The Handbook of English Pronunciation

Marnie Reed, John Levis, Marnie Reed, John M. Levis

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781119055266, 9781118314470
• eBook ISBN: 9781118346808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of English Pronunciation presents a comprehensive exploration of English pronunciation with essential topics for applied linguistics researchers and teachers, including language acquisition, varieties of English, historical perspectives, accent's changing role, and connections to discourse, technology, and pedagogy.

• Provides thorough descriptions of all elements of English pronunciation
• Features contributions from a global list of authors, reflecting the finest scholarship available
• Explores a careful balance of issues and topics important to both researchers and teachers
• Provides a historical understanding of the importance of pronunciation and examines some of the major ways English is pronounced today throughout the world
• Considers practical concerns about how research and practice interact in teaching pronunciation in the classroom

Part I
The History of English Pronunciation

1
The Historical Evolution of English Pronunciation

JEREMY SMITH

Introduction

Since at least the nineteenth century, the study of sound-change has been at the heart of English historical linguistics and our current state of knowledge depends on the insights of generations of scholars. This chapter aims simply to give a broad outline of the current “state of the art”, confronting basic questions of historical explanation. What does it mean to “account for” or “explain” a sound-change? How far can sound-changes be “explained”? How does one practise English historical phonology?

It is held here that historical phonology is as much history as phonology, and this insight means that evidential questions need to be addressed throughout. To that end, evidential questions are addressed from the outset. The chapter proceeds through the examination of a series of case studies from the history of English, ranging from the period when English emerged from the other Germanic dialects to become a distinct language to residualisms found in present-day varieties.

Overall, the chapter invites readers to reflect on their own practice as students of historical phonology; the explanations offered are, it is held here, plausible ones but by no means closed to argument. Good historiographical practice – for academic disciplines are of course collective endeavours – demands that such explanations should always be contested, and if readers can come up with better, more plausible explanations for the points made here, that is a wholly positive development, indicating new ways forward for the subject.

A question of evidence

Present-Day English is full of phonological variation; this variation, which is the outcome of complex and dynamic interactions across time and space, is valuable evidence for past states of English. To illustrate this point, we might take the varying British English pronunciations of the words (a) good, (b) food, and (c) flood: a Scot will commonly rhyme (a) and (b); speakers from northern England typically rhyme (a) and (c); southern British English speakers rhyme none of them. Another example: southern British English speakers have a phonemic distinction between /ŋ/ and /n/ in, for example, sing, sin; northern English speakers do not, since they retain a final plosive in sing and for them [ŋ] is environmentally conditioned (and thus an allophone of, and not a distinct phoneme from, /n/). Many speakers of Scots, the traditional dialect and accent of Scotland, as well as speakers from north-east England, will pronounce the vowels in words such as cow, now, house with a close rounded back monophthong rather than (as southern speakers do) with a diphthong (see further Wells 1982).

Those learning to read, or non-native speakers, might reasonably expect, in a supposedly phonographic language such as English, that words ending in the same three letters, viz. –ood, in the written mode, should rhyme when read aloud, but, as we have just observed, in many accents of English they do not. The reason for the variation, and for the mismatch between spelling and sound, is that sound-changes have occurred since the spelling-system of English was established and standardized, and that these sound-changes have diffused differently through the lexicon in different parts of the English-speaking continuum. Some changes have only been adopted in some varieties.¹

The outcome of such patterns of divergence and diffusion is a body of residualisms, i.e., older forms of the language that remain in some accents but have ceased to be used in others (see Ogura 1987, 1990; Wang 1969; Wells 1982). The Scots/north-eastern English monophthongal pronunciations, for instance, of cow, now, house reflect the monophthongal pronunciation that seems to have existed in English a thousand years ago, cf. Old English cū, nū, hūs respectively. These pronunciations are therefore residualisms.

