Problems in Scottish English Phonology (Linguistische Arbeiten) 348430328X, 9783484303287

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Linguistische Arbeiten

328

Herausgegeben von Hans Altmann, Peter Blumenthal, Herbert E. Brekle, Gerhard Heibig, Hans Jürgen Heringer, Heinz Vater und Richard Wiese

Tatiana Ewa Kaminska

Problems in Scottish English Phonology

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1995

to the memory of my father, Wiodzimierz Alfred Kaminski (1931-1983). who encouraged me

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Kaminska, Tatiana Ewa: Problems in Scottish English phonology / Tatiana Ewa Kaminska. Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1995 (Linguistische Arbeiten ; 328) NE:GT ISBN 3-484-30328-X

ISSN 0344-6727

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tübingen 1995 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen, Printed in Germany. Druck: Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt Einband: Hugo Nadele, Nehren

Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Symbols and Abbreviations

ix χ xii

1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

1 1 3 18 18 19

Theoretical Background Goals of the Book Scots and Scottish Standard English Lexical Phonology 1.3.1. Introduction 1.3.2. Lexical Phonology: Principal Assumptions 1.3.2.1. Phonology-Morphology-Lexicon: How Are They Related? 1.3.3. Cyclicity and Strict Cycle Condition 1.3.4. Postcyclic and Postlexical Rules 1.3.5. Lexical Phonology: Conclusion 1.4. Three - Dimensional Phonology 1.4.1. Overview 1.4.2. Phonological Representations in Three-Dimensional Phonology 1.5. Syllable and Sonority Hierarchy 2. 2.1.

Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule RP - SSE: A Comparison of Vowel Systems 2.1.1. The Vowel System of RP 2.1.2. The Vowel System of SSE 2.1.3. The Two Vowel Systems Compared 2.1.3.1. Anglicization of Basic Scottish Vowel System 2.1.3.2. Aitken's Vowel: Lexical Distribution 2.1.3.3. Aitken's Vowel: Phonetic Characteristics 2.2. Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule: Introduction 2.2.1. SVLR: Basic Facts 2.3. SVLR: Discussion of Rule Formulation 2.3.1. Input to SVLR 2.3.1.1. Input to SVLR: Vowels Which Resist Lengthening 2.3.1.2. Input to SVLR: Vowels Which Undergo Lengthening 2.3.1.3. Input to SVLR: A More Detailed Discussion of Scottish [ε]

19 22 23 26 27 27 28 32 36 36 37 40 42 44 45 47 47 48 50 50 51 54 57

VI

2.3.1.4. Input to SVLR: Concluding Remarks 2.3.2. The Environment of SVLR 2.3.2.1. The Environment of SVLR: Discussion of the Feature [±continuant] 2.3.2.2. The Environment of SVLR: Discussion of the Feature [±voice] 2.4. SVLR: Discussion of the Status of the Rule in Lexical Phonology 2.4.1. Mode of Application of SVLR: Why Is It Neither Cyclic Nor Postlexical? 2.4.2. Interaction of SVLR with Other Rules of SSE 2.5. SVLR: Concluding Remarks The Allophonic Rule of Vowel Lengthening in English and Aitken's Law 3.1. Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English: Basic Facts 3.2. Factors Determining Vowel Duration 3.2.1. Intrinsic Duration of Vowels 3.2.2. Segmental Conditioning of Vowel Duration: Voice Quality of the Following Consonant 3.2.3. Segmental Conditioning of Vowel Duration: Manner of Articulation of the Following Consonant 3.3. An Interpretation of the Allophonic Lengthening Rule in Lexical Phonology 3.4. Allophonic Lengthening Rule: Problems Related to Status Assignment in Lexical Phonology 3.5. Allophonic Lengthening Rule: Concluding Remarks 3.6. Aitken's Law Viewed as a Lexicalizalion of the Allophonic Lengthening Rule

58 59 59 63 64 .66 70 73

3.

4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4.

Phonological Account of [r]-Related Processes in RP and SSE: R-Deletion [r]-Distribution in Rhotic and Non-Rhotic Accents of English [r]-Related Processes in Non-Rhotic Accents: Linking [r] and Intrusive [r] [r]-Related Phenomena in Non-Rhotic Accents: Phonological Account Discussion of the R-Deletion Interpretation 4.4.1. Possible Objections 4.4.2. Syllable Structure in Three-Dimensional Phonology 4.4.3. [r] and Syllabification Phenomena

76 76 78 .78 80 83 84 91 94 95

97 97 99 102 109 109 110 114

Vll

4.4.3.1. [r] and the Interpretation of Extrasyllabic Consonants in English 4.4.3.2. The Postlexical Resyllabification Rule in English: Discussion of Domain Assignment in Lexical Phonology 4.4.3.3. R-Deletion Analysis and Interpretation of the English Syllable Template: Compulsory Onset 4.4.3.4. R-Deletion Productivity 5. 5.1.

5.2.

5.3.

5.4. 5.5.

5.6. 5.7.

Phonological Account of [r]-Related Processes in RP and SSE: R-Weakening The Distinctive Feature Characteristics of English [r] 5.1.1. Syllabicity: Two Principal Approaches 5.1.2. The Feature [±consonantal]: Introductory Remarks 5.1.3. The Feature [±sonorant]: Introductory Remarks 5.1.4. Distinctive Feature Description of English [r] The Rule of [r]-Weakening in Lexical Phonology 5.2.1. One or Two-Phase [r]-Weakening? Discussion of the Formulation of the Rule 5.2.2. [r]-Weakening: Definition and Formalization R-Weakening Analysis: Problems 5.3.1. An Account of Low Long Vowels 5.3.2. [r] as an Onset Filler After Low Back Vowels 5.3.2.1. The Phonological Interpretation of Glides: Basic Facts The [rj-Insertion Rule under R-Weakening Analysis: Discussion of Rule Status Formulation of the [reinsertion Rule: Basic Facts and Problems 5.5.1. Varieties of RP 5.5.2. [r]-Insertion in Variety "A" 5.5.3. [r]-Insertion in Variety "E" Long Vowels Under the R-Weakening Interpretation An Account of the Evidence for [r]-Weakening in a Sound Change in Progress in SSE 5.7.1. Introduction 5.7.2. The Most Common Variants of [r] in SSE from the Perspective of Recent History 5.7.3. Basic Facts: A Summary of Romaine's Data 5.7.4. SSE: An Analysis of Romaine's Findings As Evidence Relevant to [r]-Related Processes in RP

114

116

118 120

122 125 125 127 127 128 130 130 132 141 141 145 147 151 152 152 154 158 161 167 167 167 168 170

Vlll

5.8.

5.7.4.1. The Issue of Sound Change in Progress in SSE: Discussion and Possible Objections 5.7.4.2. The Synchronic Phonetic Realizations of [r] in SSE: Evidence for Gradient Weakening 5.7.5. Romaine's Data as Evidence for Gradual Interpretation of [r]-Loss: Conclusion Concluding Comments to R-Weakening Analysis

Conclusion Appendix References

171 172 174 175 177 184 187

Abstract This book presents an account of phonological data related to the study of sonorants in Scottish Standard English, as compared with Received Pronunciation. We analyze and interpret these data within the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology and according to recent non-linear, three-dimensional theories of phonological representation (see especially Kiparsky 1982a and 1982b, Mohanan 1984, Rubach 1984, Halle and Mohanan 1985, Booij and Rubach 1987 for the former theories and McCarthy 1979a and 1979b, Kiparsky 1981, Halle and Vergnaud 1980, Clements and Keyser 1983 for the latter). The basic tenets of Lexical Phonology as well as those of Three-Dimensional Phonology (with particular reference to its application to syllable stucture) are explained in chapter 1. In the same chapter we discuss the distinction between Standard English spoken with a Scottish accent (Scottish Standard English or SSE) and Scots, the traditional dialect spoken in southern, central and north-eastern Scotland. Our presentation of the theoretical paradigms in question as tested against the linguistic material of SSE is organized around the issues of vowel length and the phonological processes pertaining to the sound [r]. More specifically, our analysis focuses on two lengthening processes operating in SSE, namely, the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule, also referred to as "Aitken's Law" (as discussed in chapter 2), and the Allophonic Lengthening Rule, a phenomenon universal to accents of English (investigated in chapter 3). Our claim is that the former is an accent-specific lexicalization of the latter. Proposals concerning the phonological interpretation of [r]-related phenomena in both non-rhotic and rhotic accents of English are examined in chapters 4 and 5. In particular, we will look at various ways of accounting for the distribution of [r] in the pronunciation of non-rhotic accents (as exemplified by RP) and propose on the basis of evidence from rhotic accents (especially SSE) an interpretation based on a gradient rule of [r]-Weakening. In our Conclusion we shall evaluate the success of the Lexical Framework in accounting for the data from SSE and RP investigated in the present study.

Acknowledgements A number of individuals have helped me in the realization of the final version of the present work. First and foremost I wish to thank my teacher Professor Jerzy Rubach for his invaluable advice and criticism of draft versions of this book. His friendly and patient guidance and the discussions we had together not only influenced the final shape of the present work but also taught me a lot about how to conduct phonological analyses: how to examine facts meticulously from many angles before drawing final conclusions, as well as how to translate thinking into clear argumentation. I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Department of English Language of the University of Edinburgh, and in particular to Dr. Heinz Giegerich for his incisive and inspiring comments on the problems investigated in the present study. His ability to criticize my ideas in a way which always proved truly constructive helped me a great deal with my work on this book. Professor John M. Anderson also contributed helpful comments and suggestions. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Hans-Henning Speitel, Director of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland of the University of Edinburgh, now retired, for permission to consult materials from the archives of the Survey which were not included in the published version of The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather and Speitel 1975-1986), as well as for free access to all of the Survey's library collections. I am indebted to Dr. Speitel also for his helpful advice, and particularly for the discussions we had concerning data from SSE. I am also truly grateful to Dr. Richard Wiese of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf for his inspiring suggestions concerning the content of this book. Last but not least, I wish to thank, Erich Schneiderman of the University of Warsaw for his patience and constant encouragement as well as for his advice on stylistic matters and various useful proposals regarding nuances of logical argumentation. He proofread my text with diligence and care and saved me from the mistakes to which non-native speakers are prone when writing English. Finally I would like to acknowledge the all-important financial help of the British Council, from which I received a twelve-month scholarship for October 1986 through September 1987, which enabled me to spend this time at the University of Edinburgh studying in the Department of English Language. It is this which made it possible for me to consult the unique archival materials and to learn from the Edinburgh scholars whom I have

XI

mentioned above (as well as from others too numerous to acknowledge individually). Needless to say, the shortcomings of this study remain entirely my own responsibility.

Symbols and Abbreviations UR WFR SPE RP SSE SAE SEAmE GA Am. OE ME ESc MSC SCC BE

Co. csec. cl.

σ R N Ο C S W X N Adv. loc. sg[±ATR] [±del rel]

underlying representation word formation rule The Sound Pattern of English

by N. Chomsky and M. Halle (1968) Received Pronunciation Scottish Standard English South African English South East American English General American American Old English Middle English Early Scots Morpheme Structure Condition Strict Cycle Condition Bracket Erasure County centiseconds social class (working, middle,etc.) underlying representation intermediate representation phonetic representation morphological representation indicate author's additions inside quotations syllable syllable rhyme syllable nucleus syllable onset syllable coda strong position in the syllable weak position in the syllable timing slot Noun Adverb locative

singular advanced tongue root delayed release zero

Xlll

—» /

-

goes to, becomes, is realized as in the environment: χ ->Y/ A Β (X becomes Y in the environment of a preceding A and a following B, i.e. AXB —»AYB)

+ # V

-

morpheme boundary word boundary any vowel (=syllable peak in skeletal representation) any consonant (=syllable non-peak in skeletal representation) glide Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule Allophonic Lengthening Rule Basic Scottish Vowel System orthographic representation of [r] the allophones of "r" collectively lingual roll frictionless continuant flap uvular articulation of "r" default underspecified segment (product of the [r]-Weakening Rule)

C

-

G SVLR ALR BSVS "r" [r] [l] [Λ] [I] [£] [d]

-

β]

-

./am

[tj] [3] [1] [Θ] [δ]

-

chin measure ,v/?eep (hick this

[x]

-

IOC/7

[Tj]

-

10A7g

Μ

-

[?]

[ι] [e] [ae] [Ό] [Λ] [υ] [uu] [a:]

-

[hw] voiceless labial-velar fricative (as in Scottish where, whtch,Qtc.) glottal stop grapheme u sh/p ten tap top cwt put goose pass

XIV

[D:] [li] [3 :] [δ] [ε] [-»] Vr yer

-

[4}

-

0

:

north see turn reduced vowel schwa in China lower mid front vowel a slightly centralized type of u (high, back) vowel "r"-colouring, also marked as |> ] fleeting vowel which shows zero -e/i alternation Polish high central vowel placed below the symbol of a sound means devoicing means that the sound represented by the preceding letter is long

1.

Theoretical Background

1.1. Goals of the Book The goals of this book are twofold: descriptive and theoretical. We intend here both to describe certain phonological processes of Scottish Standard English and to interpret this material in the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology. In descriptive terms the goal of the present study is to provide a presentation and discussion of the phonological rules of the Scottish accent of English (Scottish Standard English - henceforth SSE) that constitute the most significant area of difference between this accent and the southern English accent known as Received Pronunciation (henceforth RP). Our discussion of the differences in question will be organized around the issues relevant to the study of sonorants, as it is in this field that the dissimilarities between these two accents of the English language are most crucial. More specifically, we shall focus on the interpretation of vowel length variations in SSE as compared to RP and on the phonological processes related to the [r] sound in both accents. In chapter 2 an attempt will be made to examine in detail and compare the surface vowel systems of the two accents under consideration. Most of the discussion will focus on the issue of the formulation of the phonological process which introduces surface length differentiations to the SSE vowel system, a process called the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (SVLR) or Aitken's Law. This rule, we shall maintain, lengthens all underlyingly tense vocalic nuclei before consonants characterized as [+voice], [+continuant] as well as before morphological and word boundaries (this is interpreted in the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology by assigning the rule to the postcyclic lexical component of the grammar; boundaries are represented in formal terms by means of a bracket "]"). We shall further attempt to relate Aitken's Law to the Allophonic Lengthening Rule (henceforth ALR) which affects all vocalic nuclei in all accents and dialects of the English language. Moreover, as we shall try to prove in chapter 3, the linguistic material from a number of languages including non-Indoeuropean ones, testifies to the fact that the lengthening under consideration has a universal character, though its intensity is definitely language specific. In English this gradient low phonetic lengthening process applies inside words as well as across word boundaries and, like S V L R , is most effective before the consonants specified as [+voice], [+continuant]. A lengthy discussion and a detailed theoretical interpretation of ALR (in which we will argue that, within the framework of Lexical Phonology, this rule is a postlexical phenomenon with a lexical

application) will be presented in chapter 3, whereas chapters 4 and 5 will offer accounts of phonological rules relevant to the sound [r] in both accents. Chapter 4 provides a detailed discussion of the terms non-rhotic and rhotic in relation to the accents of the English language. Non-rhotic accents are defined as varieties of pronunciation in which [r] can occur solely before vowels (as in RP) and before syllabic consonants (never in the syllable coda). The rhotic accents, on the other hand, are those which pronounce the sound [r] in all instances where it corresponds to orthographic "r" (as, at least until recently, in SSE). It is the non-rhotic accents of English that manifest the greatest variation concerning the pronunciation and distribution of the [r] sound, and it is the account of phonological phenomena in these varieties that constitutes the main focus both of chapter 4 and of chapter 5. The most important phonological phenomena which pertain to the distribution of [r] in non-rhotic accents are "linking r" and "intrusive r". "Linking r" is defined as the retention of word or morpheme final postvocalic [r] when a suffix starting with a vowel is appended or when the following word begins with a vowel. This is the [r] which is preserved in the spelling. "Intrusive r", on the other hand, refers to the appearance of [r] intervocalically, even though it is not present in the spelling. Our main intention equally in chapters 4 and 5 will be to postulate two hypotheses which might yield coherent accounts of "linking r" and "intrusive r", and to critically investigate their implications. Below we shall refer to these hypotheses as "R-Deletion" and "R-Weakening", as discussed in chapters 4 and 5 respectively. We differentiate between the name of each hypothesis and the otherwise indistinguishable name of the rule most central to (but not solely responsible for) its explanation of the relevant phenomena by using in the former case the unbracketed capital "R" symbol and the small bracketed [r] symbol in the latter case. These two interpretations of [r], together with the investigation of their theoretical implications, refer directly to non-rhoiic accents of English. Nonetheless, one of the most important reasons why we shall ultimately claim (in chapter 5) the superiority of the R-Weakening hypothesis is that the latter account receives external support from evidence based on the speech of some speakers of SSE. In particular, there exists a tendency towards [r]-dropping by young speakers of SSE, as studied and described most completely by S. Romaine (1978). Thus, first of all, the analytical framework which we will develop for non-rhoiic accents in chapters 4 and 5 will prove useful for the description of some of the phonological processes of SSE as well. Even more importantly, however, the aforementioned recent tendency in young SSE speakers appears (as we will argue in section 7 of chapter 5) to represent a sound change in progress towards non-rhoticity,

operating independently of influence from non-rhotic dialects, and showing gradient development towards [r]-lessness. Given the strength of the evidence for these conclusions, it will prove possible for us to argue that this phenomenon is indicative of the gradient nature of [r]-loss in English generally, and that it is therefore appropriate to understand a rule of [r]-Weakening as playing an important role in the phonological processes which determine the distribution of the sound [r] in the pronunciation of non-rhotic dialects of English. In theoretical terms, on the other hand, our goal is to incorporate a description of the segmental rules of SSE into the framework of Lexical Phonology (outlined in the following sections of the present chapter). In other words, we intend to test the usefulness of the Lexical paradigm for both the description and the interpretation of a significant body of the phonological material of SSE. The purpose of this work is, then, to demonstrate that the vowel lengthening rules of SSE, as well as the phonological processes related to the sound [r] in RP and SSE, can adequately and fruitfully be analyzed in this new theoretical model of grammar. For the arguments employed in the present work we have also found it satisfactory to make use of the basic principles of the current non-linear, theory of Three-Dimensional Phonology. The concepts relevant to the Lexical framework will be detailed in section 1.3. and those crucial for the Three-Dimensional Phonology will be dealt with in section 1.4. of the present chapter.

1.2. Scots and Scottish Standard English: Clarification of the Terms in the Historical Perspective The traditional approach to the presentation of the history of the English language is to view it as a history of Southern English. This situation is a result of the long-lasting political, economic and cultural domination of England over neighbouring peoples and countries. Consequently, most available histories of English provide records of linguistic variants which survived because they were prevailing linguistic forms in the geographical territory which possessed power and control over the nations which were less privileged historically. It is the limitations of such a one-sided view of the history of English which make dialectal studies particularly important, interesting and challenging. Dialectal data frequently elucidate and clarify the character of the Southern changes, since by being geographically removed from the standardizing force of the South, they retain forms which

provide evidence for earlier stages of linguistic phenomena only the final results of which can be attested in the South. We shall start the discussion of Scots by first trying to define the terms Scottish and Scots. Our survey will be based on the following sources: on Murray's excellent historical summary (1873: 1-93), which although already more than one hundred years old remains an enlightening and valuable study for dialect scholars, on Grant's Dictionary (1931), which analyzes exhaustive cross-dialectal synchronic linguistic material (including borrowings) often with reference to diachronic developments, on Daiches1 monograph (1960), which offers the broad cultural-historical and literary context for linguistic phenomena; as well as on Vaiana Taylor's dissertation (1972), significant for its updated detailed analysis of dialectal material of the Southern Counties of Scotland. The meaning of the words Scottish and Scots has changed considerably since they were first recorded in English. Originally, these terms were applied to the dwellers of the territory now known as Ireland, where Scots referred to the Gaelic of the original Scots, the language later known as Ersehe. In the eighth century (and probably previous centuries) they were used also of the inhabitants of Northern Britain who were of Irish descent, and whose land extended along the west coast of Alban, beyond the Firth of Clyde. It must be remembered, however, that "In the Anglo-Saxon or Old English period of English literature the language spoken in what is now Scotland was either one of three Celtic languages, or Norse, or the same language that was spoken and written in northern England as far south as the Humber. Much of Lowland Scotland during this period was linguistically part of Northumbria. The borders between England and Scotland were continually shifting, and the melange of Scots, Picts, Strathclyde Britons, Norsemen, and Anglo-Saxons which (with a sprinkling of Normans) was to make the Scottish people was still in the formative process." (Daiches 1960: 504-505). As is clear from Daiches1 commentary, in those days Scotland was an interesting linguistic and cultural conglomeration, which consisted of a portion of England, speaking English, of a Norwegian colony, speaking Norse, and of three independent kingdoms, speaking three different Celtic languages. In the Anglo-Saxon period the terms Scot and Scottish were also used interchangeably with Pict and Pictish, names applied to the race (and their language) which inhabited the east side of the island reaching as far south as the Firth of Forth. We should note, however, that when in the middle of the ninth century a Scottish ruler succeeded to the Pictish throne,

he retained his original title of King of the Scots (see Henderson 1967). Gradually, Scots acquired an extension of meaning so as to include the inhabitants of the whole of the country north of the Forth: the territory which was subject to the "King of the Scots". Anglo-Saxon writers began at this time to differentiate between Scot (attested in OE only in the plural, Scottas) and Scottish (Scyttisc) and Angle and Englisc, terms which could be applied to any of the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain south of the Forth. The Scyitisc language was, therefore, spoken and written in central, western and northern Scotland while Englisc was used mainly in the Lowlands. From the tenth century, the power of Scottish monarchs began to extend over the territory south of the Forth, partly at the invitation of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, who requested help in keeping their subjects in Northumberland under control. Around the year 1070 Malcom III, King of the Scots, married the last Anglo-Saxon princess Margaret. During his reign Malcolm maintained peace and achieved a stable, cultured court. Relative political stability also characterized the first half of the twelfth century. In 1122 King David reunited the two kingdoms, namely the one situated north of the Forth -- Alba and the one located south of the Firth of Forth. In his long reign (lasting over three decades) David kept Scotland united and at peace. He succeeded in introducing many beneficial reforms which contributed to the integration and growing prosperity of Scotland. He regulated the new feudalism with land grants by the crown. He organized his government into responsible departments, encouraged the growth of walled, self-governing burghs, and promoted foreign trade. Furthermore, he reorganized church government in Scotland, backed his bishops in their refusal to recognize the supremacy of the Archbishop of York over them, and founded new monasteries. The result of such consolidatory and economy strengthening policies was that Scotland had achieved the stature of a nation by the time of his death in 1153. This situation did not persist for long though, because for the next century or so Scotland remained for longer or shorter periods the vassal of England (see Treaty of Falaise), or was involved in struggles for independence from England. Therefore its political as well as linguistic situation remained more complex in the two centuries to follow. As Vaiana Taylor remarks (1972: 2): "Until the Wars of Independence in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, that part of Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was considered part of England, not part of Scotland, and the Germanic language spoken there, the "same" as Northern English, was called Lingua Anglica or Inglis.[...] it is not really until the 16th century that foreign writers, and native ones, for

political and nationalistic reasons, began to distinguish the English spoken south of the Forth and north of the Cheviot Hills from the Inglis of England by calling the former "Scottish". The early history of Lowland Scots, therefore, is not the early history of Scotland, but of the Anglo settlement of Nor5anhymbra-land, that is the territory from the Humber to the Firth of Forth." The main difficulty that scholars are faced with when studying the history of pre-Middle English Scots is one common to any non-West Saxon dialect of Old English, namely scarcity of materials. The state of English language in the North at the time of incorporation of the English and Scottish monarchies is evidenced solely by the Lindisfarne and Rushworth glosses and the runic inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshire, dated to about the year 800). Consequently, there is no textual continuity from Old North Anglian to Early Northern Middle English. An important text which was originally written in the Northumbrian dialect is Bede's Death Song. Its use for the examination of specifically northern linguistic characteristics is very limited, though, since the only preserved manuscripts in which it is attested are continental, and thus cannot serve as convincing proof of the state of the language with any definite dating. (The "Leiden Riddle" is also preserved only in a continental manuscript, and its original dialect may not have been Northumbrian.) We fully agree with the statements of Vaiana Taylor (1972: 3) that "[...] the texts from this period might enable us to see a more gradual transition in, for example, the loss of inflections; without evidence, we merely know that the process had already begun in the 9th or 10th century, and our next Northern documents from the end of the 13th century show that there was a vast discrepancy between Northern and Southern English." Likewise, the extent of Scandinavian influence cannot be evaluated with certainty because of the lack of surviving texts from the period (eighth to tenth century). Murray (1873: 24) and Sweet (1888: 195) remark that the impact of Scandinavian dialects is exaggerated and maintain that Northern English originally manifested many of the features which are now regarded as Danish, though they certainly must have been reinforced by the invasions. Murray further notes that the Danish influence is virtually minimal in Northumberland and Scotland and regards the elements of the Northern dialect which are usually interpreted as Scandinavian as having been original elements of the North Angle speech. The attempt to attribute the radical differences between early Northern ME and early Southern ME to Scandinavian influence might seem attractive to some scholars, but it seems equally likely that the differences were

already present at an earlier stage. The latter is, in fact, the view maintained by Flom (1900), who was concerned with the issue of Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scots. He writes that since Old Norse and Old Northumbrian shared many features, and since precisely these features differentiate Old Northumbrian from West Saxon, it is often hard to make a convincing judgment whether a word is a loanword or not. The matter is complicated even further by the fact that many Scandinavian loans are common to Irish, Gaelic and Lowland Scots, so it is practically impossible to determine with certainty the source language of such a loan. Flom further states that the degree of palatalization of segments such as [g], [c] and [sc] in Old Northumbrian may be employed as an indicator for the evaluation of the Scandinavian impact hypothesis. Nevertheless, the palatalization argument is by no means unquestionable. Apparently palatalization was not consistently marked in the orthography of Old English texts. This is the reason why the fact that [g], [c] and [sc] did not trigger diphthongization of the following vowel in Old Northumbrian is not a sufficient proof for or against palatalization (for further details see Flom, 1900, and Wall, 1898). Since as is evident from the above discussion, the issue of the extent of Scandinavian influence on Early Northern Middle English is by no means a settled question nor can it be decided by taking a vote of the authorities let us leave it aside for now and let us resume our discussion on the history of Scots. Murray (1873: 29) divides the history of Scots into three periods: EARLY SCOTS -

MIDDLE SCOTSMODERN SCOTS -

14th up to late 15th century, during which period it was the literary dialect of Scotland and of England north of the river Humber. 15th up to late 16th century, during which period its literary use was limited to Scotland. from the 17th century up to the present. It has ceased to be the language of general literature in Scotland but survives in the languages of the people and in popular poetry.

