Is /ə/ "real"?

"Is schwa a real phoneme?" asked a first year student, during a preliminary session preparing them for transcription in the second year. What an excellent question!

The issue arose because I had referred them to John Wells' standard lexical sets to describe English vowel sounds more easily. This is a list of English phonemes with keywords devised by Prof Wells and given in his three-volume book Accents of English (1982). Rather than trying to explain in articulatory terms what /ʊ/ is in comparison with /ʌ/, for example, they can be referred to as the FOOT and STRUT vowels respectively, and then discussion about them appearing (or not) in various accents of English can also be facilitated.

However, mid central unrounded vowel [ə] does not appear in this list ... which leads to the very intelligent question about its "realness".

The schwa vowel is the most commonly occurring vowel in reference accents such as RP or Standard Southern British English (SSBE). In articulatory terms, [ə] is a sound which can be produced by basically relaxing the articulators in the oral cavity and vocalising. From that point of view, it is certainly "real".

From a phonological point of view, however, whether /ə/ is a phoneme or not in English is more tricky. There are no single-syllable citation forms of words containing this vowel, so it is not possible to contrast it with other vowels in minimal pairs, as we would normally expect to do with a vowel phoneme (or any phoneme, for that matter) in order to test its linguistic significance/reality. E.g., we can compare the TRAP and START vowels in British English using minimal pairs such as hat /hæt/ and heart /hɑːt/ and demonstrate that, as the meaning of the word is changed by changing the vowel sound, they are therefore separate linguistic units in English. As it's not possible to do this with /ə/, this is probably why it doesn't appear in Wells' lexical sets.

Schwa is a vowel which only occurs in weak syllables in RP or SSBE and is, therefore, never stressed. This might mean you find it in a bi- or multi-syllabic word such as father /ˈfɑː.ðə/, about /əˈbaʊt/ or conglomeration /kəŋˌɡlɒm.əˈreɪ.ʃən/ (note it is also possible to have syllabic consonants in syllables one and five in the last word) or in something called "weak form words" (here's a nice post on the subject by David Brett).

Weak form words are a small group of one-syllable function words - determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, modal and auxiliary verbs, etc. - which have a weak and a strong form. The weak form is the one which is most often used.  It is unstressed, and in many instances the word is realised with /ə/ as the vowel. Common weak form words containing schwa include but, and, the, her, of, can and that (when used as a subordinating conjunction) which are often pronounced /bət/, /ən/, /ðə/, /ə/, /əv/, /kən/ and /ðət/ respectively in connected speech.

The alternation between other vowels (sometimes referred to as "full vowels") and schwa results in the distinctive speech rhythm of English accents such as RP and SSBE; this rhythm is often referred to as "stress-timed" (here's a short definition from the British Council / BBC).

But back to whether schwa is a "real" English vowel or not. One could indeed claim that it is not a phoneme in English, as it merely replaces other vowels when they are realised in weak syllables.  If we compare e.g. economy /ɪˈkɒn.ə.mi/ and economic /ˌiː.kəˈnɒm.ɪk/, we can see that /ə/ is standing in for /ɒ/ in the third syllable in economy and the second syllable in economic. The stress patterns of these words are dependent on other factors - in this case, the suffix -ic causes the main stress in economic to be placed on the syllable prior to it, which is different from economy.

However, as it is such a prevalent vowel in reference accents, and such an important part of the pronunciation of those accents, it tends to be accepted as a vowel phoneme in lists of vowels for those accents.

There are, of course, accents of English which do not use /ə/ very much, if at all - particularly those which are developing in regions of the world where other languages do not use it. Here's an example of a poem in Nigerian English in which the speaker talks about [ðɪ ˈpæʃɒn ɒv ðɪ ˈpoːem] (the passion of the poem) instead of /ðə ˈpæʃən əv ðə ˈpəʊɪm/. If you listen to the poem, you'll hear that he uses very few schwa vowels.

