Abstract
In his analysis of /dˤ/-variation in Saudi Arabian newscasting, Al-Tamimi (2020) finds unpredicatble variability between the standard variant [dˤ] and the non-standard variant [ðˤ] in different in-words positions, in different phonetic environments, and in semantically ‘content’ and suprasegmentally ‘stressed’ lexical itmes assumed to favor the standard variant. He even finds in many of these lexical items an unusual realizational flucatuation between the two variants. The present exploratory and ‘theory-testing’ study aims to find a reasonable account for these findings through examining the explanatory adequacy of a number of available phonological theories, notions, models and proposals that have made different attempts to accommodate variation, and this includes Coexistent Phonemic Systems, Standard Generative Phonology, Lexical Diffusion, Variable Rules, Poly-Lectal Grammar, Articulatory Phonology, different versions of the Optimality Theory, in addition to the Multiple-Trace-Model, as represented by Al-Tamimi’s (2005) Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal. The study reveals the strengths and weaknesses of these theories in embracing the variability in the data, and concludes that the Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal can relatively offer the best insight as its allows variation to be directly encoded in the underlying representations of lexical items, a status strictly prohibited by the rest of the theories that adopt invariant lexical representations in consonance with the ‘Homogeneity Doctrine’.
Highlights
As variation is “an inherent characteristic of all languages at all times” (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015, p. 140), it tends to naturalistically unfold at different layers of linguistic analysis—phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or lexical, and at different levels of sociolinguistic investigation
Not all variation that exists in natural languages is as systematic as, for instance, the English regular past tense markers and the English final t/d- deletion which seem to reflect a deterministic linguistic conditioning
‘variability in the stimulus is directly encoded in the lexical representations” (Docherty & Foulkes, 2000, pp. 118−119). This characteristic feature might be regarded as a theoretical breakthrough towards accommodating variation, especially the linguistically unconditioned type deemed to pose challenge to the linguistic theory
Summary
As variation is “an inherent characteristic of all languages at all times” (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015, p. 140), it tends to naturalistically unfold at different layers of linguistic analysis—phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or lexical, and at different levels of sociolinguistic investigation. Al-Tamimi (2020) finds the sound to be realized as the standard variant [dʕ] in around 70% of the time, and as [ðʕ] in around 30%, irrespective of the linguistic parameter used (i.e., different in-word position, different phonetic environment, and ‘content’ and ‘stressed’ words). That this variability has been found to recur in almost the very same percentages under all these linguistic parameters may cast doubt on the significance of linguistic conditioning for the phonetic behaviour of the sound. These findings point to linguistically unconditioned variability, and it would be interesting to know which phonological theory can best accommodate it, along with the realizational fluctuation in the ‘inconsistent set’, as exemplified in 1−2 above
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