Pre-R Dentalisation in northern England

Abstract

Dental pronunciation of alveolar consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. This PRE-R DENTALISATION (PreRD) has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-REALISATION EFFECT and a MORPHEME BOUNDARY CONSTRAINT. It is less well known that PreRD is (or perhaps was) also a feature of a number of English varieties outside Ireland, particularly in traditional northern English dialects. This article analyses dialect data from northern England in order to determine the nature of PreRD there and its historical relations with the phenomenon in Irish English. In addition, it explores the phonological complexities of PreRD in light of the loss of rhoticity in traditional northern English dialects. Pre-R DentalisationDental pronunciation of (general English, ?underlying, ?historical) alveolar nonsibilant consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known (and indeed stereotyped) feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. Thus we find pronunciations such as try [t1 |aÚe], dry [d1 |aÚe], street [st1 |it], entry ["En1 t1 |e], better ["bEt1 "], wonder ["wç· 6 n1 d1 "] and dinner ["dən1 "] used by conservative speakers of Tyrone English (TyrE) in Northern Ireland. 2 This PRE-R DENTALISATION (henceforth PreRD) is a pan-Irish English feature, having been reported from locations as linguistically and geographically diverse as Wexford see also Harris 1985: 211-18 for a critical analysis), which has 1 I would like to thank Patrick Honeybone and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on this article. Any remaining deficiencies are, of course, of my own making. 2 Tyrone English data are from ongoing research on the variety by the present author. Harris (1985Harris ( , 2006) also records PreRD for /l/ in Mid-Ulster English, as in pillar ["pIl1 "], but this is not present in TyrE. 3 In Southern Irish English (but not Northern Irish English), PreRD of original /t/ and /d/ has resulted in phonemic split and merger with original /θ/ and /ð/, since the English dental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, have also become dental stops in all environments (Wells 1982: 429-31). Since this article deals with varieties where this is not the case, I do not discuss this aspect of Southern Irish English PreRD further. 362WA R R E N M AG U I R E (phonemic) contrasts between 'broad' dental /t d n l/ and 'slender' (palato-)alveolar /t´d´n´l´/. Furthermore, PreRD has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-REALISATION EFFECT (henceforth RRE), and a MORPHEME BOUNDARY CONSTRAINT (henceforth MBC). PreRD in Irish English is often associated with tapped (and possibly trilled) pronunciations of /r/, as in TyrE try [t1 |aÚe] vs cry [k®aÚe]. The RRE has been recorded in varieties of Ulster Scots (Gregg 1985), in Mid-Ulster English generally (Harris 1985), in Donegal Gaeltacht English (Ní Ghallchóir 1981, and in Wexford (Ó Muirithe 1996). Since the RRE is also present after /θ/ and /ð/ in those northern Irish English varieties w...

Pre-R Dentalisation in Scotland

“…Firstly, the presence of these features in Scots as well as English dialects requires their history to be extended right back to the Middle English period. It is quite possible, as argued in Maguire (2012a), that given this time depth PreRD was present throughout much of England in earlier times (especially if the evidence of -dər lenition is considered). This being the case, PreRD (and the RRE) was a feature of many of the English input varieties to Ireland in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, making its continued presence in Ireland unremarkable.…”

“…In order to determine whether an RRE occurred at each location, /r/ variants were grouped to maximise the differences between PreRD and non-PreRD environments, and the significance or otherwise of these differences were tested using Fisher's Exact Test, with a probability of 0.05 or less being taken as evidence of the RRE (see Table 5, significant results in bold PreRD clusters and only 7 times in non-PreRD clusters (again a highly unlikely pattern to occur by chance). Ayrshire, suggesting that it does still exist to some degree north of the Border if not south of it (Maguire 2012a).…”

“…The widespread occurrence of PreRD in Scotland, especially its presence in Shetland and Orkney, where Scots was introduced in the 15 th century (Millar 2007), suggests that the feature is of considerable antiquity in Scots, as it also appears to be in English (Maguire 2012a is the case, Scots must have maintained a distinction, which has gone unreported, between these different allophones of /r/ for centuries (even if this distinction was lost in some dialects), and that reports of trilled [r] in all positions are either in error or apply only to certain Scots dialects. From a phonological perspective, the existence of the MBC and its patchy distribution (assuming that this is not a consequence of its loss) provide excellent evidence for the modular feedforward architecture of English and Scots phonology, and of the life cycle of sound changes which such a model predicts.…”

Wide-domainr-effects in English

“…In the present day, pre-r dentalisation is almost exclusively found in Irish English, although it was once also prevalent in northern England (see Maguire 2012). In some traditional Old-World dialects, the same consonants also show up as dentals before r or rhotic schwa, e.g.…”

“…The historical background to D's defective distribution in standard English is well established (see for example Jespersen 1909 : 199). This is the context that hosted the early spirantisation of der >Der, the main source of intervocalic D in modern English (see Jespersen 1909, Maguire 2012. In Old English, fricatives were predictably voiced in a position that is loosely described in the historical literature as intervocalic ; in fact, as the distribution in (19) shows, the position is more accurately described as intervocalic within a foot.…”