schwa-raising - English = English?

[Mark J. Jones]

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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