dissimilative elision

After non-eliding dissimilation and dissimilative addition this blog posting is about dissimilative elision. A sound is dropped because otherwise two identical/similar sounds would be too close together.

Credit must be given to Jack Windsor Lewis who coined the term dissimilative elision. It describes the deletion of "repeated sounds or syllables even when there is no logical objection to them." (source + examples here)

1. Dissimilative elision of /r/
 - caterpillar (in GA)
 - particular (in GA)
 - surprise (in GA)

2. Dissimilative elision of /l/
 - Pachelbel

3. Dissimilative elision of /h/
 - hold her hand
 - he has

I also wrote about dissimilative addition and about non-eliding dissimilation.

Lightning versus lightening

credit: www.free-extras.com

credit: skinlighteningtreatment.com

How do you pronounce these two words: lightning and lightening¹? In isolation, in their canonical forms, in careful speech probably /ˈlaɪtnɪŋ/ and /ˈlaɪtənɪŋ/. What about lightening in casual speech in a sentence like the sky was lightening on the horizon? [ˈlaɪtn̩ɪŋ] is an option - in more casual or allegro speech even [ˈlaɪtnɪŋ].
Do these two pronunciations constitute renderings of a minimal pair in the phonological sense of the term? If they do, then the syllabic and non-syllabic n-sounds seem to be allophones of different phonemes.

Let's clear this up! 
For two sounds (= phones) to be called allophones of the same phoneme two conditions must be fulfilled:

1. the distributions of the phones must be predictable and
2. no meaning difference is established if one phone is substituted for the other in the same context.

According to these conditions and assuming that we're talking here about two different sounds the two phones cannot be allophones of the same phoneme. Are they allophones of different phonemes?

Recall that the syllabic [n̩] in the casual pronunciation of lightening is the result of a structure simplification process like the change of, say, bread 'n' butter or fish 'n' chips. What's left of the weak syllable is a nasal consonant. The vowel - here schwa - is deleted and the following consonant² occupies the peak position; the consonant becomes syllabic. By this syllabic variant the syllable structure of the word is preserved. In the citation form the nucleus position is held by the schwa, the coda is occupied by the nasal. In the casual form we only have a nucleus, no coda, and this nucleus position is necessarily occupied by the /n/. As all phonemes in nucleus position are by definition syllabic, it's redundant to assign a syllabic status to the /n/. Moreover, a syllable is a syllable and a phoneme is a phoneme, i.e. they belong to different levels of analysis. 

So the two n-sounds are incommensurable from a structural point of view. I wonder if there're any auditory or acoustic differences between [ˈlaɪtn̩ɪŋ] and [ˈlaɪtnɪŋ].


¹ My thanks go to Martin J Ball for providing this beautiful example.
² The interesting question is: Which consonants can be syllabic and which cannot?

minimal pair sentences with /ʧ/ and /ʤ/

credit: www.anderslernen.com

Here's a list of minimal pair sentences containing words contrasting /ʧ/ and /ʤ/:

1. I believe he’s joking/choking.
2. The crowd jeered/cheered them.
3. What happened to your gin/chin?
4. She dropped her jello/cello.
5. They’re Jane’s/chains.
6. Is that badge/batch ready yet?
7. Marge/March is fine with me.
8. Did you see her lunge/lunch?
9. It’s a little ridge/rich.
10. They’re surging/searching now. 
11. Who's that miserable Reg/wretch
12. I prefer Jess/chess
13. I like his Joyce/choice.

Malcolm Muggeridge - sound snippet

"[...] so that to this day the BBC is thought of as the organ of the, as it were, genteel and respectable elements in society." There seems to be some flaw in the sound track that gives me impression that there is an r-sound after the vowel in 'thought'.

brɑən sjuːəl

credit: habsboys.org.uk

credit: courtauld.ac.uk

Brian Sewell was born in Kensington on the 15th of July, 1931. He is an Old Haberdasher, which means he attended HABS, a public (= independent) school by the full name of Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School.  He then went to the Courtauld (/ˈkɔːtəʊld/) Institute of Art, a college of the University of London, where he graduated in 1957. So much for the speech-forming years of [ˈbrɑən ˈsjuːəl].

When you listen to his enunciation in various clips available on the internet, you will discover that his poshness varies quite a lot. The plummiest variant I've heard so far is to be found in his series 'Brian Sewell's Grand Tour of Italy'. Try to find a video clip by typing "last of the medici" into your browser and enjoy it.

