Ministry of higher and secondary special education faculty of foreign languages of bukhara state university department of english literature

1.4 Problematic sociophonetics

With Adrian Simpson’s paper “Ejectives in English and German – Linguistic, Sociophonetic, Interactional, Epiphenomenal?” the reader is engaged in a close inquiry on the apparent spread of ejectives in varieties of British English. The production of ejectives in English (as compared to German) is a case of articulatory variation that does not properly fit with the traditional classification of sociophonetic change.

Phonetic variation of English and German ejectives is analysed with respect to two different dimensions: function and production. The fine phonetic detail in ejectives articulation is discussed; the paper does not directly rely on a large and sociolinguistically stratified mass of speech data, as other papers of the volume do, though several hours of a television comedy are the reference data set of the analysis and attention is devoted to conversational situations. Moreover, it is argued that the analysis of the contexts in which the sound change unfolds must also proceed cautiously, as the structural context (e.g., word-finality) and the conversational context (e.g., spontaneous conversation with floor-holding pause) interact in natural language production in such a way that “within normal interaction, there are different categories of word-finality or pre-pausality, different contexts which may or may not be accompanied by different bundles of phonetic events” (p. …).

Simpson’s paper can therefore be seen as a purposely provocative conclusion to this volume, inasmuch as it clearly points out issues in the study of ongoing sound changes that are problematic for current sociophonetic research.

In particular, the sound change involving the apparent spread of ejectives in varieties of British English appears to be somewhat atypical for a number of reasons. First, it seems to have an internal and independent origin in several neighboring varieties, rather than a contact-induced source. Second, it is characterized by a rather low degree of predictability of occurrence in the different contexts, since much variation is attested across speakers and also within the speech of individual speakers. Third, the auditory output is ambiguous with respect to the glottal and articulatory mechanisms, in such a way that the observed variability is inconsistent with some proposed theories of the propagation of sound changes from listeners’ misinterpretations (e.g., Ohala 1974). The author appropriately argues that only a combination of different instrumental techniques, such as transillumination and airflow measurements, would produce a substantial advancement in the investigation of the articulatory mechanisms of ejectives’ production – a position that reinforces similar arguments expressed in several other papers in the book. Fourth, the attested articulatory and functional ambiguity of ejectives is necessarily related to the very low number of occurrences in a given corpus. More specifically, the paper reports that in three hours of the television comedy The Office, only eight instances of ejectives were identified. This poses obvious problems from a methodological point of view: how would it be possible to apply a corpus perspective in the study of such infrequent speech phenomena? How should we track the precise development in time and space of marginal phonetic features by avoiding at the same time overinterpretations (besides misinterpretations) of the data? The author also points out that the level of phonetic-articulatory detail generally annotated in the available corpora is insufficient to the analysis of the spread of ejectives throughout the English language.

Some of these concerns, and particularly the latter, are probably also valid for several other phenomena worthy of sociophonetic investigation. This clearly encourages sociophonetics to pursue the journey through territories that in all probability still contain more surprises than might be expected.