26.30, Review: Phonetics: Cruttenden (2014)

Sun Jan 4 02:16:13 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-30. Sat Jan 03 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.30, Review: Phonetics: Cruttenden (2014)

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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 21:15:40
From: Stanimir Rakic [starakic at gmail.com]
Subject: Gimson's Pronunciation of English

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-1400.html

AUTHOR: Alan  Cruttenden
TITLE: Gimson's Pronunciation of English
SUBTITLE: 8th Edition
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Stanimir V. Rakic,  

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Gimson's Pronunciation of English” (GPE) is the classical introduction to
English phonetics which, for decades, has been an indispensable source of
information for English teachers and phoneticians. The work that was
originally published in 1962 under the title “Introduction to the
Pronunciation of English” and was immensely popular with English teachers
around the world has now appeared in the 8th edition. Since the 4th edition,
Cruttenden has taken on the huge responsibility of revising and updating this
classical work. In the successive editions, Cruttenden found it necessary to
rewrite and revise most chapters of the original book. Specifically,
Cruttenden has applied his great expertise as a phonetician to update the
description of Received Pronunciation (RP) and other major regional variants,
as well as to incorporate new findings and techniques into the book.

The 7th edition saw the introduction of the companion website in which the
technique of Magnetic Resonance Imaging has been used to show in video how the
tongue moves to form different English vowels and consonants. In the 8th
edition, the most  important novelty is the change of the teaching model –
this is no more Received Pronunciation, which the public has begun to regard
as outdated and class-ridden, but General British (GB) which Cruttenden
regards as a more tolerant and flexible model which nonetheless inherits some
main properties of its predecessor.  In the new edition, the chapter on the
history of English language has been completely rewritten as well as the
sections explaining the conditions which led to the demise of Received
Pronunciation as a standard and the introduction of General British in its
place. The structure of the book has remained almost the same and its spirit
has been more or less preserved. Now it has four parts, instead of three - the
13th chapter is now separated as the 4th part under the title ‘Language
teaching and learning’. The content of the four parts of the book is given
briefly below.

Part I and Part II

As in the previous editions, Part I provides basic information about
phonetics, acoustics, speech organs, speech sounds and their classification.
Part II provides an overview of the historical development of the English
sound system from the time of Old English to the time of Modern English in the
19th and 20th century. In the 7th chapter, Cruttenden updates the description
of the basic features of different varieties of English, and promotes General
British (GB) as a new teaching model. In connection with General British,
Cruttenden also describes the features of Conspicuous General British (CGB),
in fact the now outdated Received Pronunciation, and Regional General British
(RGB). The 8th and 9th chapters contain systematic descriptions of English
vowels and consonants with full details of their articulation, allophones, and
regional variants, with separate boxes for spelling variants and historical
sources followed by advice to foreign learners.

Part III and Part IV

Part III of the book deals with accent, intonation, phonotactics and the
processes which take place in connected speech such as assimilation, elision,
nasalization and liaison.

Part IV is devoted to the teaching and learning of English as a foreign
language. Two simplified models are distinguished: Amalgam English which aims
at intelligibility to native speakers, and International English which as a
lingua franca should enable international communication in some restricted
contexts.

EVALUATION

The early twentieth century books by phonetician Daniel Jones, which continued
to be published throughout the century, established the term Received
Pronunciation as the name of the standard for spoken British English. The
successive editions of GPE found welcome reception among English teachers,
particularly because of the trustworthy reports on the trends in RP and other
related accents. Now this has been changed – Cruttenden declares that instead
of RP the main object of description is General British which should be
understood as a more tolerant and flexible standard.  This move comes as no
surprise because the question of a new standard, or at least of its name, has
been already present in public discussions for some time.  Wells (1990: XII)
notes in his introduction to the first edition of “Longman Pronunciation
Dictionary” that the democratization of English society in the second half of
the twentieth century means that RP must be defined 'in a rather broader way'
than it has been done before. In many cases, Wells includes in the LPD
pronunciations which differ from RP. Gimson (1980) himself in the third
edition of the “Pronunciation” considers the term ‘General British’ as a
convenient name which may ‘in time supersede…RP’ (Cruttenden 2014: 80).

