Joseph C. Salmons

Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic

The phonetic gesture of stop consonant aspiration, which is predictable in a Germanic language such as English, has been described traditionally as ranging from a ‘puff of air’ upon release of closure (Heffner 1950) to the segmental occurrence of a following voiceless glottal approximant /h/ (Trager & Smith 1951). Within the generative phonology paradigm, however, aspiration has been construed as a featural property rather than as an independent segment of its own, often casually identified simply as [+aspiration], or, following Chomsky & Halle (1968), as a positive specification resulting from ‘heightened subglottal pressure’. We take this kind of view here as well, employing a notation with superscript h ([C h ]) to indicate representations in which aspiration is encoded as an integral feature of the segment with which it is associated, while we explore the phonological realisation of aspiration in Germanic as the reflex manifestation of a spread or open glottis, an idea first advanced in the seminal work of Kim (1970), and since developed in Anderson & Ewens treatment of ‘|O| languages’ (1987: 195–199)

Articulation rate across dialect, age, and gender

The understanding of sociolinguistic variation is growing rapidly, but basic gaps still remain. Whether some languages or dialects are spoken faster or slower than others constitutes such a gap. Speech tempo is interconnected with social, physical and psychological markings of speech. This study examines regional variation in articulation rate and its manifestations across speaker age, gender and speaking situations (reading vs. free conversation). The results of an experimental investigation show that articulation rate differs significantly between two regional varieties of American English examined here. A group of Northern speakers (from Wisconsin) spoke significantly faster than a group of Southern speakers (from North Carolina). With regard to age and gender, young adults read faster than older adults in both regions; in free speech, only Northern young adults spoke faster than older adults. Effects of gender were smaller and less consistent; men generally spoke slightly faster than women. As the body of work on the sociophonetics of American English continues to grow in scope and depth, we argue that it is important to include fundamental phonetic information as part of our catalog of regional differences and patterns of change in American English.

VOWEL DURATION IN THREE AMERICAN ENGLISH DIALECTS

The article reports on an acoustic investigation into the duration of five American English vowels, those found in hid, head, had, hayed, and hide. We compare duration across three major dialect areas: the Inland North, Midlands, and South. The results show systematic differences across all vowels studied, with the longest durations in the South and the shortest in the Inland North, with the Midlands in an intermediate but distinct position. More generally, the sample differs from and complements other work on this question by including detailed evidence from relatively small, cohesive areas, each within a different established dialect region.

Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English

This acoustic study examines sound (vowel) change in apparent time across three successive generations of 123 adult female speakers ranging in age from 20 to 65 years old, representing three regional varieties of American English, typical of western North Carolina, central Ohio and southeastern Wisconsin. A set of acoustic measures characterized the dynamic nature of formant trajectories, the amount of spectral change over the course of vowel duration and the position of the spectral centroid. The study found a set of systematic changes to /I, ε, æ/ including positional changes in the acoustic space (mostly lowering of the vowels) and significant variation in formant dynamics (increased monophthongization). This common sound change is evident in both emphatic (articulated clearly) and nonemphatic (casual) productions and occurs regardless of dialect-specific vowel dispersions in the vowel space. The cross-generational and cross-dialectal patterns of variation found here support an earlier report by Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons (2011) which found this recent development in these three dialect regions in isolated citation-form words. While confirming the new North American Shift in different styles of production, the study underscores the importance of addressing the stress-related variation in vowel production in a careful and valid assessment of sound change.

Laryngeal enhancement in early Germanic

This paper builds on growing evidence that aspirated or fortis obstruents in languages like English and German are laryngeally marked, but that phonetic voicing in the (unmarked) unaspirated or lenis series is contextually determined. Employing the laryngeal feature set proposed by Halle & Stevens (1971), as incorporated into the ‘ dimensional theory ’ of laryngeal representation (Avery & Idsardi 2001, forthcoming), we develop an explicit account of this phonetic enhancement of phonological contrasts, which is widely known as ‘ passive voicing ’. We find that both passive voicing and inherent aspiration have been phonetic and phonological characteristics of the Germanic languages since the break-up of Indo-European, with laryngeally unmarked stops repeatedly enhanced by the gesture of [spread glottis]. A key implication of this view is that Verner’s Law was not an innovation specifically of early Germanic, but rather is an automatic (ultimately phonologised) reflex of passive voicing, itself a ‘ persistent change’ rising out of the enduring ‘ base of articulation ’ that came to characterise Germanic.