Addendum 28/06/2013: Since posting this, I feel I should just add that the standard lexical sets do indeed include lettER /ˈlet.ə*/ - where * stands for possible linking /r/ - and commA /ˈkɒm.ə/ which cover schwa, and also happY /ˈhæp.i/, covering the weak close front unrounded vowel sometimes referred to as "schwee", but that these do not appear in the list I projected for students from Prof Wells's blog post.  The sets still do not have anything official to represent "schwoo", but what regularly gets used as an example of the weak close back rounded vowel (often rather mid-centralised and not very rounded) is thank yOU /ˈθæŋk ju/ and, as John Cowan suggests below, intO /ɪntu/.

Supper's Ready - let's celebrate!

I was at the Steve Hackett Genesis Revisited II concert in London on Friday, and what a fantastic show it was! Excellent to be transported back to all those Genesis songs I grew up with in the 70s and to see some wonderful guest artists, such as Nik Kershaw and John Wetton. I'm a massive Genesis fan and am not pleased to have been born too late to see them touring with the classic line-up of Banks, Gabriel, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford (so if anyone knows somebody with a TARDIS, let me know).

Steve has Nad Sylvan from Swedish band Unifaun taking on the lion's share of the vocal duties on this tour, and doing a very impressive job.

So why the blog post? My ears picked up one interesting weak vowel difference during the song "Supper's Ready" from the Foxtrot album. In the line "Today's the day to celebrate," Nad sang /ˈseləbreɪt/, whereas on various studio and live recordings Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins sing /ˈselɪbreɪt/. I'm such an anorak.

Genesis's Foxtrot album cover, courtesy of Wikipedia

I wondered how much of this was owing to age differences - I say /ˈseləbreɪt/, for example, and I must be 15 or so years younger than Messrs Gabriel and Collins - or whether it was to do with Mr Sylvan being a non-native speaker of English. I've heard he lived in the US for a period of time, too, so I wondered if it was US pronunciation.

However, whereas the 14th edition of the EPD (1991) gives /ˈselɪbreɪt/ as the only pronunciation of this word, EPD18 (2011) gives /ˈseləbreɪt/ as the first variant for both UK and US English with /ˈselɪbreɪt/ as the second, as does John Wells' Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD), with the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation giving their barred [ɪ] symbol in the second syllable to show it is one or the other.

I am deducing, then, with no knowledge of Mr Sylvan's age whatsoever, that this is largely an age difference.

However, it still sounds Australian to me to hear the -ed suffix pronounced with the /ə/ vowel instead of /ɪ/ - for example, started pronounced /ˈstɑːtəd/ rather than /ˈstɑːtɪd/ - although I acknowledge there seems to be a change in favour of /ə/ there, too.

When I was an undergraduate, I wanted to do my dissertation on the pronunciation of English in Abba songs. I was told this was "not academic enough" and ended up doing something on spelling. I'd be positively encouraging any undergraduate student who wanted to look at such things now ...

Nice to see yee!

At Christmas, we had to switch the television subtitles on for my mother-in-law to be able to "hear" the news effectively. On one of our TV sets, we haven't been able to work out how to switch them off again. This was originally a bit of an annoyance but, recently, I've been paying more attention to what's in the subtitles and it's been really interesting.

The thing I wanted to write about here is a phenomenon called GOOSE-fronting, and what prompted it was a subtitler typing the word may instead of now on the BBC Breakfast programme this morning. The presenter, Charlie Stayt - who is on the young side among the presenting team - pronounced the word now as something close to [naɨ] and this was all a bit too confusing for the poor subtitler.  

