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Abstract
We explore the vowel space, with a particular focus on the phonetic location (and phonological interpretation) of the vowel /u/ (GOOSE, FOOT) in Scottish accented English, using a socially-stratified articulatory and acoustic corpus of fifteen teenage speakers of both sexes (ECB08). The articulatory data consists of midsagittal tongue contours extracted from ultrasound tongue images, and the acoustic vowel space is modelled with F1 and F2 (in Bark). We explore the methodological issue of how to quickly measure a given vowel’s lingual location relative to others in a space of such tongue curves, given a very small sample from each speaker: we measure the linear distance between the highest point of different tongue curves. This lets us compare the somewhat metaphorical but widely accepted equivalence of frontness in acoustic space to high F2, to a more literal but still indirect measure of frontness, namely the relative closeness of the high points of /u/ and /i/. /e/ and /o/ are also measured, for comparison. We investigate two quite different rotations of the space, which reflect different hypotheses about what is an appropriate orientation for the horizontal axis. Both rotations give similar results, supporting our qualitative analysis of /u/, but we recommend the use of the occlusal plane to define horizontality (preferably measured directly on a speaker-by-speaker basis). In Scottish English, the /u/ vowel has previously been described as approximately central between cardinal vowel 1 and cardinal vowel 8, and high. Our qualitative analysis, supported by our acoustic and articulatory measurement, revises this finding: in these speakers /u/ is indeed front of centre but, however, it is not high – it is in fact a frontish, midhigh (rounded) vowel. Phonologically, a number of interpretations would be available, all of which alter the shape of the Scottish English system by accepting that “/u/” is not high and back. Moreover, /o/ is far closer to cardinal 8 in both acoustic and articulatory senses, and its location in phonetic space strongly suggests that it is (now) the high back vowel of the phonological system. Alternatively, there is no such vowel. We also find articulatory support for the very strong sociophonetic difference in the location of the /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels between more working class and more middle class speakers, and discuss whether this clear phonetic difference should be modelled phonologically. We set this discussion in the context of a critique of strongly modular approaches to the phonetics/phonology interface. We ask whether phonological labels are in any way relevant to explaining phonological change, or, equivalently, whether the phonetic measurement of a vowel category provides straightforward evidence of what the phonological label actually is. We argue that it would only be possible to find unequivocal evidence for phonological change after the fact, and that labels are likely to be assigned non-deterministically and related to phonetics in an abstract way. We therefore conclude that the use of phonetically realistic labels for phonological categories does not have any straightforward explanatory purpose, unlike the number of categories and their location in phonetic space, which, however, does not require modularity.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 103-148 |
Number of pages | 46 |
Journal | Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 1 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2012 |
Keywords
- vowel acoustics
- vowel articulation
- ultrasound tongue imaging
- GOOSE vowel
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Dive into the research topics of 'Back to front: a socially-stratified ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish English /u/'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Dynamic Dialects: integrating articulatory video to reveal the complexity of speech.
Lawson, E. (Principal Investigator), Stuart-Smith, J. (Principal Investigator) & Scobbie, J. M. (Co-investigator)
1/01/14 → 1/03/15
Project: Projects from Previous Employment