Non Rhotic

6 Key excerpts on "Non Rhotic"

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  eBook - PDF

  International English

  A Guide to Varieties of English Around the World

  • Peter Trudgill, Jean Hannah(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (b) [ʔ] usually occurs before /t∫/ and in certain consonant clusters, as in church [t∫з:ʔt], box [bɒʔks], simply [sɪmʔplɪ], where it is known as ‘glot -tal reinforcement’ or ‘glottalization’ Neither of these types of pronunciation is normally taught to foreign-ers, but students should be aware of them. It is probable that the occur-rence of [ʔ] in words such as those in (b), in particular, helps lead to the impression many North Americans have that the RP accents sound ‘clipped’ and that its absence in either environment contributes to the ‘foreignness’ of non-native accents. ‘English’ types of English 19 4 /r/. (a) As is well known, some English accents are ‘rhotic’ or ‘ r -ful’ and oth-ers are ‘non-rhotic’ or ‘ r -less’. Rhotic accents are those which actually pronounce /r/, corresponding to orthographic r , in words like far and farm: /fɑ:r/, /fɑ:rm/. The consonant r in these positions – word-finally before a pause, or before a consonant – is known as ‘non-prevocalic /r/’. Most of south-western England, together with part of Lancashire in the north-west, have rhotic accents. Non-rhotic accents do not have /r/ in these positions and have, for example, farm as /fɑ:m/. Most of southern and eastern EngEng regional accents are non-rhotic. RP is a non-rhotic accent and thus has no contrasts of the following type: ma mar cawed cord (b) Speakers of many non-rhotic accents, while not pronouncing ortho-graphic r word-finally before a pause or before a consonant, do pro -nounce it where there is a following word which begins with a vowel: It’s not far no /r/ He’s far behind no /r/ She’s far away /r/ pronounced That is to say, words such as far have two pronunciations, depending on whether or not there is a following vowel. In non-rhotic accents, the /r/ that occurs in far away , etc., is known as linking / r /.

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  eBook - PDF

  A Critical Introduction to Phonetics

  • Ken Lodge(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  8.2 Rhoticity The other example is rhoticity, that is, the occurrence of coda /r/, which we discussed in Chapter Four in relation to differences between SBE and GA. (Note that I use slant lines and an ordinary r-symbol to indicate a phonological entity which has a variety of phonetic realizations.) Within the British Isles rhoticity occurs, though it is on the decrease in some areas. For instance, in the South-East of England, in the 1970s, when I was recording speakers for my book on accent variation (Lodge [1984]), only speakers over about forty years of age still used rhoticity. Today it is very difficult to find a local rhotic speaker in Sussex, for example. On the other hand, there are areas, even in England, where it is still quite widespread, for example, the West Country (including urban Bristol) and parts of urban Lancashire (e.g., Bury). In addition, it is the norm in Scotland and in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. The com-monest articulations for /r/ in rhotic accents are an alveolar approximant [j] or a retroflex approximant [^]. Retroflex articulation affects more than just the approximant in the coda. All coda consonants involved in what we might call an r-coda, that is, one containing an /r/, are retroflex, and in many cases the articulation of the preceding nuclear vowel is affected, too. This is not surpris-ing since the tip of the tongue is either curled back or retracted for the retro-flexion, so this tongue posture is retained for the whole of the rhyme. Even in speakers who omit the approximant posture, the retroflexion remains, so we find realizations such as those in (8.2). (8.2) [kcudJ IMJ card [bs.jrje] [bsr]e] Burnley (a town in Lancashire) Some speakers in the rhotic areas of Lancashire do not have a coda approxi-mant, that is, are non-rhotic, but the preceding vocoid articulation is short before another consonant.

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  Distinctive Feature Theory

  • T. Alan Hall(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Maddieson (1984: 82) presents other generalizations on r-sounds, which will be discussed in section 3.4. (3) Generalizations on Irl i. The position in the phonotactic patterns of languages: r-sounds are vowel-adjacent elements in the syllable, occurring between vowels and other consonants in the same syllable (if such clustering is possible in a particular language). The pattern is: CrVrC. ii. r-sounds, while non-syllabic consonants in general, often have a syllabic variant. It appears that languages which allow for sylla-bic consonants at all will allow for syllabic /r/. 5 iii. Rhotics of one type often alternate with rhotics of another type (synchronically or diachronically). While alternations with other segments occur as well, the frequency and range of rhotic-inter-nal alternation is noteworthy and is found in families which are otherwise quite diverse; see Walsh Dickey (1997: section 3.3) for examples. iv. If a rhotic alternates with another rhotic in terms of stricture, the phonotactics of these r-sounds does not change; see below for examples, especially from French and German. The phonology of/ r/ 341 v. Phonological constraints and other generalizations such as those in i. to iv. above can refer to /r/ without any reference to the type of Id in question, see discussion of the /rVr/-constraint in Dutch below (section 4.2) and the positional restrictions on rhotics in Australian languages noted by Walsh Dickey (1997: section 3.3). The paradox, then, is this: how can a completely heterogenous class of sounds, with apparently no identifiable common property, func-tion as a unit in the languages of the world? Or, in other words: is Irl a fiction? Given present knowledge and the state of the art, it is clear that the unity of rhotics can only be found in their phonological behavior. But to the extent that current phonological theory relies on featural specifications of units and classes of such units, there must be some featural account of rhotics.

