Abstract
Descriptions of the Received Pronunciation (RP) and Southern Standard British English (SSBE) have previously commented on vowel lengthening in certain words such as bad and glad as opposed to shorter lad and pad. This paper comprises the first thorough description of the conditioning of /æ/ duration in twenty-one young native SSBE speakers, finding inconclusive evidence for a lexically specified split but significant general lengthening effects of postvocalic /g/ and /d/; this secondary /æ/-lengthening is discussed in reference to phonological analyses of the TRAP-BATH split (primary /æ/-lengthening) and previously established descriptions of co-articulatory segmental effects on vowel length.
Highlights
This lengthening manifested itself initially as allophonic phonetic variation conditioned by the following consonant: /a/ preceding tautosyllabic voiceless fricatives were the first to become /a/, followed by lengthening preceding nasal + fricative clusters and nasal + voiceless stop clusters (Wells 1982)
Native Received Pronunciation (RP)/Southern Standard British English (SSBE)-speaking linguists have previously asserted the existence of conventionally homophonous minimal pairs distinguished by /æ/ duration alone
None of the pairs targeted in this experiment were found to be consistently differentiated by vowel duration
Summary
In Early Modern English varieties spoken in 17th–18th century southern England, the Middle English short-/a/ vowel (TRAP) began to lengthen to /a/ in some words This lengthening manifested itself initially as allophonic phonetic variation conditioned by the following consonant: /a/ preceding tautosyllabic voiceless fricatives (e.g. bath, staff, pass) were the first to become /a/, followed by lengthening preceding nasal + fricative clusters (e.g. dance) and nasal + voiceless stop clusters (e.g. can’t) (Wells 1982). This long BATH vowel – eventually merged completely with the long PALM class – changed in quality, producing the backer, more rounded /ɑ:/ of England’s 20th century acrolectal Received Pronunciation (RP) and its successor dialect, Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Among the patterns he observed in his own idiolect were that while the short vowel
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