Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of vowels /u/ and /о/ (in BBC analytical news programs)
The current paper explores the acoustic cues of canonically back British vowels /u/ and /и/ that tend to undergo fronting and peculiarities of /u/ fronted patterns perception. The aim of the acoustic analysis was to see the extent of fronting and to understand the magnitude of the phonetic environment (mostly consonantal) impact in terms of neutral, encouraging and discouraging fronting as well as conflicting one. The results indicate that fronting is expressed to a greater extent for /u/ than for /и/ in all types of contexts due to the distributional features of these vowels in the speech flow and their variable acoustic properties associated with the environment of different types. Despite the same number of contexts that encourage fronting, front patterns with F2 values exceeding 1600 Hz were predominant only for /u/, while the central ones prevailed for /и/. One of the reasons lies in the nature of the conflicting consonant environment, where the consonant preceding /u/ was almost always either apical-alveolar or palatal, and its influence, under the natural laws of coarticulation, produced a much stronger effect on the vowel than the following consonant that discouraged fronting. On the contrary, in the overwhelming majority of C1UC2 environments, C1 was a labial consonant producing, by the similar natural coarticulation laws of greater C1 influence, a more powerful retraction effect on the vowel than apical-alveolar or palatal C2 whose fronting effect was weaker in that position. The perceptual study was aimed to test the hypothesis about the possible phonological overlap of the front patterns of /u/ (F2>1600 Hz) with /i/, /1/, /e/. The experiment program contained 35 CVC sequences segmented from stressed and unstressed phrase positions, where Vs were front /u/-tokens acoustically similar to /i/, /1/, /e/, and 2 CVCs with Vs similar to /0/ and /3/. The experiment was carried out using a specially designed web application, where a questionnaire for participants, the experiment program and tokens for listening were posted. The listeners were 16 native British speakers (10 women, 6 men), representatives of different regional dialects, involved in various spheres of society. The results demonstrate that front /u/-pattems with F2 values characteristic for /i/, /1/, /e/ were interpreted as vowels /i/, /1/, /e/ by most participants. This fact shows the possibility of a variable phonemic pattern of certain morphemes and words - canonical with /u/ and non-canonical with /i/, /1/, /e/ - as a result of current phonetic laws of producing speech flow in English on the whole and in its British accent in particular. Noncanonical forms, due to their high frequency of occurrence, infiltrate the standard and trigger changes in the phonological system in terms of vowel shift.
Keywords
британский вариант английского языка,
канонически заднерядные гласные /u/ и /о/,
согласный контекст,
продвижение вперёд,
квазичередования,
British English,
canonically back British vowels /u/ and /и/,
consonantal environment,
fronting,
quasi-alternationsAuthors
| Karavaeva Veronika G. | Amur State University | Berenices1988@gmail.com |
Всего: 1
References
Wells J.C. English Accents in England // Language in the British Isles / ed. by P. Trudgill. 1984. P. 55-69.
Gimson A. The RP accent // Language in the British Isles. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984. P. 45-54.
Parson G. From RP to Estuary English: The concept “received” and the debate about British pronunciation standards. Hamburg, 1998. URL: https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/parsons_ma.pdf
Медведева Т.В. Самая популярная разновидность произношения? (К вопросу о путях развития произносительной нормы в британском варианте английского языка) // Филологические науки. 2001. № 1. С. 78-83.
Шевченко Т.И. Фонетика и фонология английского языка: Курс теоретической фонетики английского языка для бакалавров. Дубна, 2011. 256 с.
Безбородова М.В. Estuary English в речи молодых образованных носителей британского варианта английского языка // Вестник МГЛУ. 2015. Вып. 1 (712). С. 9-17.
Безбородова М.В. Особенности вокалической составляющей речи молодых британцев // Вестник МГЛУ. 2011. Вып. 1 (607). С. 37-53.
Караваева В.Г., Андросова С.В. Аллофонное варьирование гласных /u/ и /о/ в современной британской речи (на материале аналитических новостных передач BBC) // Вестник Томского государственного университета. Филология. 2016. № 5 (43). С. 46-58.
