Glottalisation of word-final stops in Australian English unstressed syllables

Abstract

Glottalisation functions as a cue to coda stop voicelessness in many varieties of English, occurring most commonly for alveolar stops, although varieties differ according to the context and frequency with which glottalisation is used. In Australian English, younger speakers glottalise voiceless coda stops at much higher rates than older speakers suggesting a recent change to the variety, yet this change has only been examined in stressed syllables for stops with alveolar place of articulation. In addition, research has found that glottalisation occurs in a trading relationship with preceding vowel duration to cue coda stop voicing: younger speakers make less use of vowel duration and more use of glottalisation. This study investigates glottalisation as a cue to coda voicing in unstressed syllables, an environment in which coda voicing-related vowel durational differences are already reduced. We examine this phenomenon in two separate datasets of Australian English with reference to stops at three places of articulation to explore dialect-specific distributional patterns and to track the potential progression of change. The results suggest that glottalisation occurs in conjunction with voiceless stops at all places of articulation in the unstressed Australian English contexts examined here. The results also confirm that younger speakers employ glottalisation more than older speakers, and show that females glottalise more than males, both results supporting previous suggestions of a recent change to the variety.

Voicing of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels

“…These results help address the question posed by Passy (1900) cited at the beginning of our paper: we find little evidence that voiceless [h] and voiced [ç] are distinct -at least in terms of presence and strength of voicing -between two vowels and in final postvocalic position. This is illustrated in Figure 11, which shows two tokens (one initial, the other intervocalic) of voiceless [h] and voiced [ç] in two related languages: Upper Sorbian (which has /h/) and Czech (which has /ç/).…”

“…For about as long as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has existed, phoneticians (e.g. Meyer 1900, Passy 1900) have acknowledged that glottal consonants show large variation in voicing. And when glottal consonants are voiced, they look very similar to nonmodal (breathy and creaky) vowels.…”

Fifty years of change to prevocalic definite article allomorphy in Australian English

“…It is interesting that the deployment of glottalisation is becoming common in AusE in a number of contexts including the implementation of coda voicelessness (Penney et al 2018(Penney et al , 2020(Penney et al , 2021, the use of creaky voice quality (Dallaston & Docherty 2019, White et al 2021, and in hiatus management (Cox et al 2014b;Yuen et al 2017Yuen et al , 2018. A fruitful area for future research could be to explore the intriguing relationship between these various segmental, sociophonetic, and prosodic uses for glottalisation in the phonological toolkit.…”

Physical and phonological causes of coda /t/ glottalization in the mainstream American English of central Ohio

“…For example, the word 'bat' may be pronounced as [baet], [baet], [baeʔt], or [baeʔ]. Voiceless stop glottalization is common across languages (Harris, 2001;Kohler, 1994;Michaud, 2004), though in English it is better documented outside North America, where it has more widespread socio-indexical meaning (Ashby & Przedlacka, 2014;Clark & Watson, 2016;Docherty & Foulkes, 1999a;Docherty, Hay, & Walker, 2006;Fabricius, 2002;Gordeeva & Scobbie, 2013;Henton & Bladon, 1988;Higginbottom, 1964;Holmes, 1995;Johnston, 2007;Kerswill, 2007;Mathisen, 1999;Mees & Collins, 1999;Milroy, Milroy, Hartley, & Walshaw, 1994;Newbrook, 1999;Penney, Cox, Miles, & Palethorpe, 2018;Penney, Cox, & Szakay, 2019;Ramisch, 2007;Roach, 1973Roach, , 1979Stuart-Smith, 1999;Tollfree, 1999Tollfree, , 2001Watt & Milroy, 1999;Williams & Kerswill, 1999).…”

“…In several varieties of American English, coda glottalization is reportedly more common for younger speakers (Eddington & Channer, 2010;Eddington & Taylor, 2009;Roberts, 2006), and Kaźmierski (2020) finds the same qualitative pattern for prevocalic word-final /t/ glottalization in the Buckeye Corpus. In some English varieties outside the United States, younger speakers also have higher rates of glottal stop production (Holmes, 1995;Mathisen, 1999Penney et al, 2019Smith & Holmes-Elliott, 2018;Stoddart et al, 1999;Watt & Milroy, 1999).…”