There's even a Brian Sewell audio sampler.

Here's a list of words taken from the above-mentioned video clip:

from outside	frəm ʔaʊtˈsaɪdɦ
show	ʃ̱əʊ
Medici	ˈmedɪʧeʱ
try	tçrɑːɪ
sire	sɑːɜ
heir	ʔɛːɜ
to lead	thʊ liːːdh
alcove	æɫˈkəʊv
altar	ˈɔːɫtɑ
panniers of fruit	ˈphænɪɜˑz̥ əv̥ fru | th
grapes	ɡreɪ | ps
chin	ʧɪnː
dinner time	ˈdɪnɜː thaːɪmː
boys	bɔːɪ | z̥

Some people say that Brian Sewell speaks posher than what the Queen does.

Who is this handsome young man?

credit: BBC and PBS

It's John Christopher Wells as Alex Rotatori correctly answered. The photos are snapshots taken from a BBC series of 1986 called 'The Story of English' consisting of nine episodes. In episode 7 - 'Muvver Tongue' - John appears commenting on other people's pronunciation.

Malcolm Muggeridge interviewing John Reith

John Reith

credit: BBC 2

In his blog of the 6th of September Jack Windsor Lewis mentions an interview conducted by Malcolm Muggeridge ( = MM) in 1967 with John Reith ( = JR), former director of the BBC.

Malcolm Muggeridge

credit: BBC2

A section of that television interview was broadcast in Melvyn 'pink shirt' Bragg's BBC feature "RP RIP".

What follows is the script of an excerpt of the interview as played by Melvyn Bragg in his feature. I had to leave out two short sections which were incomprehensible to me (they are marked red). Should any of my readers be able to decipher them if they have access to the transmission, I'd be glad to add them.

MM	Your BBC men all spoke, or presumably were conditioned to speak in a sort of educated Southern English voice, which became known as the BBC accent and was one of the numerable ways in which the BBC strongly influenced social attitudes. Now why was it that you wanted them all to speak like that rather than in some rich regional way like ... as you do yourself?
JR	Do I speak very definitely Scottish?
MM	Very!
JR	What do you call the stuff that's coming down that chimney?
MM	[sʊt]
JR	All right. The Scot and the Northener would say [suːt] - as broad as that. I think I say something between the two keeping the purity of the vowel or double vowel: [sʊt]. [suːt] - [suˑt] - [sʊt]. Now I was just vehemently opposed to what variously has been called the Oxford accent or the south-eastern accent such as 'the [ˈθɪɐtɐ]', 'the [ˈfɑːsaɪd]' with more of the FEH's, you see, they are disappearing and the vowel becoming indeterminate: [ˈθɪɐtɐ], [ˈfɑːsaɪd], [θɪɐ]
MM	How did you arrive at your particular, the particular style of the BBC announcer?
JR	I had a first-class man appointed to take charge of announcers to give them all sorts of advice and instruction as to how to read inflections and everything and how to pronounce [the voice of Arthur Lloyd James is heard demonstrating the pronunciation of a few isolated words], and moreover I got a committee established with the Poet Laureate on it and Bernard Shaw and all sorts of well-known people who'd made a study of pronunciation.
MM	But the interesting point in terms of social history is that this particular accent which the BBC produced somehow identified the BBC with a certain section of society, certain social trends so that to this day the BBC is thought of as the organ of the, as it were, genteel and respectable elements in society.
JR	Anything wrong with that?
MM	Erm ... well, except that, after all, the people who speak in this standard way are in fact a minority. In the public mind how people spoke on the BBC was associated with a certain type of middle-class education, a certain type of middle-class life, ... erm ... so that it came to seem an organ.
JR	Came to seem?
MM	Yes.
JR	Came to seem!
MM	Yes.
JR	Who's responsible for that?
MM	Well ... I'm not saying anybody is responsible; I'm just saying that something had happened as a result of the decision that you took.
JR	Would you have taken anything different! Look! I ... I'm ... I'm sorry if local dialects are disappearing.

The dialogue is fascinating and amusing at the same time, isn't it?

PS: The bits marked blue in the interview were deciphered/explained by Jack Windsor Lewis, whose help is gratefully acknowledged.

