Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T21:04:46.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Operationalising salience: definite article reduction in the North of England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2012

PÉTER RÁCZ
PÉTER RÁCZ*
Affiliation:
Graduiertenkolleg DFG 1624/1 Frequenzeffekte in der Sprache, Universität Freiburg, Starkenstraße 44, 79104 Freiburg, Germanypeter.racz@frequenz.uni-freiburg.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Definite article reduction (DAR) is a dialectal variable confined to the North of England. In DAR dialects, the standard article alternates with a reduced one, which is mostly realised as a glottal stop and sometimes as a voiceless fricative before vowels. DAR is a salient sociolinguistic marker in the sense of Labov (1972) and Trudgill (1986). This article argues that its salience is derived from its status as a good boundary marker that listeners can utilise in order to segment the speech stream.

Salience is the property of a variable which makes it cognitively or perceptually prominent both for speakers of the dialect and for speakers of other dialects. DAR is a salient marker inasmuch as it shows variation and style shifting, can be an identity marker, and has long been recognised by layperson and linguist alike as a typical feature of Northern speech.

It will be argued that DAR is salient since it is a good word-boundary marker. The reduced article constitutes domains of low transitional probability, which listeners exploit to segment the speech signal. It has been recognised that word segmentation plays a major role in speech processing and that listeners use statistical inferences (besides other kinds of information) to locate word boundaries. The conclusion is that the salience of DAR can be derived from its distributions, as these distributions result in the variable's perceptual prominence.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 57 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altendorf, Ulrike. 2003. Estuary English: Levelling at the interface of RP and South-Eastern British English. Tübingen: Günter Narr.Google Scholar
Auer, Peter, Barden, Brigit & Grosskopf, Beate. 1998. Subjective and objective parameters determining ‘salience’ in long-term dialect accommodation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2, 163–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, Harald, Piepenbrock, Richard & van Rijn, Hedderik. 1993. The CELEX lexical database. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 1987. Markedness and salience in second-language acquisition. Language Learning 37, 385–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cairns, Paul, Shillcock, Richard, Chater, Nick & Levy, Joe. 1997. Bootstrapping word boundaries: A bottom-up corpus-based approach to speech segmentation. Cognitive Psychology 33, 111–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dilley, LauraC., Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie & Ostendorf, Mari. 1996. Glottalization of word-initial vowels as a function of prosodic structure. Journal of Phonetics 24, 423–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabricius, Anne H. 2000. T-glottaling between stigma and prestige: A sociolinguistic study of modern RP. PhD thesis, Copenhagen Business School.Google Scholar
Ghyselen, Anne-Sophie. 2010. Attitudes towards language variation in Flanders: A matched-guise investigation. Talk given at the ExApp Conference in Groningen.Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz J. 1992. English phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glauser, Beat. 1984. A phonology of present-day speech in Grassington, North Yorkshire. Munich: Francke Verlag.Google Scholar
Harris, John. 1996. Phonological output is redundancy-free and fully interpretable. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 8.Google Scholar
Harris, John & Lindsey, Geoffrey. 2000. Vowel patterns in mind and sound. In Phonological knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Zeilig S. 1955. Phoneme to morpheme. Language 31, 190–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer. 2000. Causes and consequences of word structure. PhD thesis, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Johnson, Keith. 1997. Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In Johnson, Keith & Mullennix, John W. (eds.), Talker variability in speech processing, 45–65. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Mark J. 1999. The phonology of definite article reduction. In Dialectal variation in English: Proceedings of the Harold Orton Centenary Conference 1998 (Leeds Studies in English 30), 103–21.Google Scholar
Jones, Mark J. 2002. The origin of Definite Article Reduction in northern English dialects: Evidence from dialect allomorphy. English Language and Linguistics 6, 325–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Mark J. 2007. Glottals and grammar: Definite article reduction and morpheme boundaries. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics 12.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter W., Houston, Derek M. & Newsome, Mary. 1999. The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology 39, 159–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, Peter W., Luce, Paul A. & Charles-Luce, Janet. 1994. Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of Memory and Language 33, 630–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 1985. A sociophonetic study of connected speech processes in Cambridge English: an outline and some results. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics 4, Dept of Linguistics, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 2002. Koineization and accommodation. In Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P. & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change, 669–702. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul & Williams, Ann. 2002. ‘Salience’ as an explanatory factor in language change: Evidence from dialect levelling in urban England. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 86, 81–110.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, Herrmann, Tanja, Pietsch, Lukas & Wagner, Susanne (eds.). 2005. A comparative grammar of British English dialects. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change: Social factors. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, Ravindranath, Maya, Weldon, Tracey, Baranowski, Maciej & Nagy, Naomi. 2009. Listeners’ sensitivity to the frequency of sociolinguistic variables. Ms.Google Scholar
Lodge, Ken. 2010. Th'interpretation of t'definite article in t'North of England. English Language and Linguistics 14, 111–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacFarlane, Andrew & Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2010. One of them sounds more sort of, Glasgow Uni-ish: Social variation and fine phonetic variation in Glasgow. Talk given at the ExApp Conference in Groningen.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 2003. Probabilistic phonology: Discrimination and robustness. In Bod, Rens, Hay, Jennifer & Jannedy, Stefanie (eds.), Probabilistic linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. 1996. Whaddayaknow? The modes of folk linguistic awareness. Language Awareness 5 (1), 40–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rupp, Laura. 2007. The (socio-)linguistic cycle of Definite Article Reduction. Folia Linguistica Historica 28, 215–50.Google Scholar
Rupp, Laura & Page-Verhoeff, Hanne. 2005. Pragmatic and historical aspects of Definite Article Reduction in northern English dialects. English World Wide 26, 325–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, Jenny R., Aslin, Richard N. & Newport, Elissa L.. 1996a. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, Jenny R., Newport, Elissa L. & Aslin, Richard N.. 1996b. Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 606–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schirmunski, Viktor. 1930. Sprachgeschichte und Siedlungsmundarten. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag.Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna & Hollmann, Willem. 2011. Definite article reduction in Lancashire dialect: On constructions, frequency, and (perhaps) identity. To appear in Cognitive Linguistics.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2003. The phonology of modern urban Scots. In Corbett, J., McClure, Derrick & Stuart-Smith, Jane (eds.), The Edinburgh companion to Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Roeder, Rebecca V.. 2009. Variation in the English definite article: Socio-historical linguistics in t'speech community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13, 435–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Upton, Clive, Parry, David, David, John & Widdowson, Allison. 1994. Survey of English dialects: The dictionary and grammar. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar