Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Conference article
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Conference article
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Some /l/s are darker than others
T2 - accounting for variation in English /l/ with ultrasound tongue imaging
AU - Turton, Danielle
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - The phenomenon of /l/-darkening has been a subject of linguistic interest due to the remarkable amount of contextual variation it displays. Although it is generally stated that the light variant occurs in onsets (e.g. leap) and the dark variant in codas (e.g. peel), many studies report variation in different morphosyntactic environments. Beyond this variation in morphosyntactic conditioning, different dialects of English have been reported as showing highly variable distributions. These descriptions include a claimed lack of dis- tinction in the North of England, a three-way distinction between light, dark and vocalised /l/ in the South-East, and a gradient continuum of darkness in American English. This paper presents ultrasound tongue imaging data collected to test dialectal and contextual descriptions of /l/ in English, providing hitherto absent instrumental evidence for different distributions. Data from speakers of RP, Manchester, Essex and American English show that dialectal diversity has been vastly underestimated in the existing literature on /l/- darkening. The wide range of dialectal diversity, for which this paper provides only a small subset, shows a great deal of orderliness when paying due consideration to the diachronic evolution of variable phonological processes.
AB - The phenomenon of /l/-darkening has been a subject of linguistic interest due to the remarkable amount of contextual variation it displays. Although it is generally stated that the light variant occurs in onsets (e.g. leap) and the dark variant in codas (e.g. peel), many studies report variation in different morphosyntactic environments. Beyond this variation in morphosyntactic conditioning, different dialects of English have been reported as showing highly variable distributions. These descriptions include a claimed lack of dis- tinction in the North of England, a three-way distinction between light, dark and vocalised /l/ in the South-East, and a gradient continuum of darkness in American English. This paper presents ultrasound tongue imaging data collected to test dialectal and contextual descriptions of /l/ in English, providing hitherto absent instrumental evidence for different distributions. Data from speakers of RP, Manchester, Essex and American English show that dialectal diversity has been vastly underestimated in the existing literature on /l/- darkening. The wide range of dialectal diversity, for which this paper provides only a small subset, shows a great deal of orderliness when paying due consideration to the diachronic evolution of variable phonological processes.
M3 - Conference article
VL - 20
SP - 188
EP - 198
JO - Penn Working Papers in Linguistics
JF - Penn Working Papers in Linguistics
SN - 1524-9549
IS - 2
M1 - 21
ER -