Early Scots is simply Northern English. It is a variant of the English language written and spoken in Scotland by Scotsmen or as Daiches (1960: 506) puts it: "Early Scots represents the same form of Middle English that was spoken in the northern half of England, and any romance written in the northern form of Middle English before the 15th century might as easily have been written in Scotland." To substantiate the above claim Murray analyzes eight fragments of official documents as well as literary texts which provide an illustration of the uniformity and identity of dialects of Scotland

8

and of the North of England in this Early period, namely: the Northern version of Cursor Mundi, The Early Scottish Laws, Harbour's Brus, The Pricke of Consciounce and The Acts of the Scottish Parliament of James I and James II. (John Barbour (ca 1320-95), author of the 14th century historical romance Brus, openly admits that he is writing in Ynglis (Murray 1873: 42)). All of the above texts clearly demonstrate sameness with respect to the realization of the following grammatical categories: inflectional endings, pronominal forms, verb forms, the relative at, as well as frequent lexical and phonological similiarities (evidence based principally on the spelling, of course). The presence of such important Northern dialect characteristics as retention of the OE , third person plural pronoun forms in "-th", the verb forms, including the weak preterite ending and the form of the present participle, and the interchanging of and as well as the use of or to signal vowel length in most of the Scots texts of the period, confirms that the dialects of Scotland and of the North of England during this early period were essentially the same. Middle Scots differs significantly from the Early Scots of the 14th and early 15th century in a number of ways. First, the socio-political situation of relative stability, independence from England (in 1328 a peace treaty was signed, and the King of England, now Edward III, acknowledged Scotland's autonomous status) and prosperity - especially in the second half of the 15th century - contributed to the flourishing of the national culture, language and the literature based on this language. Daiches emphasizes that (1960: 505) "Scotland's struggle for independence against the English kings Edward I and Edward II at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries had helped to mold a heterogeneous group of people into a nation and to give it a strong national feeling; while the genius of the early Stuart kings in the fifteenth century encouraged the production of a national culture. Between about 1430 and 1513, when the disastrous Battle of Flodden undid at a blow so much of the first four Stuarts' work, Scottish literature, using Middle Scots as its literary language, showed a poise, a maturity, and a national character to a degree never afterward equaled, [...] Scots has become a highly complex literary speech, used by all the Scottish writers in non-Gaelic Scotland in the golden century which produced, in the so called 'Scottish Chaucerians', Scotland's greatest poets.[...]"

Linguistically, Middle Scots differs from Early Scots in two respects. First, as Murray writes (1873: 50), it is founded on a different dialect type than that of Early Scots. Since the establishment of Scotland as a separate nation was paralleled by the decline of the prestige of Northern English in England, the written language of Scotland gradually came to conform to the variety of Northern English spoken in the political centre of the Scottish Kingdom, that is, in Edinburgh and in the Firth of Forth region. Detachment of Middle Scots from the influences of Northern English created favourable conditions for separate linguistic development of the former, in a direction different from Old Northern English. Secondly, Scots of the 14th and early 15th centuries is characterized by a considerable influx of borrowings from Celtic, French and Latin. It should be pointed out, however, that only Celtic influences left noticeable traces on the Scottish language, whereas French and Latin influences were mainly confined to literary and official writing, and as such had only a negligible impact on Middle Scots (for details cf. Grant 1931: xii). Modern Scots Its socio-linguistic characteristics and role was determined by several important political events (the Union of the Crowns and the Union of the Parliaments) and religious factors (among which the Reformation was of greatest significance) which ultimately meant that Scots no longer functioned as an official literary language in Scotland. The independent linguistic evolution of Middle Scots was hindered by the Reformation, which as Daiches (1960: 524) claims "[...] came to Scotland more violently than it came to England and it disrupted the development of national culture to a far greater degree." The question of religion in Scotland was not to be settled until the end of the 17th century. Between 1560 and 1689 the country was torn apart by civil and religious conflict. From the linguistic perspective it is crucial to note that for the first fourty years of the Reformation movement, the religious reformers were forced to obtain Bibles and other books from England since there was no translation of the Scriptures in Scots. Needless to say, the reformers were more often than not politically allied to England since they were in opposition to the Catholic French Party. These socio-religious factors triggered the transformation of Scots in the direction of the contemporary Southern English language. It is worth pointing out here that the process of linguistic modification towards the linguistic standard of England took place long before James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Grant (1931: xiii) remarks that before he became King of England, James VI of Scotland wrote several treatises in Scots, whereas after the Union of the Crowns (1603) he wrote in English. Such a choice on the part of the King clearly had its

10

political significance and contributed greatly to the increasing prestige of Southern English among influencial social circles in Scotland. Needless to say, the King's example, reinforced by the artistic merit of English Elizabethan poetry, encouraged many Scottish poets and writers to employ the English literary language as the proper means of expression, rather than the Scots vernacular (among others, this was the case with Sir Robert Aytoun, Sir David Murray, Sir Robert Ker, Sir Wiliam Alexander, William Drummond of Hawthornden and James Graham, Marquis of Montrose). Lacking the Court as an integrating cultural centre of the country, more and more artists, especially poets, writers and musicians, sought their inspiration in England. Thus, by the time of the Union of Parliaments (1707), when the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist and Scotland ceased to be a political entity and became merely the northern part of Great Britain, "English had become the recognised medium of expression for Scottish authors -- at least in all subjects of serious import" (Grant 1931: xiii). The general cultural tendency at the time was to use England as the linguistic model, and gradually, as Daiches points out, those Scottish historians, philosophers, scientists and literary critics who contributed to Scotland's second Golden Age wrote in English and diligently avoided any "Scotticisms" in their writing and speech. "Anyone who had claims to international fame in dealing with general matters of scientific or philosophic interest wrote in English for the same reason that he would have written in Latin in an earlier age. Scots thus remained a vernacular, and there was no tradition of written Scots prose in the eighteenth century." (Daiches 1960: 814-815) He further states that in 1761 the Irishman Thomas Sheridan delivered a number of lectures in Edinburgh on the speaking of the "correct" English, which enjoyed great popularity among the social elite of Scotland, and that as late as in 1788, James Beattie produced a prepostrous publication entitled Scotticisms, arranged in Alphabetical Order, designed to correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing. Another important factor that reinforced the growing importance of English in Scotland was the lack of a Scottish Bible. Murray (1873) and Grant (1931) admit that since the average Scotsman was accustomed to hear English in church services he inevitably came to regard it as an appropriate means of expression in divine worship. Consequently, he must have formed a conviction that his native tongue was inferior to English and thus he was apt to change it "in the direction of English or substitute for it the best English he could muster in addressing a superior or a stranger, or in touching upon elevated subjects of discourse. By the end of the 18th century English had supplanted Scots in fashionable circles, in the pulpit, the school, the university, Law Courts and on the public platform"

11

(Grant 1931: xiii). But despite the increasing domination and prestige of English as a medium for written and solemn expression, Scots remained the spoken language of non-Gaelic Scotland. Daiches (1960: 809) points out that although the long-term effect of the Union of Parliaments was the steady and persistent assimilation of Scottish culture to that of England, the short-term result was a renewed interest in the literary past of Scotland. (Although the vernacular Scots dialect lost its status and prestige as the standard idiom for the more elevated purposes, it remained in a sense the national tongue.) The great revival of old Scottish literature is usually associated with the name of Allan Ramsay. It manifested itself mainly in collections and editions of old Scottish literature (legends, ancient songs, ballads, tales and heroic stories as well as folk wisdom transmitted through proverbs) and to some extent also in attempts to imitate some of the earliest literary traditions. Grant (1931: xiii) suggests that this awakened concern for Scottish cultural knowledge ensured the survival of a comparatively copious vocabulary in popular speech. However, it should be remembered that in spite of the growing fascination with the vernacular speech, the revival of Scottish verse was, for the most part, a revival of dialect verse used for humorous, trivial and/or sentimental purposes, whereas most serious poets and all prose writers wrote in English. At the beginning of the eighteenth century all social classes spoke Scots, though the educated upper classes of society used English in both speech and writing. Daiches (1960) suggests that the eighteenth century Scots writer who played the most significant role in reestablishing Scots as a real literary language was Robert Fergusson. It was he and his contemporaries, eminent writers and poets like Burns, Scott and Gait, who by employing in their writing the vernacular dialect of Scots - typical of Central Scots, (a dialect descending from the old Anglian speech of the early Scottish kings), contributed to reestablishing Scots as a literary language in its own right. This period is therefore frequently referred to as the Golden Age of Scots literature. The creative output of Burns definitely constitutes the culmination of the Scottish Literary Golden Age. This brilliant poet, however, had a very ambiguous attitude towards his native tongue, as it is evident that his vernacular often gives way to English when the topic becomes more serious. Be that as it may, the general significance of the literary revival is unquestionable. The great majority of Scottish writers of the period followed example of Fergusson, Burns and Scott and thus contributed to the creation of the modern literary language. It is interesting to note that Murray (1873), Grant (1931) and Wilson (1926) all strongly emphasize the role that the lack of standard conventions for the spelling of Scots has played in the production of post-Union

12

literature, in which English words and spellings have changed Scottish speech into a bastard speech. In older Scots most words could be spelled in a number of ways, although one way of indicating vowels, for example, would be more common. The early writers of the eighteenth century did little to normalize spelling. Ramsay, and, after his death, Fergusson, Scott and Bums all mingled older Scottish spellings and Modern English ones in their delineation of the dialect, "thus helping to obscure the real differences in pronunciation between it and Standard English" (Grant 1931: xiv). Wilson's study (1926) contains a discussion and critique of the spelling systems used by Ramsay, Burns, Scott and others, and a proposal for a more uniform and accurate system to be used in the future, "not for the purpose of encouraging the adoption of a standard Scottish language, but in order to enable readers to appreciate the differences that exist in the dialects as actually spoken at the present day" (Wilson 1926). As Murray points out, the fact that Scots and English at the beginning of the eighteenth century were essentially identical to the eye does not imply that they were identical to the ear; certainly Lowland Scots remained the language of the common people. The history of Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the history of its progressive decline, especially in the cities. Such a situation was, among other factors, an immediate result of the introduction of broader education in Scotland and stricter requirements concerning uniformity/systematization for teachers who were obliged to use English at schools even at the primary level. (The act making education compulsory for all children between the ages of eight and thirteen was passed in 1872.) Attempts to recreate Scots as a national literary language, manifesting a clear political reaction against Anglicizing influences, reappeared frequently in the Scottish cultural tradition. The most recent such attempt is that of the twentieth century Lallans movement represented by Hugh MacDiarmid and others, a movement otherwise referred to as the Scottish Renaissance. In his Scottish National Dictionary (1931) Grant does not make clear exactly what variety of English he means when he says English. Presumably he means Scottish Standard English (SSE), not Received Pronunciation. At present, many people in Scotland speak only Scottish Standard English, which is English with a Scottish accent, and they openly admit that they are as confused by and frequently as unable to follow, at least initially, the speech of a farmer from Dumfriesshire, West Fife or Banffshire regions as an Australian would be.

13

Scots is still spoken, of course. But, as Catford puts it (Catford 1957b: 111), "[...] the majority of habitual Scots speakers are bilingual, in the sense that, although in some situations they speak a relatively pure Scots, in others they will use an approximation to English, the closeness of the approximation depending both on the nature of the situation itself and on personal characteristics of the speaker (e.g., education, adaptability, conservatism, local patriotism, etc.). The degree to which such Scots-based bilingualism is conscious and controlled also varies, partly from person to person, but also regionally." Our own investigations prove that, in fact, very few speakers of SSE, are bilingual in this sense. Therefore, Catford's observations must be kept in mind when evaluating Scottish linguistic data presented by various scholars, especially inasmuch as determining what portion of the potential scale from Scots to SSE is represented by a given form. Clarification of the term Scottish Standard English, which we have contrasted with Scots, is required here. SSE is by no means a homogeneous accent. It has many local variations (see Abercrombie's discussion of Basic SSE (1979)). Indeed, one of the issues of paramount significance to be dealt with in the study of the phonological differences between Scots and SSE, is what form or forms of SSE are essential (or "psychologically real") to the speaker of Scots who considers SSE a prestigious variety of speech. As Vaiana Taylor puts it (1972: 10), SSE can be defined as a group (a set) of "[...] certain systematic differences from Standard Southern English which can be predicted from the Standard Southern English system." Such a formulation implies correctly that various Scots dialects have a lexical distribution of segments which cannot be predicted from the Standard English system. It should be pointed out that Catford considers the parameter of distributional predictability as absolutely cnicial for differentiating between dialects and accents. (There would certainly be other factors involved in the judgement that a speaker was using Scots as opposed to SSE, such as lexical choices, grammatical structures, intonation, suprasegmental characteristics, etc.) Catford (1957a: 110) presents the following example to illustrate the way in which SSE and Scots (dialect of Angus) compare to Standard Southern English (RP):

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(1-1)

RP

SSE

[υ] [u:]

[u]

SCOTS [u] book [Λ] bull [ι ] foot [0] boot [ο] lose [A ]!OOSC

Other systematic differences between SSE and RP are (following Grant 1914: 193 and Aitken 1971):

(1-2) RP

SSE

1) pure long vowels: [o] [e] [i] [u]

1) diphthongized long vowels

2) [a]

2) [a] before s, f, Θ, (pass, raft, bath)

3) [ae] / [/si]

3) [ai]

4) ir/dr/er/Ar remain distinct (fur, fern, fir)

4) [d:] / MERGER

5) or/or/o: remain distinct (cored, cord, cawed)

5) [0:]

6) [M]1

6) [w] (what)

7)[θ]

7) [8] (with, though)

The use of the phonetic symbol [M] as employed in the diagram requires some explication. The consonant system of SSE retains a historical segment described phonetically as a voiceless labial-velar fricative. The sound under consideration is present in SSE in words such as: where, whine, which, when, what, etc. Some linguists choose to transcribe this consonant as a two element sequence [hw] (see Wells 1982: 229), though some others disclaim this possibility and treat it as one unit [M] (see Mather and Speitel 1986). In some regional pronunciations where the velar component is very strong the sound is often represented as [xw] (again, see Mather and Speitel 1986).

15

Before leaving the subject of Scots entirely, mention must be made of the geographical location of its most important varieties. In the Introduction to the Scottish National Dictionary, Grant (1931: xxiv and xlvii-xlviii) gives the following division into Scottish dialect districts for the Mainland of Scotland, which are further subdivided into regions as illustrated below (For the sake of clarity of the schema, we have omitted the abbreviated forms of the names of both the dialect districts in question and the geographical regions provided by Grant; the Roman figures are our own addition): (1-3)

DIALECT GROUP

COUNTY OR AREA

I.

Insular Scots

Shetland Orkney

II.

Northern Scots North Northern Scots(b)

Caithness (Sutherland)

North Northern Scots(a)

Cromarty Easter Ross Black Isle

Mid Northern Scots(b)

Inverness Nairn Moray or (Elgin) Upper Banffshire

Mid Northern Scots(a)

Lower Banffshire Aberdeen Buchan Deeside

South Northern Scots

Mearns (Kincardine) East Angus (East Forfar)

16 III. Mid Scots: East Mid Scots (a)

West Angus (West Forfar) East and S.E. Perthshire Sterling Fife Kinross Clackmannan

East Mid Scots (b)

Linlithgow (West Lothian) Edinburgh (Mid Lothian) Haddington (East Lothian) Berwick Peebles

West Mid Scots

East and West Dumbarton South Argyll Bute Renfrew Glasgow Lanark North Ayr

South Mid Scots

South Ayr Wigtown Kirkcudbright West Dumfries

IV. Southern Scots

Roxburgh Selkirk East and Mid Dumfries

V.

Antrim Down Londonderry Donegal Tyrone

Ulster Scots

Grant (1931) strongly emphasizes that the above dialect districts are by no means watertight compartments, entirely separate from each other. Unless a great natural barrier intervenes, such as a mountain range, wide river or a

17

barren waste of country, dialects pass gradually into each other, leaving a neutral district between the two. What we have attempted to do in the current section is to present a summary of the most relevant facts related to the historical and geographical background of Scots, as well as to its phonology as contrasted with the Scottish accents of English, exemplified here by SSE. It is the latter which we shall attempt to describe in greater detail in the chapters to follow. In conclusion, we would like to remark that there is a rich and long lasting tradition of interest in the Scots language. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the majority of relevant works were of a lexicographic nature. Mclntosh (1952) cites Murray's study (1873) as a turning point in Scottish linguistic research because it deals with sounds, which function as a system. Indeed, Murray's book is perhaps the first systematic synchronic linguistic study in Europe (Speitel also asserts this in his article of 1971). Murray's The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873) discusses, as do Wright's The English Dialect Grammar (1905) and Watson's The Roxburghshire Word-book (1923), varieties of Scots spoken in the Southern counties of Scotland. The descriptions of these same dialects provided by Zai (1942) and Wettstein (1942) make detailed contrastive references to Murray's findings. An account of the Central Scottish dialects, on the other hand, is given by Wilson in The Dialects of Central Scotland (1926), whereas the data relating to the northern area of Scotland are contained in Dieth's A Grammar of the Buchan Dialect (1932). The relevant materials pertaining to these three major dialectal regions are exhaustively complemented by data included in Mather and Speitel's The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (1975-1986). As Vaiana Taylor (1972) acknowledges in her dissertation, there are at least two kinds of obstacles one is faced with when examining data from a variety of studies of dialects from different times and places, such as the above-mentioned works. The first is the varied nature of such studies with respect to the scope of the material included. Murray, for example, seeks to describe three counties, Watson discusses one county (Roxburgshire), Zai studies one town (Morebattle in East Roxburghshire), Wilson deals with six counties (Perth, Fife, Haddington, Midlothian, Linlithgow and Ayr), Dieth with one county (Aberdeenshire) and The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland with all the Scottish counties (the transcriptions of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland are of the speech of one individual on a given occasion). The second difficulty one encounters is really a natural consequence of the first, that is to say, each study represents different scholarly objectives and methodologies as well as techniques of collecting and interpreting the linguistic material. Whatever theoretical objections might be raised (and we

18

are fully aware of them) to treating such diverse descriptions as being essentially of equal value, the determining factor is that these are the descriptions available. In a sense they provide, through their diversity, a kind of continuing countercheck among themselves. At any rate, scholars investigating Scots and Scottish Standard English will have for the present to content themselves with these basic sources of data.

1.3. Lexical Phonology 1.3.1. Introduction The theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology was first formulated by P. Kiparsky and by K. P. Mohanan and was first introduced in monographs published in the early 1980's (Kiparsky 1982a and 1982b; Mohanan 1982). However, the conception that some phonological rules apply only in derived environments, cnicial to the framework (see below), has its roots in earlier works by Kiparsky (1973) and by Mascaro (1976). The number of phonologists who have begun to work within or in response to the theory in the short time since its appearance is worthy of note (e.g., Booij, Dresher, Halle, Kaisse, Kiparsky, Mohanan, Pesetsky, Pulleybank, Rubach and Shaw, to mention only some of them). This has happened for two reasons at least. One reason that Lexical Phonology has attracted so much interest is that it supplies new tools for analysis and new ways of approaching language data. First, a growing body of empirical evidence has been used to argue against the view, advocated for instance in the Standard Theory of Chomsky and Halle as outlined in the SPE, that the phonological component is selfcontained and independent of other components of grammar. Instead, the model of Lexical Phonology claims just the opposite. According to the assumptions of the latter theory certain phonological rules (the so called "lexical rules") may apply within the lexicon to the output of each morphological process. In such a view the lexicon itself is organized into a hierarchy of levels ("strata" or "components" in the terminology of various authors), each of which constitutes a well defined and relatively independent morphological domain. The second major development offered by Lexical Phonology is that constraints on rule application and the assumption that the application of rules at different points in the grammar may be subject to different regulative principles are imposed to limit the abstractness of the UR. For example, it is well established (see Kiparsky 1982a and 1982b; Mohanan 1982, Rubach 1981, 1984; Halle and Mohanan 1985; Booij and Rubach 1987) that there

19

are rules which apply exclusively in derived environments (they are subject to the Strict Cycle Condition, an explanation of which is given in section 1.3.3. below), whereas the so called "postlexical rules" are not restricted in this way and apply "across the board", with no regard to whether the environment is derived or non-derived. Such principles often do not suffice to determine outright where and how a rule is to apply, but they do significantly restrict the range of possibilities. The other significant reason why Lexical Phonology enjoys such wide popularity is that it comes as a natural outgrowth of and response to many of the major trends in phonology and morphology of the last twenty years. Most important in this regard is the idea of reintroducing morphology to generative grammar that began with Chomsky (1970) and with Halle (1973) and was taken up by Siegel (1974), Aronoff (1976) and other authors. Morphological information is cnicial to the Lexical model. As we will see, the relevance of morphological information for phonological analysis is expressed in the Lexical framework in terms of the relationship between the morphological structure of a word and the way in which phonological rules apply to it.

1.3.2. Lexical Phonology: Principal Assumptions The remainder of the present section will be devoted to a detailed exposition of the basic theoretical assumptions put forward by Lexical Phonology as well as to a discussion of the model of the organization of grammar as seen by this framework.

