowel space, but that does not mean that the speaker produced normal /I/ values for his or her own speech (though with single instances such as this there is always the case of a speaker error too - another reason why phoneticians collect averages of many repetitions). I'm happy to pass on my 'Saddam' and 'Sidney' tokens to any list member for them to listen to. Any southern British English speakers out there who hear /I/ in 'Saddam'? Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Mon Jul 28 15:14:57 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:14:57 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, just a response to Bob Rankin's latest comments on the validity of his judgement here as a non-native speaker of the variety in question. I disagree that his being a speaker of another variety of English makes him qualified to comment on my phonology. What he is doing is mapping the phonetic realisations of one accent to the phonemes in his own. There is nothing wrong in this, we do it all the time when we, as English speakers, talk to someone with another variety. And he may hear /I/ for perfectly legitimate reasons within his own dialect, but that tells us nothing about standard southern British English phonology. An anecdote told to me by Francis Nolan will make clear that this cannot tell us anything about the phonology of that variety. A speaker of northern English goes into a shop in Cambridge and asks for a 'pan'. As his production of this word involves an unsapirated /p/ and a central /a/ (close to IPA [a]), the southern speakers hear the word 'bun' /b^n/, because the phonetic values for /p/ and /a/ in the northerner's speech fall within the range of values they expect to hear for /b/ and /^/ in southern English. They direct the northerner to a baker's. So, the southerner's misperception involves mapping northern /pa/ to their own /b^/. Does this tell us that in northern English there is no contrast between /p/ and /b/, or /^/ and /a/ (in fact, southern /^/ relates to northern /U/), or at the lexical level, 'pan' and 'bun'? No, it does not, though it tells us something about the southerner's perceptual mechanisms. The southerners may claim that northern English has merged /p/ and /b/ etc., but a little further questioning would indicate that the northerner has a different production of 'bun', i.e. as [bUn], so we can see that there is no merger. Now suppose that the speakers (like Bob) fail to hear this contrast between [pan] and [bUn]. Does this tell us anything about northern English? No, it still does not. To be certain that there is or is not a merger, we must measure the values for the northerner's /p/ and /b/ etc. using a more objective method, i.e. acoustic analysis. If there are consistent differences, even ones which we cannot hear, then we may assume that there is a contrast in that variety to which we are not sensitive. We can go further, and synthesise speech on the basis of average values across speakers, and test to see whether they can consistently distinguish the two averages. If they can, even if we cannot, then we can claim that there is a contrast to which we are not sensitive. It really does not matter that Bob is a native speaker of some variety of English. In fact, as his comments indicate, there is perhaps all the more reason to perform acoustic analysis on other varieties of one's own language than on 'foreign' languages. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 22:31:22 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:31:22 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Jones writes: > just a response to Bob Rankin's latest comments on the validity of his judgement here as a non-native speaker of the variety in question. I disagree that his being a speaker of another variety of English makes him qualified to comment on my phonology. With so many over-extended analogies and exaggerated claims in play, I wonder how many readers remember exactly what the question is/was here. I had to go back and look through my deleted postings to be sure myself. Bob Rankin wrote: > "I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucett... say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim." Cecil Ward wrote: > "That's how Bob Rankin _heard_ his particular word, so that instance passes my test, regardless of the precise phonetic realisation of Lise Doucett's pronunciation." Indeed. If anyone would like to present evidence that Mark Jones responds: > "What he is doing is mapping the phonetic realisations of one accent to the phonemes in his own." No, what he is doing is identifying the sound phonologically in his own dialect. Ditto, Cecil Ward. Mark continues: " ... that tells us nothing about standard southern British English phonology." Of course not, but no one has said that it did. Although I have said that I am not an Anglicist, I should add that I am indeed conversant with the phonologies of a variety of British, North American and Australian English, although not a specialist in them. I frankly doubt very much that for Lise Doucett an [I] would be normally identified as a phonological schwa if semantically identifiable material around it were removed. That would be an experiment for someone who felt strongly that it was worth doing. In this instance I don't think it is. Talk of Tamil dialects or Scottish buns is as irrelevant to this discussion as most of this discussion is to historical linguistics. I suggest that interested persons take it to a phonetics or phonology list. Any relevance to sound change has gotten pretty distant at this point. Bob Rankin From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Tue Jul 29 11:37:58 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 07:37:58 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: Note: This last posting from Mark Jones draws this line of discussion to a close. Dorothy Disterheft List Moderator ************************************************************************ Dear Bob and list members, just to clarify a few points Bob raises. 1) The non-southern English dialects I was referring to in my anecdote were not Scottish but northern English, as I said. Southern English /^/ does correspond to Scottish English /^/. In northern English, the correspondence across lexemes is to /U/. 2) Bob originally wrote: > "I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucett... say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim." This contains an apparently phonetic transcription (in square brackets) as well as a phonemic interpretation. Bob Rankin states that he made no claims about southern English phonology, yet normally we would expect the phonemic interpretation to be made in terms of the variety under discussion, not the researcher's (hence my comments on Tamil: I can say from the point of view of my English phonology that I hear only one /t/ in that language). I assumed that Bob's phonemic /I/ was a southern English one. The original question related to southern British English phonology of which I am a native speaker, which is why my measurements and comments are relevant. As a native speaker of that variety, I have and hear schwa in 'communication'. I think I've made the point that 'interdialectal' mappings do not constitute a basis for phonological comments, though they are interesting in themselves. 3) This material is *very* relevant to the "business end" of sound change, as it relates to the way that speakers map predictable phonetic variation to an underlying constant (if such things exist, but as the argument here is based on them, I offer no comment on Roger Lass's interesting observation). Indeed, the essential questions are whether such variation exists in the way it has been described and if it does, how is it perceived in the relevant variety. Experimental phonetic and laboratory phonological studies have made very important contributions to this field (e.g. the work of John Ohala). I would say that although it is widely known that there is lexical variation across varieties of English in the way that unstressed vowels are considered to be schwa /@/ or lax /I/ (whether we say 'quickest' with a final [@] or [I], for example), in southern British English at the present time, there is no phonological merger between /@/ and /I/, and not even a phonetic change, though allophonic raised schwa occurs. For those interested, I submitted my original instrumental results to the PHONET list for critical review by phoneticians at the same time I posted them here. At the time of writing, they have been accepted by the list members without comment. But "no news is good news", as they say. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Thu Jul 3 16:57:15 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:57:15 EDT Subject: Professor Werner Winter Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Madam/Sir, As some of you are undoubtedly aware, Professor Werner Winter - scholar, linguist, polyglot, mentor - will celebrate his 80th birthday on October 25th of this year. Werner Winter has been closely associated with Mouton de Gruyter, formerly Mouton/The Hague, for more than three decades, starting his work as chief editor of the linguistic series Trends in Linguistics in the early 1970s. Brigitte Bauer and Georges-Jean Pinault are currently editing a Festschrift (including a Tabula Gratulatoria) which will be presented to Werner Winter to mark the occasion of his birthday, as well as to celebrate this long and fruitful cooperation. In addition, a special "book of personal congratulations" will be prepared. We are approaching you today because we would like to invite you to contribute to these two projects. First of all, we kindly ask you to send your name, current address and current affiliation to Ms. Regina Tr?b at prakmou1 at degruyter.com by July 15th. For the special "book of personal congratulations", individual hand-written letters will be collected and bound into book form. To this end, we have ordered special sheets of paper, obtainable from us upon request. Please indicate in your message to Regina Tr?b whether you would like to contribute a personal note. Once we have received your order along with your current address, we will send you the paper, along with more detailed information on technical details, layout, etc. Please note that your personal congratulations should be returned to us by August 25th. Those of you wishing to have their names mentioned in the Tabula Gratulatoria in the Festschrift should also mention this explicitly in the message to Regina Tr?b. