Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T18:12:26.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The phonology of ‘/ɔː/’ and ‘/ɑː/’ in RP English: Henry Sweet and after1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Heinz J. Giegerich
Heinz J. Giegerich
Affiliation:
Department of English LanguageUniversity of EdinburghDavid Hume TowerGeorge SquareEdinburgh EH8 [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper attempts to account for the synchronic representations and surface distributions of the long low vowels (particularly of [ɔː] and [ɔə]) in present-day RP and Cockney, as well as to map in detail the twentieth-century developments that have given rise to them. It is argued that the long low vowels must still be underlyingly centring diphthongs in modern RP (as they were at Henry Sweet's time), now synchronically monophthongized by a spread-and-delink rule, while the corresponding underliers in Cockney must since have been restructured into monophthongs. The theoretical framework for this analysis is a version of Lexical Phonology that assumes an English lexicon comprising two levels, where the first level is characterized by cyclic rule application and the presence of the Strict Cycle and Structure Preservation Conditions (Giegerich, 1988; Kiparsky, 1982), and the second level by noncyclic rule application as well as the presence of neither condition (Borowsky, 1989).

Type
Articles
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1997 , pp. 25 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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.)

References

Borowsky, T. (1989). Syllable codas in English and structure preservation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 146–66.Google Scholar
Borowsky, T. (1993). On the word level. In Hargus, S. & Kaisse, E. (eds.), Studies in lexical phonology. (Phonetics and Phonology 4.) San Diego: Academic Press. 199–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broadbent, J. (1991). Linking and intrusive r in English. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 3: 281–302.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. & Halle, M. (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
EPD (1963) = Jones, D. (1963). English pronouncing dictionary. 12th edn.London: Dent.Google Scholar
EPD (1991) = Jones, D. (1991). English pronouncing dictionary. 14th edn, ed. by Gimson, A. C., rev. by Ramsaran, S.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fry, D. B. (1947). The frequency of speech sounds in southern English. Archives Néerlandaises de Phonétique Expérimentale 10: 103–20.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1987). Zur Schwa-Epenthese im Standarddeutschen. Linguistische Berichte 112: 449–69.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1988). Strict cyclicity and elsewhere. Lingua 75: 125–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1992a). English phonology: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1992b). The limits of phonological derivation: spelling pronunciations and schwa in English. Linguistische Berichte 142: 413–36.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1994a). Base-driven stratification: morphological causes and phonological effects of ‘Strict Cyclicity’. In Wiese, R. (ed.), Recent developments in lexical phonology. (Theorie des Lexikons: Arbeiten des Sonderforschungsbereichs 282, 56.) Düsseldorf: Heinrich Heine Universität. 31–61.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (1994b). Confronting reality: phonology and the literate speaker. In Stamirowska, K., Mazur, Z., & Walczuk, A. (eds.), Literature and language in the cultural context: proceedings of the inaugural conference of the Polish Association for the Study of English. Cracow: Universitas. 157–73.Google Scholar
Giegerich, H. J. (forthcoming). Lexical strata in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gimson, A. C. (1994). Gimson's pronunciation of English. 5th edn, rev. by Cruttenden, A.. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, J. A. (1990). Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gussmann, E. (1980). Introduction to phonological analysis. Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.Google Scholar
Gussmann, E. (1991). Schwa and syllabic sonorants in a non-linear phonology of English. Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis: Anglica Wratislaviensia 18: 25–93.Google Scholar
Halle, M. (1977). Tenseness, vowel shift and the phonology of back vowels in Modern English. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 611–25.Google Scholar
Harris, J. (1989). Towards a lexical analysis of sound change in progress. Journal of Linguistics 25: 35–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, J. (1991). Derived phonological contrasts. In Ramsaran, S. (ed.), Studies in the pronunciation of English: a commemorative volume in honour of A. C. Gimson. London: Croom Helm. 87–105.Google Scholar
Harris, J. (1994). English sound structure. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Horn, W. & Lehnert, M. (1954). Laut und Leben: Englische Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit, 1400–1950, vol. I. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar
Hughes, A. & Trudgill, P. (1987). English accents and dialects: an introduction to social and regional varieties of British English. 2nd edn.London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Itô, J. (1986). Syllable theory in prosodic phonology. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
Jespersen, O. (1909). A Modern English grammar on historical principles, part I: Sounds and spellings. London: George Allen and Unwin; Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard.Google Scholar
Kahn, D. (1976). Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Kamińska, T. E. (1995). Problems in Scottish English phonology. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 328.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P. (1973). ‘Elsewhere’ in phonology. In Anderson, S. & Kiparsky, P. (eds.), A festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 93–106.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P. (1982). Lexical phonology and morphology. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm. Seoul: Hanshin. 3–91.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P. (1985). Some consequences of lexical phonology. Phonology Yearbook 2: 82–138.Google Scholar
MacMahon, M. K. C. (1985). James Murray and the phonetic notation in the New English Dictionary. Transactions of the Philological Society 72–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, A. M. S. (1990). Vowel shift, free rides and strict cyclicity. Lingua 80: 197–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, A. M. S. (1996). On the use of the past to explain the present: the history of /r/ in English and Scots. In Britton, D. (ed.), English historical linguistics 1994: papers from the eighth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 135.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 73–89.Google Scholar
Minkova, D. (1991). The history of final vowels in English: the sound of muting. (Topics in English Linguistics, 4.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Mohanan, K. P. (1985). Syllable structure and lexical levels in English. Phonology Yearbook 2: 139–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mohanan, K. P. (1986). The theory of lexical phonology. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
NED (1888–) = Murray, J. A. H. (ed.) (1888–). A new English dictionary on historical principles. 10 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Nespor, M. & Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic phonology. (Studies in Generative Grammar 28.) Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Sivertsen, E. (1960). Cockney phonology. Oslo: Oslo University Press.Google Scholar
Strang, B. M. H. (1970). A history of English. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Sweet, H. (1877). A handbook of phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sweet, H. (1888). A history of English sounds from the earliest period. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sweet, H. (1904). Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (Grammatik, Texte und Glossar). Oxford: Clarendon Press; Leipzig: Tauchnitz.Google Scholar
Sweet, H. (1908). The sounds of English: an introduction to phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. & Hannah, J. (1985). International English: a guide to varieties of standard English. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Vennemann, T. (1972). Rule inversion. Lingua 29: 209–42.Google Scholar
Ward, I. C. (1939). The phonetics of English. 3rd edn.Cambridge: Heffer.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiese, R. (1986). Schwa and the structure of words in German. Linguistics 24: 697–742.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, S. (1975). Tense and lax vowels – degree of constriction or pharyngeal volume? Lund Working Papers in Phonetics 11: 55–107.Google Scholar