Sonya Bird

Bird’s short paper applies an exemplar-based (cf. e.g. Pierrehumbert 2001) model of variation to laryngealized resonants in the Northern Interior Salish language St’át’imcets, and includes observations on the utility of exemplar approaches in modeling diachronic language shift. Working with three speakers, she describes laryngealization in St’át’imcets as a process carrying a very low functional load (only one minimal pair found) and realized as anything from a complete glottal stop through significant creak to a mere dip in f0, and appearing in pre- , post-, and mid-resonant positions. In, e.g., /ʕ̔/ (used in IPA conventions for North American languages to indicate a laryngealized voiced uvular, rather than pharyngeal, fricative [389]), “Speaker 1 continually used a pre-laryngealized resonant [ˀʕ]. Speaker 2 consistently replaced this complex segment with a simple (epi-)glottal stop [ʔ], regardless of position. Speaker 3 avoided the sound altogether by neutralizing the laryngeal contrast for this sound, replacing / ʕ̔/ with [ʕ] (393)”. Bird interprets the greater role of idiolectal and idiosyncratic variability in change in languages such as St’át’imcets as a result of the limited number of speakers, each of whom will then hear themselves speaking more and others speaking less than would be the case for a language such as e.g. English. Thus, more exemplars are derived from the speaker’s own pronunciation, and idiosyncratic productions are reinforced.
While the direct relevance of Bird’s paper for my initial study is slight, it will be desirable to keep in mind general questions raised, including the possibility of frequency effects on word-specific creak and how to identify alternate phonation changes which might result from the production of a segment with a creaky target, such as post-glottalization/laryngealization (e.g., man as /mænˀ/), or pitch and loudness effects.

Article appeared in Canadian Journal of Linguistics 53.2. Also, no symbol for a voiced pharyngeal fricative? Boo, LibraryThing! (Boo, Google Chrome? Somebody's gonna get booed for this).… (mehr)