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you soon! Best regards, Mouton de Gruyter A Division of Walter de Gruyter Publishers Berlin/New York __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at Thu Jul 3 16:58:13 2003 From: muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at (Rudolf Muhr) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:58:13 EDT Subject: Invitation - Conf. "The Unifying Aspects of Cultures - Standardvariations" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (This mail is particularly addressed to scholars working on fields like sociolinguistics, pluricentric languages, language policy, foreign language teaching, discourse analysis, political discourse, pragmatics, language ideologies, lexicology of BE/AE/AUE etc. I apologize, if this mail is unsolicited.) Dear Colleague, I would like to draw your attention to the international conference "The Unifying aspects of Cultures" which will be held from Nov. 7-9th 2003 in Vienna (Austria) and in particular to the section "Standard Variations and Conceptions of Language in Various Language Cultures" which is organized by myself. If these topics are part of your working areas, I would like to invite you to present a paper (30 Min.) or a statement (15 Min.). The papers will be published in the proceedings of the conference (TRANS ). Papers from the Americas, from Asia and Australasia about aspects of pluricentric languages and language ideologies are particularly welcomed as it is in my intention to achieve a broad overview on different approaches to concepts like "mother tongue", "our common language", "language attitudes of dominating varieties vs. attitudes of the "other varieties", "standard variation", "one language-different norms" etc. The title of your paper + abstract should be sent to me: muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at The details of the registration are found under: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/org_anm_teilnehmerinnen_e.htm The conference is hosted by the "Research Institute for Austrian and International Literature and Cultural Studies" (INST-Vienna) (http://www.inst.at) and will take place in the Austria Conference Centre. General information about the conference can be found under: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/index_e.htm. A details description of the section can be found below or under the following internet address: http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr_e.htm (English) http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr.htm (German) http://www.inst.at/kulturen/2003/06sprachen/sektion_muhr_f.htm (French) Yours sincerly R. Muhr ***** Standard Variations and Concepts of Language in Various Language Cultures Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Papers to: Email: Rudolf Muhr (Graz) The aim of this section is to discuss differences and commonalities in the ideas about language and language norms in various language cultures. These differences concern, for example, one's openness to "foreign" elements (purist versus integration), one's attitude to one's own language (language pride versus language shame), one's attitudes toward variants of one's own language (multilingualism vs. monolingualism) as well as association with stigmatisation or prestige of languages and language variations. Another topic could be the differences in the association with language norms in mono- and pluricentric languages and their effects on the concerned language cultures. In the "smaller" variants a discrepancy always exists between the norms of one's own country and the norms of the entire language, which are normally determined by the largest country. How to deal with these uncertainties and the differences in the standard norms can also be one of the many additional themes! of this section. *********************************************** Das Verbindende der Kulturen SEKTION: Standardvariationen und Sprachauffassungen in verschiedenen Sprachkulturen Email: Rudolf Muhr (Graz) muhr at gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at Inhalt: Die Sektion hat das Ziel, Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in den Vorstellungen von Sprache und Sprachnorm in verschiedenen Sprachkulturen zu diskutieren. Diese Unterschiede betreffen z.B. die Offenheit gegen?ber "fremden" Elementen (Purismus versus Integrismus), die Einstellungen zur eigenen Sprache (Sprachstolz versus Sprachscham), die Einstellungen gegen?ber Varianten der eigenen Sprache (innersprachliche Mehrsprachigkeit vs. Einsprachigkeit) sowie den Umgang mit Stigmatisierung bzw. Prestige von Sprachen und Sprachvarianten. Ein weiteres Thema k?nnten die Unterschiede im Umgang mit Sprachnormen in mono- und plurizentrischen Sprachen und ihre Auswirkungen auf die jeweiligen Sprachkulturen sein. In den "kleineren" Varianten besteht stets eine Diskrepanz zwischen den Eigennormen des Landes und den Normen der Gesamtsprache, die in der Regel vom gr??ten Land bestimmt werden. Der Umgang mit diesen Unsicherheiten und den Unterschieden in den Standardnormen kann eines von vielen! weiteren Themen dieser Sektion sein. ************************** Rudolf Muhr. Projekt ?sterreichisches Deutsch Austrian German Project Dept. of German, University of Graz Heinrichstr. 22/2 A-8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43-316-380-8176 www.oedeutsch.at / www.oewort.at Rudolf Muhr. Projekt ?sterreichisches Deutsch Austrian German Project Dept. of German, University of Graz Heinrichstr. 22/2 A-8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43-316-380-8176 www.oedeutsch.at / www.oewort.at From tam_lindstrom at HOTMAIL.COM Wed Jul 16 00:05:40 2003 From: tam_lindstrom at HOTMAIL.COM (=?iso-8859-1?B?VGhlcmVzZSBMaW5kc3Ry9m0=?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:05:40 EDT Subject: personal endings Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all Could anyone tell me what the latest theory regarding the personal endings on verbs in Indo-European languages is? I would be very grateful for any ideas or references with regards to this subject. (I will post a summary.) Best regards, Therese Lindstr?m PhD student, University of Sheffield _________________________________________________________________ Hitta r?tt k?pare p? MSN K?p & S?lj http://www.msn.se/koposalj From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Wed Jul 16 20:19:44 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:19:44 EDT Subject: Rong Chen: English Inversion. A Ground-before-Figure Construction (2003) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- New from Mouton de Gruyter! >From the Series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH Series Editors: Ren? Dirven, Ronald W. Langacker, and John R. Taylor Rong Chen ENGLISH INVERSION A Ground-before-Figure Construction 2003. xi, 333 pages. Cloth. Euro 78.00 / sFr 125.00 / approx. US$ 86.00 ISBN 3-11-017810-9 (Cognitive Linguistics Research 25) The author provides an account of English inversion, a construction that displays perplexing idiosyncrasies at the level of semantics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. Basing his central argument on the claim that inversion is a linguistic representation of a Ground-before-Figure model, the author develops an elegant solution to a hitherto unsolved multidimensional linguistic puzzle and, in the process, supports the theoretical position that a cognitive approach best suits the multidimensionality of language itself. Engagingly written, the book appeals to linguists of all persuasions and to any reader curious about the relationship between language and cognition. Rong Chen is Professor at California State University, San Bernardino, USA. FROM THE CONTENTS: Chapter 1: Preliminaries 1. Issues of inversion 2. Previous research 3. Relevant tenets of cognitive linguistics 4. Other issues Chapter 2: Inversion as GbF instantiation 1. The GbF model 2. LOC BE: The prototype 3. PATH Vm: From existence to motion 4. NSPAT BE: From spatiality to nonspatiality 5. A radial classification 6. The phonology of inversion: A matter of focus 7. GbF and information packaging: A comparison Chapter 3: Syntactic constraints 1. Polarity 2. Transitivity 3. Embeddedness 4. Auxiliaries 5. Weight 6. Summary Chapter 4: Inversion in discourse 1. Discourse types: A tripartite 2. Inversion in description 3. Inversion in narration 4. Inversion in exposition 5. Summary 6. Inversion in parody Chapter 5: Conclusion 1. Summary 2. GbF representation in other languages To sign up for our FREE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER, please visit our website at www.degruyter.de/newsletter To order, please contact SFG-Servicecenter-Fachverlage GmbH Postfach 4343 72774 Reutlingen, Germany Fax: +49 (0)7071 - 93 53 - 33 E-mail: deGruyter at s-f-g.com For USA, Canada and Mexico: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 200 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA Fax: +1 (914) 747-1326 E-mail: cs at degruyterny.com Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter: http://www.mouton-publishers.com __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM Wed Jul 16 20:20:13 2003 From: Julia.Ulrich at DEGRUYTER.COM (Julia Ulrich) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:20:13 EDT Subject: Donald N. Tuten. Koineization in Medieval Spanish (2003) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- New from Mouton de Gruyter >From the series CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE Series Editor: Josha A. Fishman Donald N. Tuten KOINEIZATION IN MEDIEVAL SPANISH 2003. iv, 345 pages. Cloth. Euro 78.00 / sFr 125.00 / approx. US$ 86.00 ISBN 3-11-017744-7 (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 88) How and why do changes happen when and where they do? Is it possible to explain changes that occurred centuries ago? These are the central questions addressed in this book, in which the author argues that the development of numerous features of medieval (and modern) Spanish can best be explained as the results of koineization, a process in which mixing among speakers of different dialects leads to the rapid formation of a new mixed and generally simplified variety. The book includes a complete introduction to koineization and detailed study of three stages of dialect mixing in medieval Spanish. Donald N. Tuten is Assistant Professor at Emory University, Georgia, USA. >From the Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Koines and koineization 3. The Burgon phase 4. The Toledo phase 5. The Seville phase 6. Conclusions For a list of reduced titles published in this series, please visit our website at www.mouton-publishers.com. To sign up for our FREE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER, please visit our website at www.degruyter.de/newsletter To order, please contact SFG-Servicecenter-Fachverlage GmbH Postfach 4343 72774 Reutlingen, Germany Fax: +49 (0)7071 - 93 53 - 33 E-mail: deGruyter at s-f-g.com For USA, Canada and Mexico: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 200 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA Fax: +1 (914) 747-1326 E-mail: cs at degruyterny.com Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter: http://www.mouton-publishers.com ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________ Diese E-Mail und ihre Dateianhaenge ist fuer den angegeben Empfaenger und/oder die Empfaengergruppe bestimmt. Wenn Sie diese E-Mail versehentlich trotzdem erhalten haben, setzen Sie sich bitte mit dem Absender oder Ihrem Systembetreuer in Verbindung. Diese Fusszeile bestaetigt ausserdem, dass die E-Mail auf zum Pruefzeitpunkt bekannte Viren ueberprueft wurde. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender or the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Thu Jul 17 16:41:34 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:41:34 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in unstressed syllables to /I/ (should be /?