Cruttenden rightly concludes that the time for this change has arrived. The
expansion of schooling and education after the Second World War has
contributed to the spreading of RP to wider layers of the population, although
in somewhat diluted form in which occasional regional features are tolerated.
Thus, a new, modern form of RP has developed, while the older one began to be
regarded by many people as outdated, class-ridden and limited to a small
minority in southeast England.  Cruttenden dubs this older form of RP as
‘Conspicuous General British’. According to Cruttenden, the modern RP has a
broader basis than the old RP, and therefore a greater number of speakers in
almost all regions of Britain. He estimates that the modern RP has more
speakers than any other variety of English, and further argues that the claim
often repeated in the literature that only 3 per cent of the population use
this variety could be true of the old version of RP in which no regional
features are allowed. The speech of southeast England is the nearest to the
modern RP, but it is also widely used in other regions, and may be heard
spoken even in Cardiff or Edinburg. Nevertheless Cruttendon declares that the
name of the standard has to be changed because many people persist in
identifying  the term RP with the old version of the standard and ‘object to
the term in a variety of ways: either it is posh, it is an imposed standard,
it is too regionally limited, or it is outdated’ (Cruttenden 2014: 79, cf.
Wells 1990: XII, 1997, Roach 2004). Cruttenden considers  the other names
which have sometimes been used such as Queen’s (or King’s) English, Oxford
English, BBC English or Southern English, and finds faults with each of these
names. He concludes that the name ‘General British’ must be preferred over all
the others assuming that ‘Britain is not normally taken to include Northern
Ireland’.  It seems that Cruttenden reluctantly accepts the new name of the
standard, adding hastily that this is only ‘an evolved and evolving version’
of the standard under the new name.

A democratization of English society has brought a greater respect and
tolerance towards regional accents and dialects. Cruttenden has done a
marvelous job in reporting and comparing the changes of pronunciation in
different accents. He notes that some characteristics of ‘broad London’  ‘may
pass unnoticed’ by other GB speakers as, for example, vocalization of /l/ to
/ʊ/ in such words as held [heʊd] əand ball [bɔʊ]. Yet some regional features 
are still not acceptable as, for example, realization of /t/ by a glottal stop
word-medially between vowels as in [wɔ:ʔə] for water in ‘broad London' or the
lack of distinction between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ as in Northern English. Cruttenden
further notes that GB speech with some regional markers is increasingly heard
in different regions of Britain. He remarks that we should speak of RGBs in
plural because all these speeches include a large number of GB features. A
particular role belongs to London RGB, for which Cruttenden also uses the
terms 'broad London' or 'popular London' – the speech of working people which
includes Cockney pronunciation with possible exclusion of Cockney vocabulary.
According to Cruttenden, popular London has historically greatly influenced
the phonetic development of GB, and this influence is nowadays still very much
alive. C. remarks that some features of popular London may be considered
variants in GB, as for example the substitution of /əʊ/ with /ɒʊ/or the use
of [ʔ] instead of /t/ before an accented vowel or a pause (e.g. ‘not even’
[nɒʔ ’i:vn], ‘need it’ [ni:d ɪʔ]). A kind of complication may be seen in the
introduction of the name Estuary English for a hybrid between popular London
and GB which Cruttenden also calls London RBE. Estuary English seems to differ
from broad London in that it does not include some features of the former such
as /h/ - dropping, monophthongization of /aʊ/, the wide diphthongue in /əʊ/,
fronting of /ʌ/ and the replacement of /ð,ø/ with /v,f/. On the other hand,
Estuary English has some recent trends common with GB as, for example, the
replacement of /s/ with /ʃ/ in consonant clusters, e.g. ‘strain’, ‘industry’,
‘obstruct’. Estuary English seems to have been developed by people who looked
for some middle ground between broad London and RP.

Like the previous editions, the book includes a section on the sound changes
of the standard. The first subsection with the changes 'almost complete'
contains 5 items which all were also present in the previous 7th edition which
included six such changes. The only difference is that /tj,dj/ → /tʃ,dʒ/ has
expanded so it now applies also to accented syllables.  The only change which
is missing in this subsection is the process of  monophthongizing of /eə/ to
/ɛ:/ which is now downgraded by being included in the list of well-established
changes. This may be viewed as surprising because the sign /ɛ:/ as a novel
transcription is motivated by this change.  The lowering of /æ/ to /a/, which
has also induced the introduction of a new transcription sign, is included in
the list of well-established changes both in the 7th as well as in the 8th
edition. Noting these details, one might wonder why Cruttenden claims that the
changes which have brought about the new transcription signs are not ‘almost
complete’ but only ‘well-established.’ In the list of recent trends Cruttenden
notes that [ɒʊ] appears instead of /əʊ/ in words such as ‘goal’, ‘bold’,
‘mould’, the source of which may be located as popular London. In the book the
sections on sound changes precede the sections on main accents and dialects,
but the reverse ordering would make it easier for the reader to recognize what
is the influence of particular dialects. The explanation that the lowering of
/e/ followed the lowering of /æ/ does not sound convincing if we take into
account that the monophthongizing of /eə/ to /ɛ/ has to fill the same space.

The change of notation of /æ/ to /a/ does not seems necessary because, for
English learners, it makes no difference how the new pronunciation is marked,
and native speakers normally do not learn pronunciation from textbooks.
Furthermore, Cruttenden does not claim that the new pronunciation is equal to
C.4[a] but only closer to it, i.e. still somewhere between C.3 and C.4, and
for such a vowel the sign /æ/ may still be a better choice. In Wells (2008)
and Roach (2009) the traditional sign /æ/ is further used for the vowel in
‘bad’, ‘back’, ‘hand’. Besides this, Roach (2009: 14) explicitly claims that
/æ/ is ‘front, but not quite as open as a cardinal vowel no. 4 [a]’.  

The use of the sign /a/ for the vowel in ‘bad’ and ‘land’ may be a problem for
the speakers of the languages which have a central open vowel spelled with 'a'
as they may wrongly interpret /a/ as the vowel of their native languages. To
counteract this influence Cruttenden advises them to keep /a/ fully front and
above C.[a]. The second part of this advice may be difficult to realize as it
is well-known that speakers have problems identifying the position of the
tongue in their mouth. Among a host of valuable pieces of advice to foreign
learners with very different language backgrounds, there are some which are
not very practical. Some speakers are, for example, advised to shorten the
vowels preceding the voiceless plosive ‘remembering that vowels and sonorants
are shortened before /p,t,k/’ (p. 166). To follow this advice speakers would
have to know how many milliseconds vowels are shorter before voiceless
plosives, and such knowledge is hardly possible to apply in normal speech.

The book is not errors free. Most of the errors are trivial as, for example,
the word ‘inˈspired’ which should illustrate /ɪ/ remotely preceding the
accent. Some may be more perplexing  as, for example, the claim  that the
opposition between /ə/ and /ɛ:/ exists “solely in length” (p.100) which
contradicts Table 1 on page 33. What is surprising is the fact that one error
has survived since the 6th edition.  Kaltenböck (2002: 434) remarked that it
is not appropriate to note the realization of /r/ without a tongue tip contact
as a recent innovation ‘when normally no tongue tip contact is involved in the
production of /r/’. In the 8th edition, this pronunciation is still presented
as a recent change.

The companion website contains a rich choice of materials for further
learning. First, there are audio files with texts from Old English, Middle
English and Early Modern English, and audio files for the practice of
intonation of sentences given in Section 11.6. Second, there are valuable
materials prepared by G.F. Arnold and A.C. Gimson, and revised by Cruttenden
for Pronunciation Practice, as well as a rich choice of websites dealing with
English pronunciation and phonetics from some renowned universities and
distinguished phoneticians. The videos showing the articulation of English
sounds with commentaries, which has been added to this edition, could be a
great help to foreign learners. The problem is, however, that the animation
scrolls too quickly for the reader to read the commentaries. Thus, the reader
must first read the commentaries, and then activate the animation to be able
to understand what is going on. The addition of these videos is a welcome
novelty, although it may require too much persistence from some readers.

All in all, in spite of some minor problems, Cruttenden has again done an
excellent job in updating GRP so that it remains the chief source of
information on the pronunciation of standard English and related accents for
English teachers and phoneticians around the world.

REFERENCES

Gimson, A.C. 1980. Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. 3rd edition,
London: Edward Arnold.

Kaltenböck, G. 2002 Gimson's Pronunciation of English. 6th edition. ELT
Journal 56 (4): 431-434.

Roach, P. (2004) Illustrations of the IPA. British English: Received
Pronunciation. Journal of the IPA, vol. 34.2, pp.239-245.

Roach, P. 2009 English Phonetics and Phonology. A practical course. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Wells, J.C. (1990) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Essex: Longman. 

Wells, J.C. (1997) Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation? In Medina
Casado, Carmelo and Soto Palomo, Concepción (eds.), II Jornadas de Estudios
Ingleses. Universidad de Jaén, Spain. p.19-28. 

Wells, J.C. (2008) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Third edition with CD.
Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr Stanimir Rakic was a Professor at the Pedagogic Academy in Belgrade and at
the University of East Sarajevo. He is interested in phonetics, phonology,
morphology and semantics. He has published a number of papers in Serbian,
Yugoslav and international journals. He is now retired.

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