PT's transcription workbook - some observations, #5

Chapter 4 - 'Allophones' -  starts with some musings on the phoneme /l/:

[...] linguists usually distinguish between two varieties, known as clear and dark [...]. The two varieties never contrast with each other in English and so are never responsible for creating differences in meaning. This is because the two varieties are distributed differently in English words; (60)

Certain varieties of English such as General American, Canadian, Glaswegian English (as well as some varieties of Australian English) predominantly have dark /l/ in almost all contexts. Cum grano salis the last sentence in the above quotation is acceptable if we restrict its applicability to what PT calls SESP (aka RP, GB, ...).

PT introduces the terms allophone and phoneme, the distinction between broad and narrow transcription and the one between slant and square brackets. Coming back to the two /l/-sounds, he describes their distribution (in SESP!):

[...] the clear [l] occurs before vowels and the consonant /j/, whereas the dark [ɫ]/[lˠ] occurs before consonants, except /j/, and at the end of words. (61)

This sentence is a bit vague as it stands, I think. Clear l occurs before vowels even if the /l/-phoneme ends a word but abuts with an initial vowel of a following word and both words are slurred. As regards the distribution of the dark variant, one must not forget to mention syllabic l, which is dark as well. One might even say that in many (all?) varieties of English there is not a binary distinction but rather a continuum from light to dark l (see John Maidment's blog of the 13th of May, 2011).

PT then illustrates various other allophone variants of phonemes such as

• aspirated and unaspirated plosives, e.g. [ph, p˺]
• glottal reinforcement and glottal replacement of plosives, e.g. [ʔp, ʔ]
• flapping of /t/, e.g. but I as [bʌt̬ aɪ]
• devoicing of canonically voiced consonants, e.ɡ. [b̥]
• fronting, backing and rounding of consonants in their respective environments
• nasalisation of vowels adjacent to nasal consonants
• pre-fortis clipping of vowels
• pre-l breaking and pre-r breaking as in [fiːəɫ] and [ˈsɪəriəs]
• smoothing of a long monophthong or diphthong plus a weak vowel as when liable becomes [ˈlaəbɫ]
• diphthongisation of /i:, u:/, e.ɡ. in [t^hɪi] or [t^hʊu]

This ends my series on PT's workbook for the time being.
I shall still recommend this book to my students, but with some accompanying comments.


Addendum: See also Alex Rotatori's critical evaluation here.

PT's transcription workbook - some observations, #4

credit: Resource International
copyright limitations here

Chapter 3 of Paul Tench's transcription workbook bears the title "Word Stress".

As to be expected of a book on transcription the concepts of primary stress, secondary stress and of non-stress are introduced and exemplified. When it comes to detecting degrees of prominence in a polysyllabic word, problems may arise as to where and how many stresses should be indicated. But do we really need to indicate secondary stress in a disyllabic word such as blackbird because the second syllable contains a long vowel?

PT also briefly touches upon the phenomenon of stress shift: fundaˈmental when pronounced in isolation, but ˈfundamental iˈdeas as a phrase. When you take a look at LPD's information box on stress shift (p. 784), you will find a similar example but with a slightly different stress pattern: ˌ fundamental miˈstake. PT claims that the words pronunciation, university and communication behave in a like manner. LPD3, however, does not indicate the possibility of stress shift by adding a wedge sign to these words. This is not to say that stress shift is impossible or even unlikely, but it illustrates that it is notoriously difficult to agree upon stress assignment.

Compound stress¹ is also touched upon briefly. Combining forms containing a Greek or Latin bound stem are included, e.g. homophone, homograph, homorganic.
Let's see how PT's workbook and the 3 pronunciation dictionaries treat these as regards stress assignment:

lemma	PT	LPD3	EPD17	ODP
homophone	ˈhomoˌphone	ˈhomophone	ˈhomophone	ˈhomophone
homograph	ˈhomoˌgraph	ˈhomograph	ˈhomograph	ˈhomograph
homorganic	ˌhomorˈganic	ˌhomorˈganic	ˌhomorˈganic	<no entry>

One final comment on this chapter: On p. 58 we read:

Notice too that a compound itself can become one part of another compound: thus, two secondary stresses are required
3.13 railway, railway lines, railway station ___________________

Do we really need two secondary stress marks? Why not ˈrailway ˌstation (see LPD3 lemma railway)?


¹ Be informed that summer heat can compound stress of expecting mothers. :)