By the way, I've seen all sorts of other fun incorrect subtitling, including liars for lawyers, which made me laugh out loud - particularly as the lawyers were representing someone to whom the public clearly doesn't give much credibility (mentioning no names). To be fair, news and other live TV shows have to be subtitled very quickly indeed and in real time, so it's not really surprising lexical or grammatical errors get made in these situations. I did actually have an interview many, many moons ago for a BBC subtitling job and I know they are able to watch as well as listen, but sometimes the listening seems to take priority, the subtitler not paying attention to the visuals, and I do sometimes wonder about the general knowledge of some of the people doing it.

Full IPA vowel chart, revised to 2005
(http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/vowels.html)

As John Wells points out in his phonetic blog post of 16th June 2010, "it was Caroline Henton who first properly documented the new fronting of RP GOOSE, in her 1983 article 'Changes in the vowels of Received Pronunciation', JPhon 11: 353-371". GOOSE-fronting is a process by which the close back rounded vowel /uː/ is produced with a much more front tongue gesture, so instead of old-fashioned RP /uː/, the speaker produced something more like the close central rounded  vowel [ʉː]; this symbol is know as "barred u". You can see this symbol on the full IPA vowel chart reproduced here. This process is also affecting the FOOT vowel, /ʊ/, to some extent ... and this extends to the target for back-closing diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/.     

More recently, however, the lip-rounding associated with these vowels appears to be in decline among younger speaker groups. Wells mentions this at the end of his blog post, and Cheshire, Gillett, Kerswill and Williams comment on this in their report of 1999; see in particular the Annexes from p. 16 onwards.  As an observation, the younger speakers of (near-)RP accents get, the more fronted and unrounded their GOOSE and FOOT vowels seem to be. There is very little difference for some speakers between GOOSE and geese, for example, and between mouse and mice. Natasha Kaplinsky, another erstwhile rather younger BBC Breakfast presenter, commented to one interviewee that it was [ˈnaɪs tə ˈsiː jɨ] ("Nice to see you"), for example.

This is not something only observed in (near-)RP but also in other accents. It has been noted as a phenomenon in South African, Australian and New Zealand English, and we even note that it has been recorded in Hong Kong English, too (Setter, Wong & Chan 2010), which may be more interesting as, in learner terms, it has traditionally been based on a conservative RP accent.

John Wells comments in his blog post that, nearly a century ago, Daniel Jones had spotted GOOSE-fronting in the environment of a preceding /j/ - so in, e.g., music or beauty, but not in spoon  - and that it could be spreading from there. Wells does not attempt to explain the unrounding of the lips, however. I'm not too hung up on the "whys" of this, and just enjoy observing the differences and, sometimes, the confusion which results.

Fun and games with /r/

Well it's now January 2013 and I haven't posted anything since September 2012.  The good news is that my module "English in the World" starts again this term - tomorrow, in fact - so I should have more to say.

In the mean time, I thought you might enjoy my retelling of a conversation I had with a friend about intrusive and linking /r/.  She was complaining that someone on the television had pronounced the word "drawing" as /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/.  This is in fact the way I pronounce it (which doesn't mean it's necessarily right, I should hasten to add!).  The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary gives /ˈdrɔː.ɪŋ/ as the "-ing" form of "draw" but notes in a box below that an intrusive /r/ is sometimes inserted.

My friend was horrified by this.  "It sounds terrible!" she wailed. We then had a discussion about value judgments and language but she wasn't convinced.

In fact, intrusive /r/ is an interesting one.  If you are a speaker of a rhotic accent - i.e., one in which you always pronounce "r" everywhere it appears in the spelling (e.g., General American; Irish; Scots) - then intrusive /r/ is just not something you do.  It's not there so you don't say it (although I note the box about "drawing" seemed to suggest that it even occurs in American English accents - would anyone like to comment?).

Intrusive /r/ comes about in non-rhotic accents by analogy with linking /r/.  Non-rhotic accents are those in which the speaker only pronounces /r/ if it is followed by a vowel (e.g., RP; Australian).  Linking /r/ is an optional connected speech process which happens in non-rhotic accents, such as RP, in rapid speech where there is an "r" in the spelling and the following word begins with a vowel.