1.3.2.1. Phonology-Morphology-Lexicon: How Are They Related? Lexical Phonology is a theory about the organization of grammar. In particular, it determines the relationship between phonology, morphology and the lexicon. Its principal assumption is that all morphological operations as well as a substantial number of phonological rules apply in the lexicon. In Lexical Phonology two types of rules (at least) are distinguished: lexical rules and postlexical rules. Lexical rules may interact with morphological rules, whereas postlexical rules may not. This diversity in the properties of phonological rules is reflected in the model of the organization of grammar, in which all lexical phonological rules are located in the lexicon and all postlexical rules are located in a separate phonological component which is ordered after all syntactic rules. As a result, any phonological rule

20

that applies to constituents larger than words must be postlexical because such constituents are formed by the syntactic component. All lexical rules, on the other hand, apply within the domain of the word. As far as the place of morphology in the model of grammar postulated by the Lexical theory is concerned, the theory assumes the "strong version" of the Lexicalist Hypothesis (see Chomsky 1970) which claims that all word formation including inflection is accomplished in the lexicon. The basic model of grammar as advocated by Lexical Phonology may be represented in (1-4) below (this table is a simplified version of that of Kiparsky 1982: 132):

(1-4) List of words/stems Lexieoii->

Morphological rules

Cyclic phonological rules

Syntactic component

Phonological component (=postlexical rules)

The above diagram represents the notion that there exists interaction between cyclic phonological (lexical) rules and morphological rules. The main idea expressed by this model is that a lexical phonological rule applies as soon as either morphology or phonology has created a form that meets the conditions of its structural description. That is to say, in the derivation of a complex word morphological and phonological rules are interspersed. The effect of this is that lexical phonological rules apply cyclically (i.e., they

21

may reapply after each morphological application, at each "cycle"). For this reason they are referred to as cyclic rules. Booij and Rubach (1991-see also Rubach 1984: 18-19) provide the following diagram which illustrates the idea of cyclic rule application:

(1-5) Cycle 1:

Root

(taken from the lexicon)

Cycle 2:

[RootlY]

Word formation rule 1

[Root]Y]' [RootlY]"

Phonological rule A Phonological rule B

([Root]Y]"Z]

Word formation rule 2

[lRoot]Y]"Z]' [[Root]Y]"Z]"

Phonological rule A Phonological rule B

Cycle 3:

This type of rule interaction adequately predicts that the application of a morphological rule may hinge on the prior application of a phonological rule. Booij and Rubach (1987: 2) quote the example of a word formation rule in Dutch which requires information related to the stress pattern of the input words: "[...] nouns ending in a stressed syllable take -isch and nouns ending in an unstressed syllable take -ief." An earlier hypothesis about the interaction between phonology and morphology failed to account for phenomena of this kind. This formulation treated the interaction between the two components as indirect, stating that first all word formation rules apply and only thereafter may all cyclic phonological rules apply. Discussions of variants of this hypothesis can be found in Rubach (1984: 44ff.) and in Halle and Vergnaud (1987). Last of all it should be noted that in the model presented in (1-4) above the cyclicity of lexical phonological rules is not an inherent characteristic of the rules themselves but something which follows from the organization of the lexicon. This is because every application of a word formation rule creates a potential environment for the application of lexical phonological rules.

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1.3.3. Cyclicity and Strict Cycle Condition Both of the aforementioned interpretations of the interaction between phonology and morphology agree that cycles constitute the basic organizing mechanism for the application of lexical phonological rules. The idea of cyclic rule application is by no means new in phonological theory. Chomsky and Halle in the SPE, for instance, claim that the English Main Stress Rule is cyclic. The essential property of cyclic lexical rules as conceived of in the Lexical framework is that their application is governed by the principle of Strict Cyclicity (the so called Strict Cycle Condition: henceforth SCC). This concept, too, is a development from traditional Generative Grammar, and it was first introduced in syntax by Chomsky (1973). We quote it after Halle (1978), who revised the formulation of SCC as offered by Mascaro (1976): (1-6) The Strict Cycle Condition A cyclic rule R applies properly on cycle j only if either (a) or (b) is satisfied: (a) R makes a prior pass available on (a). R refers (i) (ii) (iii)

specific use of information, part of which is available on through the cyclic rules, and part of which becomes first cycle j. There are three separate cases subsumed under specifically to some A or B in:

[j ΧΑΥ...[η ...Β...] Ζ; [j Z[ H ...B]XAY]; [j Χ [Η ...Α] Υ [H ...B ...l Z];

(b) R makes specific use of information assigned on cycle j by a rule applying before R. Restriction (a) of the SCC prevents a cyclic rule from applying in the domain of one cycle only. It demands that part of the structural description specification of the rule be available in the domain of another cycle. In other words, no rule may apply to structures internal to a single cycle. Consequently, cyclic rules cannot apply to morpheme internal sequences. Restriction (b) of the SCC, on the other hand, specifies the conditions which make it possible for a rule to go back to the cycle which has already been terminated. This is the case only if a given rule X which applies on

23

a later cycle B has introduced a feeding change with respect to a rule Y, ordered after X. Then the rule Υ may effect changes in the domain of an earlier cycle A. Note that the application of Υ is only possible on the cycle B, that is, the cycle on which a feeding change has been introduced (see Rubach 1984: 12-13). It should be emphasized that both (a) and (b) indicate that structure changing cyclic phonological rules apply in derived environments only (in other words, they cannot apply on the first cycle). We have seen that the environment can either be derived morphologically (restriction l-6a) or phonologically (restriction l-6b). In the former case a new structure results from the operation of a morphological rule, in the latter case it is produced by a phonological rule. The examination of a Polish example, rektorze 'rector' (loc. sg.) points up the usefulness of the notion of derived environment in phonological analysis. The fact that the first sequence [-re] is not palatalized whereas the second identical sequence is (the underlying representation for the word is //rektor+e//) remains an inexplicable coincidence if one disregards the information about the morphological structure of the word. This is because in contrast to the first sequence [re], the second one is derived morphologically: the vowel [ε] is the inflectional ending which marks the nominal categories of case and number (loc. sg., in the present example). Polish has a cyclic palatalization rule that palatalizes coronal consonants before front vowels (for details see Rubach 1984: section 4). The SCC thus rightly predicts that only the second [r], the one which stands in the derived environment, can be and is palatalized. It is important to note that the SCC does not imply that structure adding cyclic phonological rules cannot apply in non-derived environments (see Kiparsky 1985). For example, syllabification and stress rules which are structure adding processes that supply prosodic information can apply on the first cycle. Moreover, structure adding rules do not create derived environments. If they did create derived environments all cyclic rules would apply on the first cycle and incorrect outputs would result, since the syllabification rules already apply on that cycle. 1.3.4. Postcyclic and Postlexical Rules The most significant consequence of the SCC is that it establishes two classes of rules: cyclic, those that apply according to the Strict Cycle Condition and non-cyclic, those which are not governed by SCC. The result of SCC is likewise the fact that the relative ordering of individual rules corresponds to their manner of application. Having characterized the cyclic

24

rules in considerable detail let us now pass on to a description of non-cyclic rules. One of the current debates in the theory of Lexical Phonology revolves around the question of whether the cyclicity of the lexical component is derived from Universal Grammar or has to be specified in the grammars of individual languages. Pesetsky (1979), Mohanan (1982) and Kiparsky (1982a and 1982b) assume that all lexical strata are cyclic. In contrast, Mohanan and Mohanan (1984), Halle and Mohanan (1985), Kiparsky (1985), Booij and Rubach (1987) state that lexical strata may be either cyclic or non-cyclic. In fact, for some languages at least, it does seem necessary to recognize a set of phonological lexical operations which interact neither with morphology nor with syntax and are not restricted by SCC. Booij and Rubach (1987 and 1991) call these rules, which apply both morphemeinternally and across morpheme boundaries, postcyclic lexical rules (the postcyclic lexical component of grammar in Booij and Rubach corresponds to level II in Siegel (1974) and in Allen (1978) and to stratum 2 in Halle and Mohanan (1985). They illustrate the concept of postcyclic rules by analyzing examples of the process called Progressive Devoicing in Polish. This process devoices [v] into [fj after voiceless obstruents exclusively word internally and not across word boundaries. One can thus come across sequences such as [xf], [kfj, [tfj, etc. word internally (originating from underlying //v//) in words such as marchwi 'carrot' (gen. sg.), rzodkwi 'raddish' (gen. sg.) or bitwa 'battle' (nom. sg.). On the other hand, phrases with similar sequences of sounds across word boundaries never display devoicing of the fricative. In these cases a postlexical voice assimilation rule applies, and the fricative becomes voiced: las za [laz za] 'the forest behind', brat wie [brad yje] 'brother knows', etc. However, the situation is not as clear-cut with respect to all languages as it is for Polish and for Dutch, which Booij and Rubach (1987: 30) claim do not permit any link between the postcyclic component and the word formation rules. In fact, as these authors claim (1987: 29-30), the link between the two is a parameter along which languages vary. In English, some word formation is done in the postcyclic component (see also Halle and Mohanan 1985: 61-62). In other words, certain word-level non-cyclic rules do in fact interact with morphology. However, the postcyclic component is still a necessary element in a description of languages like English within the framework of Lexical Phonology. Unlike the interaction between phonological and morphological rules in the cyclic lexical component, the interaction between word-level non-cyclic rules and morphology is indirect, since in this component all word formation rules precede all phonological rules (Booij and Rubach 1987: 29). As we will see

25

at the end of chapter 2 of the present book, Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (Aitken's Law) is an example of a postcyclic lexical process in certain accents of English. The other group of non-cyclic rules are postlexical processes. These apply between words as well as within words. They are therefore sensitive to syntactic information and as such they are placed outside the lexicon. These rules are not subject to lexical exceptions: they will apply whenever their structural descriptions are met. The model of grammar as quoted in (1-4) above can thus be altered so as to include the component of postcyclic lexical rules the introduction of which proves indispensible in accounting for differences in the domain in which rules apply. We quote the following modified version of the model after Booij and Rubach (1987: 3):

(1-7) List of words/stems

I

Lexicon—>

Morphological —> Cyclic phonological rules rules Φ Postcyclic Phonological rules

Syntactic component

Phonological component (=postlexical rules)

26 1.3.5. Lexical Phonology: Conclusion As a summary of the most important facts about the theory of Lexical Phonology we shall outline the diagnostic properties pertaining to lexical and postlexical rules (see e.g., Kiparsky 1982a and Kaisse and Shaw 1985):

(1-8) Lexical Rules

Postlexical Rules

1. apply cyclically

1. apply non-cyclically (i.e., once only: they do not recur)

2. are governed by SCC

2. are not governed by SCC

3. may have lexical exceptions (e.g. Trisyllabic Laxing: obesity)

3. never have exceptions

4. are structure preserving; produce only segments that exist already in the UR inventory

4. may create new forms not present in the UR inventory (e,g., the rule of Flapping in Am. English creates a non-lateral, alveolar liquid, never present in the UR)

5. apply in the domain of the word only

5. apply word internally and across word boundaries (after syntax)

The diagnostic properties pertaining to postcyclic lexical rules are those properties listed above as items 3, 4 and 5 for lexical rules and those listed as items 1 and 2 for postlexical rules.

27

1.4.

Three-Dimensional Phonology

1.4.1.

Overview

In our treatment of material from SSE and RP in the present study we will make use of major concepts and terminology from the theoretical framework of Three-Dimensional Phonology, in addition to those from Lexical Phonology. For this reason it is important that we outline these principles here in this introduction as well. As it is most especially in our analysis of problems related to syllable structure in SSE and RP that we will employ the Three-Dimensional (non-linear) paradigm (in chapter 4 below), the present section will be followed by a brief discussion of general principles relevant to the syllable. Until very recently Generative Phonology was premised on the idea that phonological representations are linear. Within the Standard Theory (SPE), for instance, it is assumed that phonological representations consist of a sequence of units or segments and of boundaries. The segments are conceived of as unordered sets of features. The boundaries interspersed between the segments are, with respect to their "nature" and location, dependent on morphological and syntactic structure. The function of boundaries is to partition the string of segments into substrings that constitute possible domains for phonological generalizations. The hierarchical organization of the morpho-syntactic structuring is only of limited importance for the application of phonological rules (with the one exception of the stress rule). It is important to note that the segments are not grouped in terms of any hierarchical structure, like that of the syllable, for example. The notion of the syllable was considered to play no role in phonological organization. In the early seventies, however, it was pointed out that this theoretical model was in principle incapable of handling tonal phenomena in various African Languages. The analyses of W. Leben (1971) and E. Williams (1971) showed how both subsegmental (tone) and suprasegmental (intonation and rhythm) phenomena make clear the inadequacy of the classical "strictly segmental (linear) theory". Their observations suggested that the Standard Theory was oversimplified with respect to the treatment of phonological representations, and that it should be modified. To remedy this inadequacy Williams (1971) and Goldsmith (1973) proposed that the standard one-tiered representation be split into two tiers (hence "non-linear"): a tonal tier and a segmental tier, each constituting a linear organization of units which can be affected independently by rules specific to it. Segments in different tiers are linked to each other by

28

association lines that indicate how they are coarticulated. This major extension of the Standard Theory has come to be known as Autosegmental Phonology. (Williams and Goldsmith's suggestions were in fact an elaboration of the ideas of Z. Harris's concept of long components (1944), (1951) which, in turn, resembles J. R. Firth's (1948) theory of prosodic units (prosodies). Although the Autosegmental Theory was intended to account for tone phenomena, it later came to be applied (and with considerable success) to the description of non-tonal phonological processes as well (especially in the domain of vocalic harmony). A further modification of the SPE paradigm with respect to the structure of phonological representation was the refinement of "standard" Autosegmental Phonology introduced by McCarthy (1979a and 1979b). McCarthy suggested that new autonomous tiers be introduced, alongside the tone and segment tiers. In particular, he demonstrated that by splitting the "segment" tier into three separate and autonomous tiers (hence "three-dimensional": the vowel tier, the consonant tier and the syllable tier, the basic structure of Semitic verbal stems could be adequately and simply interpreted. In this book we will make use of this modification of the Standard Theory. In particular we will employ a version of the framework based on McCarthy's revision (1979a; see below) and will follow his lead in applying this to phonology. We do this all the more eagerly because the elimination of the syllable in considerations of phonological representations is a serious omission in classical Generative Phonology. A theoretical solution such as the unmodified Standard Theory totally ignores the fact that a sizeable number of phonological rules only acquire appropriate formulation if interpreted in terms of syllable structure. This being the case, quite a few generative phonologists in addition to those already mentioned (e.g., Kahn 1976; Halle and Vergnaud 1980; Clements and Keyser 1983 and others) have put forward the idea of integrating the syllable into a revised version of phonological theory. This notion is countenanced by most of those working within the Lexical framework as well.

1.4.2. Phonological Representations in Three-Dimensional Phonology In the non-linear phonological theory it is assumed that phonological representations are three-dimensional, since they involve three tiers: skeletal tier, melodic tier and syllable tier. The core of the phonological representations is constituted by a linear sequence of timing slots called the skeleton. Each segment of each morpheme in a word is represented by a

29

sequence of distinctive feature complexes, which is called the melody. The phonetic content of each skeleton slot is specified by means of lines that link the slot in the skeleton and a segment in a morpheme melody. It is premised in the Three-Dimensional framework that the skeleton slots do not simply succeed one another in linear order but have a special organization of their own. The most important is the organization of slots into syllables. We shall further assume that the syllable consists of an optional onset and a rhyme, and that this rhyme, in turn, consists of an obligatory nucleus and an optional coda (for a detailed discussion of the interpretation of the syllable in the Three-Dimensional framework see section 4.4.2. of the present book). By comparison to the above view of the structure of phonological representations, the investigation of the phonetic properties of segments as carried out previously by Generative Phonology provides merely basic information. The difference is that in the above system the phonetic realization of a segment is further defined by structural information at two other levels of representation (skeletal and syllabic). Consequently, it has become evident that length, for instance, should be expressed in terms of the number of slots in the skeleton to which the segment is linked. Thus, with the added skeletal structure, the same feature matrix at the melody tier may represent a long vowel or a short one. The interpretation of affricates, on the other hand, exemplifies a situation converse to that of vowel length. One slot in the skeleton may be associated with more than one feature matrix at the melody tier. In this way, for one affricate we have two matrices (stop and fricative) associated with a single skeletal slot. The crucial differences of phonological representations can be expressed at the syllable tier, namely, if a segment is in the nucleus of the syllable, it is syllabic; if it is in the syllable margin (onset or coda), it is not syllabic. In this approach any [+syllabic] segment would automatically have to be assigned to the nucleus, be it a vowel, a diphthong or a syllabic liquid or nasal. (Whether an extrasyllabic consonant would be considered syllabic or nonsyllabic is left unclear, since there seems to be variation across languages.) Within the three-dimensional approach syllabic segments are distinguished from nonsyllabic ones by having an X slot which is dominated by the N (nucleus) node (or, within the CV approach (Clements and Keyser 1983), a V slot dominated by this segment). It is precisely at the syllabic tier that segments such as [i] and the glide [j] are distinguished; the former is adjoined to the nucleus while the latter is not. Examples illustrating these assumptions are given below:

30

(1-9)

I

yes

beam

σ

σ

/\

/\ Τ ?

SKELETON

χ χ χ

MELODY

i e s

I

/\

R

I

I

O

Jago

R

Τ /\ /Λ\ ϊ

χ χ χ χ

Ι \ / Ι

b i m

(Let us note that we simplify the representations at the melodic tier by using transcription symbols rather than distinctive feature matrices.) It follows automatically from the above assumptions that some phonetic distinctive features of classical Generative Phonology are no longer necessary and can thus be eliminated. This refers to [Hong], [±del rel], and [±syllabic], which are made redundant due to the fact that in this framework the relevant contrasts are expressed by the structural properties of the phonological representations. (The suggestion that [+syllabic] should be eliminated as a distinctive feature has been elaborated in Levin (1985). Levin's proposal is to use the structural representation with the nucleus and X slots only. We shall follow Levin in representing the skeleton as a sequence of X slots rather than of CV slots. For a detailed comparison of the two main conventions for the representation of syllabicity in Three-Dimensional Phonology see section 4.4.2.) The enrichment of phonological representations in terms of tiers has opened new ways of transferring properties from the segmental-feature level to the levels of structural organization (skeleton and syllable). This is especially evident in the enlarged number of theoretical possibilities of interpretation as provided by this new paradigm. Let us clarify this statement by a brief consideration of several examples. If we were to compare the predictions offered by the Three-Dimensional theory with those of the Standard Theory with respect to the interpretation of words such as cat, top, fm, etc. we would have to admit that the non-linear framework by no means provides more insightful or explanatory observations than those available within the Standard Theory (SPE). The former approach would specify the melodies of the three segments of each of the above morphemes in terms of the sets of distinctive features contained in the feature matrix at the melody level (with the exception of [±syllabic]) in the sequence of their occurrence, then it would assign an X slot for each

31

segment of each morpheme in such a way as to preserve the one to one correspondence between a timing slot and a melody matrix. Finally, and most importantly, it would assign syllabic structure to the above morphemes. A linear interpetation of the classical model of phonology would not be much different except that the information related to the number of syllables would be captured by the phonological feature [±syllabic] and not by the structural properties of the tiers. With reference to such cases the three-dimensional framework does not make any interesting or insightful predictions that could not otherwise be stated in the classical SPE model. Methodologically speaking, for such examples the assumptions of the three-dimensional theory would merely be a retranslation of old premises into a new formal notation without any necessary motivation. There are examples of phonological phenomena, however, in which the three-dimensional paradigm proves significantly more adequate than the standard model. This relates, in particular, to the possibilities of utilizing structural information in phonological analysis. For example, it is possible to interpret some phonological segments in terms of just a melody matrix (filled with phonetic features) not attached to any timing slot or to postulate that some melody matrices are empty (which automatically precludes their being linked to a timing slot). Both of these latter solutions seem to find confirmation when tested against data from various languages. The former finds justification in that it is capable of accounting for absolute neutralizations. A case in point is the interpretation of abstract vowels such as yers in Polish (see Rubach 1986). Given that yers must be made underlyingly distinct from other vowels, the linear framework is forced to claim that the difference is rendered in terms of phonetic features. Thus, they are the only high vowels specified as [-tense] in the vowel system of Polish. On the other hand, in the non-linear approach yers may be represented as floating matrices, that is, melody matrices not attached to the X slots or to a syllable slot. (Such unconnected matrices cannot be realized phonetically.) This interpretation is advocated by Rubach (1986). The idea that yers be represented solely at the melodic level is acceptable in the three-dimensional framework due to the assumption that tiers are independent of each other and that there need not be a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of adjacent tiers. These descriptive possibilities, as uncovered by non-linear phonology, have advantageous consequences both in the area of phonological rules and in that of the phonological representation (for a detailed discussion of them see Rubach (1986)) of segments otherwise unaccountable for in the linear framework. The other option, namely that of representing a segment as an X slot unassociated with any melody matrix is instanciated by the analysis of

32

schwa in English (see Halle and Mohanan 1987: 82 and section 2.3.1.1. of chapter 2 of the present study). Halle and Mohanan prove that the lack of tensing of [ι] whenever followed by [d] can be accounted for by postulating that this following [d] is (at the stage of the derivation in which the relevant tensing rule applies) represented as an empty timing slot. Consequently, the [ι] is not followed by a [-cons] segment, the necessary context for the application of the Non-final Tensing rule which tenses vowels in diphthongs as well as in words such as radiate and variation (Halle and Mohanan 1985: 82). Another solution which employs this theoretical possibility is the postulation of a syllable template (for English) with obligatory onsets (see Giegerich 1985; this view will be accepted for the interpretative purposes of this book as well). This entails that they be represented as X slots attached to the syllable tier irrespective of whether there is a melody to fill them or not. The consequences of accepting such a syllable model are crucial for an account of syllabification phenomena in English (and in particular, prove pertinent to the analysis of [r]-related processes in non-rhotic accents of English).

1.5.

Syllable and Sonority Hierarchy

The idea that speech sounds can be ranked in terms of relative sonority can be found in work as early as that of Whitney (1865). The first comprehensive attempts to utilize such sound systematization for the explanation of syllable structure are due to Sievers (1881), Jespersen (1904), Saussure (1916), and Grammont (1933). The theories of sonority as developed in these late nineteenth and early twentieth century studies, although formulated at a time when the notion of a synchronic grammar viewed as a system of categories and representations defined at various degrees of abstraction from the physical data was not yet in existence, have yet to be superseded and remain of significant value for current linguistic research. To substantiate this claim concerning the descriptive adequacy and value of these works for present-day studies, we can mention as an example the fact that the Sonority Sequencing Principle (see below), first observed by these 19th century scholars, has been revived in close to its original form in the context of syllable phonology (see for example Hooper 1976, Kiparsky 1979, Steriade 1982, Selkirk 1984a, Clements 1988). Let us now very briefly outline some formulations of the concepts of sonority and sonority scale the notion most significant for the organizational structure of the syllable (those, in particular, which remain congruent with recent observations pertaining to syllable structure).

33 Sievers (1881) noted that certain syllable types were more frequently used in languages, while others differing from them only in the order of segments were very rare or nonexistant. By examining possible sound combinations in various positions he arrived at a ranking of speech sounds in terms of their inherent sonority. In a syllable consisting of several sounds the one with the greatest sonority is termed the peak, or sonant, and the others the marginal members, or consonants. According to Siever's sonority principle, the nearer a consonant stands to the sonant, the greater must its sonority be. Jespersen, on the other hand, defines sonority as follows: "In jeder Lautgruppe gibt es ebensoviele Silben als es deutliche relative Höhepunkte in der Schallfülle gibt" ("In every group of sounds there are just as many syllables as there are clear relative peaks of sonority" 1904: 188). His version of the sonority scale is given in (1-10) below: (1-10) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

(a) voiceless stops, (b) voiceless fricatives voiced stops voiced fricatives (a) voiced nasals, (b) voiced laterals voiced r-sounds voiced high vowels voiced mid vowels voiced low vowels

Drawing on the works of these two authors it is possible to state a provisional version of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (see Clements 1988: 3): (1-11) Sonority Sequencing Principle: Between any member of a syllable and the syllable peak, only sounds of higher sonority rank are permitted. The validity of this principle is undeniable, as it allows us to account for crosslinguistic data related to the behaviour of consonant clusters, namely, clusters conforming to the Sonority Sequencing Principle are the most commonly occurring, and are often the only cluster types permitted in a given language. Clusters violating this principle do occur in languages, but they are relatively infrequent.