Residualisms are one of the major sources of evidence for the reconstruction of past states of pronunciation. We might illustrate the process of reconstruction using residualisms by comparing the British, Australian, and US pronunciations of the word atom; British and Australian speakers pronounce the medial consonant as /t/ whereas US speakers characteristically use a voiced alveolar tap, meaning that in US English the word atom is a homophone with Adam. It is usual to consider the US pronunciation to be an innovation, whereas the other usages are residualisms, the evidence for this interpretation being that US speakers characteristically voice intervocalic sounds in derived forms, cf. US English intervocalic /d/ (however precisely realized) in hitter beside final /t/ in hit, beside /t/ in both environments in British and Australian usage. Such reconstructive processes are, of course, the basis of comparative linguistics.

However, deciding what is a residualism and what is not can be a difficult matter without further information. To take a large-scale example: the phenomenon known as Grimm’s law (the “First Consonant Shift”), whereby a series of consonants in the Germanic languages seem to have undergone a comprehensive redistribution within the lexicon, is traditionally described as a Germanic innovation. Illustrative examples are given in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Grimm’s law cognates in Germanic and non-Germanic languages.

	Germanic examples	Non-Germanic examples
/f/ - /p/	English fish, Norwegian fisk	Latin piscis, French poisson, Welsh pysg
/θ/ - /t/	English three, Icelandic þrír	Latin trēs, French trois
/h/ - /k/	English hound, German Hund	Latin canis, Welsh ci, Tocharian ku

However, some scholars, arguing that a similar process is also found in Armenian, like Germanic a “peripheral” language within the Indo-European group but at the eastern as opposed to the western end of that language-family’s extent, have argued that Grimm’s law represents a residualism rather than an innovation. This so-called “glottalic” theory is highly controversial, but that it has found purchase with at least some scholars indicates the nature of the problem (see Smith 2007: ch. 4).

The study of residualisms as evidence for the history of pronunciation, therefore, is – where possible – combined by researchers with other sources of evidence: sound-recordings, available since the end of the nineteenth century; contemporary comments on past pronunciation; past spelling-practices, given the mapping between speech and writing found in phonographic languages; and the practices of poets, in terms of rhyme, alliteration, and metre. Taken together, these various pieces of evidence allow scholars to develop plausible – though never, of course, absolutely proven – accounts of past accents, and sometimes even to offer plausible explanations for how particular accentual features emerged. A series of case studies follows, with special reference to the history of English, to illustrate the process of developing such plausible accounts and explanations.

Case study 1

Voiced and voiceless fricatives: development of new phonemic categories

The first of these case studies deals with the Present-Day English phonemic distinction between voiced and voiceless fricatives, a distinction that has emerged during the history of English and is reflected – albeit sporadically and unevenly – in Present-Day English spelling. The example also allows us to ask a certain key, and surprisingly neglected, question: what is a sound-change?

One such distinction, which often puzzles present-day learners of English, is to do with the pronunciation of the word house; when used as a verb, the word ends with /z/ but, when used as a noun, it ends with /s/. The usual historical explanation is as follows: in Old English, voiceless [s] and voiced [z] were allophones of the same phoneme, conventionally represented by /s/, and therefore in complementary distribution within the sound-system. It seems that /s/ was pronounced voiced intervocalically, but voiceless when a word-final. The Old English word for “house” (noun) was hūs, while the Old English word for “house” (verb) was hūsian; when, in the transition from Old to Early Modern English, inflectional endings such as –ian were reduced and ultimately lost, a voiced sound emerged in final position in words such as “house” (verb), leading to the current pattern for the sound’s deployment. Since “house” (noun) and “house” (verb) now have distinct meanings marked by replacement of single word-final segments, the two words have come to form a minimal pair for the purposes of phonological analysis, and the phonemes /s, z/, now in contrastive distribution, may thus be distinguished.

Of course, the evidence we have for the initial complementary distribution can only be deduced; direct evidence, in the form of contemporary commentary or distinctive spellings from Old English times, is almost entirely lacking and the distribution of forms means that poetic evidence is not to be had. The issue is one of plausibility, in that the proce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The History of English Pronunciation
• Part II: Describing English Pronunciation
• Part III: Pronunciation and Discourse
• Part IV: Pronunciation of the Major Varieties of English
• Part V: Pronunciation and Language Acquisition
• Part VI: Pronunciation Teaching
• Index
• End User License Agreement