Variation in fine phonetic detail modulates the outcome of sound change

The case of stop lenition in Jutland Danish

Rasmus Puggaard-Rode

2023-12-07

Road map

• The problem

• Danish stop gradation

• Research questions

• Methods and materials

  • The corpus
  • The stats

• Results

• Discussion and conclusions

The problem

• Multiple degrees of freedom in the phonetic realization of laryngeal contrasts

  • The “neat” voiced–unaspirated–aspirated distinction looks more like an unbroken continuum

Lisker & Abramson (1964); Ladd (2011); Chen (2011); Beckman, Jessen & Ringen (2013); Kirby & Tan (2023)

Cho & Ladefoged (1999)

The problem

• Multiple degrees of freedom in the phonetic realization of laryngeal contrasts

  • The “neat” voiced–unaspirated–aspirated distinction looks more like an unbroken continuum
  • Languages vary w.r.t. voicing and F₀ perturbations in unpredictable ways
  • Do these details impact higher-order linguistic structures?

Lisker & Abramson (1964); Ladd (2011); Chen (2011); Beckman, Jessen & Ringen (2013); Kirby & Tan (2023)

The problem

• Laryngeal realism: [±voice] is insufficient for two-way laryngeal contrasts

  • Regressive voicing assimilation common in ‘true voice’ languages
  • Progressive aspiration assimilation common in ‘aspiration’ languages
  • Debuccalization to [h] found in ‘aspiration’ languages

• Does phonology care about anything smaller?

Iverson & Salmons (1995); Lombardi (1999); Honeybone (2002); Honeybone (2005); cf. Cyran (2011)

The problem

• We have good reason to assume the answer is yes from other domains

  • Velar palatalization before front vowels is the result of small differences in burst noise characteristics
  • Lenition predominantly targets codas because word-final information is more contextually predictable, and as such, hypoarticulated

• Difficult to test though!

Lindblom (1990); Ohala (1992); Guion (1998); Hall et al. (2018); Wedel, Ussishkin & King (2019)

The problem

• Enter: Danish stop gradation!

  • Phonological process which targets stops
  • Outcome known to vary geographically
  • Stop phonetics also known to vary geographically
  • Relevant varieties documented in a huge legacy corpus

Bennike & Kristensen (1898–1912); Skautrup (1944–1970); Puggaard (2021); Puggaard-Rode (2023a); Puggaard-Rode (2023b)

Danish stop gradation

• Danish phonology makes reference to strong and weak prosodic positions

  • Strong positions (SP) are onsets before a full vowel
  • Weak positions (WP) are codas and onsets before a neutral vowel, i.e. [ə] or [ɐ], as well as [i] in some morphemes

Rischel (1970)

Danish stop gradation

• Modern Standard Danish (MSD) shows alternations between

  • aspirated stops in SP, unaspirated stops in WP
  • unaspirated stops in SP, semivowels in WP

• This is often interpreted as an active phonological process

  • Colleagues and I have argued against this

Uldall (1936); Hjelmslev (1951); Rischel (1970); Horslund, Puggaard-Rode & Jørgensen (2022)

Danish stop gradation

/p t k/	→	[pʰ tʰ kʰ]	/	SP	skalpere
		[p t k]	/	WP	skalp
/b/	→	[p]	/	SP	købte
		[p ~ ʊ̯]	/	WP	købe
/d/	→	[t]	/	SP	validere
		[ɤ̯]	/	WP	valid
/g/	→	[k]	/	SP	bagte
		[ɪ̯]	/	WP, _ [-back, -high]	bage
		[ʊ̯]	/	WP, _ [+back, -high]	bagværk
		Ø	/	WP, _ [+high]

Danish stop gradation: variation

• Stop gradation affected almost the entire Danish-speaking area, but the precise outcomes differed
• Thanks to a historically strong tradition of dialectology, this variability has long been well-described

Danish stop gradation: variation

Bennike & Kristensen (1898–1912)

Danish stop gradation: variation in /b/

Puggaard-Rode (2023a)

Danish stop gradation: variation in /g/

Puggaard-Rode (2023a)

Danish stop gradation: variation in /d/

Puggaard-Rode (2023a)

Danish stop gradation: variation

Research questions

• Broad RQ:

  • Are sound changes sensitive to the phonetic details of laryngeal contrast beyond broad descriptive features like ‘aspiration’ and ‘true voice’?

• Narrow RQ:

  • Is the variation in stop gradation patterns in Jutland Danish limited to WP, or are there meaningful correlates in SP?