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  Pronunciation is in the Brain, not in the Mouth

  A Cognitive Approach to Teaching it

  • Edward Y. Odisho(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  There are scores of such cross-language pronunciation problems. With native speakers of Arabic learning English, the /ʧ/ as in is not a problem for those speakers of Iraqi Arabic as opposed to Egyptian, Lebanese or Syrians speakers because Ira-qis have the sound in their local dialect. The focus in this study 62 P RONUNCIATION IS IN THE B RAIN is essentially on interlanguage phonological and phonetic ac-cent. 4.3. P HONETIC AND P HONOLOGICAL A CCENTS From the functional perspective, the phonetic vs. phonological distinction in the nature of accent is extremely significant in teaching pronunciation. It was a major distinction that I devel-oped in the mid-1990s and began implementing in my classes. The distinction was in print in 2003. Pedagogically, it made a substantial difference in helping learners focus on more im-portant problems of pronunciation facing them rather than scratching on the surface of phonetic accent. One needs to understand the difference prior to any elabo-ration on the applied side of the dichotomy. Phonetic accent re-fers to a mispronunciation that does not result in a semantic (meaning) change, though it may negatively interfere with the proper comprehension of meaning due to partial detraction from the acceptable standard rendition of a given pronunciation. In other words, it is a mispronunciation that does not directly cause a miscomprehension , but it may hamper it or delay it and become a distraction. Let us now elaborate on the key words in the last statement. An example for the non-semantic nature of this ac-cent is the massive replacement of the English approximant /r/ (English [  ] and American [  ]) by a tap/flap [  ], or trill [r] or retroflex tap/flap [  ] by millions of learners of English. This re-placement does not cause a change in meaning in English; it simply phonetically deviates from the normal standard and ac-ceptable rendition of it.

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  Salience in Sociolinguistics

  A Quantitative Approach

  • Péter Rácz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This means that the rhotic gesture still takes place (the token is, strictly speaking, rhotic), but it simply comes too late to be heard. To put it differently, some non-rhotic tokens still have the articulatory ges -ture associated with rhoticity, as well as some acoustic cues on the preceding vowel. The whole thing is closely linked to variation in /r/ realisation itself: the typical work-ing-class variant of /r/, an alveolar flap or a central approximant, is much less audibly rhotic than the classic middle-class one, the retroflex approximant. What follows is that the working-class realisation may be connected, due to articulatory necessities, to processes which lead to /r/ vocalisation much more than the middle-class one. Another important aspect of derhoticisation as a derivative of gestural off-timing and varied tongue configurations (as discussed above) is that speakers might still as-sociate a vocalised coda /r/ token with a performed tongue gesture. I.e. they would think that a vocalised coda /r/ is still there. If a working-class speaker of Glasgow Ur -ban Scots tends to produce coda /r/-s with the respective tongue gesture but without any audible rhoticity, they could register similar derhoticised input tokens as linked to an (inaudible) tongue gesture (Koen Sebregts p.c.). The speaker would reason that if he or she speaks rhotic (even if you cannot hear it) then other people also speak rhotic, even if he or she cannot hear that either. This has a two-fold effect on the process in general: first, the change will proceed more slowly, as the inaudible tongue config-uration can linger on without any supporting acoustic cues of rhoticity, second, the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic tokens will be even more muddled, which renders them more difficult to use for social indexation. 118 | 7 Derhoticisation in Glasgow Social awareness to /r/ in Glasgow has been put to explicit test in a study by Mac-Farlane & Stuart-Smith (2012).

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  Studies in the History of the English Language

  A Millennial Perspective

  • Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell, Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Instead, the tongue tip points forward in a congur-ation Hagiwara called blade up (1994). Dellatre and Freeman (1968, re-ferred to in Hagiwara 1994) found six different tongue configurations for American English / r /, and two more in British English. However many ways there are to make this sound, they all have one thing in common: a very similar auditory effect (Ladefoged 1993: 84). Here, the mechanism of change from [ – ] to [ Ú ] is purely acoustic: the ma-jority of children learning English learn to make an acceptable r -sound one with the proper “auditory effect,” regardless of tongue position. Whether the tongue tip is up, down, or elsewhere does not matter, just so long as the resultant phone is sufficiently sonorant and rhotic. (Of course, some children fail to master [ – ] or [ Ú ], and there are speakers and dialects that substitute labiopalatals for rhotic / r /. See §4.3.3.) What constitutes rhotic-ity, however, is still an open question. Two relevant factors for English / r / are pharyngeal constriction and the lowering of the third formant (Lade-foged 1993: 84, 227; Lindau 1980). As seen by the large number of poss- On the development of English r 197 ible articulations that pass for / r / in English, it does not seem to matter much how these are achieved, just so long as they are. Of course, this leads to the question of when this articulatory variation started to appear. I believe that as soon as continuant r started appearing outside the phonologically-conditioned environment – i.e., once [ – ] started to appear in codas regardless of whether or not the following consonant was coronal – then other, non-retroflex realizations of / r / could appear. 4.2 R-Vocalization In Swedish and the non-rhotic varieties of English, another process has ap-plied to coda / r /. This change is R-Vocalization , which changes coda / r / to a kind of schwa.

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