E.g.:

1. In "My car burns too much fuel these days", we do not pronounce the /r/ at the end of "car" in non-rhotic accents as the next word begins with a consonant - /maɪ ˈkɑː bɜːnz ˈtuː mʌtʃ ˈfjʊəl ðiːz deɪz/;
2. In "My car always starts on cold mornings", we may very well pronounce the /r/ at the end of "car" as the following word begins with a vowel - /maɪ ˈkɑːr ɔːlweɪz ˈstɑːts ɒn kəʊld ˈmɔːnɪŋz/ (I've not added in any assimilation here but you might get them at the end of "on" and "cold") - but we wouldn't pronounce the "r" in "start" as it is followed by a consonant.

It is not necessary to perform linking /r/ in 2., but most speakers of e.g. RP will do it.

So, why does intrusive /r/ happen - i.e., why would a speaker pronounce "drawing" as /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/ when there is evidently no /r/ at the end of "draw"?

If you consider the words which can contain a linking /r/, these all have vowels in the non-high area of the vowel chart, all of which are spelled with "r" at the end of them.  See HERE for the IPA vowel chart and compare the position of the vowels (note these are English phonemes listed below and not Cardinal Vowels).  The vowels are as follows:

• /ɑː/ - e.g., "car"
• /ɜː/ - e.g., "cur"
• /ɔː/ - e.g., "core"
• /ɪə/ - e.g., "pier"
• /eə/ - e.g., "pear"
• /ʊə/ - e.g., "pure"
• /ə/ - e.g., "mother" /ˈmʌðə/

In the case of /ɪə/, /eə/ and /ʊə/, these vowels are referred to as "centring" diphthongs as the tongue moves from the first vowel towards the second vowel which is a central one, /ə/.   NB. /ʊə/ is becoming rather low-frequency in modern RP and is often replaced with /ɔː/.

This doesn't mean you have to have an "r" in the spelling to have these vowels in a word, however, and this is where intrusive /r/ comes in.  For example:

• In "I can see the pier over there", an RP speaker will most likely have a linking /r/ at the end of "pier" because the next word begins with a vowel - /ˈaɪ kən siː ðə ˈpɪər əʊvə ˈðeə/ (Quiz: There is no /r/ at the end of "over" and "there" - why not?)
• In "The mere idea of it!", there is likely to be a linking /r/ at the end of "mere" but ALSO an intrusive /r/ at the end of "idea" - /ðə ˈmɪər aɪˈdɪər əv ɪt/ - because it contains one of the set of vowels in the list above.  This will sound very odd indeed to a speaker of a rhotic variety.

One must note, however, that linking and intrusive /r/ are both optional connected speech processes; they do not HAVE to happen.  For reasons of fluency, they often do.  My friend was saying that she would always put a glottal stop between "idea" and "of" in that last example; if I could hide behind her with a recording device to find out whether this is true in such instances, I would ... but of course this would be unethical.

In the Lingua Franca Core, Jenny Jenkins recommends always pronouncing "r" where it is found in the spelling, i.e., adopting a rhotic accent.  Personally, I can't think of many occasions in which my r-lessness or insertion of linking or intrusive /r/ has been a problem.  However, it's quite possible that I wouldn't have as, often being considered a role model for my particular accent, it is unlikely that I would ever have been challenged.  

Fresh prints ...

This isn't exactly a global Englishes-related post but I've explained this once or twice recently so I thought it might be worth blogging about.

One of my former students in HK asked me the following on Facebook:

"About the coda /ts/:

• Why is there an italicised /t/ before /s/ in the transcriptions of words like 'dance', 'finance', 'answer' in some learner dictionaries? 
• Is there now a systematic use of this /t/ in British English native speakers?"

My response:

"This means that, although there is no 't' in the spelling, it is sometimes pronounced by a speaker. This is called an epenthetic /t/.