34

As far as specific phonetic correlates of sonority are concerned a helpful definition is provided by Ladefoged (1982: 221): "The sonority of a sound is its loudness relative to that of other sounds with the same length, stress and pitch." The role of loudness, or inherent voice quality of sounds seems to be very relevant to sonority. Voicing naturally increases sonority and therefore voiced fricatives and voiced stops are more sonorous than their voiceless counterparts. Also, it has been observed that sonority can be correlated with degrees of obstruction of the airflow. It thus follows that high vowels are less sonorous than low vowels and that nasals are more sonorous than their corresponding oral stops, etc. A sonority scale which attempts to reflect these observations is provided by Hooper (1976: 205) and is organized as in (1-12) below: (1-12)

obstruents

nasals

liquids

vowels

(sonority) The usefulness of the concept of a sonority scale in the definition of a syllable lies in the fact that the syllable nucleus, in many languages a vowel or a highly sonorous consonant, is the most sonorous element of the syllable, whereas where sonority is lowest we are at the edge of a syllable. It must also be remembered that any given language may show its own specific implementation of this universal sonority scale. It has to be filled in with the specific phonetic and phonological properties of that language's particular segments. What seems to be a generally accepted observation, however, is that, viewed from left to right, sonority typically increases between the left hand boundary and the nucleus and decreases between the nucleus and the right hand boundary. The fact that this is a highly systematic and consistent phenomenon has led many linguists (see Bell and Hooper 1978: 8-13) to establish what Selkirk (1984a: 116) called a "Sonority Sequencing Generalization", which proceeds as follows: (1-13) Sonority Sequencing Generalization (SSG) In any syllable, there is a segment constituting a sonority peak that is preceded and/or followed by a sequence of segments with progressively decreasing sonority values. (Selkirk 1984a: 116)

35

Clearly, Selkirk's observation is in agreement with the Sonority Sequencing Principle (1-11) based on data of Sievers and Jespersen (as discussed above). To illustrate the explanatory power of the SSG (we shall quote Giegerich's example (1985: 43): "[...] English lilt forms one syllable and little forms two, simply because the sequence [It] decreases in sonority and [tl] doesn't." Moreover, in many languages syllable structures may sometimes violate the sonority hierarchy with respect to the behaviour of stops, e.g., Polish bzdura [bzdura], 'humbug1, 'nonsense', grdyka [grdika] 'Adam's apple', or even English spire, scream, etc. (an examination of such-like clusters in the context of theoretical issues pertaining to the concept of syllable in Polish is provided in Rubach and Booij 1990 and 1990a). On the whole, however, as a principle, the correlation between syllable structure and the sonority scale is maintained (see Kiparsky 1979).

2.

Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule

In the present chapter we shall attempt to account for the vowel length differences between RP and SSE within the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology. In what follows we shall also endeavour to examine in detail the vowel systems of both accents under consideration, as this has a significant bearing on our main topic. Most of our discussion, however, will revolve around the issue of the formulation of the phonological process which introduces length differentiations in SSE: the so-called Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (henceforth SVLR) or Ailken's Law. Our comparison of the two accents in question with respect to quantitative differences will be carried out on the basis of data included in Aitken (1962), Jones (1963), Gimson (1977), McClure (1977), Aitken and McArthur (1979), Abercrombie (1979), Wells (1982), Mather and Speitel (1986), Agutter (1986) (unpublished measurements of vowel length in SSE) as well as my own analysis of the unpublished materials from the archives of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (University of Edinburgh).

2.1. RP - SSE: A Comparison of Vowel Systems In this section we shall examine in detail the vowel systems of the two accents under consideration, Received Pronunciation and Scottish Standard English. Not only will this inquiry prove pertinent to the problem of the interpretation of the quantitative variations in these accents, but we shall also point out below a tendency towards anglicization displayed by the SSE vowel system. It is a well known fact that there is a great deal more to be said about vowels than about consonants in the accents and dialects of the English language. Consonant systems are quite astonishingly homogenous in accents and varieties of English all over the English speaking world. Abercrombie states that "[...] it is possible to speak about a 'general English consonant system' which is the same, with the occasional omission or addition of an item, for all Standard English speakers" (Abercrombie 1979: 71). He further comments (Abercrombie 1979) that SSE, for example, which otherwise has the general English consonant system, is quite famous for one of these additions. The sound under consideration is a voiceless velar fricative [x], absent in all other accents of Standard English. It is worthwhile pointing out that even within SSE the sound in question has a limited distribution: it is used in proper names like Buchanan, Strachan, etc., in loan-words from Gaelic, like loch, as well as in words like technical, technique, etc. The rest

37 of the English speaking community uses a voiceless velar plosive [k] in these instances. As we have already remarked, there is much more to be said, with respect to the degree of systemic differentiations, about vowels in accents of English. It is generally agreed that vowel systems are not homogenous throughout the English-speaking world, and it is hardly possible to speak of a *general English vowel system. In order to confirm this widely accepted statement we shall analyze in greater detail vocalic systems of a chosen Southern and Northern variety of Standard English. More specifically, we shall confine our discussion to the comparison of vowel systems of an English accent as instantiated by RP and that of a Scottish accent as exemplified by SSE. 2.1.1. The Vowel System of RP The principal phonetic realizations of vocalic nuclei in RP may be schematized as in (2-1) below. Attention should be drawn, however, to the fact that the symbols in the diagram are the main phonetic realizations of vowels and diphthongs in RP and not the phonemes in the structuralist sense. A discussion of the phonemic status of these vocalic nuclei would take us too far afield and would have no bearing on the theoretical issues in the framework that we assume in the present study. (We quote this diagram after Wells 1982: 119; the placement of the reduced vowel schwa is our own addition.) (2-1)

ι e

υ

(δ) Λ

ae

checked

t)

ιί ei

DU

DI ai

dO au

id εο

vd 3:0:

a:

free

There are two minor issues to be dealt with before we proceed to examine in detail the vowel system of RP as outlined in (2-1), namely the choice of the symbols for specific vocalic nuclei employed in the above schema and the interpretation of the relationship of these (surface) nuclei to their counterparts at the underlying level.

38

As there are several conventions (see, for example, Jones 1960; Trager and Smith 1951; Biedrzycki 1976/1977a; Wells 1982 and others) available for the symbolic representation of the vowel system of RP, we believe it advisable to make a mention of certain controversial points of difference between them. The main variations between these systems concern the representation of long vowels and of diphthongs. It is to these two categories that we will restrict ourselves here. Jones (1960), for instance, lays emphasis on the distinctive importance of length. He distinguishes the members of the pairs [i:, i, o:, o, u:, u, 3: , d] by means of length alone (long vowels being designated by [:]). These vowels are thus seen as long and short realizations of four different vowel units, which Jones calls phonemes. Other types of analysis (see especially Gimson 1970) begin with the short vowels as their primary units. The basic set of vocalic nuclei in English may then be represented as [i, e, ae, D, υ, Λ, d]. The remaining vowel sounds, however, are regarded by some phoneticians as sequences of these elements ("A" on the table below) and by others as combinations of one of these elements with either a front or back glide: [j] or [w] ("B" on the table below). According to these two systems of representation, then, we are dealing with either of the following sets of possibilities (Gimson 1970: 97):

(2-2)

A [i: [u: [ei [ai [31

[dO [αυ

is interpreted as " " " " " " If

f»

ft

If

[i [υ [e [a [ο [d [a

+ + + + + + +

B i u ι ι ι Ό υ

] J ] j j ] ]

or or or or or or or

as as as as as as as

[i + j [u + w [e + j [a + j [3 + j [d + w [a + w

Exponents of these latter two systems generally choose one of two ways of representing the long homogeneous vowels, namely [a:, o:, d:] or as sequences of identical vowels [aa, oo, 3 3 ] . Unlike the system of Jones, systems "A" and "B" not only indicate duration as a distinctive parameter, but also make clear the qualitative difference between the two elements of diphthongs. Throughout this book, as on the schema (2-1) above, we will use the representational system referred to as "A" in diagram (2-2) (in more or less arbitrary preference to "B": none

39

of the arguments below hinge on the interpretation of the phonetic characteristics of the second element of the diphthong). Long homogeneous vowels in RP will be represented throughout as vowels followed by the length mark [:] for example: [:>:], [a:], etc., as this constitutes a more accurate transcription of the surface realizations of these vocalic nuclei in the accent under consideration. The second of the issues mentioned above is that of the examination of the relationship between the surface vocalic variants, as shown in (2-1), and their underlying representations. Note that the diagram under consideration represents the principal phonetic (surface) realizations of vocalic nuclei in RP which should not be confused with the representations of the vowels in question at the underlying level. Below, we shall mainly be concerned with examining in detail and comparing the surface vowel systems of RP and that of SSE as tabulated in (2-1) and (2-3)--see section immediately following-respectively. Since our comparison of RP and SSE will be confined to the discussion of surface vocalic differences, we shall not engage ourselves in a detailed analysis of the underlying representations of all the elements of both vowel systems. The latter issue is too complex for the space available to us here, and is only of marginal relevance for the basic topic of this chapter, namely, the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule. Instead, in cases in which the underlying representation of specific vocalic nuclei proves relevant to our inquiry we adopt the interpretation of the underlying system of modern English vowels in the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology offered by Halle and Mohanan (1985). In this article they build upon several earlier studies of problems pertaining to the establishment of the underlying vowel system of modern English, namely those of SPE (1968), Halle (1977), Levin (1981), Rubach (1981, 1984), Kiparsky (1982a) and others. Although Halle and Mohanan's account is based mostly on linguistic data from the standard accent of American English we shall assume that at the underlying level it holds true generally for other accents of English (including RP). We do so because Halle and Mohanan's interpretation provides phonological rules which describe vocalic alternations exhibited by many accents of the English language (among them RP) such as Vowel Shift, Diphthongization, CiV Lengthening, Trisyllabic Shortening, Cluster Shortening, -ic Shortening, etc. Therefore, we shall find it adequate for the description of RP. As is evident from table (2-1) the RP vowel system has nineteen elements. (In addition to those mentioned above there is also schwa, a vowel restricted to weak, unstressed syllables.) Six of these are traditionally considered to be short vowels [ι, e, ae, Λ, t), υ]. This is because, when examined in isolation, they are relatively shorter than their long counterparts in the same

40

environment. The duration of these vocalic nuclei, however, varies significantly according to the phonetic context which follows them (a detailed discussion of factors affecting the duration of vocalic nuclei in English will be presented in chapter 3 of the present work). Distributionally, they stand apart in that, unlike long vowels or diphthongs, they are subject to the phonotactic restriction that they do not occur in a stressed monosyllable with no final consonant. Kurath and McDavid (1961) and Wells (1982: 119) designate short vowels checked, since they are affected by the presence of a word final consonant in such a way that it "checks" the pulse of air for the syllable and its vowel. This happens in words like: pit, pet, pot, cat, shut, put, etc. Long vowels, on the other hand, in instances such as bee, say, two, go, etc. occur free of any checking by a consonant; for this reason they are referred to as free. Moreover, it should be noted that free vowels may also occur before a checking consonant, although they are affected by it to a much lesser degree. All this amounts to saying that in the context of a following final consonant the whole vowel system has the potentiality of occurrence, but in the context of _'_ # only the free vowels are available. In other words, short vowels in RP are eliminated from the word/morpheme final, stressed, open syllable environments. The use of each vowel of RP system in particular words can be shown as in (2-3) below:

(2-3) BIT DEAD CAT GOT BUT LOOK PATH MOTH PURSE

[ι [e I« to [Λ [υ [α: to [3 :

PEACE LACE CALM SAW BOAT LUKE KITE VOICE BROW

["

1

[ei [a: [o: [du

] ] l ]

[DU ]

[at ] [οι ] [«υ ]

BEER BEAR START FOUR FORCE PURE happY bettER commA

[id [εδ [a: [o: [o: [Od [ι [d [d

2.1.2. The Vowel System of SSE The vowel system of a Scottish accent of English, on the other hand, is typically represented as displayed in (2-4) below (quoted after Wells 1982: 399-Table in (204); a brief discussion of the Scottish Vowel System is also offered by Biedrzycki 1976/1977b):

41

(2-4) i e ae

ι ε (ε) Λ /••\

ID)

(/si) (m)

u o

(3 )

a

(a)

AU

3

As there exists a substantial degree of variation within the vocalic system of SSE, we have placed in round brackets above the items which may or may not be present in the system. Those elements, however, which are always present, we have represented by bold phonetic symbols. It has been observed that if, for instance, [o] is present in the system, then [a] belongs in a part-system and has a limited distribution when compared to the system in which only [a] appears. (The placement of the reduced vowel schwa in the above diagram is our own addition.) The lexical distribution of the above items is represented in (2-5) below: (2-5)

BIT DEAD CAT GOT BUT LOOK PATH MOTH PURSE

[ι [ε [a [3

[Λ [u [a [3

[3 r

PEACE LACE CALM SAW BOAT LUKE KITE VOICE BROW

[i [e [a 0 [o [u [ae foi [AU

BEER BEAR PARK FOUR FORCE PURE happY bettER commA

[ir [er [ar [3Γ

[or [ur [e,i [Or [Α,θ]

([ ],. This vowel may also be realized as [a] in some words for those who have it. [ ]2. The vowel may also be realized as [b] for those who have it.) It should be noted that while [i, e, ε, a, o, o] are monophthongs with qualities in the general areas implied by the relevant cardinal vowels, Wells (1982) points out that [ε] may be closer than the cardinal [ε] and [a] less front than the cardinal [a]. Moreover, [u, A, o] are also monophthongs but are slightly advanced from cardinal values; [u] may be [«·] or even fronter.

42

2.1.3. The Two Vowel Systems Compared The differences between the vowel systems of RP and SSE are shown in the table below (quoted after Abercrombie 1979: 72) (2-6)

RP

SSE bead

1

i

1

i

bid bay bed [never

2 3 4 4a

ι e ε έ]

2 3 4

ι ei ε

bad

5

a

5

a

balm

6

α

not nought no

7

Ό

8

3

8

D

9

ο

9

ow

pull pool

ΙΟ w 11

u

11

u

12

Λ

bud

12

Λ

side

13

ΛΪ

sighed

14

ae

now

15

AU

15 aw

boy

16

?e

16 ΌΙ

14 ai

(The symbol [w], (Abercrombie's [a]) in the diagram corresponds to [υ] in the transcription adopted in the present book, whereas the symbol [a] (see number 5 above for RP) corresponds to the sound [ae]. Also, we have put in brackets the vowel referred to under 4a to indicate that it is a floating segment, that is it is not an integral element of any Scottish vowel system. We discuss it in detail in section 2.1.3.2. below. As far as its phonetic specification is concerned it is [-high], [-low], [-back] and [-tense vowel].)

43 As is evident from the above tables, the Scottish vowel system is typologically significantly different from the vowel system of RP (and from those of all other accents of English except the Ulster accent and that of Northumberland, both of which have obvious linguistic links with Scotland; see Orton, Sanderson, Widowson 1978, and Mather and Speitel 1986). The differences under consideration can be summerized as follows (cf. Abercrombie 1979 and Wells 1982): 1. SSE lacks the phonetic distinction of [υ] vs. [uu] as exemplified by words such as: pull-pool, look-Luke, foot-food, etc. All of these words are pronounced with [u] in SSE. The merger of [υ] and [DU] is characteristic of all Scottish accents of all regional and social types. The phonetic quality of this [u] vowel, however, varies sociolinguistically, the "elegant", prestigeous realization being a fairly back [u] whereas the usual or most common variant is not back but central [w] or centralized front [Y] (for a detailed phonetic description of the sociolinguistic vocalic variants in SSE see Macaulay and Trevelyan 1973, and Macaulay 1977). 2. SSE lacks the phonetic contrast between |τ>] and [o:] found in RP in words such as: cot-caught, don-dawn, got-saw, etc. Speakers of SSE invariably pronounce these words with [D]. 3. SSE lacks phonetic opposition of the kind [ae] vs. [a:] as in Sam-psalm, cat-cart, pal-palm, etc. Many SSE speakers use in these contexts a single sound [a], though again, as was the case with [u], the specific phonetic realization of the sound may vary depending on the social background of examined informants. It should be pointed out that the Scottish vowel system as presented in (2-6) and discussed above is sometimes referred to as the Basic Scottish Vowel System (henceforth: BSVS) (see Abercrombie 1979: 73) which means the basic vowel system of Scottish Standard English. Abercrombie maintains that this system is the commonest vowel system among Standard English speakers in Scotland. It is, however, only one of a number of Scottish Standard English vowel systems, all of which are fairly common. Abercrombie further adds that this system is basic because other Scottish English vowel systems are best described in terms of deviations from it: it provides a basis for the description of the other systems. In other words, it is descriptively, and not structurally, basic.

44

2.1.3.1. Anglicization of Basic Scottish Vowel System Alongside the Basic Scottish Vowel System there exist a number of Scottish Standard English vowel systems that differ from BSVS in the degree of anglicization. By anglicization we will understand the process consisting in the addition of some of the vowel contrasts characteristic of Anglo-English accents (discussed in Section 2.1.3. above) to the BSVS. Although they result from influence from England, they are not modifications made by individuals to their own speech in imitation of Anglo-English speakers. The systems in question "[...] are genuine Scottish systems, properly institutionalized, transmitted from parents to children or learned by children from contemporaries at school. The actual influence from England may have taken place quite far back in time, perhaps in the eighteenth century. A Scot using a vowel system containing some of these modifications towards the AngloEnglish system might never have met an Englishman" (Abercrombie 1979: 75). The modifications in question are by no means random, they form the following hierarchy (we base them mostly on Abercrombie's 1979 account and on Wells' 1982 summary): I. The first distinction added to the BSVS is that of [ae] and [a:] (vowels 5 and 6 in table (2-6)). Quite a lot of speakers, in particular in the Edinburgh area, possess this augmented vowel system. There exists, however, considerable discrepancy in the distribution of [ae] and [a] or [a] and [a] between RP and SSE. For example, RP speakers say value, alphabet, gather, salmon, etc. with [ae], whereas Scots tend to pronounce these words with [a]. Some linguists claim that this is the proof for the antiquity of the Scottish vocalic system, since one would not expect these distribution differences if the influence from England were more immediate and consistent (Speitel personal communication). II. Another modification which is frequently observed in some types of SSE is the introduction of the opposition between fo] and [D] (vowels 7 and 8 in table (2-6)). Here again the distribution differentiations can be seen between those Scottish speakers who have it and the speakers of RP. The following words may be pronounced with [o] in Scotland but with fo] in England: lorry, watch, yacht, wash, etc. Abercrombie states that there is an exceptionless dependency holding between modification I and II, namely that the ED] - [o] contrast is always accompanied by the [ae] - [a] contrast. But the reverse is not the case; that is, not everyone who distinguishes [ae] and [a] has [Ό] and [D] opposition in his vowel system. HI. The next modification to BSVS relates to high back vowels. There are speakers of SSE who differentiate between [υ] and [u] (vowels 10 and

45

11 in table (2-6)). This contrast is rather rare, however, and those who have it are inconsistent in the use of it. It is interesting to point out that the speakers who discriminate [υ] and [u] also differentiate between [ae] and [a], as well as between [Ό] and [D]. We can conclude our discussion of the anglicization process of SSE by quoting Abercrombie (1979: 76-77): "So we have four different Scottish vowel systems: the Basic System; the Basic plus a 5/6 ([ae] and [a]) distinction; the Basic plus 5/6 and 7/8 distinction ([ae] and [α], [Ό] and [o]); and the Basic plus these two distinctions and also a 10/11 distinction ([υ] and [u]). These are all modifications away from the Basic System towards the England system but, curiously, they do not make the accents which have this augmented system sound any more English than those that do not. In fact, oddly enough they tend to have the opposite effect, and make them sound more Scottish, because of the very conspicuous distribution differences, which are much more noticeable to the ordinary listener's ear than systemic differences.[...] There are two other means by which the Basic System can be augmented. Firstly, any of the four systems can have vowel number 4a added, producing, in effect, a further four systems. This, of course is not a modification towards Anglo-English. Secondly, there is one more way in which any of the vowel systems enumerated so far can be modified, and which also is not a modification towards Anglo-English; this concerns vowel length or quantity." In what follows we intend to comment on and provide thorough substantiation for these two other modes of extending the BSVS mentioned by Abercrombie above, namely the addition of Aitken's vowel [έ] (see section 2.1.3.2. below) to the BSVS and the addition of the Scottish Vowel Lengthening rule, also called Aitken's Law (see section 2.2. below). Both of these additions contribute to the increase of the differences between RP and SSE, and thus cannot be omitted in a discussion devoted to the comparison of the vowel systems of the accents in question.

2.1.3.2. Aitken's Vowel: Lexical Distribution Let us begin by considering the vowel [ε] (number 4a in table (2-6) above; often referred to as Aitken's vowel after A. J. Aitken, who first observed it in the mid twentieth century), which is a very controversial element of the

46

vowel system of SSE. It has no equivalent in any Anglo-English system, or indeed in any vowel system of the rest of the English speaking world. The vowel in question is put in brackets in our table to indicate that its appearance in the BSVS is optional, by which we mean that it is not an integral element of the BSVS. In fact, it is not an integral, compulsory part of any Scottish vowel system. It can occur with any of the Scottish vowel systems, although its distribution is slightly different in each. This is the reason why Aitken's vowel is also called a floating vowel. More specific justification for such labelling of its distributional flexibility comes from the following observations: 1.

As we stated above, [£] is not an essential component of any Scottish vowel system, inasmuch as some speakers in a given geographical region may have it, while others who live in the same region may not.

2.

Those speakers who have [8] in their vowel system use it for a limited number of words only, and its distribution varies from speaker to speaker. In other words the lexical distribution of this vowel varies a great deal with different speakers. The following, however, are words in which it is commonly heard: devil, clever, never, eleven, heaven, leopard, shepherd, next.

3.

[ε] seems to have a regionally determined basis; it is found in the West of Scotland, in the Borders, and in Perthshire. Formerly it was believed not to be found in Edinburgh, but Aitken as well as Speitel (personal communications of both) maintain that this is not the case. The detailed analysis of its regional localization, however, requires further study and would be very much in order.

4.

It appears only in stressed syllables.

Kohler (1964) has suggested an explanation for the peculiar distribution of Aitken's vowel. He claims that in several dialects of Scots this [ε] is used in many or even all words of the standard lexical type {BIT}. As a result, its distribution would entirely correspond to the distribution of the sound [ι] in standard English. Kohler further states that at a certain moment the [ι] sound from English was acquired and steadily replaced Γέ] in most of the {BIT} type words in the system, [ε] being retained only in a handful of words without any systematic distribution. It is also worthwhile to mention that [ε] is until present day regularly pronounced in Buchan English, as described by W lck (1965). This dialect employs no fully front [ε], but

47

only the centralized [ε] (which W lck transcribes as [d]. This vowel is used not only in {DEAD} type of words, but also in unstressed syllables, where it corresponds to the [δ] of standard English accents.

2.1.3.3. Aitken's Vowel: Phonetic Characteristics Wherever present, [ε] is phonetically and phonologically distinct from the other two front vocalic nuclei of the Scottish vowel system, ie. from [i] and [ε]. Its quality is slightly less open than that of cardinal vowel 3 and it is considerably centralized (it is not a fully front vowel). Consequently, [ε] sounds quite similar to the [schwa] of standard English. The interpretation of the phonetic description of [ε] given above can be specified in terms of distinctive features as: [-high], [-low], [-back], [-tense]. Phonologically, [ε] is distinct from both [i] and [ε] (as well as from other vowels which surface in stressed syllables) because it does not undergo the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule. As a result, it is invariably a short vowel in the SSE system.

2.2. Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule: Introduction The subject of our investigation in the present section is the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) or Aitken's Law. Although vowel length differences have been observed in SSE and Scots dialects over a long period, the process was first formulated as a rule by Aitken in (1962). Earlier studies relating to specific Scottish dialects of English, including the Scotsinfluenced dialects of the Belfast area (Dieth 1932; Wettstein 1942) and the phonological data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland provided information which served Aitken as a basis for his formulation (1962, 1975, 1981, 1984 a, b) of the process under discussion. The rule has been examined as an interesting phenomenon from the standpoint of historical phonology, e.g. by Lass (1974, 1976). Its continued operation in Modem Scots and SSE is claimed by Abercrombie (1979), Aitken (1979, 1981), McClure (1977) and Wells (1982). These authors maintain unanimously that SVLR is still current in non-standard Scots dialects and that it is a salient feature of the SSE. The influence of the rule, though not its complete operation, is observed in Belfast accents by Milroy (1981) and Harris (1985). Of all the above studies only that of McClure (1977) and of Agutter (1986) are based on machine measurements of vowel length differences. These latter, however, are, like the others, confined to the examination of only a

48 very few native speakers of SSE (McClure studies the speech of one speaker only, whereas Agutter limits her research to four informants).

2.2.1. SVLR - Basic Facts The result of the operation of SVLR in SSE is that the vowel system of SSE is typologically entirely different from that of RP and from the vowel systems of other accents of English in yet another way: it lacks the long-short opposition which is characteristic of many English dialects. Vowel duration in SSE varies considerably according to phonetic environment. More specifically, there exists a process of systematic lengthening of vowels followed either by voiced fricatives ([ν], [ζ], [δ]), by the sound [r], or by a morphological boundary + / or a word boundary # (the duration contrasts which result from this lengthening may thus signal morphological boundaries, which is not the case in other accents of English). The rule has been observed to operate in the above mentioned environments if they are morpheme final in stressed syllables. It should be noted that in all other contexts the same vowels remain short. Although RP also has vowel length variation according to phonetic environment, most analyses treat vowel length in RP as subsidiary to phonemic quality differences (Gimson 1972). The importance of SVLR is therefore that it distinguishes SSE as an accent of English in which vowel length is purely phonetically determined, irrespective of quality distinctions. Due to the rule in question, vowels are long in SSE in words such as: I. II. III.

tea [ti:], two [tu:], day [de:], know [no:], etc. in which cases vocalic nuclei stand before a word boundary in a stressed syllable; sleeve [sli:v], smooth [smu:5], amaze [dme:z], Oz [o:z], etc. where vocalic nuclei are followed by voiced fricatives in a stressed syllable; pour [po:r], Kerr [ke:r], etc. where vowels are followed by [r] in a stressed syllable.

Long vowel duration is also retained in SSE if a morpheme final vowel is followed either by the derivational suffixes such as: {-ness}, {-!y_} or by the inflectional, past tense suffix {-d}, e.g.: daily [de:li], shyness [Ja:nes], agreed [dgri:d], brewed [bru:d], etc. If, on the other hand, a vowel stands before a final [d] sound which belongs to the same morpheme, as in greed, brood, etc. the length of the vowel remains unaltered. Similar contrasts, resulting from the differences in the morphological structures of words, also appear

49

in: need-kneed [nid]-[ni:d], staid-stayed, [sted]-[ste:d], [tod]-[to:d], nod-gnawed [nod]-[no:d], tide-tied [teid]-[ta'ed], etc.

load-towed

Thus, the distribution of length in SSE can be represented as in table (2-7) below (we quote the table after Lass 1974: 317): (2-7)

[i:] [e:j

bee day

beer mare

sleeve brave

breathe

sneeze graze

f c· 1 [O·]

——«. «—

__„„_._ -»__..

II*PV VY

____«._..

-—__-._,

do row caw

far poor bore war

have move grove

smooth clothe

has lose nose cause

[ :] [y:] [o:J [D:]

The diphthongs participate in length alternations in the same environments2. Their lengthening, however, is accompanied by the quality change, as indicated below:

[ει]—»[a*e] [oi]—>[3*e]

fly boy

fire Moir

five

scythe

size noise

(As there exists a great deal of variation in the pronunciation of some of the SSE vocalic nuclei linguists use different phonetic symbols to represent specific realizational variants. Those employed by Lass (1974) differ from those offered by Abercrombie (1979) and Wells (1982). It is the transcription of SSE as given by Wells (1982) that we shall adopt below.) It is interesting to observe, nevertheless, that there are two vowels, namely [ι] and [Λ], which do not undergo the SVLR; [ι] remains short in fir, his, etc. and [Λ] is short in fur, love, buzz, etc. Having presented the distributional facts about the SVLR we now face the problem of accounting for the data under discussion within the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology adopted in the present study.

In addition to the monophthongs discussed in subsection 2.1.2. many speakers of SSE also have diphthongs. The number of diphthongs and their phonetic quality in SSE varies depending on the age, social status, sex, etc of individual speakers. The most relevant facts pertaining to the phonetic description, distribution and phonological interpretation of SSE diphthongs will be discussed in the Appendix to the present book.

50

2.3.

SVLR: Discussion of Rule Formulation

In this section, we shall consider the problem of the formalization of SVLR in terms of phonological features. Expression of the specification of segments in this manner will allow us to account for the relatedness between the natural classes of sounds acting as either input, environment or output of our rule. 2.3.1.

Input to SVLR

In what follows we shall endeavour to describe in terms of distinctive features those vowels which undergo the lengthening process in SSE. We shall also try to discriminate them from those vowels which resist the lengthening rule. It is perhaps advisable for the sake of the clarity of the discussion that we begin by representing the SSE vowel system on the cardinal vowel diagram (see diagram (2-8) below, which is a representation of approximate tonguepositions of average Scottish English Vowels compared with those of Cardinal Vowels). (2-8)

SSE

VOWEL SYSTEM

Front

51 2.3.1.1. Input to SVLR: Vowels Which Resist Lengthening It is commonly pointed out in the literature on SSE (see Lass 1974, Aitken 1981, Wells 1982, Wettstein 1942, Zai 1942) that out of all the above pictured vowels only [ι] and [Λ] never lengthen in SVLR environments. (Neither, as we have already pointed out, does Aitken's vowel [ε]. As this vowel is not a constant element of the BSVS, we have treated it separately above). In SSE, and in most Scottish dialects (see The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland 1975-86), these two vowels remain short regardless of the following context. As a result, they must be excluded from the input to the SVLR. We must now proceed to examine whether it is mere accident or coincidence that these two vowels alone require to be excluded from the input to the SVLR. In fact, as we shall try to prove below, [Λ] and [ι] manifest similar behaviour in SSE with respect not only to Aitken's Law, but to other phonological processes as well. Furthermore, we shall argue, the two vowels under consideration can be specified in terms of common phonological distinctive features. In other words, as we will proceed to show, there are considerable grounds for treating them as members of a natural class. A group of sounds (segments) constitute a natural class in Generative Phonology when they and they alone fill the same function (behave similarly) in a given phonological process (ie. the members of a natural class form either the environment, the input or the output of one or more phonological rules). This description reflects the fact that only the similar behaviour of segments in one or more phonological rules gives us grounds to believe that they share some important phonetic and phonological properties which differentiate them from the other segments of the language. Hence, a natural class consists of a group of segments which have certain distinctive features in common, and which can therefore be described jointly by fewer features than can each of the sounds separately. Thus, in order to determine that [ι] and [Λ] form a natural class in SSE we need to isolate the phonological processes in which these two vowels group together as environment, input or output. A relevant fact becomes clear from the examination of the behaviour of the two vowels in unstressed syllables, in which the following, freely varying, sound replacements can be observed:

52

(2-9)

barrow

china

city

letter

never

[barAJ [bard]

[tJAinA] [tJAind]

[siti] [sitd]

[letArJ [letdr] [letir]

[nevAr] [nevdr] [nevir]

The above examples show that both [A] and [ι] reduce to [o] in unstressed syllables. Moreover, the three vowels can freely replace one another in the same phonetic context within the speech of the same informant. This is most likely to occur in the environment before [r] when not under stress. In fact, no other vowels are in free variation with [d] in this environment. Note, that [ι, A, o] are all mid, lax, fairly centralized vowels (see diagram (2-8)) which share the following feature characteristics on the surface: [-high], [-low] [-round], [-tense]. Hence, like any natural class, they can be described as a group in terms of fewer features than can each of them individually. Another piece of evidence which supports the claim that [ι] and [A] behave similarly in some phonological processes comes from the analysis of their behaviour before [r] in stressed syllables. Wells (1982) states that there is a tendency in some varieties of SSE to merge the vowels of dirt, bird, pert, and hurt into a centralized [3* ] with [r] colouring. This merger into [3* ] is observed in middle class Edinburgh speech, but in general it seems rather exceptional for Scotland as a whole. In other parts of the country SSE displays partial mergers of vowels before [r]. In the working class Glasgow accent, for example, the vowels of dirt, hurt, bird, and -word are all pronounced [AT], while heard, pert, etc. retain [er]. In still other parts of Scotland (Wells points in particular to more prestigious west-of-Scotland accents) the historical three way contrast is maintained, with [ι] appearing in bird, firm, [ε] in heard, pert and [A] in hurt, word. Some Scottish speakers, in fact, have even more than these three vowel distinctions. In their speech [έ] may occur in: jerk, herd, earth, whereas shirt [Jdrt] does not rhyme with skirt, pert, hurt, the latter being pronounced [skirt], [pert] and [hAit]. As wide a range as five contrasting vowel possibilities for so-called nurse type words is, however, unusual in SSE. The degrees of merger of stressed vowels before [r] in SSE are exemplified by the accents described in the table which follows (we have here expanded and modified the table given by Wells, 1982: 407):

53

(2-10) ISOLATED(A) WESTERN(B) CLYDESIDE(C) EDINBURGH(D) SPEAKERS SCOTTISH (Glasgow (middle ACCENTS working class) class) pert hurt stirred dirt earth

er ΛΓ ir dr er

er ΛΓ ir ir ir

er ΛΓ ΛΓ ΛΓ ΛΓ

3 3 3 3 3

r = [3* r = [3* r = [3* r = [3* r = (3*

The above data show interesting regularity in the systematic correspondence between [ι, έ, d] vowels in informant group A and either vowel [ι] in group B or [Λ] in group C. The fact that the [ι, e, d] are replaced by [ι] or [Λ] in stressed syllables before [r] in several varieties of SSE points to a phonological relatedness between (and peculiar to) these two vowels, which may hold true for the vowel system of SSE in general. Another piece of evidence to substantiate the claim that [ι] and [Λ] display similarity of behaviour in SSE comes from phonotactics. These are the only vowels in SSE which do not occur in a stressed monosyllable with no final consonant. Such vowels are often referred to as checked vowels (see Wells, 1982: 119 and section 2.1.1. of the present chapter). The division into checked and free vocalic nuclei corresponds to the classification of vowels into lax and tense (free vowels being tense, whereas checked vowels are lax). Thus, the conclusion that can be drawn from the data above is that lax vowels [ι] and [Λ], insofar as they function together in the phonological processes described above, form a natural class in SSE and can be described in terms of distinctive features as: [-tense], [-back]. As a final comment about the segments which resist SVLR mention should also be made about schwa which is yet another lax vowel in the SSE system. The explanation of the lack of lengthening of schwa in the SVLR contexts can be offered a more convincing grounding if we explore some of the descriptive mechanisms (possibilities) provided by the theory of three-dimensional phonology and that of the underspecification. The lack of the lengthening of schwa by SVLR follows from the principles of the theory of underspecified underlying entries (for detailed discussion of the concept of underspecification see Archangeli 1984, Pulleybank 1983, Kiparsky 1982a and 1985 as well as chapter 1 above) accepted for some theoretical solutions also in the present book. According to this theory these segments which are underlyingly unspecified for predictable feature values become fully

54

specified by the so called fill-in rules or the default rules which fill in the predictable feature specifications of segments at some point during the phonological derivation. Given the fact that schwa must be underlyingly distinct from other vowels (In all cases where there is no alternation between schwa and any other full (unreduced) vowel on the surface nor there exist no other independent phonological argument which would determine the specific justification of the underlying source for schwa one is faced with a considerable descriptive difficulty to motivate its underlying representation.) linear phonological framework is forced to claim that the difference is expressed in terms of phonetic features. Thus, schwa would be classified as a lax vowel [-cons, -tense, -round, -back, -low]. On the other hand, nonlinear three-dimensional framework suggests other options. Halle and Mohanan (1985), for example, propose that schwa be interpreted at the underlying level as an empty X slot unassociated with any melody. The actual phonetic segment schwa would be supplied by a separate default rule in the course of phonological derivation. Thus the distinction between schwa and full vowels would be reflected at the melody level: the former would have no feature specification (empty melody) whereas the latter would be fully specified for all the unpredictable feature values. Schwa is then automatically excluded from the input to SVLR, as at the underlying level it is an empty slot with no melodic content (unattached to any melody matrix) whereas the structural description of the SVLR, as we will argue below, requires that the input segments be specified as [+tense].

2.3.1.2 Input to SVLR: Vowels Which Undergo Lengthening Now let us establish and discuss the proper elements of the input to the lengthening rule in SSE. Below, we shall claim that the vowels which function as the input to the SVLR can be all described as [+tense]. Although this phonetic feature is by no means an uncontroversial concept in modern phonological theories, we shall regard it as adequate for the characterization of the input to Aitken's Law. We shall, therefore, begin by analyzing several available definitions of the feature [±tense]. We shall then proceed to compare their relative appropriateness for the description of the input to our rule. Tenseness is generally correlated with the following parameters: degree of maximal constriction in the vocal tract, tongue height, advanced tongue root and length. As a result of these multiple correlations, phoneticians have had difficulty keeping tenseness distinct from other phonetic features.

55

A. M. Bell, the founder of modern phonetics, was the first linguist to recognize [±tense] as a distinct phonetic feature. In his book Visible Speech of 1867, Bell employed this feature to differentiate the German vowels in Biene 'bee', See 'sea1, Sohn 'son', from those in bitte 'please', fest 'firm' Sonne 'sun'. He called the former narrow, and the latter wide. The terms in question refer to the degree of constriction in the vocal tract: it is relatively narrow in the first group of vowels and wide in the second. There is also a correlation between tenseness and tongue height. Many but not all tense vowels show greater tongue height than their lax cognates. Halle (1977), when addressing this correlation, quotes E. Sievers's Grundzüge der Phonetik of 1901, where it is stated that: "One must guard against confusing the concepts 'tense' (or 'narrow') and 'lax' (or 'wide') with those which are designated by the traditional expressions 'close' and Open.' The latter express only the fact that a given vowel has greater or lesser mouth width than some other vowel, but without taking into consideration the very different articulatory processes which produce differences in the mouth width in each case; specifically without considering whether a given mouth width is due to greater or lesser raising of the tongue, rather than to greater or lesser tension in the tongue, or to a mixture of the two. A vowel may, therefore, be 'more open' than another because it has lesser tongue height, or because it has less tension, and conversely in the case of 'close' vowels." (p. 100; quoted after Halle). The simplest observation which we can make about this passage is that Sievers treats tenseness as an effect of diverse articulatory factors related to the action of the tongue, height of the tongue being only one of them. Such a definition clearly leads us to the discussion of the next correlate associated with tenseness and the tongue, that of advanced tongue root. Much debate has been devoted to the role of this feature in relation to tenseness. When one analyzes the X-ray pictures of tense and lax vowels, the first difference that one notes in them is the position of the tongue root: tense vowels characteristically have an advanced tongue root, whereas lax vowels have a more retracted tongue root. This fact was first made clear in X-ray pictures published by Ladefoged (1964), and was then discussed in an interesting paper by Stewart (1969). The same year brought also an article by Halle and Stevens (1969), in which they propose that tenseness be equated with advanced tongue root, abbreviated as [ATR]. For the classification of vowels either as [+ATR] or as [-ATR] we rely on Kiparsky's

56

paper "A Note on the Vowel Features" (1974). According to Kiparsky (1974: 165) upper-high, upper-mid and upper-low vowels are produced with an advancement of the tongue root, and thus they are [+ATR]. Lower vowels in each of the three height regions are [-ATR]. These observations were then reviewed by Wood (1975) who studied the relationship between articulation and acoustic output and demonstrated conclusively that the differences in formant frequencies could not be accounted for by the observed differences in pharynx volume produced by advancing the tongue root. Instead, Wood argues, the formant frequency differences can be accounted for by differences in the maximal narrowing to be found in the vocal tract. This claim confirms Bell's original idea, as well as confirming Jakobson's proposal, first expounded in Fundamentals of Language (Jakobson and Halle 1956: 43), that the tense sound is produced with a vocal tract configuration that deviates more from a uniform tube than does the one involved in the production of its lax counterpart; for the greater the constriction, the greater the deviation from a tube of uniform crosssection. This view was also furthered by Chomsky and Halle in SPE (1968). The proposal that tenseness is correlated with degree of constriction solves a problem that could not be resolved within a framework where tenseness was correlated with advanced tongue root. This is because only according to the former system are we able to differentiate between tense and lax vowels at the low vowel level (the [+low, +back] vowels being [+tense] and [+low, -back] remaining [-tense], for a detailed discussion see Halle 1977). The last correlate of tenseness that we mentioned above is length. In the tradition stemming from Jakobson (and continued in SPE), length is not treated as a prime but is associated with tenseness, so that the feature [ttense] dichotomizes vowel systems, and length is a low level exponent of tenseness. (Lass, on the other hand, (1984: 91) advocates the separation of these two features on the basis of Swedish data). Finally, it should be recalled that in addition to the phonetic parameters conditioning tenseness we have already noted a phonotactic criterion which determines tense vowels as free and lax vowels as checked (see section 2.1.1. of this chapter). As can be seen from our survey of standpoints related to the interpretation of the feature [itense], the issue of formulating a definition of it and specifying precisely its empirical correlates is complex and controversial (there are linguists, e.g. Lass (1984), who question even the mere existence of the empirical correlates of the feature which we have discussed above). Moreover, it seems to be the case that the postulation of the feature [±tense] can be more or less motivated (or necessary) depending on the phonological behaviour of segments in a specific language.

57

We shall treat vowels which undergo Aitken's Law as tense for the following reasons: I. They display a high degree of constriction in the vocal tract. They are located in the upper high: [i], [u] (the latter vowel being somewhat advanced from the cardinal value), upper mid: [e], [o] and lower back [a], [o] areas of the vowel field (see diagram (2-8) above and our discussion of the feature [±ATR]). II.

All of the lengthening vowels are free vowels. They appear in stressed, open syllables before a word boundary: bee, day, meh 'cry of sheep', Da 'father', lah, do, row, caw pronounced with: [i:], [e:], [ε:], [a:], [u:], [o:], and [o:], respectively.

III. The vowels which function as the input to SVLR are peripheral, noncentralized segments. By claiming that such segments are tense we account for the commonplace observation which maintains that susceptibility of vowels to acquire length correlates with tenseness (which is tme in many accents and dialects of the English language). Tenseness, and thus length, pattern with more peripheral segments of vowel systems, while laxness and shortness characterize more centralized segments (see Lass 1984: 91). 2.3.1.3. Input to SVLR: A More Detailed Discussion of Scottish [ε] The proposal to characterize [ε] as [+tense] made in the above discussion is by no means an unproblematic one. This is because unlike other [+tense] vowels in SSE [ε] is placed in the region pertaining to lax segments on the cardinal vowel diagram, namely that of lower mid vowels (see diagram (2-8) in the present chapter). This fact would suggest that the vowel under consideration should be characterized as a [-tense] segment. In what follows, however, we shall argue that, contrary to the latter observation, the phonological behaviour of [ε] in SSE does not accord with description as [-tense]. The aspects of the phonological behaviour of [ε] on which we shall base this claim are the following: 1. 2.

Unlike [-tense] vowels [ε] appears in free syllables (likewise [+tense] vowels) e.g., meh 'cry of sheep' (quoted after Aitken 1981). Unlike [-tense] vowels [ε] never appears in unstressed syllables (see the alternations of lax vowels in (2-9) above).

58

3. 4.

Unlike [-tense] vowels [ε] never reduces to [d] or alternates with other lax vowels in SSE. [ε] is the only [-tense] vowel which undergoes lengthening in the SVLR contexts (likewise [+tense] vowels).

The above statements indicate that phonologically [ε] is more prone to pattern with [+tense] rather than lax vowels in SSE. In order to account for this peculiarity we may suggest that at the underlying level the vowel in question be classified as [+tense] and that at some stage in the phonological derivation it is laxed by a redundancy laxing rule, affecting only [ε] in SSE, the rule ordered after Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule. This ordering is due to the fact that at the stage in which SVLR applies in the derivation [ε] should still be a [+tense] vowel.

2.3.1.4. Input to SVLR: Concluding Remarks Treatment of Length in Three Dimensional Phonology The problem of the correlation of surface length with tenseness is solved in the present analysis in a different way than in the SPE and in works using a similar linear framework. This is because the treatment of length is altogether different in the theory of three dimensional phonology, which we follow here. In the latter approach, we do not need to introduce the feature [±long], as length is represented in terms of a number of slots in the skeleton to which the segment is associated. Consequently, with the added skeletal structure, the same feature matrix at the melody tier may represent a long vowel or a short vowel. (The only difference between the two is that a long vowel is associated with two X slots and a short one with one X slot.) As a result, this framework eliminates a phonetic distinctive feature [±long] used in the classic generative phonology. In three dimensional phonology, the change introduced by Aitken's Law will only affect the structural level, namely that of the skeleton containing timing slots. Thus, the relevant change introduced by Aitken's Law can be schematized as follows: (2-11) Ν

I I

X [+tensej

Ν

->

/ \ X \ /

X

[+tense]

59 It should be observed that the linking of two X slots to one feature matrix at the melody level is effected automatically by the convention called Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) (see Leben 1973) that prohibits the existence of two identical melody segments side by side in the same morpheme. For example, if a given rule generates a sequence in (i) below then it automatically becomes reinterpreted as (ii) below due to the OCP:

(i) X X M 1•

(ii) X X \ /

·

·

I

1

2.3.2. The Environment of SVLR Having decided upon the structural description of the input to the SVLR, we may now pass on to determining its environment in terms of phonological feature specification. The SVLR applies before [ν, δ, ζ, r, +, #]. Leaving the problem of interpretation of # aside for the present (see section 2.4. below for a discussion of this issue), we shall claim that all of these sounds can be described as members of a natural class characterized by [+continuant], [+consonantal], and [+voiced]. The treatment of [r] as a [+continuant] sound requires that we treat [1], together with nasals, as [-continuant]. As the status of liquids with regard to the feature [icontinuant] deserves some further clarification, it is necessary that we discuss this feature in detail in the present section. We will offer here also a general characterization of the feature [±voiced]. The feature [±consonantal], on the other hand, will be discussed in detail in section 5.1.2. below. 2.3.2.1. The Environment [^continuant]

of

SVLR:

Discussion

of

the

Feature

We begin by quoting a definition of the feature [icontinuant] after Lass (1984: 89): "In a [+cont] articulation, airflow is not totally blocked at any point; [-cont] means a stricture of complete closure. Thus, [+oral] stops and affricates and [-oral] [?] are [-cont]; fricatives and vowels are [+cont]. Nasals should probably be interpreted generally as nasal stops, i.e. [+nas, -cont]. Laterals are a

60

problem, because even though they often have complete closure, they are also rather λ vowel-like1 in their behaviour; they should probably be handled on a language specific basis. As for various types of [r], the approximants and fricatives are [+cont], and so probably are trills; but taps are difficult; how short a closure qualifies as complete?" Many linguists dealing with the phonological interpretation of the feature under discussion (see e.g., the SPE, p. 317 and Rubach 1982) claim, on the other hand, that the distinction between [+continuant] and [-continuant] sounds depends greatly on the phonological behaviour of sounds in a specific language. Rubach (1982: 86-87) remarks that: "An off-hand intuitive definition would describe [-contin] as a feature characterizing sounds during the production of which air flow is stopped for a moment, i.e. both the nasal and the oral passages are blocked. Under this definition only stops and affricates would be regarded as noncontinuants. Notice that this interpretation of [-contin] makes a good phonological prediction: indeed it is the case that stops and affricates function as a natural class. Thus English has a low phonetic (allophonic) rule by which stops lose their plosion phase if they stand before stops or affricates [...]. However, this prediction is not extensive enough. English has a phonostyslistic rule by which [t,d,n] are assimilated to the point of articulation of the following stop or nasal. [...] This phonostylistic rule shows that stops and nasals function together as a class: they form not only the input for but also the environment of the assimilation rule in question. Therefore, one would want to find a common parameter for them. This can be done easily if the definition of [Icontin] is somewhat modified. Let us define [-contin] as a feature referring to those sounds during the production of which air flow in the mouth cavity is stopped for a moment. Under this definition the escape of air through the nose is not relevant: stops, affricates and nasals are [-contin]." Rubach proceeds to further modify the definition of the feature [±continuant] to account for still another allophonic process, namely that of the assimilation of the place of articulation of [t, d, n, 1] to that of the following consonant, a rule for which he cites examples from both English and Polish. Under the new formulation [-continuant] are sounds during the production

61

of which air flow over the centre of the tongue is blocked for a moment. Thus, stops, affricates, nasals and laterals (the sounds which constitute the input to this assimilatory rule) would be grouped as [-continuant]. It should be emphasized that each of the above definitions is phonetically true; the definitions, that is to say, are in accordance with the facts of articulation. The selection of a given formulation of a definition, however, is motivated on the basis not of phonetic but of purely phonological data, namely, the behaviour of segments in phonological rules. Let us then proceed to examine both [r] and [1] individually in the light of the above statements. We agree with Lass in assuming that the fricative varieties of [r] do not represent any specific difficulty; they are clearly [+continuant]. The trilled [r] so frequent in SSE and Scottish dialects is more troublesome, since there exists interruption of the air stream during at least part of the duration of the sound. Chomsky and Halle (SPE: 318) describe this sound as [+continuant] and mention that, "[...] the vibrations of the tongue tip are produced by the drop in pressure which occurs inside the passage between the tip of the tongue and palate when the air flows rapidly through it (Bernoulli effect). The trill is thus a secondary effect of narrowing the cavity without actually blocking the flow of air. Consequently, there is good reason to view the trilled [r] as a continuant rather than as a stop." There still remains the tap (otherwise referred to as a flap) [I] variant of [r] to be mentioned, in the production of this sound a single tap is made by the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge, the side rims of the tongue usually making a light contact with the upper back grinding teeth. The articulation of a flap differs from that of alveolar stops in that the contact between the articulators for [£] is of much shorter duration and is less complete than is that of [t] or [d] (see Jones 1975, Gimson 1970, Ladefoged 1971). Therefore the tap or flap realization of [r] is also considered a [+continuant]. (Although, as Lass-see above-points out, the issue of feature description of the flap is rather debatable.) All of the three forms of [r] referred to above as [+continuant] sounds, namely, the fricative [r], the trilled point consonant [r], and the tap [X] are found in SSE and in dialects all over Scotland. (Some accents also include the frictionless continuant [Λ], see our discussion of Romanic's data (Romaine 1978) in chapter 5 below.) The specification of the liquid [1] with respect to the feature [±continuant] seems to be even more complicated than that of [r]. Chomsky and Halle (1968) point out that if the defining criterion of stops is taken to be a complete blockage of airflow, then [1] is a continuant and can be distinguished from [r] solely by the feature [±lateral]. They proceed to show, however, that if non-continuant sounds are characterized by the blockage of airflow past the primary stricture, then [1] will function together with stops

62

as a [-continuant]. In other words, although (as we have shown) certain phonetic descriptions of [r] and [1] classify them as [+continuant] and [-continuant] respectively, phonetic evidence on its own does not enable us to assert this classification with certainty. In fact, Chomsky and Halle emphasize (as do Lass and Rubach~see above) that the characterization of liquids with respect to the feature [±continuant] needs to be determined for every dialect or accent on the basis of language-specific phonological data. The SPE standpoint has recently been set in a slightly different light with respect to the interpretation of the status of [1] as a non-continuant sound. Lately, a number of scholars have demonstrated that [1] should be treated as [-contin]. Wiese (personal communication) states that: "For German, there are good reasons for the claim that [1] should be seen as [-contin]." Clements (1985) also views the sound [1] as [-continuant] when discussing English rule of assimilation of the place of articulation of stops [t,d,n] to the following coronal consonant, though he further states that: " [1] participates in this assimilation only in part, assimilating to [Θ] (health) but not, at least not fully, to [c, J] (filch, bilge}" (Clements 1985: 236). In addition to the phonetic evidence there exist phonological arguments for treating [r] as distinct from [1]. Those which particularly require to be mentioned here are the following: 1.

