Transcript Prolegomena to a sociolinguistics of 'modern RP

Short vowels in real time: TRAP, STRUT
and FOOT in the South of England
ANNE FABRICIUS
ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK
ICLAVE #5, COPENHAGEN
JUNE 27TH, 2009
Introduction
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 Language change in progress, its social embedding,
predictions and complications

A real-time diachronic study of some features of modern
RP/changing SSBE
 At one level a quantitative study of patterns of variation
implicated in linguistic change in some cases
 At another level, a study of the evolution and
devolution/transformation of modern RP as a social
practice and its place in the sociolinguistic landscape of
the UK
 Here: an exemplificatory look at short vowel
configurations
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Background
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 Phonologically and phonetically the RP accent has been
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well described in the past (native speaker phoneticians
e.g. Daniel Jones’ EPD, Gimson & Cruttenden)
Methodological foundations in the structuralist tradition
of phonetics, a ‘variety’ perspective
“axiom of categoricity” vs sociolinguistic/variationist
school of thought
Historical roots of RP are discussed by Mugglestone
(2003): Talking Proper: the rise of accent as social
symbol
the traditional ‘non-regional’ accent /as consequence of
the insularity of public school boarding life/preparatory
schools from age ~7, 8
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RP: fact and fiction (Ramsaran 1990)
 ‘Native RP’ (s)
 Sociolinguistically observable
through a defined population in
successive generations
 Sociologically
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Socioeconomic background
Educational background and
experiences
 Phonological system(s) with
phonetic variations …
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 ‘Construct RP’ (s)
 Systematically related to n-RP
but distinct and with its own
diachrony
 Here the notion of ‘standard’
comes into play, and can change
 E.g. on age-graded reactions to tglottalling
 Each generation has its own
cutoff points: ‘posh’
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 Change is a different
phenomenon in each case
 All ‘varieties’ have this potential
ambiguity
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Examples of ‘clergy-speak’
 A sociolinguistics of perception…
(Harrington , Kleber and
Reubold 2008, on generational
perceptions of /u/-fronting)
Modern RP or SSBE?
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 A question of naming practice
 Why ‘Modern RP’
 Why ‘SSBE’
 What do the titles emphasize and de-emphasize
 Standard as a label mixes form and function, Southern
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as a result of regional history
Modern RP emphasizes a generational sociolinguistic
continuity
which however may be illusory in some individual cases
Ask what is the ‘breaking point’, empirically, for a
decisive cut with the earlier label…
Connotations of ‘RP’ led many to abandon it in the 60’s.
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Empirical background: Social polarities in the UK
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 Historical social differentiation in UK secondary
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education: public school - independent school –
grammar school - state school (similar to Australia, vs
e.g. Denmark, Scandinavia)
Universities, Govt. Education policy and Access schemes
Are educational backgrounds blurred or maintained in a
higher education context?
Application rates to e.g. Cambridge are rising (Access)
Present Economic situation (?)
What are students’ perceptions? (North-South divide,
levelling, do accents ’matter’ to people)
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Theory: sociolinguistics and class
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 Chambers (1995:37),
 The “upper class,” consisting of people with inherited wealth and privileges, is so
inconsequential – nonexistent outside Europe and Asia and dwindling rapidly
there - that it will not be considered here.
 Schneider's (1999:51) review of Chambers
 "we are less well-informed about [upper-class] speech patterns, attitudes, ... and
although it may be true that for sociolinguistic purposes they are rather
irrelevant, that still does not imply non-existence, - for sociolinguistic modelling,
a continuum of which one pole just does not exist, would not be very convincing."
 Macaulay (2002: 398) points out, social class was to some extent
sidelined compared to ethnicity, social networks and gender as
important sociolinguistic categories.
 (My interviewees MC/UMC rather than aristocratic UC)
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Kroch 1996
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 Anthony Kroch’s interview-based study of the upper-
class of Philadelphia
 members of that group were users of the same
phonological system as other Philadelphians
 E.g. complex phonetic conditioning of features such
as Philadelphians short /a/.
 What distinguished them in their speech and in the
perception of others was a distinctive set of prosodic
and lexical behaviours. (c.f. creak in RP)
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Thus...
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 A research interest in the sociolinguistics of the successor
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to RP, e.g. speakers’ rates of participation in ongoing
England-wide vernacular changes (such as discussed in
Foulkes and Docherty 1999)
Is non-regionality breaking down/changing, e.g. in
Oxbridge contexts?
