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Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2018

Laurel MacKenzie
Laurel MacKenzie*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

This paper investigates analogical leveling in a small set of English nouns that have irregular plural forms. In these nouns, all of which end in a voiceless fricative, the fricative standardly voices in the plural (e.g., wolf–wol[v]es, path–pa[ð]s, house–hou[z]es). Using audio data from three large spoken corpora of American English, I demonstrate that this stem-final fricative voicing is variable and conditioned by a number of factors, most notably the identity of the stem-final fricative—with /f/-final lexemes (e.g., wolf), /θ/-final lexemes (e.g., path), and the /s/-final lexeme house all patterning differently in apparent time—and the frequency of a lexeme in its plural form. I argue that the way these two factors affect the variation is reminiscent of the patterns seen in children's first language acquisition errors, providing a potential source for the variation and underscoring the importance of considering morphophonological factors when accounting for patterns of change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , July 2018 , pp. 147 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

Thanks to Lucy Giannasi and Amy Hughes for data collection, supported by the University of Manchester's Q-Step Centre. Thanks also to Charles Yang, Isaac Bleaman, members of NYU's Sociolinguistics Lab, audiences at the Second Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology at the University of Edinburgh (December 3–4, 2015) and New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45 in Vancouver (November 3–6, 2016), and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments.

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