Abstract
The fronting of the high-back /uː/ and /ʊ/, as currently seen in Southern British English (SBE), is a rare opportunity to study two similar sound changes at different stages of their phonetic development: /uː/-fronting is a more advanced change than /ʊ/-fronting. Since the fronting in both vowels is restricted from applying before a following final /l/ (e.g., in words like fool or pull), we can exploit the difference in the phonetic advancement of /uː/ and /ʊ/-fronting to illuminate the nature of ‘fuzzy contrasts’ affecting vowel+/l/ sequences in morphologically complex words. As recent results show that /uː/-fronting is partially limited in fool-ing (but not in monomorphemes like hula), we ask whether similar morphological constraints affect /ʊ/ followed by /l/ (e.g., bully vs. pull-ing). Simultaneously, we consider the question of what phonological generalization best captures the interaction between vowel fronting, /l/-darkening, and morphological structure. We present ultrasound data from 20 speakers of SBE representing two age groups. The data show that morphologically conditioned contrasts are consistent for /uː/+/l/, but variable and limited in size for /ʊ/+/l/. We relate these findings to the debate on morphology-phonetics interactions and the emergence of phonological abstraction.
Highlights
There are numerous reported cases in English dialects where apparent surface contrasts, manifested by the presence of minimal pairs, are, structurally predictable
In Strycharczuk & Scobbie (2016), we considered whether the difference between monomorphemic and morphologically complex words in this case can be convincingly analyzed as involving allophonic oppositions, as predicted by the life-cycle model
For both/ul/ and /ʊl/, we find the highest linear discriminant (LD) values in the word-final pre-consonantal contexts, i.e., in the contexts for maximal vowel backing and maximal /l/-darkening
Summary
There are numerous reported cases in English dialects where apparent surface contrasts, manifested by the presence of minimal pairs, are, structurally predictable. Vowels are shortened in the same segmental context when no morphological boundary intervenes, e.g., in brood (Aitken, 1981; Scobbie et al, 1999; Scobbie & Stuart-Smith, 2008). For some accents of American English, /l/-darkening is reported to apply in canonical coda positions, and pre-vocalically before a morphological boundary, yielding a contrast between words like hail-y and Hailey (Boersma & Hayes, 2001; Lee-Kim et al, 2013). We will refer to cases like this as ‘fuzzy contrasts’ or ‘morphologically conditioned contrasts/differences,’ meaning segmental differences triggered by the presence of morpheme boundaries (see Hall, 2009 for discussion on other terms used in the literature in such cases)
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