/ - small-cap-I) in English in England. Recent examples heard on the BBC, spoken by reporters and newsreaders :- kImju:nIkeit "communicate" sId?m "Saddam Hussein" Perhaps someone would be kind enough could point me some references? Does anyone know anything about the time-development of this phenomenon. Is this a very recent development? Has it strengthened noticeably in the last few decades? Does anyone know if this development is known in English outside England? The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? I'm not sure what the conditioning factors are. Cecil Ward. From lass at IAFRICA.COM Fri Jul 18 12:54:52 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:54:52 EDT Subject: 'Raising' of unstressed vowels in English Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A couple of points. 1. This phenomenon is not at all uncommon in English across the world. To take one example of a fairly typical sort, my own New York City dialect has [I] before /t, d/ in weak syllables (e.g. weak pasts and past participles), and often before velars as in 'communicate'. Impressionistically, what is *not* common is to have a 'schwa' type of vowel in these environments, at least in England and the eastern US. One of the more striking low-level phonetic characters of much South African English is precisely the lack of two weak vowels of different heights. 2. The existence of a higher weak vowel especially before coronals has been attested as a regularity in southern and South Midland English dialects since late Middle English. Chaucer for instance apparently rhymes the regular noun plural in /-Vs/ with 'is', and it is common later Middle English MS practice to spell this ending with rather than . My impression (needs checking, but this is a quick answer) is that spellings for noun plural are rather late: the earliest example I've found in a quick look at the samples in the corpus for the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English currently being prepared in Edinburgh is from the Lambeth Homilies (c. 1200). If anybody is interested I can run a more detailed check, and it would be worth looking at the sections on unstressed vowels in these environments in some of the more detailed histories of English. From jhewson at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA Fri Jul 18 12:55:29 2003 From: jhewson at MORGAN.UCS.MUN.CA (John Hewson) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:55:29 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Cecil Ward wrote: (snippet) > The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? Not true. Remember AA Milne's They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; Christopher Robin went down with Alice. I've often heard Canada pronounced Canida by British speakers. And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. The first vowel in _disaster_ is reduced to schwa in American English, as is the last vowel in _Latin_; is the [i] that is heard in British English in these words a reduced vowel? The American pronunciation [latn] has a syllabic [n] in the last syllable and no vowel. (The converse happens in _pattern_, where BE has [patn], but in AE, where there is r-colouring, the second vowel is clearly heard). The question is further complicated by the fact that American schwa is often barred [i]. ******************************************************************************* John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 Henrietta Harvey Professor Emeritus fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 ******************************************************************************* From rankin at KU.EDU Fri Jul 18 12:55:06 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:55:06 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in unstressed syllables to /I/ (should be /?/ - small-cap-I) in English in England. >Does anyone know if this development is known in English outside England? >The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? I'm not sure what the conditioning factors are. In the US it was a feature of some rural dialects, and still is to an extent, but the environment is different. Word-final schwa (the one that picks up an -r in much of the world) is [I] (the same small-cap i) in these dialects. You see it reflected orthographically as in attempts to reproduce rustic, period pronunciation: Arizona --> Arizony, sasparilla --> sasparilly, umbrella --> umbrelly, Alabama --> Alabamy, and such. All the cases I can think of are at least trisyllabic. Doing this with "Cuba, sofa, panda" seems very strange to me. There is also an [ae] "ash" that raises to [I] in words like Arkansas --> ArkInsas; this may be the sort of thing your SIddam is showing. I tend to think of these as a 19th century phenomenon, but I'm not an Anglicist and could be corrected on that. Nor can I picture how someone who says "umbrelly" might pronounce "communicate", so these may be entirely unrelated phenomenoa. Bob Rankin U. of Kansas From erickson at PIERCINGSUIT.COM Fri Jul 18 12:56:06 2003 From: erickson at PIERCINGSUIT.COM (Blaine Erickson) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:56:06 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to...? Message-ID: Cecil Ward wrote: > I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in > unstressed syllables to /I/ Although I am not familiar with the current state of BBC English, I strongly suspect that the vowel in question is not small-cap I, but is the high central vowel barred i. In many varieties of North American English, the word 'just' is often realized with barred i, though when stressed or in slower speech it comes out with schwa. This same change may affect other unstressed schwas, though not necessarily all of them (i.e., I don't know or understand all the conditions for this change). Part of why I am skeptical of the change schwa to small-cap I is that this would require the change of two features--the addition of palatality ([-pal] -> [+pal]) and the changing of the height ([-hi] -> [+hi]), and I see no motivation for the former. On the other hand, the change schwa -> barred i requires only a change in height ([-hi] -> [+hi]). In English, this change appears to preferentially affect schwas in syllables that are not only unstressed but have been further reduced for prosodic reasons (your 'Saddam' example illustrates this nicely). The motivation here is obvious: barred i is even "less" of a vowel than schwa (i.e., shorter duration and less sonorant, all else being equal), and we all know how much English likes to reduce its unstressed vowels. Furthermore, the change schwa -> barred i appears to have occurred historically in Vietnamese. Perhaps the best reference on how vowels change is: Donegan, Patricia J. 1985 [1978]. On the Natural Phonology of Vowels. New York: Garland. This is the published version of her Ohio State University dissertation. Sorry I can't help you with more references. Best wishes, Blaine Erickson erickson at piercingsuit.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cecil at cecilward.com Fri Jul 18 12:56:42 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:56:42 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Hewson wrote: > Remember AA Milne's > They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; > Christopher Robin went down with Alice. This development seems to me to be patchy. I was asking myself the question whether the spread of this phenomenon is due to analogy. It seems to me that there are two possibilities, one is that this is a "phonetic" development, by which I mean that the conditioning factors are predictable from the phonetic environment. Maybe, but I don't see it. The second possibility is that speakers have come to have certain words stored in their lexicon as containing an //I//, whereas the "correct", written form has a different vowel. If this is the case, selective analogy could be responsible on a case-by-case basis, analogy with other "legitimate" word-elements, and this might involve "knowledge" of morphology. Possible candidates that I might expect to find, off the top of my head, would be things like pre- /pri/- vs pro- giving forms like *"pretect" (=protect), *"previde" (=provide) by analogy with "prevent", "pretend" for example. John's example of "palice" = "Alice" is another good candidate, because -ice (pronounced with non-schwa) is a legitimate suffix, and so is -ace. Although I can't think of a great number of examples right now -ace Horace terrace menace solace -ice lattice malice crevice avarice For example, one might expect there to be pressure on "Eustace", because of Doris, Phyllis, Eunice, Norris, Morris, Willis, Harris, Davies. If forms like disagreeable or igreeable or even igree (=agree) are heard, then I would consider that as a problem for this "analogy" theory. John Hewson wrote: > And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. Good point. Are these forms then sources for analogical spread? Cecil Ward. -----Original Message----- From: John Hewson [mailto:jhewson at morgan.ucs.mun.ca] Sent: 18 July 2003 01:47 To: Cecil Ward Cc: HISTLING at LISTSERV.SC.EDU On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Cecil Ward wrote: (snippet) > The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes the stress, is that correct? Not true. Remember AA Milne's They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice; Christopher Robin went down with Alice. I've often heard Canada pronounced Canida by British speakers. And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages, the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches, dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited, boarded. The first vowel in _disaster_ is reduced to schwa in American English, as is the last vowel in _Latin_; is the [i] that is heard in British English in these words a reduced vowel? The American pronunciation [latn] has a syllabic [n] in the last syllable and no vowel. (The converse happens in _pattern_, where BE has [patn], but in AE, where there is r-colouring, the second vowel is clearly heard). The question is further complicated by the fact that American schwa is often barred [i]. **************************************************************************** *** John Hewson, FRSC tel: (709)737-8131 Henrietta Harvey Professor Emeritus fax: (709)737-4000 Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9 **************************************************************************** *** From lass at IAFRICA.COM Sat Jul 19 14:06:14 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:14 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I'd like to add a few more points and some queries to the discussion. 1. What exactly is meant by 'schwa', and where does the notion come from that the vowel was 'once' lower and has been raised? The neutralisation of unstressed Vs that began to occur in late OE can be interpreted as merger in [e], and the evidence for 'schwa' in the usual sense (a middish central vowel that nobody wants to transcribe too closely) for any period before the 17th century is at least ambiguous. The first descriptions of central vowels in the voluminous phonetic literature of the 16th-17th century comes after 1650, and only in stressed syllables. See my discussion in Cambridge History of the English Language, III. 2. I think some of us raised in different traditions may be talking past each other. As an American raised in the SOAS tradition of transcription, 'barred-i' means not whatever Smith & Trager thought it might be, but a high central unrounded vowel, and that we certainly do not get in these environments. The IPA transcription I think is meant (would someobdy clarify?) is a further centralised version of small-cap I (which is itself a centralised [e]). 