What does Higher education contribute to koinéization
processes (Bigham 2008)?
Reflects a changing picture of (fluid) relationships
between language and socioeconomic privilege and
historical processes
Part of the picture of English in the UK in its entirety
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Moreover
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 When is an accent variety no longer the same, when has
it changed beyond recognition (mutually intelligible still
across generations or breaking down: through changes
below consciousness... yeast/used, toasties/tasties)
 Linguistic Variety perspectives and social practice/social
constructionist perspective potentially complement each
other (having an accent versus doing being a student at
Cambridge linguistically)
 Thus, linguistic and ethnographic/sociological
perspectives can/must potentially intertwine...
 Need an updated model of the generational picture also
for ’modern RP’ speakers (cf Rampton’s model based on
Wells 1982)
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The research questions arising here
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 To what extent is there still a non-regional accent of
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English in the UK?
What phonetic characteristics does it maintain from
earlier generations?
and to what extent are ongoing UK-wide processes of
vernacular change visible here?
Are there changes particular to this variety alone?
What is its relationship to ongoing metaprocesses of
standard-formation/devolution/transformation
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Methods
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 Interview corpus with present author as interviewee
 40+ interviews collected 1997/1998
 40+ interviews collected 2008
 At Cambridge University
 Students with independent school backgrounds
 Structured sociolinguistic interviews, 1hr duration
 Ongoing project
 Quantitative studies of phonetic variation to ’map’ the
accent variety empirically to an extent not attempted
before
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Presuppositions
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 The forces of linguistic change which act on all
varieties of a language will also apply to n-RP
 whether internally-motivated endogenous or
contact-induced exogenous changes (Trudgill 1999)
 Popular or folk-linguistic notions of, and about,
correctness or standardness also undergo change,
due to historical societal developments,
 these changes represent developments in c-RPs (cf
Rampton’s ’posh’ performances)
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The unity of varieties...
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 Varieties emerging from dialectologically-focussed studies
 Demarcation lines become important; Wells 1982 (RP, near-RP…)
 However, difficulties of demarcation and definition in late modern societies
are sometimes emphasized (Rampton Language in Late Modernity)
 So is the British accent landscape characterized by stability as well as
change?
 Coupland and Bishop 2007 reporting stability in regional vernacular
downgrading
 Plus younger speakers’ rejection of standard prestige in highly
decontextualised attitudinal rating settings
 Report ”disappointingly familiar conservative tendencies”..(2007:84)
 Alongside findings for younger listeners ” [that] at least to a limited extent,
challenge the inference that there is a consolidated, single ideological set in
the evaluation of English accents” (2007:85)
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...contra
social practice perspectives
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 Social practice emerging through ethnographic approach
 We could for example ask how do students do being at
Cambridge linguistically
 speaking differently when they start and when they
finish… (Evans and Iverson 2007)
 Are there gender distinctions? (are they potential motors
of wider change?)
 Communities of practice in the Cambridge University
landscape: rowing clubs, choirs, subject groups
(Classics?), different colleges, could form basis for
ethnographic studies
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Data: short vowels in reading passage data
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Analysis
Data set
CORPUS
FEMALE
MALE
1998
4
4
2008
4
4
FLEECE
DRESS
TRAP
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KIT
FOOT
 Lexical items with tone group
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LOT
STRUT START
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prominence
PRAAT analysis using
standard settings (adjusted
with greater Hz range for
female voices)
PRAAT script by Tyler
Kendall to extract mid-point
formant values
900 tokens in all, 8 keywords
Hand checked, 4 tokens
discarded
Comparisons presented here
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 Compare reading passage data in year and gender
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cohorts
For comparison with trends in RP over the course of
the twentieth century, see Fabricius 2007a and b.
TRAP-STRUT rotation brought about by (1) trap
backing and lowering (2) STRUT raising to central or
back of central position
FOOT fronting (and unrounding) towards KIT
Changes in short vowel system only.
Comparisons needed with long vowels e.g. START
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Male
speakers,
1998
cohort
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M3’s interview
speech
LOTFOOT
TRAPSTRUT
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Male
speakers,
2008
cohort
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Female
speakers,
1998
cohort
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Female
speakers,
2008
cohort
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Tendencies suggested
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 TRAP/STRUT configuration stable
 LOT raising vis a vis FOOT
 Females 2008 plus 1 male 2008 speaker
 FOOT remains distinct from KIT, process has slowed
 STRUT/ START overlapping needs further
investigation
 Importantly, individual differences can be tracked
 Unity and diversity...