The evolution of a Bilingual Discourse Marking System: Modal particles and English markers in German-American dialects

Previous studies (Clyne, 1972, 1987; Salmons, 1990) have shown that German dialects in long-term contact with English have both borrowed key English discourse markers (well, you know, and so on) and lost much of the native discourse- marking system of German (most notably the “modal particles”). For the study of language- contact change, discourse markers are particularly interesting, first as items in a sense on the boundary between ordinary lexical items and structural borrowing, and second because they are typically salient to bilingual speakers. This paper uses Myers-Scottons Matrix Language- Frame model to examine new evidence on the diachronic process leading to this contemporary situation. We draw on the representation of spoken language in two German-language dramas written around the turn of the 20th century, one in Wisconsin and the other in Texas. The data suggest that English markers first entered German speech as emblematic codeswitches and eventually became established borrowings, which then paved the way for loss of the native system.

Legacy Specification in the Laryngeal Phonology of Dutch

Dutch consonant cluster assimilations have come to play a central role in the debate over whether laryngeal features are restrictedly privative (single-valued) or must be encoded as binary (marking both positive and negative values). It has been argued, in particular, that the negative specification [–voice] is necessary in order to capture the difference in directionality of assimilation between stop-final and fricative-final clusters in Dutch as well as to accommodate the contrary behavior of the past suffix - de . Under the dimensional theory of laryngeal representation, the present paper provides a fresh analysis of the Netherlandic facts without reference to negative feature values, focusing on the role of phonetic enhancement versus phonology proper. The exposition is anchored in the history of Dutch as a Germanic language that is to a great extent Romance-like in its laryngeal phonology, and takes into consideration evidence from dialects and experimental phonetics. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 8) at Indiana University, Bloomington, April 26–28, 2002, and a related paper, “Privativity and the Laws of Enhancement”, was held at a Linguistics Student Organization Colloquium, University of Wisconsin–Madison, in March 2002. In addition to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, we owe thanks to Anthony Buccini, Rob Howell, Monica Macaulay, Bert Vaux, and the audiences at both presentations for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

Domains and directionality in the evolution of German final fortition

Laryngeal realism (Honeybone 2005 ) holds that thoroughly voiced stops in a language like Dutch will be represented phonologically with the feature [voice], leaving the voiceless unaspirated stops laryngeally neutral, whereas the typically aspirated stops of a language like German are marked with the feature [spread glottis], rendering the passively voiced stops in this language neutral. These two languages also merge laryngeal oppositions in final environments, Dutch undergoing final devoicing but German final fortition. We apply the findings of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004 , 2006b ) to these distinctions in final laryngeal neutralisation, underscoring that the evolutionary approach to phonological alternation allows for non-assimilatory feature addition as well as loss. We examine in particular the known history of final fortition in German and find that the reference standard form of the language has evolved an alignment condition to the effect that a fortified syllable edge must match up with the morpheme edge.

GERMAN SUBSTRATE EFFECTS IN WISCONSIN ENGLISH: EVIDENCE FOR FINAL FORTITION

A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin, shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English final laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language varieties and contact situation involved are all well understood, provides good evidence for structural influence from a substrate and provides a challenge to conventional views of language contact

Prosodic prominence effects on vowels in chain shifts

This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns anddirectionsofshiftsinvowelsystemsovertime,weexaminetheroleofalargely neglectedparameterofstructuredheterogeneity:prosodicprominence.ExperimentaldatafromtwoMidwesterndialectsofAmericanEnglish—centralOhioandsouthcentral Wisconsin—show that, for the vowels studied here, the changes in vowel characteristics observed under higher degrees of prosodic prominence (or greater emphasis) correspond to the changes predicted by well-established principles of chainshifting.Anacousticstudyassessesvariationinprosodicprominencebyexamining formant frequencies at multiple locations in the course of vowel duration, whichprovidesinformationaboutvowelqualitydynamics.Aperceptualstudydetermines listeners’sensitivity to the obtained acoustic variation, as manifested in specific patterns of vowel identification, confusions, and category goodness ratings. Finally, a prosodically based explanation of the transmission of sound change is described, which offers new connections between structural and social factors in sound change, notably the roles of “social affect” and speaker gender.