Warren Maguire

Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories

Linguists have traditionally represented patterns of divergence within a language family in terms of either a ‘splits’ model, corresponding to a branching family tree structure, or the wave model, resulting in a (dialect) continuum. Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have tended to assume the former as a viable idealization also for the latter. But the contrast matters, for it typically reflects different processes in the real world: speaker populations either separated by migrations, or expanding over continuous territory. Since history often leaves a complex of both patterns within the same language family, ideally we need a single model to capture both, and tease apart the respective contributions of each. The ‘network’ type of phylogenetic method offers this, so we review recent applications to language data. Most have used lexical data, encoded as binary or multi-state characters. We look instead at continuous distance measures of divergence in phonetics. Our output networks combine branch- and continuum-like signals in ways that correspond well to known histories (illustrated for Germanic, and particularly English). We thus challenge the traditional insistence on shared innovations, setting out a new, principled explanation for why complex language histories can emerge correctly from distance measures, despite shared retentions and parallel innovations.

The sound patterns of Englishes: Representing phonetic similarity

Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.

T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics

Accents and dialects of English and Scots in Britain have been under active investigation for many decades, as reported through the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather et al. 1975–86), Wells’ three-volume compendium (1982), and a host of detailed studies of individual varieties. There are also welcome recent signs of the reintegration of variation data into theoretical discussion (see Henry 2002, Cornips & Corrigan 2005a and Trousdale & Adger 2007 for morphosyntax, as well as Anttila 2002 and Coetzee & Pater 2011 for phonology). Nonetheless, the precise structural, geolinguistic and sociolinguistic patterning of many features of vernacular Englishes in the UK is still largely unknown.

A Linguistic ‘Time Capsule’: The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English

The general goal of this chapter is to outline the models and methods underpinning the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE), created by the amalgamation of two separate corpora of recorded speech from the same geographical location. The earliest of these was collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (see Strang, 1968; Pellowe et al., 1972; Pellowe and Jones, 1978; and Jones-Sargent, 1983). The more recent of the two was created between 1991 and 1994 for a project entitled Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC), which was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (see Milroy et al., 1997). More specifically, the chapter addresses four topics: (i) the objectives of the NECTE enhancement programme and the original aims of the TLS and PVC projects that are its foundation; (ii) the initial state of the sources on which the NECTE corpus is built; (iii) procedures for the amalgamation of these sources; and (iv) projected further developments of the resultant corpus and preliminary linguistic analyses of it.

The past, present and future of English dialects: Quantifying convergence, divergence and dynamic equilibrium

This article reports on research which seeks to compare and measure the similarities between phonetic transcriptions in the analysis of relationships between varieties of English. It addresses the question of whether these varieties have been converging, diverging, or maintaining equilibrium as a result of endogenous and exogenous phonetic and phonological changes. We argue that it is only possible to identify such patterns of change by the simultaneous comparison of a wide range of varieties of a language across a data set that has not been specifically selected to highlight those changes that are believed to be important. Our analysis suggests that although there has been an obvious reduction in regional variation with the loss of traditional dialects of English and Scots, there has not been any significant convergence (or divergence) of regional accents of English in recent decades, despite the rapid spread of a number of features such as TH-fronting.

Pre-R Dentalisation in northern England

Dental pronunciation of alveolar consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. This Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD) has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/- Realisation Effect and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint . It is less well known that PreRD is (or perhaps was) also a feature of a number of English varieties outside Ireland, particularly in traditional northern English dialects. This article analyses dialect data from northern England in order to determine the nature of PreRD there and its historical relations with the phenomenon in Irish English. In addition, it explores the phonological complexities of PreRD in light of the loss of rhoticity in traditional northern English dialects.

Mapping The Existing Phonology of English Dialects

Abstract Given its early date, breadth of coverage (geographical and linguistic) and the huge amount of data it contains, Alexander Elliss The Existing Phonology of EnglishDialects marks an extremely significant episode in British dialectology. Despite this, there has been very little in the way of detailed linguistic analysis of Ellis’s survey, and no attempt has been made to construct a linguistic atlas from the data it contains, although several studies have included a few preliminary maps based on it. Why is this so, and what might we discover if we did investigate this early survey of the dialects of English and Scots in more detail? The aim of this paper is to begin such an investigation and, in particular, to demonstrate that there is considerable mileage (and benefit) in mapping the data in Ellis (1889).

Identifying the Main Determinants of Phonetic Variation in the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English

Abstract The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English is a corpus of dialect speech from North-East England. It includes phonetic transcriptions of 63 interviews together with social data relating to each interviewee, and offers an opportunity to study the sociophonetics of Tyneside speech of the late 1960s. In a previous paper we began that study with an exploratory multivariate analysis of the transcriptions. The results were that speakers fell into clearly defined groups on the basis of their phonetic usage, and that these groups correlated well with social characteristics associated with the speakers. The present paper develops these results by trying to identify the main phonetic determinants of the speaker groups.

Introduction: what are mergers and can they be reversed?

In his foundational book on accents of English, Wells (1982: 374–5) describes the apparent merger of the vowels in the nurse and north lexical sets in Tyneside English (‘Geordie’) as follows: ‘In the broadest Geordie the lexical set nurse is merged with north , /ɔː/: work [wɔːk], first [fɔːst], shirt [ʃɔːt] (= short ).’

Pre-R dentalisation in Scotland

Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD), the dental pronunciation of /t/ and /d/ before /r/ and /ər/, is a well-known feature of English varieties throughout Ireland. PreRD is often accompanied by an /r/-Realisation Effect (RRE), whereby /r/ is pronounced as a tap after the dentalised consonant, and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint (MBC), such that PreRD is blocked by Class 2 morpheme boundaries. Although an Irish origin for PreRD has been suggested, the presence of PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in northern English dialects in a form nearly identical to what is found in Ireland suggests that the origins of PreRD lie instead in English in Britain. The possible existence of PreRD in Scotland is suspected, but definitive evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC there has never been published. In this article, I provide the first detailed analysis of these features in Scotland, using unpublished data collected as part of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland . It will be seen that there is substantial evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in Scots dialects. The presence of these features in Scotland has important consequences for their history in Britain, and confirms the British origin of PreRD in Ireland.