ICLAVE#5, June 2009
Some sound samples
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 1997-1998 corpus:
 M2
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M3
 2008 corpus:
 F1
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F4
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Future plans with corpus data
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 1997-8 and 2008 materials will be transcribed and
annotated
 Building up a series of inductive quantitative
sociolinguistic-oriented studies of stability, variation
and change-in-progress
 Mapping the current features of Modern RP/SSBE
from a dynamic perspective which integrates
individual and group differences
ICLAVE#5, June 2009
Language change in progress examples
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 GOAT fronting/merging with FACE
 GOAT-allophony
 MOUTH-PRICE onsets
 Monophthongisation
 T-glottalling
 R-sandhi
 Vowels in unstressed syllables (weak vowels)
 L-Vocalisation (variants)
 Gender differentiations, lexical effects, style effects in all
of the above
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Potential comparison points
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 BBC Newsreader corpus (Hannisdal)
 London WC (Kerswill, Torgersen, Fox & Cheshire)
 DyViS – 100 male SSBE speakers in Cambridge
(Nolan, McDougall et al)
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Bibliography 1
28
The Modern RP page www.akira.ruc.dk/~fabri
Bigham, D. 2008. Dialect contact and accommodation among emerging adults in a university setting .
Ph.D. Thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
Chambers, J.K. 1995. Sociolinguistic Theory. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell.
Cruttenden, Alan. 2001. Gimson's Pronunciation of English. 6th edition. Oxford UK: Oxford University
Press.
Coupland, Nikolas and Hywel Bishop. 2007. Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 11, 1: 74-103.
Fabricius, Anne. 2007a. Variation and change in the TRAP and STRUT vowels of RP: a real time
comparison of five acoustic data sets. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37:3: 293320.
Fabricius, A. 2007b. Vowel Formants and Angle Measurements in Diachronic Sociophonetic Studies:
FOOT-fronting in RP. Proceedings of the 16th ICPhS, Saarbrücken, August 2007. www:
www.icphs2007.de/.
Fabricius, Anne H. 2002a. RP as sociolinguistic object. Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol 1, nr 2:355372.
ICLAVE#5, June 2009
Bibliography 2
29
Fabricius, Anne H. 2002b. Weak vowels in modern RP: an acoustic study of happY-tensing and
KIT/schwa shift. Language Variation and Change. Vol 14, nr 2: 211-237.
Fabricius, Anne H. 2002c. Ongoing change in modern RP: evidence for the disappearing stigma of tglottalling. English Worldwide 23, 1:115-136.
Foulkes, P. and G. J. Docherty. eds. 1999. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London:
Arnold.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hannisdal, Bente Rebecca . 2007. Variability and change in Received Pronunciation : a study of six
phonological variables in the speech of television newsreaders . University of Bergen PhD thesis.
http://hdl.handle.net/1956/2335
Harrington, J., F. Kleber and U. Reubold. 2008. Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound
change in standard southern British: An acoustic and perceptual study. JASA 123,5: 2825–2835.
Macaulay, Ronald. 2002. "Extremely interesting, very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and
social class." Journal of Sociolinguistics. 6.3:398-417.
Mugglestone, Lynda. 2003. Talking Proper: the Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2nd edition.
Rampton, B. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
ICLAVE#5, June 2009
Bibliography 3
30
Ramsaran, Susan. 1990. RP: fact and fiction. In Ramsaran, Susan, ed. Studies in the Pronunciation of
English: A Commemorative Volume in honour of A.C. Gimson. London: Routledge.
Schneider, E. W. (1999). Review of Chambers 1995. Journal of English Linguistics. 27,1. 49-56.
Trudgill, P. 1999. Norwich: endogenous and exogenous linguistic change. In P. Foulkes and G.J. Docherty
1999, 124-140.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English, 3 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Acknowledgements
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 Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde
University
 Department of Linguistics, Cambridge University

Francis Nolan, Kirsty McDougall, Toby Hudson
 Tyler Kendall, Duke University and North Carolina
State University.
ICLAVE#5, June 2009
Short vowels in real time: TRAP, STRUT
and FOOT in the South of England
ANNE FABRICIUS
ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK
ICLAVE #5, COPENHAGEN
JUNE 27TH, 2009