On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/
-
Sylwester Jaworski
and
Edward Gillian
Abstract
Even though rhotics are very common sounds in the languages of the world, there is a consensus in the literature that they are articulatorily complex. Not only do they tend to be acquired at the last stages of the acquisition period, but also their distribution is usually constrained (cf. Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996; Żygis 2005). As a consequence of being complex, rhotics manifest a strong susceptibility to phonetic change. The present paper reports the results of an experiment that aimed at describing various physical realisations of the Polish phoneme /r/ placed in intervocalic position. The data presented in the article show that in this position speakers do not articulate a tap, but in most cases they produce either a fricative or an approximant. In the light of the data, high vowels constitute an environment that is more conducive to this sort of reduction than mid or low vowels.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
Articles in the same Issue
- Part one. Complexity in Natural Linguistics. Guest edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler
- The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology
- Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony
- A "natural" approach to text complexity
- Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity
- Part two. Regular articles
- A current trend or a historic remnant? The case of a Lovari verb-forming suffix
- Two communicative levels and twofold illocutionary force in televised political debates
- Common Semantic Denominators of the Internal Vowel Alternation System in English
- Indexical pronouns: Generic uses as clues to their structure
- A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing
- On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/
- Lexical and functional decomposition in syntax: A view from phonology
Articles in the same Issue
- Part one. Complexity in Natural Linguistics. Guest edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler
- The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology
- Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony
- A "natural" approach to text complexity
- Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity
- Part two. Regular articles
- A current trend or a historic remnant? The case of a Lovari verb-forming suffix
- Two communicative levels and twofold illocutionary force in televised political debates
- Common Semantic Denominators of the Internal Vowel Alternation System in English
- Indexical pronouns: Generic uses as clues to their structure
- A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing
- On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/
- Lexical and functional decomposition in syntax: A view from phonology