First of all, [r] functions together with obstruents in SSE and in other Scottish accents in that it undergoes a low phonetic rule of partial devoicing before voiceless obstruents and before a pause. Nasals or [1] never devoice in this context. Thus, [r] classes phonologically with the obstruents rather than with [1].

2.

Another piece of evidence which shows that [r] and [1] behave differently comes from phonotactics. Namely, there is a principle in Scottish and English dialects whereby monosyllables cannot contain sequences of the following structure: V + G (glide: j,w) + r. In fact, none of the possible combinations of [r] and a glide occur in monosyllables: *[rw, rj, wr, jr]. (Sequences of the type [r] + glide and glide + [r] do occur in English, but only where they are not tautosyllabic, e.g., tyrant, Lowry, wayward, Harwell, etc.) The behaviour of [1] with respect to the distributional constraint of forming sequences with glides in syllable initial or syllable final positions is, significantly, otherwise. It is the case that [1] follows glides in: tail, tile, toll, toil, etc. pronounced as: [tejl], [tajl], [tcHvl], [tojl]. Furthermore, [1] can also precede glides, as in Luke, lune, lure, etc., pronounced [IJDuk], [lji)un], and [Ijud].

63

3.

Still another example of the dissimilarity of the behaviour of the sounds [r] and [1] is that only the latter participates in the coronal assimilation process in English (see Rubach 1982: 86-87 quoted earlier in this subsection, and Clements 1985: 236). The rule in question is a low allophonic process which makes alveolar stops, nasals and laterals agree with the place of articulation of the following consonant. The sound [r] is not affected by this assimilatory process. The phonological rules mentioned in 1, 2, and 3 above indicate that [r] and [1] should be assigned different phonetic feature characterization. It is the dissimilarity in the specification of the two sounds with respect to the feature [±continuant] that we shall claim to be responsible for this difference.

2.3.2.2. The Environment of SVLR: Discussion of the Feature [±voice] Recent phonetic research (see Halle and Stevens, 1971 and 1972), especially that dealing with data from tone languages, has undermined the validity of the feature [±voice]. It has been criticized because, among other things, it cannot bring out the relationship between voicelessness and high pitch on one hand, and voicing and low pitch on the other. These are concurrent in some tone languages. Halle and Stevens have for this reason proposed the introduction of four more detailed features reflecting straightforwardly the state of the glottis and the characteristics of the vocal cords, namely: [±stiff vocal cords], [±slack vocal cords], [±spread glottis] and [±constricted glottis]. In spite of the fact that the definitions of the above mentioned features are more or less self explanatory, a few clarifying remarks are probably in order. When vocal cords are stiff their vibrations are naturally more difficult. Voiceless obstruents and high pitch vowels are produced with stiff vocal cords. On the other hand, slackening vocal cords facilitate vibration. In obstruents slack vocal cords accompany voicing, whereas in vowels this state accompanies low pitch. When the glottis is spread the vocal cords are moved apart, which makes normal voicing impossible. The air flow is then faster and stronger, since it is unimpeded in the larynx. If, however, the vocal cords are stiff, spreading of the glottis is more effective. Consequently, stops produced in this state are aspirated and sonorants voiceless. Spreading of the glottis and slackening of the vocal cords brings about low vibration. English voiced [h] as in behave is pronounced in this way. Yet another configuration of the glottis to be dealt with is that of constricted glottis and stiff vocal cords. This configuration is typical for glottal stops. The above system of features

64

can exhaustively characterize all English sounds as follows (see also table (2-12) below quoted after Halle and Stevens 1971): (2-12) aspir. stops v-less sonor. and [h] stiff v.c. slack v.c. spread glottis constr. glottis

+

v-less obstr.

voiced obstr.

vowels vd sonor, devoiced obstr.

+

glottal stop

+ +

+

-

-

-

voiced [h]

+

-

+ +

According to the above table the voiced fricatives [δ, ν, ζ, r] in SSE which constitute the lengthening environment for Aitken's Law are described as: [+slack vocal cords], [-stiff vocal cords], [-spread glottis], [-constricted glottis]. For the sake of clarity and brevity of formulation, however, we shall continue to use [±voice], but only as an abbreviation for the combinations of features here specified.

2.4. Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule: Discussion of the Status of the Rule in Lexical Phonology In the present section we shall focus mainly on the interpretation of the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (Aitken's Law) within the theoretical paradigm of Lexical Phonology. To do this means in effect to attempt to justify a particular placement of the process under discussion in the grammar of SSE. This we can most satisfactorily accomplish by examining the mode

65

of application of the rule in question as well as the relationship of SVLR to other phonological and morphological processes of this accent. Lexical Phonology as set out in Booij and Rubach (1987)3 recognizes three distinct components of grammar to which phonological rules belong, namely: cyclic rules, postcyclic rules and postlexical rules (for the purposes of this discussion the "mode of application" of a rule is understood as designated by the particular component to which it belongs; see chapter 1 above). The first two of these groups of rules, unlike the third, apply at the lexical level. Booij and Rubach claim that a set of rules belonging to one component forms an ordered block and that nil es from one block are not interspersed with rules of a different type. With the assumption that rules belong to ordered and separate blocks (components) we can make predictions regarding the membership of a rule in one of the three components: predictions regarding its behaviour in a given language. Suppose that a given rule A is ordered before a cyclic rule W. We can then predict (remembering that there are no phonological rules which can precede cyclic rules in a derivation) that A must also be a cyclic rule. As such, like all cyclic rules, it must apply at the level of words, must reapply cyclically after every word-forming operation, and must obey the principle of Strict Cyclicity (see item 1 in subsection 2.4.1.). On the other hand, if rule B is ordered after some postcyclic rule X then it cannot be cyclic. If B is ordered between X and a second postcyclic rule F, then B, also, must be a word-level postcyclic rule (in other words, it does not interact directly with morphology and is not subject to Strict Cyclicity). Finally, any rule C which is ordered after a postlexical rule Z must itself be postlexical (ie. apply after the operation of the syntactic component-both inside words and across word boundaries). It should be noted that Booij and Rubach's (1987) model of Lexical Phonology differs from that proposed by Halle and Mohanan (1985) in that it reduces the system of five ordered strata (as suggested for English by the latter authors) to a system of three ordered components. Halle and Mohanan's (1985) description includes the following strata: Stratum 1 (cyclic): class 1 derivation, irregular inflection; Stratum 2 (noncyclic): class II derivation; Stratum 3 (cyclic): compounding (a loop to stratum 2), Stratum 4 (cyclic), regular inflection; Stratum 5 noncyclic: postlexical phonology; This model corresponds to that of Booij and Rubach (1987) in the following ways: Stratum I corresponds to the cyclic component; Stratum 5 is identical with the postlexical component: Strata 2. 3. 4 are comprised in the postcyclic lexical component. Suffixes such as i-ness} or (-ly) are classified as stratum 2 suffixes, which makes an automatic prediction that any rule triggered by these suffixes is automatically a lexical process. In Booij and Rubach's account this amounts to saying that the process effectuated by the presence of the suffixes in question is a postcyclic lexical process.

66 "Thus, ordering ascribes domains to rules and predicts whether they should be constrained by Strict Cyclicity" (Booij and Rubach 1987: 12).

2.4.1.

Mode of Application of SVLR Why Is It Neither Cyclic Nor Postlexical?

To begin with the mode of application of Aitken's Law, we shall claim that it is a postcyclic lexical rule. We maintain this for the following reasons:

1. SVLR is not cyclic. There are significant grounds on which to reject the possibility of cyclic lexical status for Aitken's Law. A particularly decisive argument is that the rule applies morpheme internally in non-derived environments, e.g. in beer, sleeve, sneeze, breathe, etc. The application of this phonological process to such contexts automatically precludes the cyclic character of this process. This follows from a principle crucial to Lexical Phonology, the principle of Strict Cyclicity or Strict Cycle Condition (SCC; for an extended discussion of basic assumptions of the Lexical framework see chapter 1 of the present study). The essence of SCC is that structure changing cyclic phonological rules apply in derived environments only. The environment may be derived either morphologically or phonologically. In the former case a new structure is created due to the operation of a morphological rule, that is, a word formation rule; in the latter case the new structure arises due to a phonological rule. The SSE words cited above in which lengthening results from the application of the SVLR are not derived in either of the senses mentioned above. It is important to emphasize that the fact that the SCC prohibits the application of structure (or feature) changing cyclic phonological rules to non-derived environments does not imply that cyclic, structure preserving rules cannot apply to underived environments. In other words, a given cyclic rule can apply in non-derived environments only if it adds information rather than changing structures. For example, syllabification rules and stress rules only add prosodic information and, therefore, they can apply to non-derived word forms (ie. on the so-called first cycle). Segmental rules can also apply on the first cycle, but only in cases where they fill in certain feature specifications for the underspecified segments. (This is, for instance, the case with Nasal Assimilation in English. This rule specifies that the underlyingly underspecified nasal consonant [N] has the same place of articulation as the following obstruent, as in camp, tent, sink, etc.) It should

67 also be noted that the structure adding applications of rules do not create derived environments. SVLR, as a rule which causes vowel lengthening, is a structure changing rule. Also, it applies in non-derived environments. Both of these features of Aitken's Law eliminate the possibility of classifying this rule as a cyclic lexical process.

2. SVLR is not postlexical. Our claim that SVLR cannot be a cyclic rule combined with the assumption that mles which belong to different components must not be interspersed in the phonological derivation make clear that SVLR must apply after the block of cyclic lexical rules. Consequently, it must be allocated to either the postcyclic component in the Lexicon or to the postlexical phonological component. We proceed now to elucidate a conclusive piece of evidence in favour of the placement of SVLR in the postcyclic component. This evidence comes from the study of the interaction of SVLR with the information provided by the morphological component. As we have pointed out above (see section 2.3.2.) Aitken's Law, in addition to applying before segments characterized by the distinctive feature combination [+consonantal,+continuant,+voiced], applies before derivational and inflectional suffixes such as I-ness K {-ly_}, {-er} (agentive) and l-(e)s). f-(e)dK {-er} (comparative degree)}, respectively, as well as before the word boundary. Earlier in this chapter we deferred an investigation of the problem of explaining Rile applications in these morphologically conditioned environments to the present section. We chose to do this because the issue of the interpretation of boundaries in the Rile's environment in Lexical Phonology pertains directly to the determination of its status and, thus, domain of application. Thus, we shall now proceed to compare the concept of boundaries as used in traditional (SPE type) generative phonology with its counterpart in Lexical Phonology. Standard generative phonology attempted to encode the morphologyphonology relationship in the concept of boundaries. Boundaries were treated as sequential units in the phonological string without phonetic content. They were symbolized in SPE as: +, =, #, standing for a morpheme boundary, a boundary assigned after some prefixes in English and a word boundary, respectively (SPE: 371). (Hence, in the classical SPE descriptions, the environment for Aitken's Law would include also the two types of boundaries: +, # in the Rile's environment.) Lexical Phonology eliminates boundaries altogether. Instead, it relies exclusively on morphological bracketing and the appropriate ordering of levels (see Kiparsky 1982a and b) (strata; Halle and Mohanan, 1985) or components

68

(Booij and Rubach 1987). (One immediate advantage of such a view is that it avoids the possible ad hoc interpretation of boundaries as segments with distinctive feature specification.) This reflects the fact that this theory of phonology emphasizes most of all the relationship between the morphological structure of a word and the way phonological rules apply to it. The independently justified bracketing information provided by the morphological component makes significantly different claims with respect to the interpretation of the constraints on the accessibility of morphologically layered information. In the SPE it was assumed that internal brackets were erased at the end of each cycle (SPE: 20). Although this strong convention is retained by some authors (see Pesetsky 1979), most have adopted the weaker condition which erases brackets at the end of every stratum. The Bracket Erasure Convention (BEC) dictates that: After the application of all rules at a stratum, the brackets between the morphemes are deleted, so that reference to the constituent morphemes becomes impossible at subsequent strata. (Halle and Mohanan 1985: 61). Note that brackets (boundary markers) merely indicate the beginning and end of constituents in the string. The fact that SVLR applies before derivational suffixes (such as i-lvi and I-ness), for example) and inflectional suffixes ({-(e)s}. He)d}X all classified by Booij and Rubach as postcyclic component suffixes (which correspond to Halle and Mohanan's stratum 2 and stratum 4 suffixes, respectively), suggests that the rule is sensitive to the presence of a morphological bracket. As a result, it must be assigned to the postcyclic rule component. Let us explain this in detail using more examples. We have assumed after Halle and Mohanan (1985) and Booij and Rubach (1987) that suffixes such as I-ness} or {-\y} are adjoined "at stratum 2" (according to the terminology of the former authors) or "in the postcyclic lexical component" (according to the terminology of the latter). In view of this, at stratum 1 (in the cyclic lexical component) the two morphemes composing words like daily, shyness, etc. are treated as two independent elements. That is to say, there is no reference made to the fact that they are next to each other in the derivation, like in (2-13) below:

69

(2-13)

CYCLIC LEXICAL COMPONENT: (STRATUM 1)

[de]4 None of the phonological rules of the cyclic lexical component (stratum 1) apply to the two morphemes in (2-13). The first step in the postcyclic component (stratum 2) is the adjunction of the suffix |-lvl to the stem day to form an adverb daily, as shown in (2-14): (2-14) POSTCYCLIC LEXICAL COMPONENT: (STRATUM 2)

[[de] li]Adv If we stipulate that the domain of the SVLR is the postcyclic lexical component, the final vowel in day in the derivation of the adverb daily will be lengthened, yielding the output attested in SSE, namely: (2-15) POSTCYCLIC LEXICAL COMPONENT: (STRATUM 2)

[[deej li]] Aitken's Law The form day, to which no morphological operation applies in the postcyclic lexical component, is also an input to the SVLR, yielding [dee]. At the end of the postcyclic component (stratum 2), wherein the relevant suffixation took place, the brackets delimiting the two constituents of the adverb are erased due to the convention noted above (BEC) and the word appears as the unbroken sequence of segments shown in (2-16):

It should be pointed out that the underlying representation of the word day in SSE contains a tense vowel [e] which undergoes lengthening by means of SVLR. The rule of diphthong!zation does not apply in SSE, and therefore the UR of the word differs from its surface representation solely in the length value of the vocalic nucleus.

70 (2-16)

[deeli];

The Bracket Erasure Convention erases brackets between morphemes after the application of all the rules of a given stratum. It is therefore evident that after the BE of the postcyclic component applies the SVLR cannot apply to a sequence like [deli], since no vowel precedes a constituent bracket. As a result, the possibility that Aitken's Law belongs to the postlexical component of SSE grammar is eliminated. We have then reasonable grounds to suggest that the SVLR be allocated to the postcyclic lexical component of SSE grammar.

2.4.2. Interaction of SVLR with Other Rules of SSE Now that we have determined, on the basis of its relationship with word formation rules, that SVLR is a postcyclic lexical process in SSE, we consider it appropriate to proceed to verify this assertion by examining the interaction of SVLR with other rules of SSE (inasmuch as the alternations of this accent permit it). Below, we shall argue that the observed interactions between Aitken's Law and other rules of the SSE grammatical system do not contradict (disconfirm) the postcyclic lexical status here assigned to SVLR. To begin with, SVLR has to apply after the differentiation between words such as: breathe - breath, clothe - cloth, etc. has been introduced. This is because there is an apparent difference observed in the pronunciation of these word pairs. Namely, the first member of each pair has a long vowel (in addition to the change in vowel quality in some words), whereas the second member has a short vowel. Consequently, the effects of the lengthening resulting from the application of Aitken's Law are visible solely in the case of the former and not in that of the latter of these pairs of words. The rules responsible for the differentiations in question can be outlined in the following derivation:

The bracketing of the structures in derivation (2-13)-(2-16) requires some comment. In the version of Lexical Phonology adopted here we shall claim that affixes are not listed in the lexicon as separate entries, but that they are part of the morphological (word formation) rules. As such they have no brackets of their own. This is the reason why the left hand suffix brackets are omitted altogether, and why they are only added after the whole WFR operation in such a way that the whole entry is bracketed and not its parts according to the model: [[[X] Y] Zl and not * [[[X] [Y]j [Z]J] (where Υ and Ζ stand for affixes).

71

(2-17)

breathe CYCLIC roots 7/bre5// Cycle 1 AIIom.WFR: ----(Noun Formation) Cycle 2 CC-Laxing6 ----7 Regr.Devoic. ----BE -----

breath

SVLR Vowel Shift

//bre8//

[brii5] -----

//klo8//

//klo5//

[[bre5]0J

-----

[[klo5]0]

[[br88]8] [[br80]0| [br800j

---------

[[kIo0J0| [klo00]

COMPONENT

--------

POSTLEXICAL Degemination

cloth

COMPONENT

POSTCYCLIC [bre6] [bree6] [brii8]

clothe

[br£00] [bre0]

[klo5 ] [klooo]

COMPONENT [kloo8] ----

[klo00] [klo0]

The derivation in (2-17) clarifies the fact that SVLR must be ordered after the cyclic rule of CC-Laxing6 which is directly responsible for the differences between the pairs of words given as examples. (For a detailed

Vowels in English are commonly laxed before clusters of two consonants separated by a morpheme boundary. This process is often referred to as CC-Laxing (see SPE: 172 rule 8 and Rubach 1984a: 44 rule 44). The rule in question accounts for alternations like: widewidth, five-fifth (-fifteen, -fifty), lose-lost, convene-convention. This rule must clearly be assigned cyclic status as it never applies morpheme-intemally: the vowels are not lax in shield, mind, mound, etc. In other words, the rule applies in derived environments only. The SSE system of rules has a similar process that alters the quality of vowels before consonant clusters. However, its input is more limited here than in other accents of English. The only vowels in SSE which display quality change in this context are [-low] vowels. Hence, the process affects breathe-breath but not clothe-cloth. Just as in other accents of English, the SSE CC-laxing rule is a cyclic process.

72

discussion of this rule see the SPE: 172, Rubach 1984a: 44 as well as the revised formulation of the rule as offered by Halle and Mohanan 1985: 77). In the former version of the rule emphasis is laid on its being a taxing phenomenon, whereas in the latter it is regarded to be primarily a shortening rule. We shall assume that for SSE the rule under consideration functions as a laxing process, as length in this accent results from the application of a phonological rule and there are no length distinctions between vocalic nuclei in SSE at the underlying level. Thus, the CC-Laxing, being cyclic, and therefore ordered before the SVLR, would never have a chance to operate on long vowel contexts. In (2-17) above we have also assumed that a cyclic Regressive Devoicing7 rule applies to morpheme structures before

The rule of Regressive Devoicing applies in English to a limited group of strong verb forms which display {Λ}/{^ά} suffixation in their past tense and perfect participle formations: bereave-bereft, deal-dealt, keep-kept, lose-lost. etc. Moreover, it applies before the nominalizing suffix {-th}, appended by an allomorphy rule to some adjectives, numerals and verbs, e.g., wide-width, five-fifth, twelve -twelfth, breathe-breath. etc. The productivity of both {d}/{rd} and {-th} derivations is restricted to a class of entries marked in the lexicon for the application of the affixation rules in question. It should be noted that in order to account for the vocalic alternations in the above word forms we must assume that the suffixes under consideration are added in the cyclic lexical component of the grammar (stratum 1 in Halle and Mohanan (1985: 105), because only then can this morphological process be ordered before the cyclic CC-laxing rule (see note 6 to the present chapter). (The effect of CC-laxing can be seen from the fact that all the word forms quoted above have an underlying tense //e// as their stem vocalic nucleus which surfaces as [ε].) We can assume that the Regressive Devoicing under discussion is a cyclic rule because it does not apply in non-derived environments (we commonly encounter in English sequences of different voice quality next to each other within a morpheme: abs[\>s]olute, obs[bs]tnient, abs[bs]urd, etc.). It is clear that this rule must be distinguished from the postcyclic lexical and postlexical Progressive Devoicing rule in English operating in the context of a preceding voiceless obstruent on certain inflectional affixes (the regular past tense morpheme {-(ek . the regular plural/genitive/present tense formation suffix {-(e)s}) and across word boundaries on contracted auxilliary forms (as in Jack's [ks] read the book.) As these affixes are appended in the postcyclic lexical component, and as the application of this rule across word boundaries must be preceded by syntactic transformations, the Progressive Devoicing is both postcyclic lexical and postlexical. The two devoicing rules differ also with respect to their mode of application (one is progressive, the other regressive). Moreover, they cannot be subsumed under one and the same rule for yet another reason, namely, the first one is an unproductive process whereas the second one is clearly a regular process of high productivity. Furthermore, the cyclic Regressive Devoicing rule and the postcyclic-postlexical Progressive Devoicing should both be differentiated from the low phonetic devoicing which applies to all voiced obstruents both morpheme internally and across word boundaries and which makes them only partially devoiced.

73 they enter the postcyclic component. This is because a difference has to be introduced between this regressive, cyclic devoicing and a postcyclic voice assimilation responsible for the voice concord in inflectional morphemes, e.g., regular past tense (walked, traced) and the plural/genitive/present tense morphemes (roofs, Jack's, walks). The former devoicing rule must be cyclic, as it does not apply morpheme internally to non-derived structures and thus, words like adsorb, obtain, absurd, etc. are pronounced with a cluster of non-homogeneous obstruents with respect to voice ([ds], [bt], and [bs] respectively). The latter rule, on the other hand, is probably both postcyclic lexical and postlexical, as in addition to applying to inflectional suffixes it applies across word boundaries. For example, Eric is here is pronounced as £>/[ks] here. Evidence about the domain of Degemination is absent, and we shall assume that it applies in the postlexical component. One more issue should still be mentioned before we conclude the question of rule interaction relevant for SVLR, namely the surface vowel alternations like those in breathe-breath, wide-width, etc., present also in SSE. As is generally known the issue is a matter of great controversy. These alternations have been described by some linguists (Chomsky and Halle 1968; Halle 1977) according to a synchronic rule of Vowel Shift relevant for the whole system of English vowel alternations such as [ai]-[i], [ii]-[e], [ei]-[se], [ου]-[ο], |>D]-[A]. In SSE (contrary to RP or GA, for example) the alternations in question are only marginally present in the sound system. Thus, we shall assume that in SSE Vowel Shift is only a minor rule of marginal relevance for the synchronic phonology of this accent. Our conclusion regarding the examination of rule interactions in SSE is that they prove to be in agreement (or at least noncontradictory) with the assertion that SVLR is a postcyclic lexical rule. Although there is no direct evidence available of the rule being ordered after an earlier postcyclic lexical rule in the derivation, we have not found any interaction which would disconfirm our hypothesis concerning the status of SVLR in Lexical Phonology.

