Abstract
This paper presents an empirical analysis of /l/-darkening in English, using ultrasound tongue imaging data from five varieties spoken in the UK. The analysis of near 500 tokens from five participants provides hitherto absent instrumental evidence demonstrating that speakers may display both categorical allophony of light and dark variants, and gradient phonetic effects coexisting in the same grammar. Results are interpreted through the modular architecture of the life cycle of phonological processes, whereby a phonological rule starts its life as a phonetically driven gradient process, over time stabilizing into a phonological process at the phrase level, and advancing through the grammar. Not only does the life cycle make predictions about application at different levels of the grammar, it also predicts that stabilized phonological rules do not replace the phonetic processes from which they emerge, but typically coexist with them, a pattern which is supported in the data. Overall, this paper demonstrates that variation in English /l/ realization has been underestimated in the existing literature, and that we can observe phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic conditioning when accounting for a representative range of phonological environments across varieties.
Highlights
The process of /l/-darkening, whereby /l/ is realized with a delayed and/or reduced tongue-tip gesture, shows a remarkable amount of variation across accents of E nglish
This paper presents an empirical analysis of /l/-darkening in English, using ultrasound tongue imaging data from five varieties spoken in the UK
This paper demonstrates that variation in English /l/ realization has been underestimated in the existing literature, and that we can observe phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic conditioning when accounting for a representative range of phonological environments across varieties
Summary
The process of /l/-darkening, whereby /l/ is realized with a delayed and/or reduced tongue-tip gesture, shows a remarkable amount of variation across accents of E nglish. In this investigation, /l/s were analyzed in 9 contexts, ranging from word initial position, to pre-consonantal position, and other prosodically conditioned environments in between Their methodology allowed them to monitor gestural phasing, leading them to uncover a distinction which would regularly be cited as the primary articulatory correlate of light and dark /l/ from on. Working on the fair assumption that it is unlikely that three phonological categories would fall within such a tiny articulatory range, they conclude that darkness must be gradient, not categorical They discuss an explanation whereby phonetic implementation is conditioned by morphological boundaries, which may result in an indirect sideeffect of duration in some contexts. It is fair to say that we may need data for the entire spectrum of realization possibilities before making such conclusions, i.e., a set of stimuli more like Sproat and Fujimura’s than Lee-Kim, et al.’s
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