Vowel length

TRAP/PALM/BATH

Scottish Standard English usually shows a single vowel for TRAP and PALM, and the same for BATH, represented here as /a/, though Abercrombie (1979: 75–76) observes that “quite a lot of people, particularly in Edinburgh” do have two vowels but with slightly different lexical incidence, giving rise to /A/ in e.g. value, salmon. The corresponding Scots vowel is CAT, whose realization tends to be more retracted in Glasgow (Macaulay 1977; Stuart-Smith 1999: 208) and even more so in Edinburgh (Johnston and Speitel 1983). Macaulay (1997) again found social stratification in the realization of /a/, with fronter variants in higher class speakers and backer ones in lower class speakers. Some of Macaulay’s Class I speakers showed the very front [æ] which is stereotypical of the speech of the middle-class ‘Kelvinside’/‘Morningside’ areas (Wells 1982: 403), where it is said that “‘sex is what the coal comes in’ and ‘rates are large rodents akin to mice’” (Johnston 1985: 37). As in Macaulay’s data, the working-class pronunciation in the 1997 Glasgow data was more retracted than that of middle-class informants, though with some unexpected alignment of allophonic variation with English English lexical incidence such that fronter allophones were found in e.g. cap [kap] and backer ones in e.g. car  (Stuart-Smith 1999: 209).

مواضيع ذات صلة

Spelling and Pronunciation SUMMARY

American English vs. British English

Morphological Basis of English Spelling

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Vowels

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Consonants

Spelling and Pronunciation Irregularity of English Spelling

Structural Factors in Second Language Phonology SUMMARY

Perception

Optimality Theory (OT)

Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM)

Markedness

Hypercontrast