3. The 'rural' pronunciations of words like 'China' etc. with a final vowel other than 'schwa' normally do not have small cap I (that would sound very North English), but in fact [i] or [Ii] - at least they did in S Indiana in the 1970s, where I was exposed to them. If sung versions are evidence, this vowel is [i] in some Virginia lects of the earlier parts of this century, as witnessed by 'Virginia' and similar forms in the recordings of the Carter Family. Roger Lass From roger.wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Sat Jul 19 14:06:35 2003 From: roger.wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (roger wright) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:35 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The [-is] written "-ace" in Terrace, "-ice" in "malice" and "-is" in "Doris" can't really be called a suffix, though, not being a separate morpheme ..... > John's example of "palice" = "Alice" is another good candidate, because > -ice (pronounced with non-schwa) is a legitimate suffix, and so is -ace. > Although I can't think of a great number of examples right now > -ace Horace terrace menace solace > -ice lattice malice crevice avarice > > For example, one might expect there to be pressure on "Eustace", because > of Doris, Phyllis, Eunice, Norris, Morris, Willis, Harris, Davies. From jrader at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Sat Jul 19 14:06:54 2003 From: jrader at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Jim Rader) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:06:54 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ In-Reply-To: <6CFE0AAEA0B7E84A9E6292B3A056A68D164CE0@meadowlark2.home.ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > In the US it was a feature of some rural dialects, and still is to an > extent, but the environment is different. Word-final schwa (the one > that picks up an -r in much of the world) is [I] (the same small-cap > i) in these dialects. You see it reflected orthographically as in > attempts to reproduce rustic, period pronunciation: Arizona --> > Arizony, sasparilla --> sasparilly, umbrella --> umbrelly, Alabama --> > Alabamy, and such. All the cases I can think of are at least > trisyllabic. Doing this with "Cuba, sofa, panda" seems very strange > to me. There is also an [ae] "ash" that raises to [I] in words like > Arkansas --> ArkInsas; this may be the sort of thing your SIddam is > showing. > > I tend to think of these as a 19th century phenomenon, but I'm not an > Anglicist and could be corrected on that. Nor can I picture how > someone who says "umbrelly" might pronounce "communicate", so these > may be entirely unrelated phenomenoa. > > Bob Rankin > U. of Kansas Final schwa is perhaps a different category entirely. It has distinctive permutations in varieties of English on both sides of the Atlantic, such as hyperrhotacism and "Bristol l," that may have to do with constraints on final schwa or may have some completely different origin. There is also a batch of American toponyms/ethnonyms, most acquired from North American French, that have final [O] or less often [A] and sometimes [ey] where one might have expected reduction to schwa. The original vowel in French was presumably usually [a] or [A], which after English stress placement on a non-final syllable was not reduced. >From the top of my head, examples of ethnonyms: Chickasaw, Choctaw, Quapaw, Chippewa; ethnonyms and toponyms: Arkansas, Omaha, Ioway (though usually Iowa with schwa), Utah (from Spanish, presumably), Wichita. There must be many others. As for the final vowel of , note that in some more traditional "rural" varieties of American English and I believe still in Southern American English the suffix <-y> was pronounced [I]. I've wondered if [I] for schwa doesn't involve morphologizing in some cases. Of course, [i] in "General American" pronunciation (a convenient fiction, I know) has traditionally been realized as [I]/schwa in "Missouri" or "Cincinnati" in "folk speech." The "proper" pronunciation of , i.e., whether final schwa, [I], or [i] was once the subject of furious debate. There is a well-known article on the matter by the late Allan Walker Read in the 1933 volume of _American Speech_. Jim Rader From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Sat Jul 19 14:07:30 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:07:30 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to...? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, I'm afraid I can't offer any extra data on this, except to say that to my phonetician's way of thinking, the unstressed vowels in my Southern British English 'communicate' and 'Saddam' are definitely not identical in quality. In the former, the potential schwa is much closer to schwa, and in the latter it does have a raised quality somewhere between barred [i] and [I]. Although I'm not sure that a) the following comment applies in all cases, or that b) some kind of phonological change can be ruled out for all speakers of all varieties, I wonder whether this is actually sometimes just a phonetic effect due to the high front position of the tongue with coronals. That would certainly take care of the quality difference in my own speech. I'm not able to offer an acoustic analysis of formants right now, but I will do. all the best Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Sun Jul 20 16:28:46 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:28:46 EDT Subject: Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/ Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >As for the final vowel of , note that in some more traditional "rural" varieties of American English and I believe still in Southern American English the suffix <-y> was pronounced [I]. I've wondered if [I] for schwa doesn't involve morphologizing in some cases. Of course, [i] in "General American" pronunciation (a convenient fiction, I know) has traditionally been realized as [I]/schwa in "Missouri" or "Cincinnati" in "folk speech." The "proper" pronunciation of , i.e., whether final schwa, [I], or [i] was once the subject of furious debate. There is a well-known article on the matter by the late Allan Walker Read in the 1933 volume of _American Speech_. The schwa > [I] change is also discussed by Edgar Sturtevant in his book _Linguistic Change_ from before 1920. He recognizes two kinds of sound change, what he calls "primary sound change", i.e., regular Lautgesetz, and what he calls "secondary sound change", his way of talking about borrowing and analogy ("lexical diffusion" for some). Our schwa to [I] change is one of his examples of secondary sound change. His split treatment of sound change is well worth reading since he presages developments that didn't recur until the '60's. Bob Rankin From lass at IAFRICA.COM Mon Jul 21 12:31:59 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:31:59 EDT Subject: schwa-raising, lexical diffusion &c. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- 1. One of the contributions to this discussion raises some interesting problems, in attempting to distinguish between 'proper' neogrammarian change and 'secondary' change. I think this is a distinction without a difference: any historian who works with large-scale corpora covering long time-periods ought to be aware that neogrammarian change is not a 'kind' of change, but simply the result of completed lexical diffusion. Attempts have been made (notably by Labov) to distinguish the two, but they do not really succeed: see the discussion in Joan Bybee's 2001 book on phonology and language use for some good arguments. Neogrammarian change is an artifact of the way historians intersect the time-lines of languages, and the result in part of looking primarily at institutionalised 'standard' or 'focussed' languages as the main data sources. This is often forced on us by the textual record: but if one has good corpora at one's disposal it seems to be the case that the normal state for any language is to be constantly varying and constantly undergoing change, which I suppose nobody would deny. But the standard shall we say 'Wang/Chen S-curve' of diffusing change can abort at any time, leaving residue; it can go to completion, leaving neogrammarian Ausnahmslosigkeit; or it can reverse, giving what Wolfgang Dressler once called 'lexical fading', which is distinguishable from lexical diffusion only if (contingently) you happen to know the vectoral properties of the time-line you are intersecting. I would suggest that neogrammarian change is the same kind of artifact as speciation in palaeontology: it is the paucity of the record and the lack of 'intermediate stages' in so many textual traditions that creates the illusion that 'transformative' change is even possible. Textual historians generally have a rather different view, because their data is of the kind that - if the traditions are rich enough - typically show only very old changes 'complete', and most of the classical ones 'in progress', or in mess, which is a better description. Most important, if you can catch changes that later turn out to be neogrammarian in progress and track them, they often turn out to be not 'events' at all, but very long term trends, which look like X > Y only if you restrict your vision to the X and Y portions of the trajectory, or if this is what's available, in which case faute de mieux you get neogrammarian change. As a simple example, the (now) neogrammarian loss of postvocalic /r/ in non-rhotic dialects of English actually took over four centuries to complete, starting very slowly indeed in the 14th century in some isolated lexical items, but only picking up steam after 1700, and still not complete even in 'proto-RP' in the 1870s and 80s. The same thing is true of the lengthening of Middle English /a/ (early Modern /ae/) before voiceless fricatives in Southern British English and its descendants (giving the contrast in these dialects and their descendants between the vowels of 'cat' and 'pass'): the first sporadic evidence of lengthening comes from the 1680s, but the change is still not completed even in the London 'standards' in the 1870s, and there is still variation even in single speakers, as well as between speakers. (On both these developments see the discussions and data in AJ Ellis' Early English pronunciation, vol.V.) Roger Lass From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Tue Jul 22 16:46:04 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 12:46:04 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Formant measurements were made of single FFT and LPC spectra at the vowel midpoint (128 sample window at 11025 sample rate - lowpass filtered at 5000 Hz). The words used were 'Saddam' with coronal consonants either side of the unstressed schwa, 'Copernicus' with non-coronal consonants flanking the unstressed schwa, and 'Sidney, with coronals flanking a stressed /I/ for comparison. Three tokens each recorded in a carrier sentence "Say X again" by me - 31 yr old male speakers of Southern British English. The vowels were all of extremely short duration and in the case of 'Copernicus' showed extensive F2 transitions (the vowel in 'communicate' was investigated but was nasalised and so no reliable measures could be made of F2 and F3). No F2 transitions were seen in 'Saddam' or 'Sidney'. The unstressed vowel of 'Saddam' had an average duration of 49.3 ms (range 47-53 ms) and of 'Copernicus' had an average duration of 31.3 ms (range 28-36 ms). The stressed vowel of 'Sidney' had an average duration of 56.7 ms (range 49-69 ms). Note the similarity of this to the unstressed schwa durations in 'Saddam' even though it is stressed. F1 values for 'Saddam' ranged between 330 Hz and 400 Hz (average 373.3 Hz) whereas F1 for 'Copernicus' showed values between 435 Hz and 460 Hz (average 446 Hz) - F1 was therefore lower for the 'Saddam' vowel. For 'Sidney', F1 was 384 Hz on average (range 360-408 Hz). F2 values were average of 1601 Hz for 'Saddam' (1541-1641 Hz range) and 1621.3 Hz for 'Copernicus' (range 1600 - 1643 Hz). F2 was therefore also lower on average, if very slightly, though the range for 'Saddam' was greater, and F2 was moving in the case of 'Copernicus'. The fall in F2 throughout the vowel in 'Copernicus' was 394.7 Hz on average (range 172 - 603, Hz values between 1809 and 1206). This obviously makes the idea of an F2 'value' for the 'Copernicus' vowel more or less problematic depending on your view of how vowel quality is perceived. For 'Sidney', F2 moved little and was 1865.7 Hz on average (range 1813-1910 Hz). F3 values were more or less static throughout. The average for 'Saddam' was 2577.7 Hz (range 2541 - 2571), and for 'Copernicus' 2400.3 Hz (range 2400 - 2401). F3 was therefore higher for the 'Saddam' vowel. In 'Sidney', F3 was also static and at 2546 Hz on average (range 2498-2594 Hz). These results are only from 3 repetitions of 1 speaker, but they do indicate that there are quality variations in the static F1 and F3 targets of schwa vowels. Quality differences are also likely on the basis of F2, though it is unclear how a general F2 target should be identified. A higher jaw position in 'Saddam' and relatively little lingual movement away from a high front position for the coronals may cause the lowering of F1 and possibly also raise F3 according to perturbation theory. In a standard vowel plot, the 'Saddam' vowel will be higher than the 'Copernicus' vowel, but the problem of identifying a good F2 value for 'Copernicus' schwa and the lack of representation of F3 means that it is not possible to locate this latter vowel accurately. Relative to stressed /I/ of 'Sidney', the 'Saddam' vowel shows a greater similarity in terms of F1 and F3 values, but F2 is much higher for /I/, suggesting that the 'Saddam' vowel is more located more centrally than /I/, and higher then 'Copernicus' schwa within my vowel space. It is not the case that all schwas are subject to raising (at least in my British English speech), and the effect appears to be a phonetic one due to coronal consonants. Mark Mark J. Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Thu Jul 24 12:22:35 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:22:35 EDT Subject: phonological change as lexical diffusion. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > 1. One of the contributions to this discussion raises some interesting problems, in attempting to distinguish between 'proper' neogrammarian change and 'secondary' change. I think this is a distinction without a difference: any historian who works with large-scale corpora covering long time-periods ought to be aware that neogrammarian change is not a 'kind' of change, but simply the result of completed lexical diffusion. (truncated) This has certainly been the position of many text historians and sociolinguists (including creolists) since Schuchardt. But while extensive corpora can provide insight into many aspects of language, they are unreliable as a guide to sound change type and chronology, because of the strong tendency for written language to preserve the spellings of individual words. Even corpora supposedly based on transcription (e.g., Bloomfield's Algonquian texts or James Dorsey's Siouan ones) are poor at these tasks as they have nearly always undergone normalization. In other words, lexical diffusion is certainly a good way to describe spelling change, but it leaves open the question of phonological change, and especially its actuation phase. Practicing historical linguists have always found that they can routinely distinguish among (1) change of articulatory habit, (2) borrowing, including dialect borrowing or imitation, and (3) change effected in imitation of some already-existing model. These are not distinctions without a difference nor do they depend exclusively on when the time line is intercepted: they are simply different sorts of human activity, some cognitive and some not. The first of them can often be seen in its clearest form in regular distribution of allophonic features, something that is hard to show is the result of lexical diffusion (tho' one might additionally insist on change in distinctive features as a part of a definition of real sound change). The second, borrowing, is a conscious or quasi-conscious process and may rely on social factors. The third matches what we traditionally call analogy and may be stimulated by the first and/or second. Historical linguists also generally insist, quite rightly, on dealing with change in langue, not just parole. The boundary between the two became a bit muddy in the early generative phonologies of the '60's and then again with attempts to make phonetics more relevant to phonology in more recent times. But the langue/parole distinction is still an important part of understanding language change. Those specializing in language usage may well wish to ignore what virtually all practicing historical linguists have traditionally seen as three different sorts of change. For them, these may not be interesting distinctions, and they may wish to use a cover term like "lexical diffusion" for some or all of them. So be it, but lack of interest in individual mechanisms or occasional difficulty in separating their effects does not make them any less real. That the three traditionally recognized origins for change in pronunciation interact comes as no surprise either. Labov's recent work (since his 1980 LSA presidential address) does handle this in depth, but it was discussed prominently not only by Sturtevant but by Bloomfield in 1933:365ff. In fact, one seldom has to go beyond Bloomfield to find most of the points dealt with that many linguists have debated with much sound and fury since. But, as Bloomfield made clear, interaction among mechanisms does not legitimize either confusing or deliberately lumping them. Bob Rankin Linguistics Dept. University of Kansas From rankin at KU.EDU Thu Jul 24 12:23:23 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:23:23 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sensitized to this question by the recent correspondence I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucette (sorry if I misspell her name) say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim. Her male colleague said the same word a moment later with a phonemic schwa. Whatever their etic makeup, phonologically these things are lax high front vowels. It was very striking. It also seemed to me that the fronted variant of /k/ was used with the /I/. Bob Rankin -----Original Message----- From: Mark J. Jones [mailto:mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK] Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:46 AM To: HISTLING at LISTSERV.SC.EDU Subject: Re: schwa-raising - formants ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Formant measurements were made of single FFT and LPC spectra at the vowel midpoint (128 sample window at 11025 sample rate - lowpass filtered at 5000 Hz). The words used were 'Saddam' with coronal consonants either side of the unstressed schwa, 'Copernicus' with non-coronal consonants flanking the unstressed schwa, and 'Sidney, with coronals flanking a stressed /I/ for comparison. Three tokens each recorded in a carrier sentence "Say X again" by me - 31 yr old male speakers of Southern British English. The vowels were all of extremely short duration and in the case of 'Copernicus' showed extensive F2 transitions (the vowel in 'communicate' was investigated but was nasalised and so no reliable measures could be made of F2 and F3). No F2 transitions were seen in 'Saddam' or 'Sidney'. The unstressed vowel of 'Saddam' had an average duration of 49.3 ms (range 47-53 ms) and of 'Copernicus' had an average duration of 31.3 ms (range 28-36 ms). The stressed vowel of 'Sidney' had an average duration of 56.7 ms (range 49-69 ms). Note the similarity of this to the unstressed schwa durations in 'Saddam' even though it is stressed. F1 values for 'Saddam' ranged between 330 Hz and 400 Hz (average 373.3 Hz) whereas F1 for 'Copernicus' showed values between 435 Hz and 460 Hz (average 446 Hz) - F1 was therefore lower for the 'Saddam' vowel. For 'Sidney', F1 was 384 Hz on average (range 360-408 Hz). F2 values were average of 1601 Hz for 'Saddam' (1541-1641 Hz range) and 1621.3 Hz for 'Copernicus' (range 1600 - 1643 Hz). F2 was therefore also lower on average, if very slightly, though the range for 'Saddam' was greater, and F2 was moving in the case of 'Copernicus'. The fall in F2 throughout the vowel in 'Copernicus' was 394.7 Hz on average (range 172 - 603, Hz values between 1809 and 1206). This obviously makes the idea of an F2 'value' for the 'Copernicus' vowel more or less problematic depending on your view of how vowel quality is perceived. For 'Sidney', F2 moved little and was 1865.7 Hz on average (range 1813-1910 Hz). F3 values were more or less static throughout. The average for 'Saddam' was 2577.7 Hz (range 2541 - 2571), and for 'Copernicus' 2400.3 Hz (range 2400 - 2401). F3 was therefore higher for the 'Saddam' vowel. In 'Sidney', F3 was also static and at 2546 Hz on average (range 2498-2594 Hz). These results are only from 3 repetitions of 1 speaker, but they do indicate that there are quality variations in the static F1 and F3 targets of schwa vowels. Quality differences are also likely on the basis of F2, though it is unclear how a general F2 target should be identified. A higher jaw position in 'Saddam' and relatively little lingual movement away from a high front position for the coronals may cause the lowering of F1 and possibly also raise F3 according to perturbation theory. In a standard vowel plot, the 'Saddam' vowel will be higher than the 'Copernicus' vowel, but the problem of identifying a good F2 value for 'Copernicus' schwa and the lack of representation of F3 means that it is not possible to locate this latter vowel accurately. Relative to stressed /I/ of 'Sidney', the 'Saddam' vowel shows a greater similarity in terms of F1 and F3 values, but F2 is much higher for /I/, suggesting that the 'Saddam' vowel is more located more centrally than /I/, and higher then 'Copernicus' schwa within my vowel space. It is not the case that all schwas are subject to raising (at least in my British English speech), and the effect appears to be a phonetic one due to coronal consonants. Mark Mark J. Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at cam.ac.uk Thu Jul 24 21:20:17 2003 From: mjj13 at cam.ac.uk (Mark J. Jones) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:20:17 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Bob Rankin comments on the pronunciation of 'communication' by the BBC's Lise Doucett (see appended text). He states that the pronunciation involved a lax high front vowel /I/, with a fronted realisation of /k/ preceding it. He concludes that regardless of phonetics, this realisation is a phonological /I/. Firstly, I would like to point out that some speakers may indeed have phonologised this pattern, though it remains a moot point whether /I/ or /@/ would be the target of closest auditory similarity. There is also the issue of a fronted /u/, normal in many varieties of British English. I find this an easier alternative than /I/ for 'communication' on auditory grounds, but there may be variation here too. Further, in 'communication' (which in my speech has a schwa-like unstressed vowel), the nasalisation may play a perceptual role: nasalisation will make the bandwidth of F1 broader, and also affect the higher formants. The untressed vowels in question are very short, and if in addition formant transitions are moving throughout (as in the case of F2 i reported for schwa in 'Copernicus'), quality variation in perception is likely. So it seems that a great deal of variation is heard. The same comment is made for schwa realisations of the STRUT vowel in Cardiff (Mees and Collins, p. 189, in Urban Voices, eds. Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty, Arnold, 1999) and for schwa in Californian English by Peter Ladefoged in his description for the IPA Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 1999). I'm not sure on what grounds Bob Rankin makes the claim that these vowels are phonologically /I/. If it is on the basis of fronted /k/, the articulation of /k/ before /@/ in 'Copernicus' or the /^/ vowel in 'cud', or the reverse epsilon/long schwa in 'curd' is definitely more similar in auditory terms to /k/ in 'kid' than /k/ in 'card', as it will have a relatively front articulation. In other words, /k/ sounds fronted for many central vowels. I would venture to say that the degree of fronting of /k/ proves nothing in this case, and that the phonological status of IPA reverse E as an allophone of a particular vowel remains to be demonstrated. >From the phonetic point of view, the two are non-identical in my own speech. Clearly more instrumental work is needed. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge Bob Rankin's original comments: > Sensitized to this question by the recent correspondence I was listening > to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucette (sorry if I > misspell her name) say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with > a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim. Her > male colleague said the same word a moment later with a phonemic schwa. > Whatever their etic makeup, phonologically these things are lax high > front vowels. It was very striking. It also seemed to me that the fronted > variant of /k/ was used with the /I/. > > Bob Rankin > From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Thu Jul 24 21:21:15 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:21:15 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap In-Reply-To: <6CFE0AAEA0B7E84A9E6292B3A056A68D164CEC@meadowlark2.home.ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It really does seem that these phenomena are not simply (or solely) "phonetic environment-governed". One further example heard today from a news reporter on the BBC in England, /f?lkIn/ ="falcon" so not in contact with a syllable containing /i/ or /j/. The vowel in question was clearly audible albeit fleeting. But then a minute afterwards the same speaker said /falk at n/ twice, and continued with the schwa-type pronunciation afterwards. Clearly above the "phonemic quantum level", if I mix metaphors. Indeed "falkin" is a possible word of English. Cecil Ward. From rankin at KU.EDU Fri Jul 25 16:27:16 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:16 EDT Subject: schwa-raising. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I'm not sure on what grounds Bob Rankin makes the claim that these vowels are phonologically /I/. It's my phonological identification of it as a native speaker of English, albeit one of the US varieties. I take it that native speaker reaction is really the only factor that enters into such identification. Personally, I find the acoustics of such things interesting and appreciate those who go to the trouble to take the measurements, but let's face it, the relationship between what is "really" there phonetically and the phonology of the situation is rather indirect with lots of factors in play. People perceive things all the time that aren't even there objectively, and they completely miss or misidentify things that are clearly present objectively. I like to use the example [dlaes] 'glass' in introductory courses. Students who speak languages that permit initial /dl/ clusters always get it right, but all my English-speaking students swear up and down they heard a /g/. But they didn't. They just perceive it that way. Actually, if anyone is curious, it is possible you can still get a playback on the BBC website. The quotation in question was on the version of Newshour carried in the States by some NPR stations around local noon on July 23 -- early evening in Britain. Bob Rankin From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Fri Jul 25 16:27:31 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:31 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- To clarify; when I raised this matter in my original post, I was very much concerned only with deviation which is sufficiently marked that it "crosses the gap between phonemes", if you understand me, from the viewpoint of an albeit sensitized hearear who is a native speaker of some English dialect. So my litmus test is the very hearer's "phonemic reading" of it, if you like. That's how Bob Rankin _heard_ his particular word, so that instance passes my test, regardless of the precise phonetic realisation of Lise Doucett's pronunciation. And a "phonemic-level distinction is possible in that case, just as **"pritect" /prI/- and "protect" /pr@/- are distinct possible words. I first noticed this phenomenon because when only _half listening_ to the news, hearing a "wrong vowel" (phonemically distinct) made me start, as if the speaker had selected a non-existent though possible word of English. Certainly there are some instances of /I/ or /i/ where English orthography would suggest some other vowel, possibly with an unstressed "schwa-class" realisation. In my dialect "diprive" and "diny", possibly with /d'i/ rather than /dI/) seems to be predominant. Similarly -age-words, with /I/ such as villige, tonnage, footage, storage. However, these don't count for my purposes, because there is no "deviance" from the norm, that _is_ the norm. Taking Bob on trust on the cimunicate example, I don't see it as being clearly be predictable by rule though, and so can't see it as an allophone. Cecil Ward. From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Fri Jul 25 16:27:42 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:27:42 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, Cecil Ward comments that: > It really does seem that these phenomena are not simply (or solely) > "phonetic environment-governed". and gives the example of the pronunciation [f?lkIn] ="falcon" on the BBC. The claim for a phonological process is apparently supported by the comment that the schwa vowel here is "not in contact with a syllable containing /i/ or /j/", i.e. this is the conditioning environment. Thereafter, the speaker apparently said [falk at n]. I would like to make clear that my own instrumental study identified surrounding coronal consonants (not therefore /i/ or /j/) as the phonetic conditioning factor, in which case 'falcon' could qualify, having a final /n/. There will also be some nasalisation of the vowel, which could also contribute to differences. There may be other phonetic factors which contribute. I determined a lower jaw height to be crucial in 'raising' schwa. When speaking loudly there is a tendency to open the mouth more. This can have the effect of lowering the vowels, especially the central ones. When teaching a practical phonetics class demonstrating the IPA transcription of vowels, it is hard to get [@] and not RP /^/ (IPA turned A) if projecting the voice in a large room. Cecil Ward's speaker may therefore have varied this aspect of speech (particularly if involved in a 'performance' of some sort for broadcast), but the very fact that the same speaker said [@] thereafter suggests that for them, this vowel is underlyingly /@/. I've already alluded to the possibility of there being variation between speakers here, and hinted that as the unstressed vowels are so short, their quality may be hard to determine precisely. This goes as much for perception as for instrumental analysis. Vowel perception is a tricky business at the best of times, with issues like normalisation across speakers and environments, and the utility (or not) of coarticulatory features to surrounding consonants playing a role. At the end of the day these impressionistic comments are all very well, but as anyone who has done any acoustic analysis will confirm, the gulf between what we think we hear and what is there in the signal can be immense. Speech perception is for this very reason a complex subject. By this, I do not mean to suggest that Bob Rankin (who commented on [I]-like realisations previously) and Cecil Ward are wrong, merely that they may have, under certain conditions, attributed a vowel showing a particular phonetic effect to the vowel /I/. This is arguably how sound change happens, and so there is nothing surprising in it, but I feel, as I have said before, that a larger instrumental production study, possibly involving perceptual identification and discrimination experiments on vowels, is the best way to resolve this matter. I end by saying once again that the only (relatively) objective data on this issue so far, on my own speech, shows that 'raised schwa' is not phoentically equivalent to /I/, but is probably best transcribed IPA reverse E (secondary cardinal 19). Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Sat Jul 26 17:01:44 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:01:44 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, more on raised schwa, I'm afraid. Bob Rankin and Cecil Ward have both said basically the same thing: they hear these vowels as /I/, and so they are /I/. I take this point, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny on a wider basis. There are really two major aspects to the phonological identification of any sound on which we can carry out phonetic investigations: production, and perception. It's clear that for both Bob and Cecil, the raised schwa counts as /I/, i.e. perceptually they identify the vowel with /I/. I'm not sure what Cecil's linguistic background is, but Bob is not a native speaker of the same variety as me, and therefore his analysis is like saying that because a speaker of a particular variety of English cannot hear the difference between alveolar /t/ and dental /t/ in Tamil, there is no distinction in Tamil. Or that because s/he hears French /t/ as English /d/, that is what is French /d/ is phonologically. Clearly these comments are untenable for the Tamil or French and maybe also therefore for differences between varieties of English. Production-wise, we can claim that if two things have a consistently measurable difference (acoustic or otherwise) which cannot be attributed to passive effects of surrounding segments etc., then they do not have the same input to the speech production mechanism, i.e. for that speaker two separate entities exist at the level of motor programming. It would be normal to regard these as separate phonemes. Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. For many speakers, raised schwa may be identified as /I/, and this would lead presumably to a merger of raised schwa and /I/. But for others (like me) these two things are not only acoustically, but also perecptually, distinct. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From lass at IAFRICA.COM Sat Jul 26 17:02:31 2003 From: lass at IAFRICA.COM (Roger Lass) Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:02:31 EDT Subject: schwa-raising and related Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This discussion is wandering off into some rather interesting byways. I'd like to make some observations and raise a few questions. 1. Why does a token have to 'belong' to some specific phoneme at all? Are phoneme inventories necessarily exhaustive? Couldn't it be the case that in noisy or obscure environments you can get values that hover between what might in other environments be norms for other phonemes, and that are simply not assignable? It could be a kind of structuralist error to assume that every utterance token belongs exhaustively to some determinate class. Perhaps, since hearers are looking for meaning, a lot of detail is simply allowed to be fudged, as long as context gives enough clues for interpretation? There are alternative models of phonological structure (like the one in Bybee 2001) that don't in fact have fully determinate inventories. Perhaps worth thinking about. 2. On 'falcon'. I wonder what the background of the speaker who started all this was, and how much of the word was actually listened to as carefully as the unstressed vowel. What follows is impressionistic, but perhaps no less relevant for that. I was brought up in New York and am married to a speaker whose dialect is a kind of 'mixed' E Pennsylvania and New York. But I have lived in 'British' environments for the past 30 years, 11 years in Edinburgh and 20 in Cape Town. In other words, my primary exposure to other speakers of English over this time has been to dialects other than my own, and I have been teaching in these environments. One thing I've observed over the past few years is that I have two quite distinct versions of /ae/; a lower one, which is native, and a higher one, which is distinctly not, but more like an RP /ae/ than a New York one. The higher version is not 'native', but adopted. I also have, like any New Yorker, and here I have not changed, a dark /l/ in all positions pretty much, though the coarticulation varies with the surrounding vowels. Looking at my own pronunciations of 'falcon', I find that if I use the higher /ae/, the following /l/ is palato-velarised ('barred-i' vocalic quality), and the unstressed final vowel is distinctly [I]-like. If I use the slightly lower native /ae/, which may be a bit retracted as well, the /l/ is uvularised, and the unstressed vowel is [@] quality. I don't know to what extent there's a literature in English on the effect of preceding vowels on /l/-quality, but my system appears to be rather sensitive to even rather small distinctions, rather more like Finnish than the usual descriptions of English. If I go totally 'Brit' and have my 'bought' vowel (approximately IPA 'backward c') in the first syllable of 'falcon', the /l/ is pharyngealised, and the unstressed final vowel rather a centralised [^]. So it looks as if at least words containing /l/ may be 'harmonic' to a certain extent. It would be nice to know what kind of /ae/ the speaker who started this all had, and how complex the substrate of his speech was. From colkitto at SPRINT.CA Mon Jul 28 10:07:31 2003 From: colkitto at SPRINT.CA (colkitto) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:07:31 EDT Subject: anecdotal stuff Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I seem to remember hearing, on an anecdotal level, that the form mensarum (genitive plural of mensa, recited by possibly millions of schoolchildren, Sir Winston Churchill being only the most famous example) is nowhere actually attested in Classical Latin. Any references? Thanks in advance, Robert Orr From cecil at CECILWARD.COM Mon Jul 28 10:14:29 2003 From: cecil at CECILWARD.COM (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:14:29 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - common samples In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am very grateful to Mark Jones for his insightful remarks, and for bringing some sanity to this discussion. Unfortunately, I am not able to hear Mark's subjects' speech, nor has Mark had access to the speakers I have quoted. It would be good if we could compare perceptions of the same material. Bob was good enough to give an example that was recorded and publicly accessible. I'll try to do the same so that Mark can give his opinion on a specific example. Maybe some sound recordings on the Web somewhere? > I'm not sure what Cecil's linguistic background is, I was brought up in England in rural Staffordshire and my parents are farming people, speakers of Derbyshire and North Staffordshire dialects. My dialect of English may differ significantly from that of Mark Jones, which doesn't help. I find great difficulty with many phonetic textbooks that deal with English and refer to "RP" or "Standard English", southern varieties that I don't have a command of. I am certainly no phonetician, and English is not my specialist study. (Scottish Gaelic syntax is, for what its worth.) > Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. Indeed, and we first have to find some common data. I'd like to ask Mark if he can find a speaker in which there is a wide variation _of the same word_, as in my falcin/falcon BBC reporter. Perhaps a researcher could check out hearers' perceptions too by asking them to write down what they hear? Cecil Ward. From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 10:08:15 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:08:15 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - formants Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Bob Rankin and Cecil Ward have both said basically the same thing: they hear these vowels as /I/, and so they are /I/. I take this point, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny on a wider basis. That depends on whether "wider basis" is intelligible in this context or not. I'm certainly far from certain what it might mean. > It's clear that for both Bob and Cecil, the raised schwa counts as /I/, i.e. perceptually they identify the vowel with /I/. I believe that's about all either of us has really claimed. If it sounds like an English /I/ to us, then to us it's an English /I/. What it might be to someone from NYC or Glasgow is immaterial to our particular identification. What the sound turns out to be spectrographically might be different from phonetic [I], but that is also immaterial to our phonological identification, isn't it. > Bob is not a native speaker of the same variety as me, and therefore his analysis is like saying that because a speaker of a particular variety of English cannot hear the difference between alveolar /t/ and dental /t/ in Tamil, there is no distinction in Tamil. No, it's like another speaker of Tamil saying that *to him* it sounds like the one or the other variety of (apical/laminal) stop. > Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be, before we come to any conclusions. Again, what's being claimed here is far from clear. Certainly no amount of understanding of formant structure or other etic information constitutes a valid test. Only identification made by one or more speakers would be linguistically valid, and if possible that test should be conducted under normal conditions of "noisy channel", etc. One can conceive of a number of possible experiments, but the "experment" with Bob and Cecil is already conclusive. If Mark hears it differently, it merely shows that he has a slightly different phonology and talks funny. :-) Bob Rankin From cecil at cecilward.com Mon Jul 28 10:14:40 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:14:40 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - crossing the phonemic quantum gap In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > in which case 'falcon' could qualify, having a final /n/. There will also be some nasalisation of the vowel, which could also contribute to differences. So would other nasals count - the /m/ in cimunicate ? Wouldn't help with "Siddam", of course. > Cecil Ward's speaker may therefore have varied this aspect of speech (particularly if involved in a 'performance' of some sort for broadcast), I speculated at the time as that pragmatics might be a factor. The reporter was introducing the subject of his report, and the "falcin" was "new, noteworthy" material. He gestured towards the bird and its owner. His intonation said to me that the subject was "something the viewer should be surprised by/marvel at". He then carried on talking having established the context, and used a more even intonation with lower pitch, and fewer words were heavily emphasised. Certainly the first instance of the word was higher pitched and slightly louder, as best I recall. Cecil. From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 10:15:28 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:15:28 EDT Subject: schwa-raising and related Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > 1. Why does a token have to 'belong' to some specific phoneme at all? Are phoneme inventories necessarily exhaustive? Couldn't it be the case that in noisy or obscure environments you can get values that hover between what might in other environments be norms for other phonemes, and that are simply not assignable? It could be a kind of structuralist error to assume that every utterance token belongs exhaustively to some determinate class. Perhaps, since hearers are looking for meaning, a lot of detail is simply allowed to be fudged, as long as context gives enough clues for interpretation? There are alternative models of phonological structure (like the one in Bybee 2001) that don't in fact have fully determinate inventories. There are several different questions here. I suppose everyone would agree that individual tokens can be and are "fudged" (i.e., in production) and/or misperceived because of noisy channels, etc. I take that to be an aspect of "parole", "performance" or whatever, and assume that the underlying or "stored" forms of these same words do have some sort of determinate phonological shape. Beyond that, I suppose one's answer depends on the version of phonological theory one subscribes to. Praguean orthodoxy specified one answer to the neutralization question and American Structuralism another. Various generative phonologies have tried to combine the two to different degrees. But I think all agree on some sort of distinctive (underlying in some sense) phonological representation for all words. And with the exception of some instances of sound symbolism and loanword phonology I think most would agree on an underlying inventory. Interestingly though, in the development of generative phonologies of the '60's and '70's (i.e., before I became bored with them and went back to strictly diachronic work), there was no place in the