Лефельдт В. Акцент и ударение в русском языке. М. : Языки славянской культуры, 2006. 246 с.
Cambridge dictionary. Cambridge University Press, 2017. URL: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/eng-lish/pronunciation (дата обращения: 20.06.2017).
Macmillan dictionary. Macmillan Publishers Limited 2009-2017. URL: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/denomination (дата обращения: 20.06.2017).
Greenberg S., Chang S., Hitchcock L. The Relation between Stress Accent and Vocalic Identity in Spontaneous American English Discourse // Proc. of the ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding. [S. l.] : [S. n.], 2001. P. 51-56.
Beyond the Phoneme: A Juncture-Accent Model of Spoken language / S. Greenberg, H. Carvey, L. Hitchcock et al. // Proc. of the Human Language Technology Conf. (HLT - 2002). San Diego, California : [S. n.], 2002. P. 36-43.
Fry D.B. Duration and Intensity as Physical Correlates of Linguistic Stress // JASA. 1955. Vol. 27. P. 155-158.
Hitchcock L., Greenberg S. Vowel Hight is Intimately Associated with Stress Accent in Spontaneous American English Discourse // Proc. of the 7th Eurospeech Conf. on Speech Communication and Technology. [S. l.] : [S. n.] 2001. P. 79-82.
Silipo R., Greenberg S. Automatic Transcription of Prosodic Stress for Spontaneous English Discourse // The Phonetics of Spontaneous Speech : ICPhS-99. San Francisco : [S. n.], 1999. P. 2351-2354.
Silipo R., Greenberg S. Prosodic Stress Revisited : Reassessing the role of Fundamental Frequency // Proc. of the NIST Speech Transcription Workshop. College Park, MD : [S. n.], 2000. P. 1-6.
Луганцева Ю.С. Безударный вокализм в спонтанной речи (экспериментально-фонетическое исследование на материале американского варианта английского языка) : дис.. канд. филол. наук. Благовещенск, 2016. 214 с.
Chaldakova K., Hamann S. High vowels in Southern British English: /u/ - fronting does not result in merger. ICPhC Regular Session. Hong Kong, 17-21 August, 2011. P. 476-479.
The Bottom Line” (2016) BBC Radio 4. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sz6t/episodes/downloads
“The Sound Track of my Life” (2015) BBC Radio 2. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vc9gs/episodes/downloads
“The Business of Film” (2015) BBC Radio 4. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054cbnp/broadcasts/2015/08
“Confessions” (2016) BBC Radio 2. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvdq/episodes/downloads
BBC Radio London. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrtqm/episodes/downloads
Acoustic and Perceptual Studies of Speech at the Amur State University. URL: https://pss.amursu.ru
Касевич В.Б., Ягунова Е.В. Еще о роли фонетического слова в восприятии речи // Идеи и методы экспериментального изучения речи : сб. ст. памяти проф. Л. А. Чистович и проф. В. А. Кожевникова / отв. ред. Л.В. Бондарко, В.В. Люблинская. СПб. : Фак-т филол. и искус ств С.-Петерб. гос. ун-та, 2008. С. 99-110.
Acoustic and Perceptual Similarity of Japanese and American Vowels / K. Nishi, W. Strange, R. Akahane-Yamada et al. // JASA. 2008. Vol. 124, № 1. P. 576-588. ISSN 0014966.
Андросова С.В. Акустические и перцептивные корреляты цельнооформленности слога (экспериментально-фонетическое исследование на материале американской спонтанной речи) : дис.. д-ра филол. наук. Благовещенск, 2012. 535 с.
Андросова С.В. Слог как единица координации (экспериментально-фонетическое исследование на материале спонтанной речи). Благовещенск : Изд-во АмГУ, 2010. 272 с.
Андросова С.В. Неканонические фонологические модели морфем и слов в русском и английском языках // Теоретическая и прикладная лингвистика. 2015. Вып. 1, № 1. С. 5-15.
