Abstract
This paper highlights a hitherto unreported change in progress among northern speakers of British English, with increasing post-nasal [ɡ]-presence in words like sing or wrong pre-pausally. The factors that condition this innovation are unclear due to collinearity between various boundary phenomena. The right edge of phrasal prosodic categories may be associated with boundary tones, final lengthening, and pause; consequently, the variable presence of [ɡ] appears to be affected by prosodic boundary strength, segmental duration, and the presence and duration of a following pause. These factors are teased apart through analysis of an elicitation task from 30 northern speakers, which reveals that [ŋɡ] clusters are conditioned most strongly by pause. Post-nasal [ɡ]-presence is only licensed when the following consonant-initial word is temporally distant, showing only minimal sensitivity to prosodic boundaries directly. The surface effect of segmental duration arises only indirectly through its collinearity with pause duration. Current theoretical approaches to external sandhi emphasize a range of different factors, including phonological representations of prosodic constituency, phonetic parameters like segmental duration, and psycholinguistic mechanisms of production planning. This paper provides quantitative evidence from an under-reported feature of northern English that bears directly on these debates.
Highlights
External sandhi processes, where a phonological alternation is triggered across word boundaries, have been subject to extensive study, with respect to locality restrictions on their application and the implications this has for theories of speech planning
The collinearity between boundary phenomena such as pause and phrase-final segmental lengthening poses a serious problem for research into the mechanisms conditioning such effects: Are they conditioned directly by adjacency to prosodic boundaries of particular strengths, or do they reflect a more general sensitivity to segmental duration or pause? This study seeks to disentangle the close relationship between these factors, and does so by investigating one particular case of external sandhi that has been often overlooked in variationist linguistics
Kilbourn-Ceron (2017) investigates the conditioning of high vowel devoicing (HVD) in Japanese and addresses the same collinearity issue highlighted in this paper; the results indicate that all three boundary phenomena play a joint role in conditioning HVD, with an interaction between prosodic position and pause presence such that pauses inhibit HVD phrase-medially but promote it phrase
Summary
External sandhi processes, where a phonological alternation is triggered across word boundaries, have been subject to extensive study, with respect to locality restrictions on their application and the implications this has for theories of speech planning (see Wagner, 2012 on the Production Planning Hypothesis, and more recently Kilbourn-Ceron, 2017; Tamminga, 2018). Bermúdez-Otero and Trousdale (2012), drawing upon reports by eighteenth-century orthoepist James Elphinston as discussed by Garrett and Blevins (2009), provide a enlightening account of this change They show how the phonological /ɡ/-deletion rule progressed through the grammar such that in varieties of Present Day English, [ŋɡ] clusters are only ever present pre-vocalically in monomorphemic or root-based items such as finger or elongate, in addition to a small set of lexically-listed exceptions (the comparative and superlative forms of strong, long, and young). With many of them relying on impressionistic and auditory analysis, variation in (ng) has not been subject to the same sociophonetic scrutiny as other variables
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