phonology of a language itself where an inventory of phonemes, underlying or otherwise, was specified. There were only underlying representations and rules that operated on them. The matrices with all the little pluses and minuses in the various textbooks were not, in fact, part of the "phonological grammar" of the language. They were just there for the linguist's reference. This said, I'd be surprised to find a native English dialect where [I] and [schwa] were really allophonic. Neutralization in "parole", yes, but probably not in "langue." I could be corrected on that point however, since, as I've said, I'm not an Anglicist. I just speak the language by accident of history. Bob Rankin Linguistics Dept. University of Kansas Lawrence, KS From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Mon Jul 28 15:14:04 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:14:04 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - common samples Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Cecil and fellow list members, many thanks to Cecil for the latest post on schwa, and the kind comments on my own contributions. We seem agreed that more data is required, but i'd just like to make a comment on the request for variation in the same word. In fact, production variation in repeated utterances of the same word is precisely what we find with acoustic analysis (even if these are consistently related to a single phoneme by our perceptual mechanisms). For example, I've just been measuring some data on voice onset time (VOT = the period between the release of the stop and the onset of vocal fold vibration) in Barnsley English. For one female speaker I have (so far) VOT values of 71 ms, 71 ms, 51 ms, 53.5 ms. This kind of variation is normal and is why phoneticians ask their subjects to repeatedly utter the same phrase or word, so that we can get an average as well as an idea of the range of variation. This speaker has an average VOT for /t/ of 61.6 ms, which is far in excess of her values for /d/ (average around 15 ms). So, I am pretty convinced that *any* utterance of *any* word would show a great deal of variation in its acoustic structure (frequency and amplitude values, and relative timing of events). The real question is, what boundaries is Cecil employing to hear /I/, and do the formant values for raised schwa cross those perceptual boundaries? This is not a question which can be directly answered by acoustic analysis, but requires perceptual testing involving controlled (and so often synthetic) stimuli. Cecil has heard /I/ once, because the vowel possessed the relevant qualities for that vowel in Cecil's perceptual vowel space, but that does not mean that the speaker produced normal /I/ values for his or her own speech (though with single instances such as this there is always the case of a speaker error too - another reason why phoneticians collect averages of many repetitions). I'm happy to pass on my 'Saddam' and 'Sidney' tokens to any list member for them to listen to. Any southern British English speakers out there who hear /I/ in 'Saddam'? Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Mon Jul 28 15:14:57 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:14:57 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, just a response to Bob Rankin's latest comments on the validity of his judgement here as a non-native speaker of the variety in question. I disagree that his being a speaker of another variety of English makes him qualified to comment on my phonology. What he is doing is mapping the phonetic realisations of one accent to the phonemes in his own. There is nothing wrong in this, we do it all the time when we, as English speakers, talk to someone with another variety. And he may hear /I/ for perfectly legitimate reasons within his own dialect, but that tells us nothing about standard southern British English phonology. An anecdote told to me by Francis Nolan will make clear that this cannot tell us anything about the phonology of that variety. A speaker of northern English goes into a shop in Cambridge and asks for a 'pan'. As his production of this word involves an unsapirated /p/ and a central /a/ (close to IPA [a]), the southern speakers hear the word 'bun' /b^n/, because the phonetic values for /p/ and /a/ in the northerner's speech fall within the range of values they expect to hear for /b/ and /^/ in southern English. They direct the northerner to a baker's. So, the southerner's misperception involves mapping northern /pa/ to their own /b^/. Does this tell us that in northern English there is no contrast between /p/ and /b/, or /^/ and /a/ (in fact, southern /^/ relates to northern /U/), or at the lexical level, 'pan' and 'bun'? No, it does not, though it tells us something about the southerner's perceptual mechanisms. The southerners may claim that northern English has merged /p/ and /b/ etc., but a little further questioning would indicate that the northerner has a different production of 'bun', i.e. as [bUn], so we can see that there is no merger. Now suppose that the speakers (like Bob) fail to hear this contrast between [pan] and [bUn]. Does this tell us anything about northern English? No, it still does not. To be certain that there is or is not a merger, we must measure the values for the northerner's /p/ and /b/ etc. using a more objective method, i.e. acoustic analysis. If there are consistent differences, even ones which we cannot hear, then we may assume that there is a contrast in that variety to which we are not sensitive. We can go further, and synthesise speech on the basis of average values across speakers, and test to see whether they can consistently distinguish the two averages. If they can, even if we cannot, then we can claim that there is a contrast to which we are not sensitive. It really does not matter that Bob is a native speaker of some variety of English. In fact, as his comments indicate, there is perhaps all the more reason to perform acoustic analysis on other varieties of one's own language than on 'foreign' languages. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Mon Jul 28 22:31:22 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:31:22 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Jones writes: > just a response to Bob Rankin's latest comments on the validity of his judgement here as a non-native speaker of the variety in question. I disagree that his being a speaker of another variety of English makes him qualified to comment on my phonology. With so many over-extended analogies and exaggerated claims in play, I wonder how many readers remember exactly what the question is/was here. I had to go back and look through my deleted postings to be sure myself. Bob Rankin wrote: > "I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucett... say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim." Cecil Ward wrote: > "That's how Bob Rankin _heard_ his particular word, so that instance passes my test, regardless of the precise phonetic realisation of Lise Doucett's pronunciation." Indeed. If anyone would like to present evidence that Mark Jones responds: > "What he is doing is mapping the phonetic realisations of one accent to the phonemes in his own." No, what he is doing is identifying the sound phonologically in his own dialect. Ditto, Cecil Ward. Mark continues: " ... that tells us nothing about standard southern British English phonology." Of course not, but no one has said that it did. Although I have said that I am not an Anglicist, I should add that I am indeed conversant with the phonologies of a variety of British, North American and Australian English, although not a specialist in them. I frankly doubt very much that for Lise Doucett an [I] would be normally identified as a phonological schwa if semantically identifiable material around it were removed. That would be an experiment for someone who felt strongly that it was worth doing. In this instance I don't think it is. Talk of Tamil dialects or Scottish buns is as irrelevant to this discussion as most of this discussion is to historical linguistics. I suggest that interested persons take it to a phonetics or phonology list. Any relevance to sound change has gotten pretty distant at this point. Bob Rankin From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Tue Jul 29 11:37:58 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 07:37:58 EDT Subject: schwa-raising - English = English? Message-ID: Note: This last posting from Mark Jones draws this line of discussion to a close. Dorothy Disterheft List Moderator ************************************************************************ Dear Bob and list members, just to clarify a few points Bob raises. 1) The non-southern English dialects I was referring to in my anecdote were not Scottish but northern English, as I said. Southern English /^/ does correspond to Scottish English /^/. In northern English, the correspondence across lexemes is to /U/. 2) Bob originally wrote: > "I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucett... say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic /I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim." This contains an apparently phonetic transcription (in square brackets) as well as a phonemic interpretation. Bob Rankin states that he made no claims about southern English phonology, yet normally we would expect the phonemic interpretation to be made in terms of the variety under discussion, not the researcher's (hence my comments on Tamil: I can say from the point of view of my English phonology that I hear only one /t/ in that language). I assumed that Bob's phonemic /I/ was a southern English one. The original question related to southern British English phonology of which I am a native speaker, which is why my measurements and comments are relevant. As a native speaker of that variety, I have and hear schwa in 'communication'. I think I've made the point that 'interdialectal' mappings do not constitute a basis for phonological comments, though they are interesting in themselves. 3) This material is *very* relevant to the "business end" of sound change, as it relates to the way that speakers map predictable phonetic variation to an underlying constant (if such things exist, but as the argument here is based on them, I offer no comment on Roger Lass's interesting observation). Indeed, the essential questions are whether such variation exists in the way it has been described and if it does, how is it perceived in the relevant variety. Experimental phonetic and laboratory phonological studies have made very important contributions to this field (e.g. the work of John Ohala). I would say that although it is widely known that there is lexical variation across varieties of English in the way that unstressed vowels are considered to be schwa /@/ or lax /I/ (whether we say 'quickest' with a final [@] or [I], for example), in southern British English at the present time, there is no phonological merger between /@/ and /I/, and not even a phonetic change, though allophonic raised schwa occurs. For those interested, I submitted my original instrumental results to the PHONET list for critical review by phoneticians at the same time I posted them here. At the time of writing, they have been accepted by the list members without comment. But "no news is good news", as they say. Mark Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge