Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English

Abstract

Retraction of /s/ to a more [ʃ]-like sound is a well-known sound change attested across many varieties of English for /stɹ/ words, e.g. street and strong. Despite recent sociophonetic interest in the variable, there remains disagreement over whether it represents a case of long-distance assimilation to /ɹ/ in these clusters or a two-step process involving local assimilation to an affricate derived from the sequence /tɹ/. In this paper, we investigate Manchester English and apply similar quantitative analysis to two contexts that are comparatively under-researched, but which allow us to tease apart the presence of an affricate and a rhotic: /stj/ as in student, which exhibits similar affrication of the /tj/ cluster in many varieties of British English, and /stʃ/ as in mischief. In an acoustic analysis conducted on a demographically-stratified corpus of over 115 sociolinguistic interviews, we track these three environments of /s/-retraction in apparent time and find that they change in parallel and behave in tandem with respect to the other factors conditioning variation in /s/-retraction. Based on these results, we argue that the triggering mechanisms of retraction are best modelled with direct reference to /t/-affrication and with /ɹ/ playing only an indirect, and not unique, role. Analysis of the whole sibilant space also reveals apparent-time change in the magnitude of the /s/–/ʃ/ contrast itself, highlighting the importance of contextualising this change with respect to the realisation of English sibilants more generally as these may be undergoing independent change.

Immediate Integration of Coarticulatory Cues for /s/-Retraction in American English

“…The focus of the present study is /s/-retraction, a sound change in progress in many varieties of English by which /s/ approaches /S/ in the context of /r/, most notably in /str/ clusters 2 So for a speaker exhibiting /s/-retraction, a word like street /strit/ may sound more like shtreet /Strit/. This has been observed in various dialects of American English (Shapiro, 1995;Durian, 2007;Baker et al, 2011;Gylfadottir, 2015;Wilbanks, 2017;Smith et al, 2019;Phillips, 2020) as well as varieties of English across the Anglophone world (Lawrence, 2000 for New Zealand;Glain, 2013;Bailey et al, 2022 for the United Kingdom; Stevens and Harrington, 2016 for Australia). Additionally, corpus studies have demonstrated that /s/-retraction is advancing in apparent time in the United States (Gylfadottir, 2015;Wilbanks, 2017).…”