L563F10.A06
Meredith Tamminga
Phase III
Phase III of Bermudez-Otero’s (2007) life cycle of a sound change is characterized
by sensitivity to morphosyntactic structure and/or the emergence of lexical
idiosyncrasy. I will explore the extent to which Canadian Raising exemplifies this
phase.
Canadian Raising is traditionally understood to be the allophonic rule that
centralizes the nuclei of the diphthongs /ay/ and/aw/ before voiceless segments
(Joos 1942, Chambers 1973). The raising of /ay0/ is found not only in Canada but
throughout various regions of the United States as well, including the Inland North
and Philadelphia. Raising has already been reported to have some sensitivity to
morphological structure; morpheme boundaries potentially block raising, as in the
case of unraised eyeful contrasting with raised Eiffel (Bermudez-Otero 2003).
It has long been known that raising applies prior to the American English rule of
flapping, leading to phonological opacity in cases such as writer versus rider. More
recent studies, notably Fruehwald (2008), have documented lexical exceptions to
the usual pattern and linked their development to the difficulty introduced into
acquisition by opacity. As Fruehwald points out, the newly-developed
unpredictability in the lexical distribution of /ay0/ indicates that it has
phonemicized, meaning it has probably already moved out of Bermudez-Otero’s
Phase II (the restructuring of the phonological representations underlying the
phonetics) and into Phase III.
I would suggest that Canadian Raising, at least in some dialects where it is found,
may be undergoing, or at least poised to undergo, another previously-unreported
development that could be indicative of Phase III. My own (largely Canadian) speech
does contain at least one of the lexical /ay0/ irregularities Fruehwald reports for
Philadelphia (raised spider). I also have some lexically-conditioned raising before
/r/, as in fire but not wire. But perhaps most interestingly, is my intuition that the
verb tire and its related adjective tired are raised, but that the tire you put on a car is
unraised. This one-off use of raising to indicate a difference in part of speech would,
I think, fit in well with Phase III. It is also one pathway along which we might expect
to see a transition to Phase IV, as I will describe in the next paragraph. Of course,
this transition may well never get underway given the probably somewhat
stochastic nature of sound change, especially if the noun-verb distinction turns out
to be no more than a personal idiosyncrasy. As a result, the wildly ambitious
research project I will outline in the following paragraphs would be a risky one!
It would be a great accomplishment for linguistic science to make a strong
prediction about a future language change and then watch it unfold in real time.
Canadian Raising may be on the brink of undergoing a series of substantial linguistic
changes, and if it is we would be well situated to observe it in real time. The
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following are my predicted steps for how Canadian Raising might transition from
Phase III to Phase IV through a mix of transmission and diffusion, and how it might
be detected in the course of a longitudinal dialect geography research project.
First, I would predict the extension of the pre-/r/ noun/verb generalization to other
homophonous noun/verb pairs: attire, desire, fire, wire, sire. This might be a
reasonable analogical extension for children to make in their search for generalities
during the course of acquisition – if they perceive the raising of /ay/ before /r/ in
tire (v) to be syntacticosemantically meaningful, they may extract this meaning and
use it to form verbs from other /ayr/ nouns. This might especially be prone to
happen if the current raising status of many of these words is actually variable, even
within individual speakers (which I suspect might be the case). The imposition by
adults of such morphosyntactic structure on variation perceived through dialect
contact seems to be much less likely. The association of raised /ayr/ with verbs in
noun-verb pairs could then easily spread by essentially the same mechanism to
other /ayr/ verbs that do not have nominal homophones. At some point, raising
could thus come to have a component that is entirely morphological, replacing the
original phonological pattern that /ay/ before /r/ should not be raised.
At the same time, raising of /ay/ in other voiced environments seems more
amenable to diffusion across different speech communities, as there is nothing
particularly sysematic about it. In other words, we might expect to see the diffusion
of /ayV/ through the lexicon take place at least partially through, essentially, the
borrowing of superficial phonetic forms across groups of adults. Although of course
the specific raised /ayV/ lexical items must originate somewhere, quite possibly in
the course of normal acquisition, this is the notoriously difficult actuation problem
and is not likely to be solved in this study. However, the spread of raised /ayV/ is a
more tractable issue and could possibly be observed in real time if a sufficiently
long-term study were undertaken.
So how might such a study be constructed? The main challenge would be to collect
sufficient data to study both lexical and geographic diffusion over time. I would
begin by collecting a baseline sample that is geographically well-distributed from
dialect areas that are known to have Canadian Raising. One possibility would be to
post a reading passage online through a website that is equipped to collect
recordings that people make themselves using their computer mics.1 Distribution of
the URL for the survey could be done through Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist,
academic listservs, etc. The reading passage would include tokens of noun/verb
/ayr/ pairs in unambiguous contexts as well as the /ayV/ items that Fruehwald
identified as being possibly raised in Philadelphia. Very basic demographic
information (perhaps as simple as birth year and sex) could be collected as well.
The data collected in the first year would serve two purposes. First, after making
any changes in design that seemed necessary, the online survey could be repeated at
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I’m sure I took a survey like this at some point but I can’t remember where.
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regular intervals for a longer period of time (such as every three years for 30 years).
Each subsequent year could be compared to the original data to assess whether
individual lexical items were showing up in broader geographic environments over
time. Second, while the long-term collection of the lexical diffusion data was
underway, the baseline data could be used to identify more restricted locations
where raised /ayV/ and specifically /ayr/ items were found at higher than average
rates. A more extensive word list and reading passage could be administered to
recruited participants in these areas, with participants screened for having at least
one raised /ayV/ token so that they would provide useful data on raising. Ideally
there would be an emphasis on finding participant families with children in the
model of Johnson (2007), in the hopes of uncovering cases where children whose
parents have at least one noun/verb distinction based on raising extend this pattern
to other noun/verb homophone pairs. Even in the absence of such a felicitous
discovery, within-family data would be useful for carefully studying the unbroken
pattern of language acquisition that constitutes transmission.
As the longitudinal aspect of the online study progressed, new families could be
recruited in areas where raised /ayV/ tokens were appearing for the first time. This
approach would be useful for exploring how diffused changes subsequently get
transmitted.
Let’s discuss how such a project might be implemented next term. The Atlas failed
to inquire into these matters, and it might be possible to call up Atlas subjects as
well as fish for people on the web. I think the writer/rider opposition has to be
made central.
References
Bermudez-Otero, R. 2003. The acquisition of phonological opacity. In Jennifer
Spenader, Anders Eriksson, and Osten Dahl (Eds.), Variation within
Optimality Theory: proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop in ’variation within
Optimality Theory’, 25–36.
Bermudez-Otero, R. 2007. Diachronic phonology. In Paul de Lacy (Ed.), The
Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, 497-517. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chambers, J. K. 1973. Canadian Raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18:131–135.
Fruehwald, J. 2008. The spread of raising: opacity, lexicalization, and diffusion.
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14: Iss. 2, Article 11.
Johnson, D. 2007. Stability and change along a dialect boundary: the low vowels of
southeastern New England. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
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Joos, M. 1942. A phonological dilemma in Canadian English. Language 18:141–144.
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