"The reason it occurs is because there is a homorganic nasal + fricative (in this case, /ns/). For a nasal the velum is lowered but for an obstruent like /s/ the velum has to be raised.

"In the sequence of articulation, if the velum is raised while the tongue is still making a complete contact with the alveolar ridge and upper side molars before the tongue moves to a narrow approximation with the alveolar ridge, there may be plosion rather than a straightforward narrow/fricative release.

"Compare the two words 'mints' and 'mince', which can sound the same in e.g. RP."

After discussing /t/ epenthesis on the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics this year, one of my class told me the following joke:

Q: How do you find Will Smith after a blizzard?
A: Go outside and look for the fresh prints in the snow.

Love it!

A skiing problem

Here's an interesting one.

One of my PhD students based in SE Asia, who teaches English language proficiency classes among other things, asked me what the correct response to this statement would be from the list of four options, because it appears on a test of English language proficiency.  She said the teachers had all been arguing about it.

I'll post the item here and then you can let me know what you think the answer is.

A: I'll never go skiing again.

B: (select one)
i.    Me too.
ii.   Me so.
iii.  Me neither.
iv.  Me either.

Your responses please!

The "cooperative rise" in Malay English

My PhD student Noor Fadhilah Mat Nayan, who successfully defended her thesis on my birthday earlier this year, has written on intonation in Malay English - as opposed to Malaysian English - and has found an interesting feature (well, it's all interesting as far as I'm concerned but this is one of the most interesting bits).  She calls this feature the "cooperative rise".

Unlike uptalk - also known as the high-rising terminal or HRT (see Wikipedia on this topic) - the pattern is not used in statements, which would commonly have a falling tone in my English but not that of my undergraduate students (I sometimes joke that I'm too young for one type of HRT and too old for the other!  Ahem).  The use of uptalk is common in American and Australian English and, in fact, its appearance in British English is sometimes blamed on the popularity since the 1980s of Australian soap operas, which usually feature younger speakers many of whom use uptalk.  From the point of view of discourse meaning, one suggestion is that using a high-rising terminal at the end of a phrase is an appeal to the listener to be more involved in the conversation, and another is that it shows the reader is seeking approval from the listener in a sort of "inclusion in the social group" kind of way.

In Malay English, however, the cooperative rise identified by Noor seems to be doing something slightly different.  Here's a transcript of an example, where the tones are indicated at the start of the tone unit as follows: R = rise, CR = cooperative rise, F = fall and L = level.

 / CR oK | CR we move forWARD | R STRAIGHT | F we going DOWN | F SOrry | CR we going DOWN | CR and THEN | CR move forWARD | CR go STRAIGHT | L and THEN | L we going to GO | CR we going to turn RIGHT | ... /

Stressed syllables here are marked with capitals.  You can see that Malay English does not necessarily stress the same syllables as e.g. British English, which would have initial stress on forward in this passage.  We found that the stress in polysyllabic words could be quite variable with e.g. monastery being stressed MONastery, monaSTERy and monaST'RY by the same speaker.

Noor's data is from map tasks and so the bulk of the interaction is spent giving directions.  The CR is found to be statistically significantly different in pitch range and duration from the "normal" rising tone and seems to be used by Malay speakers of English to slowly guide the interlocutor in an encouraging and highly cooperative way, as if to say "let's work this problem out this together".  There is no question that the listener is paying attention, as there might be with HRT, and no sense that the speaker is seeking social approval.  There's a definite soothing, laid back feel about the speech ... and I have to say it sounds very attractive when you listen to the recordings.

Anyone who is au fait with the English spoken by Malay speakers will no doubt have come across this feature but nobody had documented it until now.  We'll be writing some research papers on this soon so keep an eye out for them.

[Dear readers - I do apologise for not having posted anything in a while.  Life has not got any less hectic - I'm now Head of the Department of English Language & Applied Linguistics for one thing - but I'll try to visit and update this blog more often.]