Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:55:00.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Natural phonetic tendencies and social meaning: Exploring the allophonic raising split of price and mouth on the Isles of Scilly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2019

Emma Moore  and
Paul Carter
Emma Moore
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Paul Carter
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The existence of an allophonic split between raised onsets before voiceless consonants and more open onsets in other environments is well-established for the vowels in the price lexical set. It has also been observed—less frequently—for the vowels in the mouth lexical set. We provide evidence of this allophonic raising split in the English spoken on the Isles of Scilly (a group of islands off the southwest coast of England) where the pattern is more robust for mouth than price. We propose that the allophonic raising split on Scilly is the outcome of dialect contact and natural phonetic tendencies, as observed elsewhere. However, by reflecting on the specifics of the location studied, and drawing on a perception study, we hypothesise that the trajectory of the pattern may be the consequence of the different social and regional qualities indexed by mouth and price and the interaction of these meanings with ideologies about Scilly and its speakers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 337 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant AH/I026243/1). Many thanks to Amanda Martin and the Isles of Scilly Museum for their collaboration and to all islanders who were interviewed for the archive. Thanks in particular to Mary Bushell, Ray Williams, and Tracy Smith for collecting recordings and to Roger Banfield for historical insight. We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for suggestions that helped to improve this paper. All remaining errors are, of course, our responsibility.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, Harold. (1989). Canadian raising in the Upper Midwest. American Speech 64(1):74–75.Google Scholar
Amos, Jenny. (2011). A sociophonological analysis of Mersea Island English: An investigation of the diphthongs (au), (ai) and (oi). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex.Google Scholar
Andersen, H. (1988). Center and periphery: Adoption, diffusion and spread. In Fisiak, J. (ed.), Historical dialectology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 39–83.Google Scholar
Anderson, Peter. (1987). A structural atlas of the English dialects. North Ryde: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Banfield, Frank. (1888). The Scillonians. In Urban, S. (ed.), The Gentleman's Magazine. Vol. 265. London: Chatto & Windus. 41–54.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenick, David. (2015). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Available at: http://www.praat.org/. Accessed July 15, 2018.Google Scholar
Borlase, William. (1753). An account of the great alterations which the Islands of Sylley have undergone since the time of the antients, who mention them, as to their number, extent, and position: In a letter to the Rev. Thomas Birch, D. D. Secr. R. S. by the Rev. Mr. Wm Borlase, M.A.F.R.S. In Philosophical transactions, giving some accompt of the present undertakings, studies, and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world. Vol. 48. Part I. London: Royal Society. 55–69.Google Scholar
Bowley, R. L. (1964). The fortunate isles: A history of the Isles of Scilly. 5th ed. Reading: Bowley Publications.Google Scholar
Britain, David. (1997). Dialect contact and phonological reallocation: “Canadian raising” in the English Fens. Language in Society 26:15–46.Google Scholar
Britain, David. (2017). Which way to look? Perspectives on “urban” and “rural” in dialectology. In Montgomery, C. & Moore, E. (eds.), Language and a sense of place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 171–187.Google Scholar
Britain, David, & Sudbury, Andrea. (2008). What can the Falkland Islands tell us about diphthong shift? Essex Research Reports in Linguistics. 1–32.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. (1989). Canadian raising: Blocking, fronting, etc. American Speech 64:75–88.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. (1861). Rambles beyond railways, with the cruise of the Tomtit to the Scilly Islands. London: Richard Bentley.Google Scholar
Currie Hall, Kathryn. (2005). Defining phonological rules over lexical neighbourhoods: Evidence from Canadian raising. In Alderete, J., Han, C., and Kochetov, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 191–199.Google Scholar
Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer. (1997). Canadian raising in a midwestern U.S. city. Language Variation and Change 9(1):107–120.Google Scholar
Fabricius, Anne H., Watt, Dominic, & Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2009). A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 21(3):413–435.Google Scholar
Grigson, Geoffrey. (1948). The Scilly Isles. London: Elek.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Nolan, Aaron, & Drager, Katie. (2006). From fush to feesh: Exemplar priming in speech perception. Linguistic Review 23(3):351–379.Google Scholar
Heath, Robert. (1750). A natural and historical account of the Islands of Scilly; Describing their situation, number, extent, soil, culture, produce, rareties, towns, fortifications, trade, manufacture, inhabitants. their government, laws, customs, grants, records, and antiquities. London: R. Manby & H. S. Cox.Google Scholar
Heath-Coleman, Philip. (1995). Three Cornish place-names [Melledgan, Hanjague, Bosistow]. Nomina 18:53–62.Google Scholar
