Submitted by kkazmierski on 29 January, 2019 - 15:14.
The Centre for Celtic Studies and the Department of Contemporary English Language (DoCELu) are happy to announce a joint Celtic Reading Group / Phon&Phon meeting.
Jonathan Morris (Cardiff University)
Míša Hejná (Aarhus University)
The sociophonetics of pre-aspiration in Welsh
Abstract
Previous research has shown that pre-aspiration can be a phonemic and a variable linguistic feature susceptible to linguistic and extra-linguistic influences. In the case of Welsh, previous exploratory work has found the presence of pre-aspiration but the phonetic and phonological properties of this feature and its sociophonetic patterning in the language are not known. This paper is based on a recent study (Morris & Hejná, forthcoming) and presents analyses of the variety of Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Gwynedd). It reports the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration, its duration, and noisiness. As well as describing pre-aspiration, it attempts to ascertain the extent to which this feature is influenced by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors.
Wordlist data were analysed from 16 Welsh–English bilinguals from Bethesda (Gwynedd, north Wales). Speakers were aged between 16 and 18 years old and the sample was stratified by speaker sex and home language (either Welsh or English). The results indicate that pre-aspiration is frequent in both fortis and lenis plosives (the latter of which are typically devoiced in Welsh). In addition to a number of linguistic influences on its production, both speaker sex and home language were found to be significant predictors of variation for some measures.
The results are discussed with reference to previous studies of pre-aspiration in other languages and work on phonetic variation in Welsh–English bilingual speech. Specifically, we comment on the extent to which pre-aspiration patterns identically across languages and how further work on different varieties of Welsh (and indeed Welsh Englishes) will provide a more detailed overiew of the sociophoentics of pre-aspiration in Welsh.
Thursday, 31 January 2019, 16:45, Room 109A (Collegium Novum)
Submitted by K Kaźmierski
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