Sheila’s roses (are in the paddick): reduced vowels in Australian English
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Andrew Butcher
Abstract
In many northern hemisphere Englishes, there is a contrast between /ə/ and a vowel usually identified as /ɪ/ in word pairs such as visas and eases, affect and effect. However, in the southern hemisphere the so-called weak vowel merger is said to prevail, whereby the unstressed vowels in the above pairs of words are considered to be phonologically identical. We suggest that the merger is by no means complete in Australian English. It has also been found in speakers of several English accents that /ə/ is lower and more retracted in word-final position than in non-final positions, although the precise nature of the conditioning environments remains somewhat unclear. To further investigate the phonological status and phonetic quality of weak vowels in a non-rhotic variety of English, we measured the weak vowels of 42 young female adults who grew up in South Australia. We also looked at an issue confined to only a few accents of English - the occurrence of a fronted weak vowel preceding a velar coda consonant. Six categories of schwa were investigated, but five of these were able to be collapsed into two major types: non-final schwa coincides almost completely on the formant plot with AusEng stressed /ɜː/, whereas word-final schwa is centred between /ɐ/ and /a/. This confirms that previous findings for American English do not hold for Australian English, as we show that conditioning is purely phonological. In the sixth (pre-velar) environment, all speakers produced a front weak vowel [ɪ̈] in at least one word. Just under half the group had this vowel in all words in this environment, but the remainder only in one or two of the three word types. This may be a change in progress, proceeding by lexical diffusion and influenced by orthography. The front weak vowel, presumably originally an allophone of /ə/ in the pre-velar environment, is being replaced with the central vowel [ə] found elsewhere. As this process is incomplete, many speakers currently have a partial contrast between two weak vowels.
Abstract
In many northern hemisphere Englishes, there is a contrast between /ə/ and a vowel usually identified as /ɪ/ in word pairs such as visas and eases, affect and effect. However, in the southern hemisphere the so-called weak vowel merger is said to prevail, whereby the unstressed vowels in the above pairs of words are considered to be phonologically identical. We suggest that the merger is by no means complete in Australian English. It has also been found in speakers of several English accents that /ə/ is lower and more retracted in word-final position than in non-final positions, although the precise nature of the conditioning environments remains somewhat unclear. To further investigate the phonological status and phonetic quality of weak vowels in a non-rhotic variety of English, we measured the weak vowels of 42 young female adults who grew up in South Australia. We also looked at an issue confined to only a few accents of English - the occurrence of a fronted weak vowel preceding a velar coda consonant. Six categories of schwa were investigated, but five of these were able to be collapsed into two major types: non-final schwa coincides almost completely on the formant plot with AusEng stressed /ɜː/, whereas word-final schwa is centred between /ɐ/ and /a/. This confirms that previous findings for American English do not hold for Australian English, as we show that conditioning is purely phonological. In the sixth (pre-velar) environment, all speakers produced a front weak vowel [ɪ̈] in at least one word. Just under half the group had this vowel in all words in this environment, but the remainder only in one or two of the three word types. This may be a change in progress, proceeding by lexical diffusion and influenced by orthography. The front weak vowel, presumably originally an allophone of /ə/ in the pre-velar environment, is being replaced with the central vowel [ə] found elsewhere. As this process is incomplete, many speakers currently have a partial contrast between two weak vowels.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- On the nature of speech dynamics: approaches to studying synchronic variation and diachronic change 1
-
Part 1: Empirical perspectives on diachronic change
- Fifty years of monophthong and diphthong shifts in Mainstream Australian English 17
- Coarticulation guides sound change: an acoustic-phonetic study of real-time change in word-initial /l/ over four decades of Glaswegian 49
- The impact of automated phonetic alignment and formant tracking workflows on sound change measurement 89
- One place, two speech communities: differing responses to sound change in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian English in a small rural town 117
- Prosodic change in 100 years: the fall of the rise-fall in an Albanian variety 145
-
Part 2: Factors conditioning synchronic variation
- Control of larynx height in vowel production revisited: a real-time MRI study 175
- Sheila’s roses (are in the paddick): reduced vowels in Australian English 207
- The future of the queen: how to pronounce “König✶innen” ‘gender-neutrally’ in German 245
- Synchronic variation and diachronic change: mora-counting and syllable-counting dialects in Japanese 273
- Reconstructing the timeline of a consonantal change in a German dialect: evidence from agent-based modeling 307
-
Part 3: Theoretical approaches at the interface between synchronic variation and diachronic change
- On (mis)aligned innovative perception and production norms 343
- Phonological patterns and dependency relations may arise from aerodynamic factors 369
- Actuation without production bias 395
- Understanding the role of broadcast media in sound change 425
- Connecting prosody and duality of patterning in diachrony, typology, phylogeny, and ontogeny 453
- Index 483
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- On the nature of speech dynamics: approaches to studying synchronic variation and diachronic change 1
-
Part 1: Empirical perspectives on diachronic change
- Fifty years of monophthong and diphthong shifts in Mainstream Australian English 17
- Coarticulation guides sound change: an acoustic-phonetic study of real-time change in word-initial /l/ over four decades of Glaswegian 49
- The impact of automated phonetic alignment and formant tracking workflows on sound change measurement 89
- One place, two speech communities: differing responses to sound change in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian English in a small rural town 117
- Prosodic change in 100 years: the fall of the rise-fall in an Albanian variety 145
-
Part 2: Factors conditioning synchronic variation
- Control of larynx height in vowel production revisited: a real-time MRI study 175
- Sheila’s roses (are in the paddick): reduced vowels in Australian English 207
- The future of the queen: how to pronounce “König✶innen” ‘gender-neutrally’ in German 245
- Synchronic variation and diachronic change: mora-counting and syllable-counting dialects in Japanese 273
- Reconstructing the timeline of a consonantal change in a German dialect: evidence from agent-based modeling 307
-
Part 3: Theoretical approaches at the interface between synchronic variation and diachronic change
- On (mis)aligned innovative perception and production norms 343
- Phonological patterns and dependency relations may arise from aerodynamic factors 369
- Actuation without production bias 395
- Understanding the role of broadcast media in sound change 425
- Connecting prosody and duality of patterning in diachrony, typology, phylogeny, and ontogeny 453
- Index 483
