塞音的历时变化探微：格拉斯哥土话自发语料库中的塞音VOT考察

The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian

Jane Stuart-Smith, Morgan Sonderegger, Tamara Rathcke, Rachel Macdonald

Laboratory Phonology Volume 6, Issue 3-4 (Oct 2015)

Published Online: 2015-10-14 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lp-2015-0015

 

Abstract

While voice onset time (VOT) is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about VOT in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, in sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from unaspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested. This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analyzing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real- and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. We confirm significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. With respect to time, our results are not consistent with previous work reporting generally shorter VOT in elderly speakers, since our results from models which control for local speech rate show lengthening over real-time in the elderly speakers in our sample. Overall, our findings suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.

 

一般认为苏格兰英语的不带音塞音送气较少。格拉斯哥土话中塞音几乎不送气；而标准的苏格兰英语送气多一些。本文考察格拉斯哥土话自然话语中重读的音节首塞音，主要结论有：发音部位与局部语速对VOT有显著影响；元音高度与词汇频率也有影响VOT的趋势。以往研究一般认为老年说话人的VOT更短。本文研究结果与此并不一致。总体来看，无论带音还是不带音，在整个20世纪中苏格兰英语塞音的VOT是逐渐变长的。VOT连续统的逐渐变化与细微的社会因素有关。

原文下载：

The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian