Article published in:
Advances in Sociophonetics
Edited by Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
[Studies in Language Variation 15] 2014
► pp. 189–204

Ejectives in English and German

Linguistic, sociophonetic, interactional, epiphenomenal?

This paper describes the phonetic form, the distribution and the possible functions of ejectives in English and German, proposing that ejectives are on the increase in different varieties in English. The problems of teasing apart the different contributions of allophonic regularity, interactional function, sociophonetic variability and epiphenomenal inevitability in accounting for ejectives in English are discussed. Possible production mechanisms behind ejectives in both languages are explored and doubt is cast on previous epiphenomenal accounts which have ignored the importance of a pulmonic component in creating the necessary intra-oral pressure increase. This, in turn, raises questions about possible production mechanisms behind ejectives in languages in which they play a regular part in the phonological inventory.
Published online: 12 June 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.15.07sim
References

References

Catford, John C.
1977  Fundamental Problems in Phonetics . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, John, Mark Liberman, Greg Kochanski, Lou Burnard & Jiahong Yuan
2011 “Mining a Year of Speech”. VLPS 2011: New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research , Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania 29th-31st January 2011.Google Scholar
Collins, Beverley & Inger Mees
1996 “Spreading everywhere? How recent a phenomenon is glottalisation in Received Pronunciation?”. English World-Wide 17/2. 175–187. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cravens, Thomas D. & Luciano Giannelli
1995 “Relative salience of gender and class in a situation of multiple competing norms”. Language Variation and Change 7. 261–285. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Docherty, Gerard J., James Milroy, Lesley Milroy & David Walshaw
1997 “Descriptive adequacy in phonology: A variationist perspective”. Journal of Linguistics 33. 275–310. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, James M. Scobbie & Dominic Watt
2010 “Sociophonetics”. Handbook of Phonetic Sciences ed. by William Hardcastle, John Laver & Fiona Gibbon (2nd edition), 703–754. Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grawunder, Sven, Adrian P. Simpson & Madzhid Khalilov
2010 “Phonetic characteristics of ejectives – samples from Caucasian languages”. Turbulent sounds. An interdisciplinary guide ed. by Susanne Fuchs, Martine Toda & Marzena ?ygis, 209–244. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Higginbottom, Eleanor
1964 “Glottal reinforcement in English”. Transactions of the Philological Society 63. 129–142. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail
1983 “On a failed hypothesis: ‘Conjunctionals’ as overlap- vulnerable”. Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature 28. 29–33.Google Scholar
Kingston, John C.
1985  The phonetics and phonology of the timing of oral and glottal events . PhD Thesis, Berkeley, University of California.Google Scholar
2005 “The phonetics of Athabaskan tonogenesis”. Athabaskan prosody ed. by Sharon Hargus & Keren Rice, 137–184. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg
2006  The Atlas of North American English . Berlin & New York: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lindau, Mona
1982 “Phonetic differences in glottalic consonants”. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 71/S1. 22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1984 “Phonetic differences in glottalic consonants”. Journal of Phonetics 12. 147–155.Google Scholar
Local, John K.
2003 Variable domains and variable relevance: interpreting phonetic exponents. Journal of Phonetics 31. 321–339. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Local, John K. & John Kelly
1986 “Projection and ‘silences’: notes on phonetic detail and conversational structure”. Human Studies 9. 185–204. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Local, John K., John Kelly & William H.G. Wells.
1986 “Some phonetic aspects of turn-delimitation in the speech of Urban Tynesiders”. Journal of Linguistics 22. 411–437. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lodge, Ken R.
1984  Studies in the Phonology of Colloquial English . London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, Lesley Milroy, Sue Hartley & David Walshaw
1994 “Glottal stops and Tyneside glottalization: Competing patterns of variation and change in British English”. Language Variation and Change 6. 327–357. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Müller, E. & W. S. Brown.
1980 “Variations in the supraglottal air pressure waveform and their articulatory interpretation”. Speech and language: Advances in basic research and practice 4. 317–389.Google Scholar
Grabe, Esther, Francis Nolan & Kimberley J. Farrar.
1998 “IViE - A comparative transcription system for Intonational Variation in English”. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing ed. by Robert H. Mannell & Jordi REobert-Ribes, 1259–1262. Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, Incorporated (ASSTA).Google Scholar
Nolan, Francis, Kirsty Mc Dougall, Gea de Jong & Toby Hudson
2009 “The DyViS database: style-controlled recordings of 100 homogeneous speakers for forensic phonetic research”. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 16. 31–57.Google Scholar
Ogden, Richard
2009  An introduction to English phonetics . Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Ohala, John J.
1974 “Experimental historical phonology”. Historical linguistics II. Theory and description in phonology. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Edinburgh, September 2–7 1973) ed. by John M. Anderson & Charles Jones, 353–389. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
1979 “The contribution of acoustic phonetics to phonology”. Frontiers of speech communication research ed. by Björn Lindblom & Sven Öhman, 355–363. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1995 “A probable case of clicks influencing the sound pattern of some European languages”. Phonetica 52. 160–170. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1997 “Emergent stops”. Proceedings of the 4th Seoul International Conference on Linguistics (SICOL 1997) , Seoul 11th–15th August 1997 45–50.
Ohala, John J. & Maria Grazia Busà.
1995 “Nasal loss before voiceless fricatives: a perceptually-based sound change”. Rivista di Linguistica 7. 125–144.Google Scholar
Roach, Paul
1973 “Glottalization of English /p/, /t/, /k/ and /t?/ - a re-examination”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 3. 10–21. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1979 “Laryngeal-oral coarticulation in glottalized English plosives”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 9. 2–6. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2002 A little encyclopedia of phonetics. http://​www​.freewebs​.com​/raulillox​/Enciclopedia​.pdf
Rothenberg, Martin
1968 “The breath-stream dynamics of simple-released-plosive production”. Bibliotheca Phonetica No 6. Basel & New York: Karger. http://​www​.rothenberg​.org​/Breath​-Stream​/BSD​_contents​.htm
Simpson, Adrian P.
1992 “Casual speech rules and what the phonology of connected speech might really be like”. Linguistics 30. 535–548. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2007 “Acoustic and auditory correlates of non-pulmonic sound production in German”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37. 173–182. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simpson, Adrian P., Klaus J. Kohler & Tobias Rettstadt
, eds 1997  The Kiel Corpus of Read/Spontaneous Speech - Acoustic data base, processing tools and analysis results (= AIPUK, 32) . Kiel: University of Kiel.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Paul
1974  The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, Natasha
1996 “Acoustic characteristics of ejectives in Ingush”. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1996) , Philadelphia 3rd–6th October 1996 New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer. 1525–1528. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wells, John C.
1982  Accents of English, Vol.1: An Introduction . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Richad, Sharon Hargus & Katharine Davis
2002 “On the categorization of ejectives: data from Witsuwit’en”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32. 43–77. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wysocki, Tamra M.
2004  Acoustic analysis of Georgian stop consonants and stop clusters . PhD Thesis, Chicago, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Vietti, Alessandro, Birgit Alber & Barbara Vogt
2018. Initial laryngeal neutralisation in Tyrolean. Phonology 35:1 ► pp. 79 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.