Hypotheses

• Stop gradation led to an increase in aperture almost across the board

• The outcomes of stop gradation were affected by the precise implementation of the laryngeal contrast

  • The degree of sonority in WP is reflected in the ‘phonetic sonority’ of stops
  • I.e., more voicing, less aspiration = more sonorous

Hypotheses

Hypotheses

The data

• A bit of background

  • The past century has been very hard on regional variation in Denmark
  • The traditional dialects of Danish are mostly moribund or extinct

• Tape recordings were gathered from elderly dialect speakers in the early 1970s

Arboe Andersen (1981); Kristiansen (2003); Pedersen (2003); Goldshtein & Puggaard (2019); cf. Maegaard & Monka (2019)

The data

• The corpus consists of

  • 525 sociolinguistic interviews
  • 370 hours of speech data
  • Almost entirely unused…and un-annotated :-(

The data

• This study

  • 213 different recordings

  • 49 women, 164 men

  • Mean age = 77.4 years

    • I.e., this is roughly the same generation captured in the dialect maps of Bennike & Kristensen (1898–1912)

The data

Acoustic analysis

• First step: finding the stops

  • By…
  • …listening through the recordings -_-
  • And noting the rough locations of each stop until 50 /p t k/ tokens were found
  • Noting the locations of /b d g/ tokens in that same time span

Acoustic analysis

Phoneme	Number of tokens
/p/	1,386
/t/	5,169
/k/	4,095
/p t k/ total	10,650
/b/	2,212
/d/	2,369
/g/	2,273
/b d g/ total	6,854

Acoustic analysis

• Positive voice onset time was measured manually in /p t k/

Acoustic analysis

• Positive voice onset time was measured manually in /p t k/

Acoustic analysis: voiced or not voiced?

Stats

• Generalized additive mixed models

  • Very useful for modeling non-linear effects
  • Omnipresent in linguistics in the past half decade

Wieling (2018); Voeten & Levelt (2019); Carignan et al. (2020); Puggaard-Rode (2022)

Stats

• Generalized additive mixed models

  • Very useful for modeling non-linear effects
  • Omnipresent in linguistics in the past half decade

• In this case, spatial GAMMs

Wieling, Nerbonne & Baayen (2011)

Stats: model structure

• Dependent variables

  • Voice onset time

    • Scaled t distribution

  • Presence or absence of voicing

    • Binomial distribution

Stats: model structure

• Two-dimensional smooth modeling geographical coordinates

• Independent variables

  • Place of articulation
  • Stress
  • Speaker gender
  • Preceding boundary
  • Palatalization
  • Vowel features (roundness, backness, height)

Stats: model structure

• Independent variables were coded with sum or Helmert contrasts
• By-speaker random slopes for all independent variables
• Fitted in R with mgcv

Wood (2017); Wood (2022); Schad et al. (2020)

Results: VOT

Results: VOT

Results: VOT

Results: VOT

Results: voicing

Results: voicing

Results: voicing

Results: voicing

Results: voicing

Discussion: regional variation

• In MSD, voicelessness in /b d g/ is maintained with glottal spreading

  • This serves to block intervocalic voicing
  • It is unlikely that (Northern) Jutlandic varieties have this gesture
  • For some speakers, voicing is even found in absolute initial position, which requires extra effort

Fischer-Jørgensen & Hirose (1974); Hutters (1985); Solé (2018); Puggaard-Rode, Horslund & Jørgensen (2022)

Discussion: regional variation

• The observed patterns suggest that stop gradation = increase in aperture in /b d g/

  • If /b d g/ are voiced at high rates, the result should be a voiced fricative or an approximant

  • If /b d g/ are largely voiceless, the results should be a voiceless fricative

    • …and we might expect increased prominence of aspiration in /p t k/

Discussion: regional variation

Discussion: regional variation

Discussion: Modern Standard Danish

• MSD provides a counterexample!

  • Laryngeal contrast is highly aspiration-oriented
  • Stop gradation outcomes is highly sonorous
  • Why?

Discussion: Modern Standard Danish

• Contrast in MSD used to be more voicing-oriented

  • More voicing during the first stages of stop gradation
  • Subsequent drift towards more aspiration, less voicing in SP
  • This severed any synchronic connection between SP and WP allophones
  • Jutland stop gradation has more hallmarks of an active phonological process

Conclusion

• Uncovered systematic, highly gradient patterns of covariability in VOT and voicing rates in Jutland Danish

• These patterns have direct parallels in the outcome of stop gradation in other prosodic positions

• This suggests that fine phonetic detail directly impacts sound change/phonological processes

  • Broadly defined features are insufficient!

Tak for opmærksomheden!

rpuggaardrode.github.io
r.puggaard@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
@rpuggaardrode

These slides are available at rpuggaardrode.github.io/lancaster23

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