2.5. Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule: Concluding Remarks In the present chapter we have argued for the descriptive adequacy of the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology in accounting for vowel length differences between Received Pronunciation and Scottish Standard English. We have proved that the rule directly responsible for the introduction of long vowels into the SSE sound system is the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule also referred to as Aitken's Law.

74 Our conclusion about the SVLR is that it is a postcyclic lexical rule which has a binary output. It is a regressive, structure-changing process which lengthens underlyingly [+tense] vocalic nuclei in the environment of segments specified as [+continuant, +voiced, +consonantal] as well as in the environment of a word formation bracket: "]". It can be formulated schematically as follows: (2-18)

AITKEN'S LAW N I

Ϊ

[+tense]

->

N /\ X X \ /

[+tense]

/

, ] I r+continuant 1 I +voiced

L +consonantalJ

Lexical Phonology helps us to account for the behaviour of SVLR both synchronically and diachronically. In synchronic terms, the assignment of the rule to the postcyclic lexical component satisfactorily accounts for the application of the rule under discussion to non-derived segments in morpheme internal position. The presence of a bracket in its environment, furthermore, guarantees its application before some derivational (class II) and inflectional affixes and (together with its postcyclic lexical status) eliminates the possibility of its applying across word boundaries. Moreover, the postcyclic lexical status of SVLR accords with the predictions offered by the Lexical framework regarding the rule's evolution. The characterization of the rule as a postcyclic lexical phenomenon agrees with the relatedness which, in our view, holds between the SVLR and the Allophonic Lengthening Rule (which operates in all accents and varieties of English). This relatedness consists, as we will attempt to prove in chapter 3 below, in the fact that SVLR is an accent specific lexicalization of the postlexical ALR. This relationship is of a diachronic nature, and the predictions of the theoretical model of Lexical Phonology employed here relate to the area of rule evolution. It may be observed that rules display a tendency to change their status, not randomly but by modifying their structural descriptions systematically. Usually the modifications in question bring about the alteration of a rule's domain in such a way that it necessarily involves its re-classification to a different component. In other words, a postlexical process may become a postcyclic lexical one or the latter may become cyclic. (The reverse, namely the change of a cyclic rule into a postcyclic one or of the latter into a postlexical process is also possible;

75

however, it occurs less frequently. For details pertaining to this issue see Rubach 1984: 67-68). It is also the case that the transition from one component to another is by no means accidental. A given postlexical rule, for example, can only become a postcyclic lexical and not a cyclic rule. The lexicalization of the postlexical Allophonic Lengthening Rule as Aitken's Law conforms to this evolutionary restriction. It is the chief merit of the Lexical framework that it allows us to capture these phonological facts.

3.

The Allophonic Rule of Vowel Lengthening in English and Aitken's Law

My principal goal in the present chapter is to provide a phonological explanation for the vowel lengthening rule in SSE generally referred to as Aitken's Law or Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (SVLR) (discussed in detail in the previous chapter). Our main contention will be that Aitken's Law is an accent-specific lexicalization of the postlexical Allophonic Lengthening Rule which operates in most of the accents and varieties of the English language. We shall also claim further that the Allophonic Lengthening Rule (henceforth ALR) is a language-specific phonologization of a universal phenomenon of lengthening of vocalic nuclei before the context of consonants characterized by the features [+voice] and [+continuant] (e.g., the vowels in: seed, food, release, etc. are considerably longer than are those in: seat, root, lease, etc. respectively). Our analysis will be based on the results of experimental phonetic measurements conducted by Chen (1970), Peterson and Lehiste (1960), House and Fairbanks (1953) and others.

3.1.

Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English: Basic Facts

Textbooks on the phonetics of English agree that the duration of all syllable nuclei in the English language is significantly affected by the phonetic context which follows them. (The influence of the preceding sounds upon the length of syllable nuclei, on the other hand, appears to be negligible.) In general, the vowels and diphthongs in stressed syllables become shorter when followed by a voiceless consonant and lengthen considerably when followed by a voiced consonant or a word boundary. These observations have been confirmed by a number of thorough instrumental measurements conducted both for RP and for American English (e.g., Zimmerman and Sapon 1958, House and Fairbanks 1953, Fintoft 1961, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, Klart 1976, and others). They hold true also, however, for SSE and Scottish dialects (H. Speitel personal communication and unpublished data registered in questionnaires for the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (1986)), as well as for Ulster accents of English (Milroy 1981), and seem to be universal characteristics of all dialects and varieties of English. Gimson (1970: 94) says that the vowel "[...] [i:] in beat is only about half as long as the [i:] in bead or bee and may, in fact, be of approximately the same length (duration) as the [i] vowel of bid; [u:] in boot is only about half

77

as long as the [u:] of do or food and again has about the same duration as the [υ] vowel in good. This is also the case with [a:], fc:] and [r :]." Short vowels pattern similarly to long vowels in the sense that they become slightly longer before the context of voiced consonants and display a tendency to shorten before voiceless consonants (see Peterson and Lehiste 1960). There is unanimity of opinion among linguists that vowels are shortest before voiceless stops and that their duration increases in the gradual, hierarchical order shown below (a detailed discussion of this hierarchy is reserved to a later section of this chapter):

(3-1)

voiceless/ voiceless / stops fricatives

liquids / nasals / voiced / voiced stops fricatives

^ length increases before these segments We quote the above scale after House and Fairbanks (1953), but quite similar results were obtained by Peterson and Lehiste (1960), by Halle and Stevens (1967), and by Zimmerman and Sapon (1958). The latter authors measured the average duration of the syllable nucleus at 19.7 centiseconds (henceforth csec.) before voiceless consonants and at 29.7 csec. before a voiced consonant (1958: 152-153). Thus, the ratio of vowel duration before voiceless contexts to that before voiced contexts is approximately 2:3. Zimmerman and Sapon further maintain that the homo-organic nasals influence the preceding vowel in much the same manner as do the voiced stops. In words such as back--bag~bang they found the average value of the syllable nuclei to be 14.5 csec. before the voiceless stop, 23.3 csec. before the voiced stop and 21.3 csec. before the nasal. The voiced fricatives appear to have a further lengthening effect. The duration of the syllable nucleus before the voiced plosive is 30.0 csec. whereas the comparable duration before the voiced fricative is 38 csec. (see Peterson and Lehiste 1960). All these differences in length in English are comparatively large and are clearly above the perceptual threshold. What remains to be answered, though, is the question of whether the contextually determined vowel length variations in English are language-specific phenomena characteristic of the phonological system of English or whether the duration of vowels in certain contexts is conditioned by the physiological features of their articulation (i.e., by some physio-acoustic constant). If the latter is in fact the case, then the

78 phenomenon in question has an inherent physiological basis, and is thus language universal. If, on the other hand, the phenomenon in question has no inherent physiological basis, we would be inclined to regard these durational differences as an idiosyncratic, language-specific speech habit of the English speaking community. In what follows we shall examine the factors which condition vowel length in an attempt to ascertain to what extent the contextually determined vowel length variations in English represent a language-specific or a language universal phenomenon.

3.2.

Factors Determining Vowel Duration

Among the many factors that phoneticians have recognized as determining durational differences in vowels three of the most important are, following Lehiste (1970 chapter 2): I. II« III.

The degree of articulatory opening involved in the production of the vowel, namely, the intrinsic duration of vocalic nuclei; The voice quality of the context following a given syllable nucleus; The manner of articulation of the following consonant.

We intend to concentrate on the discussion of these factors in relation to the systematic phonetic lengthening or length adjusting process (affecting all dialects and varieties of the English language) whereby all syllable nuclei become shorter when followed by a voiceless consonant and lengthen noticeably when followed by a voiced consonant or a word boundary.

3.2.1.

Intrinsic Duration of Vowels

To a considerable extent the duration of a segment may be determined by the very nature of the segment itself: that is, by its place and the manner of articulation. The duration of a segment as determined by its phonetic qualities is called intrinsic duration. Many scholars have pointed out the fact that vowel duration tends to be directly related to the size of mouth opening and inversely related to the height of the tongue (see House and Fairbanks 1953, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, House 1961, Sharf 1962, Lindblom 1967). Lehiste (1970: 19) puts this view quite clearly: "the greater length of low vowels is due to the greater extent of the articulatory movements involved in their production". Lisker (1974: 237) suggests a couple of other possible interpretations of the above mentioned correlation

79

between vowel height and duration. One of them is that lower vowels, produced with greater movement of the lower jaw and possibly also of the tongue (Lindblom and Sundberg 1971 show that the height of the tongue is largely dependent on the position of the lower jaw) involve a greater expenditure of articulatory energy than do higher vowels, which results in greater duration. Note that such an interpretation relates to the definition of the feature [+tense] characterized in terms of muscular effort (as in Chomsky and Halle 1968; 324-326). According to Lisker's definition the markedly longer duration of tense vowels is a natural consequence of a greater expenditure of muscular energy. No matter what phonetic explanation of the correlation in question one adopts, the existence of the correlation itself hasn't been questioned. On the contrary, it has been confirmed to operate in English (Heffher 1937, House and Fairbanks 1953, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, House 1961), German (Maack 1949), Danish (Fischer-J0rgensen 1964), Swedish (Elert 1964) and Spanish (Zimmerman and Sapon 1958). These surveys of vowel duration bear out the observation that, other things being equal, lower vowels tend to be longer than higher vowels. Lehiste even maintains that these differences in vowel length according to degree of opening are physiologically conditioned and thus should be treated as a phonetic universal. Moreover, some linguists are inclined to believe that the above observation gives us grounds to suggest that lengthening phenomena are likely to affect low vowels before high vowels, because of their greater intrinsic length. This claim is confirmed by the data from some dialects of English spoken in Scotland and Ireland. In Kilrea, Co. Deny, Kells, Co. Antrim, Cashel, Co. Antrim (see The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland) one may notice that lengthening in Aitken's Law long environments (voiced fricatives: M> [ZL [δ], the sound [r] and a morpheme boundary) applies only to [-high] vowels. In the regions neighbouring with the areas in question, on the other hand, high vowels are not excluded from lengthening in Aitken's long contexts. These facts prompt the interpretation that Aitken's Law might first have applied only to [-high] vowels and in the course of history been extended to include high vowels in certain areas of Scotland. In addition to the vowel length developments in Scottish dialects we should mention examples from the recent history of English that conform to the observation that lengthening processes are more likely to affect low vowels before high vowels, because of the tendency of the former to be longer for articulatory reasons. Some lengthening phenomena involving the reflexes of Middle English (henceforth ME) short [i, e, a, o, u ] provide an illustration.

80

We quote them after Harris (1985: 111): i. Middle English open syllable lengthening affected low vowels earlier than high ones. [High vowels were only lengthened in some and not all the areas affected by the open syllable lengthening process; H. Giegerich, personal communication.] ii. The Early Modem lengthening of historically short vowels before [f, Θ, s] in southern English only affected the lowest vowels, namely ME [a], and the lowered reflex of ME [o]. Thus, the vowel in pass is long in most southern English dialects as is the vowel in cross (except in progressive RP), but those in: kiss, puss, fuss, less from historically nonlow sources have remained short. iii. The more recent North American lengthening of historically short vowels in predominantly voiced environments has preferentially affected low vowels before high ones. The vowels that have been most extensively affected by this process are, as in (ii), ME [a] and the lowered reflex of ME [o] (e.g., bad, pod). As far as I know, of those dialects with lengthened reflexes of originally short nonlow vowels [...] there are none that do not also have lengthened reflexes of ME [a] and [o]. iv. In Scots, the lengthening of short vowels in Aitken's Law 'long' environments affected the reflexes of ESc [Early Scottish] nonhigh [e, a, o] but not high [i, u] vowels [...].

3.2.2. Segmental Conditioning of Vowel Duration: Voice Quality of the Following Consonant Of the factors that condition durational variation in vowels, the nature of the following consonant has been found to be one of the most crucial. Place of articulation differences have been shown to influence vowel length to a certain degree as well. (Lehiste 1970: 20, for instance, establishes the ranking: alveolars > velars > labials among stops for decreasing length in preceding long vowels.) Much more significant, however, for durational variations are the voicing and the manner of articulation characteristics of following consonants. That vowels in the English dialects most studied tend to be longer before voiced segments than before their voiceless counterparts

81 is widely agreed by phoneticians (see e.g., House and Fairbanks 1953, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, House 1961, Steven and House 1963 and Sharf 1962). One of the most influential sets of instrumental measurements that have been carried out is that of Mathew Chen (1970). In order to gain a cross-linguistic view of vowel length under environmental influence by a following voiced or voiceless consonant, Chen chose, in addition to English, three other languages as samples for experiment, namely: French, Russian and Korean. He found out that in all four of the languages in question a vowel is invariably longer before a [+voiced] consonant than before a voiceless one. (Apparently, this is also the case in the Polish language, as indicated by Slowiaczek and Dinnsen (1985). These authors claim that this lengthening is comparatively significant but below the perceptual threshold.) Although one might argue that data based on the aforementioned languages alone (four of them being Indoeuropean) probably do not lend sufficient basis for making far-reaching generalizations, one has to account, however, for the systematic variations in vowel length depending on the voicing of the following consonant, which can hardly be accidental. The agreement of a number of widely divergent languages in sharing this characteristics seems to confirm a certain cross-linguistic validity for the claim that vowels generally tend to become longer before voiced consonants and shorter before voiceless ones. Chen concludes his article by emphasizing that the degree of the phonologization of vowel length variations resulting from the influence of the voice quality of the following context is language specific. He writes:

"In view of the above observations, we may tentatively conclude that: a. it is presumably a language universal phenomenon that vowel duration varies as a function of the voicing of the following consonant, and b. the extent, however, to which an adjacent voiced or voiceless consonant affects its preceding vowel durationwise is determined by the language-specific phonological structure" (Chen 1970: 139). We would like at this point to examine briefly some of the most commonly suggested interpretations of the observed correlation between vowel duration and the voicing character of the following consonant. One of them, referring to purely articulatory factors, is offered by Chomsky and Halle in the SPE. Drawing on conclusions reached by Halle and Stevens (1967), Chomsky and Halle maintain that the lengthening of vowels before voiced obstruents

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"[...] can be explained on the grounds that it requires time to shift from the glottis configuration appropriate for vowels to that appropriate for obstruents" (1968: 301). Their argument is based on the notion of spontaneous voicing. In spontaneous voicing, the vocal cords vibrate in response to unimpeded air flow (characteristic of vocalic segments). Non-spontaneous voicing occurs when there is a radical oral constriction (such as that characteristic of obstruents) which causes a build-up of pressure, thus reducing the pressure drop across the glottis during phonation. Maintenance of the Bernoulli effect (we characterize it in greater detail in section 2.3.2.1. above) under such conditions requires a widening of the glottal opening. The laryngeal adjustment that is needed to move from a spontaneously voiced vowel to a non-spontaneously voiced consonant is achieved relatively slowly, which results in a prolongation of the vowel (for a detailed discussion of this issue see the SPE: 301). The above explication, however, has been seriously questioned by the experimental research of Lisker (1957), Sawashima (1968), Sawashima and Miyazaki (1973) as well as Lisker, Sawashima, Abramson and Cooper (1970). Their laryngoscopic measurements have failed to detect any laryngeal adjustment of the kind suggested by Chomsky and Halle (for further criticism of the notion of laryngeal adjustment see Ladefoged 1971: 109-110). Several other researchers have arrived at a perceptual interpretation of the phenomenon. Thus, Raphael (1972) suggests that listeners concentrate on vowel duration differences as the only reliable cue to the perception of the phonological [+voice] character in the following consonant. He observes that the presence or absence of vocal cord vibrations in the consonant is not a consistent indication for the hearers of the voice value of the segment. He further emphasizes that the [+voice] obstruent may often assimilate the voiceless value of the following consonant. Lisker (1957), on the other hand, goes even further claiming that speakers "maximize durational differences between vowels in their production in order to maximize the perceptual distance between following voiced and voiceless consonants." These observations have been confirmed by the experiments conducted by Denes (1955). His data show that, at least in the varieties of American English he investigates, perception of the phonological voice value of a word-final consonant is not solely determined by the phonetic realisation of the consonant itself, but, rather, it is crucially dependent on the duration of the preceding vowel. Some other linguists, such as Javkin (1976) and Walsh and Parker (1981), confirm the accuracy of explaining durational variation in vowels in terms of the maximization of perceptual distance between following consonants.

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The above hypothesis is adequate for accents and dialects of the English language but it is not confirmed by most of the so far experimentally studied non-English material. Chen (1970) points out that in the American English dialects that he examines the difference in vowel length as determined by the voiceless vs. voiced feature of the following consonant is well above the difference Urnen of duration, that is, well above the perceptual threshold. In other languages (Chen 1970 cites data from Korean, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian and French) consistently appearing durational differences conditioned by the voice value of the following context fall on or below the difference limen (although, as we pointed out above, vowels are measured to be much longer before [+voice] and shorter before [-voice] consonants in these languages as well). The implication is that in some languages durational differences between vowels are not sufficiently great to serve as perceptual cues to the lexical [+voice] specification of the following environment (such is also the situation as we have observed it with regard to the Polish language). Still other accounts of the phenomenon in question have been offered recently, but it is beyond our concern in this book to survey all of these theories (a detailed discussion of various explanations of the relation between voice and vowel length is offered by, among others, Chen 1970 and Harris 1985). Rather, we wish to propose, in section 3.3. of the present chapter, an interpretation of the above problem within the Lexical framework on the basis of English language data with specific reference to the SSE.

3.2.3. Segmental Conditioning of Vowel Duration: Manner of Articulation of the Following Consonant Generally speaking, the manner of articulation feature of a consonant has been found not to play as crucial a role as the voicing feature in the determination of length in the preceding vowel (see e.g., House 1961: 1175). Nevertheless, many phoneticians have noted the tendency of vowels to be longer, other things being equal, before fricatives than before stops (see House and Fairbanks 1953, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, House 1961). There seems to be general agreement as to why this should be the case: "[...] the gradual, controlled movements of continuant consonants favor longer vowel durations more than do the abrupt ballistic movements of the stop-plosives" (House and Fairbanks 1953: 108). We are dealing here with rate of closure transition as a determinant factor of vowel duration. The relatively longer duration of vowels before fricatives is a function of the comparatively long time it takes for the active articulator to move to a position of close

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approximation with the passive articulator. With stop consonants the closure transition from a preceding vowel is shorter, since the achievement of a stricture or a complete closure does not require the same degree of muscular control as that required for a fricative. The vowel, as a result, is correspondingly shorter. These observations are claimed to be language universal. The feature that classifies consonants on this basis is [+continuant], defined in the SPE (p. 317) as absence vs. presence of total blockage of air in the oral tract. Thus, fricatives and approximants are [+continuant], while oral stops, affricates, nasals and [1] are [-continuant] (for further discussion of the feature [+continuant] see chapter 2 of this study). We can conclude the discussion of the influence of the manner of articulation of a consonant upon the duration of the vowel preceding it by saying that vowels tend to be slightly longer before [+continuant] sounds. Again, it is worth noting that languages may differ in the degree of phonologization of the contrasts which result from the influence of the manner of articulation feature on the preceding segment. In English (see the measurements of Peterson and Lehiste 1960: 702), voiced stops tend to be approximately one fourth shorter than voiced fricatives; the same ratio is evident when one compares voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives.

3.3. An Interpretation of the Allophonic Lengthening Rule in Lexical Phonology There have been many endeavours to interpret the allophonic lengthening process pertaining to the accents and dialects of the English language in a systematic way and within a coherent theoretical framework. The intention of this section is to make a similar attempt: that is, to provide an interpretation of the process in question within the theory of Lexical Phonology. More specifically, we shall try to describe the lengthening rule using the concepts of Underspecification and Structure Preservation as developed in the works of Kiparsky (1982a), (1985) and Archangeli (1984). Since we have already discussed the basic tenets of the framework of Lexical Phonology in the introductory chapter of this book, we shall begin at once here by presenting the principles of Underspecification and Structure Preservation as understood by Kiparsky (1982a and 1985). Kiparsky claims that lexical representations are governed by two systems. The first is the set of lexical phonological rules proper, including both language specific rules and universal rules such as those which supply the unmarked value for each feature. These also provide the default specifications for lexical entries. According to this view, every feature

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specification entered in the lexical representation of a morpheme is really an instruction that a certain default rule is not to be applied. For example, the specification [+voice] for the [b] in the word hack obviates the possibility of the application of a universal rule making obstruents [-voice]. The segments [ae] and [k] are lexically unspecified with respect to voicing and receive their respective values by the universal default rules. A segment which is unspecified with respect to one or more features at the lexical level is underspeci ed. The second system governing lexical representations comprises universal conditions determining which feature values may be marked. In English, for instance, voicing is distinctive for obstruents but not for sonorants. This observation is expressed by a marking condition which prohibits voicing from being marked on sonorants in the lexicon. The condition is stated by Kiparsky (1985) as follows:

Condition L [ α voice] [ + son ] A language in which voicing were entirely non-distinctive would have to have the marking condition [ α voice] for all segments (for a treatment of Morpheme Structure Conditions, henceforth MSC, see section 3.4. of the present chapter). If a certain feature is non-distinctive in a language it may not be specified in the lexicon. In other words, it may not figure in non-derived lexical items nor be introduced by any lexical rule, and therefore may not play any role at all at the level of application of lexical rules. This is known as Structure Preservation. In Kiparsky's understanding it is the result of marking conditions and constraints formulated over the entire lexicon of a language. It implies that condition (1) not only blocks voiceless sonorants from appearing in underlying representations and lexical derivations but also blocks the redundant specification [+voice] from being assigned to sonorants in lexical derivations. Structure Preservation contributes to the restrictiveness of the theory of Lexical Phonology, since it determines that any rule which introduces marked specifications of lexically non-distinctive features must be postlexical. Thus, for example, processes such as aspiration, glottalization, intonational features, etc. could not be lexical in English. Underspecification and Structure Preservation have considerable importance for the formulation of phonological rules. To return to voicing in English, we can see that marking condition (1) entails that voiced obstruents and sonorants form a natural class [+voice] only in the postlexical

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phonology of English. In the lexical phonology, on the other hand, sonorants remain unspecified for voicing. By the same token the class of voiced obstruents can be described (and marked) in the lexical phonology simply as [+voice], but needs the additional specification [-sonorant] in the postlexical phonology. These claims are confirmed by the data. We quote an example from Kiparsky (1985): We find that lexical voicing assimilation in English is triggered by, and applies to obstruents (a) but not sonorants (b): (a), [adz], [aas], { *a[tz], *a[bs]} (b). toDjjf], a[rjl], war[rne] Postlexical voicing assimilations in English can both apply to sonorants and be triggered by them: (a'), cjy, pjay, sp|it (b'). back[t], bagg[d], bell[z]. Kiparsky postulates postlexical status for the voice assimilation rule in (a1) and (b') on account of its applicability to the reduced forms of the auxiliaries is and has, the point being that the final obstruent becomes voiced after any voiced segment whether obstruent or sonorant. It follows that if a rule applies both lexically and postlexically, it may operate on a different set of inputs and produce a different set of outputs because of Structure Preservation and Underspecification. In what follows we shall try to prove that the notions which have been presented above will also be useful for the interpretation of the low phonetic vowel length-adjusting rule (ALR). Bearing in mind the assumptions of Structure Preservation and Underspecification, let us try to specify English consonants in terms of features that refer to phonetic parameters most relevant for lengthening phenomena (which we have discussed above), namely [+voice] and [+continuant]. We have argued that these two phonetic parameters have been sufficiently proven to have (universally in languages) the most significant lengthening impact upon preceding vocalic nuclei (be they short or long). It has also been emphasized that the degree of phonologization (or lexicalization) of this universal phenomenon is language specific, as is the exact proportion of the lengthening influence between the two variables. For English, the lengthening influence of [+voice] stands in a ratio of approximately 3:1 over that of [+continuant]. We have arrived at this ratio by analyzing Lehiste's numerical results of experimental

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measurements, and it has been confirmed by J. M. Anderson (personal communication). The table (3-2) below illustrates feature specifications of English consonants. The upper part of the diagram relates to underspecified segments, the lower to fully specified segments.

(3-2)

LENGTHENING

INFLUENCE

m VOICE CONTINUANT (NASAL) SONORANT

VOICE CONTINUANT (SONORANT)

(+)

+ +

+ +

+ +

-

+

+

(+) (+) (-) (-) (-) (-) (-)

UNDERSPECIFIED SEGMENTS

FULLY SPECIFIED SEGMENTS

The sound symbols in table (3-2) represent segment classes rather than individual segments. These are, from left to right: frj, ///, voiceless fricatives, voiced fricatives, voiceless stops, voiced stops and nasals. Parentheses in the table mean that the particular feature specification is "irrelevant" to the lengthening process under discussion and thus it is ignored in the calculations to follow, which establish the degree of the lengthening influence of consonants. These features are included in the above table merely to provide enough information to distinguish all of the relevant segments at the underlying level. If we assign each of these consonants the mathematical value of "3" for each [+voice] and "1" for each [+continuant] in the above table (according to the aforementioned proportion of lengthening influence between the two variables), we discover the following hierarchy and mathematical ratio with respect to the lengthening influence (note that the rule assigning length rate values is applied twice, namely at the UR level and after the specification rules have applied):

(3-3)

v b r m l f p

-

8 6 5 3 3 2 0

Diagram (3-3) above shows that the lengthening process in question is a gradient rule which applies most effectively before segments with the highest scores for features [+voice] and [+continuant], which are, in descending order, voiced fricatives, voiced stops, [r], nasals, [1], voiceless fricatives and voiceless stops, accordingly as the scale below shows:

(3-4)

/ bdg IT I mm) / 1 / Jfsvo / ptk Our scale outlined for the natural classes of sounds corresponds in almost all particulars to the results of the instrumental measurements conducted for individual segments of English by Peterson and Lehiste (1960). We can argue, therefore, that our theory proves reasonably successful in accounting for the allophonic or the so called low phonetic lengthening in English. We are, however, somewhat dissatisfied with the use of the term low phonetic with regard to the lengthening in question. The rule, though postlexical, is not all that low after all; it must be ordered in the postlexical derivation before the allophonic devoicing rules (as vocalic nuclei lengthen before fully and not before partially voiced consonants). The one point of deviation of the data shown in diagram (3-3) from the aforementioned instrumental measurements is that the observation that nasals and voiced stops exercise an equal lengthening influence upon preceding vowels made originally and measured by Peterson and Lehiste (1960) is not substantiated. This is because sonorants are underspecified for the feature [±voice] at the underlying level. If they were specified as [+voice] in the UR then in our account nasals, like voiced stops, would receive the lengthening rate value (6) (thus bearing out Peterson and Lehiste's findings). We could, however, achieve this result by postulating a special lexical redundancy rule, ordered before the lexical application of the ALR, according to which nasals are specified as [+voice]. The introduction of

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such a rule might, of course, be viewed as an arbitrary solution (since it would apply only to nasals and not to the other voiced sonorants). For this reason it is important that we note here a second possible solution: it might be acceptable to claim that the specification of nasals as [+voice] at the UR level is motivated after all. J. M. Anderson has suggested (personal communication) and R. Lass has confirmed (personal communication) that there are both phonetic and phonological reasons for treating nasals in some phonological processes as variants of voiced stops. Anderson further maintains that the "nasality" of nasal consonants is irrelevant to the allophonic lengthening rule, and that the rule is sensitive to [+voice] and [+continuant] as its most prominent and significant parameters. These are identical for both nasals and voiced stops, as both of these groups share the characteristic [+voice]. Anderson suggests that the natural class of stops can be schematized as below:

(3-5)

S

T

I

/

[+voice]

[bdg]

\

[ιηηη]

O

P

S \

[-voice]

I

[ρ t k]

[-nasal] [+nasal] [bdg]

[m n η]

Either of these two solutions would yield the desired ordering between the classes of segments according to their lengthening influence, in which the lengthening rate value for [m] would be 6. For both solutions, however, we would need to develop further supporting arguments, which would take us too far afield at this time. What does, however, require to be discussed in greater detail at this time is the status of ALR in Lexical Phonology, namely, why the rule is a postlexical and not a lexical phenomenon. The reasons for classifying the ALR as a postlexical rule in English are the following: L ALR is exceptionless. It is assumed in the Lexical framework that postlexical rules are not subject to lexical exceptions; they apply whenever their structural descriptions are met (see Kaisse and Shaw 1985, Kiparsky 1982, Halle and Mohanan 1985).

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The ALR is essentially phonetic in nature, which means that it depends on inherent properties of sounds and as such cannot have exceptions. 2. ALR is gradient It is also maintained that an obvious diagnostic for a postlexical rule is its ability to produce non-binary, gradient outputs. Our rule is certainly a case in point (see diagram (3-3) above for the numerical values of lengthening influence). Kaisse and Shaw (1985: 6) quote another example of a postlexical rule producing a gradient output which is the rule of Final Devoicing in Turkish. The rule they cite operates only "halfway" on voiced fricatives, "[...] producing consonants that sound voiced at the beginning of their production and voiceless by the time they are over." 3. ALR applies to non-derived, morpheme-internal structures. This characterization of the rule's environment implies in the Lexical framework that the rule is not restricted by the Strict Cycle Condition (see chapter 1). It is only cyclic lexical rules, which interact directly with morphology, that are subject to the SCC. This condition prevents cyclic lexical rules from applying to non-derived (morpheme-internal) strings that meet their structural description underlyingly. Postcyclic lexical rules, on the other hand, do not (usually) interact directly with morphology and are not subject to the SCC. It is assumed in Lexical Phonology that postcyclic lexical rules apply freely both inside morphemes and across morpheme boundaries. There still remains the group of postlexical rules to be considered. These, like postcyclic rules, are not restricted by the SCC. They may apply both inside words and across word boundaries in the traditional sense. The ALR is free to apply to any string of segments, whether non-derived or derived (e.g., brood-brewed, need-kneed, toad-towed, staid-stayed, lose-too 's, appease-peas, etc.). From the above discussion (and from the more detailed explanation of the theoretical framework offered in chapter 1 of this book), it should be clear that the fact that ALR applies to non-derived forms means in Lexical Phonology that it has to be either a postcyclic lexical process or a postlexical one. The problem of which of these components the rule should be placed in can be conclusively solved on the basis of the examples analyzed in "reason" 4 below. 4. ALR applies across word boundaries. The observation that ALR applies across word boudaries to forms such as we've, he's, he'd, you've, etc., clearly indicates that some of the structures which function as the context of the rule are derived by the syntactic

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component of the grammar, and therefore outside the lexicon. Any rule which applies in sentence phonology, that is, to syntactically derived forms, is classified in the Lexical framework as a postlexical phenomenon.

3.4. Allophonic Lengthening Rule - Problems Related to Status Assignment in Lexical Phonology Having argued that the ALR is a postlexical rule we are left with the following theoretical problems not yet accounted for in a satisfactory way: (i) The numbers in table (3-2) which denote proportions of lengthening influence between the two variables [+voice] = three and [+continuant] = one are only approximations based on general phonetic observations discussed in the initial sections of the present chapter as well as the comparison of values of Peterson and Lehiste's (1960) measurements. They were calculated and averaged in such a way as to provide the percentage of lengthening influence of each of the features in isolation. We are fully aware, however, of the shortcomings of such a comparison and of the necessity to conduct phonetic experiments designed specifically to measure the proportion of lengthening influence of each phonetic parameter in question (such a task, however, lies beyond the scope of this book). Although our numbers may seem not well enough justified or arbitrary, the relations between the classes of segments as well as the ordering of these classes obtained as a result of their introduction is correct and fully corresponds to the observations provided by Peterson and Lehiste (I960), Wiik (1965), Gimson (1970) and Harris (1985). (ii) Another debatable issue is the double application of the ALR, namely before and after blank filling rules. It should be recalled that we have mentioned the assumption of Lexical Phonology that the predictable feature values are left unspecified in the lexicon and thus need not be present in the UR's of lexical entries. Full feature specifications are assigned to lexical entries by a set of rules called lexical redundancy or blank filling rules which operate in the lexicon (for a discussion of the properties of blank filling rules see Kiparsky 1982a and Kaisse and Shaw 1985). Morpheme structure conditions (MSCs) are eliminated altogether, their function being subsumed entirely by the rules of lexical phonology interacting with the Elsewhere Condition's constraints on rule application. Thus, the lexical rules proper may apply on the first cycle as redundancy rules to fill in lexically unspecified feature values. Since their application in this instance is not feature changing it is not blocked by the Strict Cyclicity Condition. These same rules may apply later in derived environments in a feature changing

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function. By postulating that the lexical rules function also as redundancy rules one eliminates a number of problems associated with the MSCs. First, there is disagreement (see Kiparsky 1982a, 1985 and Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1977) on whether MSCs should be interpreted as static, wellformedness filters on fully specified lexical entries or as "rules" activelyfilling in predictable values of blank matrices. The Lexical Phonology model opts for this latter interpretation. Secondly, the fact that phonological rules often recapitulate the function of MSCs creates an unexplained dupplication within the grammar. Kiparsky's claim that both functions are in fact fulfilled by a single set of rules suggests a much simpler account. He further remarks that the theory of Lexical Phonology allows that the same rule may apply both lexically and postlexically and that because of Structure Preservation and Underspecification such a rule may (but does not necessarily) operate at each level on a different set of inputs and yield a different set of outputs. Let us try to determine, then, what status can be assigned to the ALR in English in the light of the above assumptions. Clearly, the first application of the rule has to take place before the lexical redundancy rules which assign [+voice] and [+continuant] features can apply. Such an ordering would identify the rule as a lexical process. Note, on the other hand, that the second application of the ALR has to occur after the application of postlexical blank filling rules, thus suggesting that the rule belongs to the postlexical stratum. (Its postlexical properties have been discussed in the previous section of this chapter.) At this point one can either decide that the rule is both lexical and postlexical (for the discussion of the problem of gradience in this context see the previous section of this chapter) or one can make an attempt to modify our rule so as to eliminate its application at the lexical stratum and treat it as a postlexical rule exclusively. The latter option would automatically resolve the problem of accounting for gradient phenomena in the lexicon, but faces the difficult issue of rule formulation. This solution would perhaps be favoured if one felt that an interpretation which claims that the rule which assigns specific numerical values to specific groups of sounds twice is ad hoc and is justified only by the correct final results. In particular, one might argue that there is no evidence for length being already present at such an early stage in the derivation, that is, before the application of blank filling rules. Specifically, there are no rules which make reference to length which would be assigned before lexical redundancy rules. We know, however, that the ALR must be ordered before the postlexical Devoicing rule (voice assimilation), since speakers concentrate on vowel duration differences as the only reliable cue to the perception of the phonological [+voice] quality of the following consonant, even in cases where the final consonant is partially devoiced due to the allophonic

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Devoicing in question. Had the Devoicing been ordered before lengthening the context for the latter rule would have been neutralized or weakened considerably. We know that the Allophonic Voice Assimilation rule in English is postlexical (for a detailed discussion of this rule see Kiparsky 1985). The observation that our lengthening rule applies before a postlexical process still leaves the discussion of the status of the rule without a definite conclusion. Such an ordering does not, as a matter of fact, equip us with any categorical piece of evidence in favour of placement of the rule into either the lexical or the postlexical component. If, on the other hand, one were to claim (and to confirm experimentally) that the lengthening rule could be triggered by the presence of partial voicing (voice residue) in the consonants after the application of the postlexical Allophonic Voice Assimilation rule, then one could specify the status of ALR as postlexical with clear and convincing substantiation. For now, however, there is no evidence to prove this. The discussion of ALR's phonological status may be concluded by stating that its definition is a debatable theoretical issue. Our intention in the present argumentation has been merely to point out the consequences of adopting certain theoretical assumptions and to consider them in the light of experimental phonetic data, rather than to provide ready answers to such complex questions. It is apparent that the above problems are controversial and require further study and further experimental diagnosis. (iii) The third issue that we would like to tackle with regard to the status of ALR is the infelicity of placing a gradient rule in the lexicon. If we assume that the rule applies at both the lexical and the postlexical levels in the phonological derivation (see (ii) above), we are in real theoretical difficulty on this point. ALR is clearly a gradient rule. To treat it as a lexical process is problematical, since in all the literature on Lexical Phonology instantiating data from various languages gradient phenomena are consistently judged as postlexical. Kiparsky (1985:94), for example, writes that "Gradient processes in many cases appear to be simply the postlexical applications of rules which in the lexicon function in strictly categorical fashion suggesting that the distinction between phonology and phonetic implementation is to some extent at least a matter of how rules apply rather than their inherent content." He further remarks that it is possible to observe some interesting generalizations about when postlexical rules will function categorically and when they will function gradiently. These can be summarized as follows:

94

(i) "Context-sensitive rules which override lexical marking conditions have gradient outputs (e.g., the devoicing of sonorants [in English]). (ii) Rules (usually context-free) which assign default values have categorical outputs (e.g., the default specification of voicing of sonorants, or the rules specifying labial fricatives as labiodental, coronals as alveolar, etc.)" (Kiparsky 1985: 94). The above remarks as well as the discussion of the status of the rule in Lexical Phonology presented by Kaisse and Shaw (1985) clearly suggest that the placement of a non-binary (gradient) process in the lexicon contradicts the characteristics of lexical rules as understood in the Lexical framework. For the present, however, we shall have to accept this apparent violation of generally accepted principles and classify the lengthening process in point as a postlexical rule applying also in the postcyclic component of the lexicon. As far as we can see, there is no other way of reconciling our interpretation of the status of ALR with the empirical data presented in table (3-2) above. This evidently controversial statement suggests that a thorough investigation of the properties of gradient phonological rules would be very much in order, as their status remains uncertain within the Lexical theory, as Kiparsky remarks: "I argue that at least some postlexical processes are truly phonological, feature changing rules. I further suggest that even gradient application might not suffice to ban a process from the phonology, on the grounds that such gradient postlexical processes are in a number of interesting cases the same as rules which apply categorically in the lexical phonology of some language and that their gradience might be predictable as a general property of the postlexical application of certain types of rules. However, I do not at this point have any idea about how representative the situation is and I put forward these preliminary explorations with some misgivings simply in the hope of providing a basis for further discussion "(1985: 86).

3.5.

Allophonic Lengthening Rule: Concluding Remarks

Our conclusion about ALR in English is that it is a gradient rule having both a lexical and a postlexical application. It modifies inherent length in vowels by taking into account [+voice] and [+continuant] features of the

95

consonantal environments by which the vowels are followed (the proportion of lengthening influence between the two variables being approximately 3:1). Whether or not it is ultimately correct to view the gradient process here under consideration as a postlexical rule applying also in the postcyclic component of the lexicon is a question which can only be decided by further investigation of the properties of postlexical and gradient rules against a large body of phonological material from many different languages.

3.6.

Aitken's Law Viewed as a Lexicalization of the ALR

In the present section we will be concerned with the question of how a language or dialect may innovate a distinctive phonological contrast. In an attempt to answer this question we shall consider the example of the introduction of long vowels by means of Aitken's Law in SSE. The specific question here is how a given dialect or accent may add to an already existing inventory of vowels, or, in other words, how it introduces vowel length contrast. There are several ways in which a language or dialect may do this (for a detailed discussion of some of them see de Chene 1979). One of them is the lexicalization of a non-distinctive postlexical phonological process already present in a given language or dialect. By lexicalization we mean the entry of a rule into the lexicon of a language or dialect. Usually, it is the case that if such a postlexical process is gradient the lexicalization takes place in the contexts where the gradient phenomenon has had its most prominent effects. It has also been observed that in the majority of instances a phonological process starts off as a postlexical, gradient rule which in the course of historical development of a language becomes elevated to a lexical, binary process. Note that the phenomenon of lexicalization "collides", as it were, with the principle of Structure Preservation, which determines that any rule which introduces the specification of lexically non-distinctive features must be postlexical. Structure Preservation also guarantees that if a certain feature is non-distinctive in a language it may not be specified in the lexicon. Let us now try to analyze the situation with respect to vowel length in SSE in the light of the above remarks. It is quite sensible to view Aitken's Law as a lexicalization of the Allophonic Lengthening Rule for the following reasons:

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1. Both rules induce typologically the same phonological change - both are vowel lengthening processes. 2. Both rules are regressive lengthenings - sensitive to the context following the input to the rule. 3. For both processes the essential feature specification of the context which triggers lengthening is [+voice] and [+continuant]. We can see, then, that the two rules are structurally very similar. The only significant difference between them is that the Allophonic Lengthening Rule (ALR) is a gradient, exceptionless, non-distinctive process whereas Aitken's Law (SVLR) is a binary, structure-changing rule introducing distinctive vowel length. For this reason the ALR has to be assigned postlexical status (possibly with a lexical application; see our discussion in section 3.4. of the present chapter) whereas Aitken's Law has to be classified as a postcyclic lexical process in the grammar of SSE. The degree of similarity between the rules in question as well as their different grammatical status suggest that the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule can in fact be interpreted as a case of "elevation" of an originally gradient postlexical rule to the lexicon. In conclusion we would like to restate what has already been said in the initial pages of the present chapter, namely that the low phonetic lengthening rule is a widespread phenomenon throughout the English speaking world; it operates in most dialects, accents and varieties of the English language. Among these are both SSE and RP. In these two accents the rule is a gradient process and it applies to all vocalic nuclei in an exceptionless manner. As has already been indicated in section 3.3. of the present chapter, the effects of ALR are most prominent before segments bearing the characteristics [+voice] and [+continuant] and least evident before [-voice] and [-continuant]. We find it reasonable to believe, therefore, that in both accents the situation regarding the interpretation of the ALR is the same. In both SSE and RP, then, the rule under consideration is a postlexical phonological process which applies also in the postcyclic component of the lexicon.

4.

Phonological Account of [r]-Related Processes in RP and SSE: R-Deletion

This chapter presents a comparison of the phonological processes associated with the [r] sound in RP and in SSE. The data for RP are documented in Jones (1975), Gimson (1970; 198O) and Wells (1982) and those related to SSE are taken from The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (1975-1986), tapes and archive materials from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, Aitken (1979), Hughes and Trudgill (tapes) and Trudgill and Hannah (1985). The solutions suggested here are couched in the terminology of the theoretical framework of Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1982, 1984, 1985; Kiparsky 1982a and 1982b, 1985; Halle and Mohanan 1985; Rubach 1981 and 1984; Booij and Rubach 1987) and in that of recent theories of syllable structure (Me Carthy 1979a and 1979b; Halle and Vergnaud 1980; Steriade 1982; Clements and Keyser 1983, Giegerich 1985 and others). In what follows an attempt is made to consider the consequences of adopting two fundamentally different accounts of [r]-related phenomena in English, namely, the solutions which we will refer to as R-Deletion and R-Weakening and to discuss their theoretical implications for the treatment of accent variations. Phonological processes related to the account of the variable retention of post-vocalic [r] in RP and SSE within a R-Deletion interpretation are the subject of this chapter, whereas the same processes in both RP and SSE as seen within a R-Weakening interpretation will be discussed in the next one.

4.1. [r]-Distribution in Rhotic and Non-Rhotic Accents of English It is useful to begin our discussion by recalling the fact that all the accents of English fall into two categories: "rhotic" or "r-full" and "non-rhotic" or "r-less". Traditionally rhotic and non-rhotic accents of English have been defined with reference to the spelling. Rhotic accents are those which pronounce the [r] sound8 in all instances where it corresponds to orthographic "r", i.e., those which pronounce words like tore, torn as [t3:r],

The [r] sound has a wide range of phonetic realizations in English accents and dialects. It can be a frictionless continuant, a flap, a rolled consonant or a fricative. For a detailed discussion of the allophones of [r] see Gimson (1980). On their distribution in the various dialects see Wells (1982).

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[tD:rn] respectively. (The consonant [r] in these positions—word finally before a pause or preceding a consonant-is often referred to as nonprevocalic [r].) In phonological terms this amounts to saying that in rhotic accents the consonant [r] is freely placed in all possible positions in the syllable structure, both in the syllable onset (red, right, etc.), and in the syllable rhyme. In the latter position [r] is free to function as a nucleus (memory, literary, etc.), as well as to stand in the syllable coda, both when it appears as a single consonant immediately followed by a morpheme/word boundary or a pause (metering, car, letter} or when followed by either a single consonant (term, card, etc.) or a consonant cluster (first, worst, etc.). Non-rhotic accents, on the other hand, do not retain [r] in pronunciation in the preconsonantal and prepausal contexts and consequently they have tore, torn, bar, barn realized as [to:], [to:n], [ba:], [ba:n] respectively. In the categories of syllable structure [r] distribution can be explained by saying that [r] is never present in the syllable coda in those accents. It may freely stand in the syllable onset (in rhyme, red, as well as before syllabic consonants in carol, baron, etc.) or function as a nucleus (literary, memory}, but it is never pronounced in the syllable coda (car, never, card, terms, etc.) (for a detailed discussion of the problem see section 4.3. and the subsequent sections of the present chapter). All accents of English, rhotic or non-rhotic, preserve [r] before a vowel, as in red, green, orange, etc. All Scottish Standard English accents are rhotic, whereas the accents of England are divided into those of the west, which are rhotic, and those of the east which are non-rhotic? RP being a non-rhotic variety. It should also be remarked that in Australian, New Zealand and South African English, as well as in some of the eastern and south-eastern U.S. dialects, [r] is not pronounced before consonants or before a pause, while it is retained in all phonological contexts in Ireland, Canada, the mid-western, western and much of the eastern U.S. The table below, quoted after Trudgill and Hannah (1985), provides some indication of the occurrence of the [r] sound in different varieties of the English language. (The terms "linking r" and "intrusive r" employed in the table below will be discussed in detail in the next section of the present chapter. The abbreviation var. here means "variable".)

Rhotic dialects, however, as distinct from accents of Standard English, can also be found in the north-east area of England, e.g. around the Durham area and in the south-east region in Kent (see Abercrombie 1979).

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(4-1)

Non-prevocalic[r| "for" Received Pronunciation no Non-RP, South England Eng. nO Scottish English yes Irish English yes Canadian English yes Mid-Western U.S. English yes East New England U.S. Eng. no

Linking[r] "for it" yes yes — — — — yes

Intrusive[r{ "saw it" VQT. yes no no ΠΟ no yes

New York City U.S. English

var.

yes

var.

South Eastern U.S. English Australian English New Zealand English South African English

no no ΠΟ ΠΟ

no yes yes no

no yes yes

4.2. [r|-Related Processes in Non-Rhotic Accents: Linking [r] and Intrusive [r] It is interesting to note that speakers of many non-rhotic accents, while not pronouncing orthographic "r" word finally before a pause or before a consonant, do pronounce it where there is a following suffix or word which begins with a vowel (the relevant examples illustrating the distribution of [r] in both rhotic and non-rhotic varieties will be discussed in detail below). This amounts to saying that words like star have two pronunciations which depend on whether or not there is a following vowel. In non-rhotic accents the [r] that occurs in star is, far away, for instance, for example, etc. is known as "linking r". RP has a "linking r" phenomenon (see the distribution of "linking r" in table (4-1) above). "Linking r" can thus be defined as the retention of word final postvocalic [r] when a suffix starting with a vowel is appended to the word or when the following word begins with a vowel. This is the [r] which is preserved in the spelling. An arguably related phenomenon is that many non-rhotic accents of English insert an [r] before a following vowel, although no [r] appears in the spelling. This [r] is called "intrusive r" because, unlike "linking r" (by analogy with which it may have developed), it has no historical justification, not being represented orthographically. (It should be remarked that the development of the "intrusive r" phenomenon may have accompanied

100 non-rhoticness without diachronic delay, but we have no written evidence which would confirm or refute such an hypothesis.) In many English English accents it occurs in environments such as:

(4-2)

[lo:]

law

law and

(fo: r dnd]

analogous to roar—roar and

shah

[ja:] shah and analogous to far—far and

[Ja: r dnd]

parka

[pot:kd]

[podkdraid]

parka and

analogous to darker—darker and Korea

[kdrid] Korea and analogous to fear—fear and

[kdrid r dnd]

"Intrusive r" can also be found in word internal contexts as in drawing [dr3:riq], outlawing [autlo:rif|] and such like cases. Trudgill and Hannah (1985: 14-15) rightly point out that, "[...] what has happened historically is that the loss of [r] before consonants in non-rhotic accents, which led to alternations of the far-far away type, has become reinterpreted as a rule which inserts [r] after the vowels [a:], [o:], [3 :], [to], [εθ], and [