Idsardi, W. (2006). Canadian raising, opacity, and rephonemicization. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2/3):21–28.Google Scholar
The Isles of Scilly Council. (2005). The Isles of Scilly local plan: A 2020 vision. Available at: https://www.cioslep.com/assets/file/Archive/Isles%20of%20Scilly%20Local%20Plan.pdf. Accessed October 29, 2018.Google Scholar
The Isles of Scilly Museum. (2007). 1901 Census of the Isles of Scilly. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Jenner, Henry. (2010). Henry Jenner's Handbook of the Cornish Language. Rev. ed. Westport: Evertype.Google Scholar
Kinloch, Murray, & Ismail, Fazilah M. (2013). Canadian raising: /au/ in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Linguistica Atlantica 15:105–114.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19:273–309.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Larn, Richard, & Banfield, Roger. (2015). Built on Scilly: The history of shipbuilding on the Isles of Scilly between 1774 & 1891. St. Mary's: Shipwreck & Marine.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2014). Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society 43(5):539–566.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Chris, & Moore, Emma. (2018). Evaluating S(c)illy voices: The effects of salience, stereotypes, and co-present language variables on real-time reactions to regional speech. Language 94(3):629–661.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. (2000). Isolation as a linguistic construct. Southern Journal of Linguistics 24:41–53.Google Scholar
Moore, Emma, & Carter, Paul. (2015). Dialect contact and distinctiveness: The social meaning of language variation in an island community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(1):3–36.Google Scholar
Moore, Emma, & Montgomery, Chris. (2018). The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language production and language perception in a Southern insular variety. In Wright, L. (ed.), Southern Englishes: Now and then. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 39–73.Google Scholar
Moreton, Elliott, & Thomas, Erik R. (2007). Origins of Canadian raising in voiceless-coda effects: A case study in phonologization. In Cole, J. & Hualde, J. I. (eds.), Laboratory phonology. Vol. 9. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 37–64.Google Scholar
Mothersole, Jessie. (1914). The Isles of Scilly: Their story, their folk and their flowers. 2nd ed. London: Religious Tract Society.Google Scholar
Mumford, Clive. (1967). Portrait of the Isles of Scilly. London: Robert Hale.Google Scholar
Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. (2017). 2011 Census aggregate data. February 2017 ed. Essex: UK Data Service. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5257/census/aggregate-2011-2. Accessed October 29, 2018.Google Scholar
ONS Geography. (2010). Regions (former GORs). Newport: Office for National Statistics. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/geography/beginner-s-guide/administrative/england/government-office-regions/index.html. Accessed October 29, 2018.Google Scholar
Pope, Jenny, Meyerhoff, Miriam, & Ladd, Bob. (2007). Forty years of language change on Martha's Vineyard. Language 83:615–627.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. (2010). Variation in language regard. In Gilles, P., Ziegler, E., & Scharloth, J. (eds.), Variatio delectat: Empirische Evidenzen und theoretische Passungen sprachlicher Variation (für Klaus J. Mattheier zum 65. Geburtstag). Frankfut am Main: Peter Lang. 7–27.Google Scholar
Rácz, Péter. (2013.) Salience in sociolinguistics: A quantitative approach. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Freiburg.Google Scholar
Sadlier-Brown, Emily. (2012). Homogeneity and autonomy of Canadian raising. World Englishes 31(4):534–548.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel. (2010a). St Helenian English. In Schreier, D., Trudgill, P., Schneider, E. W., & Williams, J. P. (eds.), The lesser-known varieties of English: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 224–244.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel (2010b). Tristan da Cunha English. In Schreier, D., Trudgill, P., Schneider, E. W., & Williams, J. P. (eds.), The lesser-known varieties of English: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 245–260.Google Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, Malley, James, & Tutz, Gerhard. (2009). An introduction to recursive partitioning: Rational, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests. Psychological Methods 14(4):323–348.Google Scholar
Thomas, Charles. (1979). A glossary of spoken English in the Isles of Scilly. Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall. 109–147.Google Scholar
Thomas, Charles (1985). Exploration of a drowned landscape: Archaelogy and history of the Isles of Scilly. London: B. T. Batsford.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Wiley.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Uren, J. G. (1907). Scilly and the Scillonians. Plymouth: Western Morning News.Google Scholar
Vance, Timothy J. (1987). “Canadian raising” in some dialects of the Northern United States. American Speech 62(3):195–210.Google Scholar
Wakelin, Martyn F. (1975). Language and history in Cornwall. Leicester: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
Wakelin, Martyn F. (1986). The Southwest of England. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wells, John Christopher. (1982). Accents of English: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Moore and Carter supplementary material

Moore and Carter supplementary material 1

Download Moore and Carter supplementary material(File)
File 14.5 KB