Consonant Clusters and Resyllabification in Black South African English

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Consonant Clusters andResyllabification in Black SouthAfrican EnglishBertus van Rooy aa School of Languages , Potchefstroom Campus, North-WestUniversity , E-mail:Published online: 25 Oct 2007.

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Consonant Clusters and Resyllabification inBlack South African English

Bertus van Rooy

School of Languages

Potchefstroom Campus, North-West University

[email protected]

Abstract

Consonants have not been a significant focus of research in Black South African

English (BSAE), apart from work on final devoicing and regressive voicing

assimilation. Pronunciation differences between the acrolect and mesolect varieties

have also not been examined in much detail, nor has attention been paid to

spontaneous speech. This article examines the realisation of consonant clusters and

the resyllabification of consonants in BSAE, comparing the acrolect to the mesolect in

a transcribed corpus of spontaneous conversation. The major findings are that the

mesolect data are subject to more extensive simplification of the distribution of

consonants in onset clusters, coda clusters and even singleton codas. Resyllabifica-

tion of codas also takes place more often in the mesolect, and when resyllabification

takes place, intervocalic voicing frequently accompanies it, such that the voicing

contrast in intervocalic obstruents is largely neutralised.

Key words: Black South African English, consonant clusters, intervocalic voicing,

phonology, phonotactics, resyllabification

Introduction

Consonants in Black South African English (BSAE) are generally regarded as

more similar to native varieties of English than the vowels (Van Rooy 2004). The

majority of recent research articles on the pronunciation of BSAE, such as

Mesthrie (2005), Lemmer et al. (2000), Van Rooy and Van Huyssteen (2000),

Van Rooy et al. (2000) and Wissing (2002), focus on vowel phenomena. A

number of important findings have been recorded as far as segmental variation

within the vowel system is concerned. However, the consonant system is less

well understood, with the only recent contributions coming from Van Rooy

(2000, 2004). The following consonant features have been identified: occasional

ISSN: Print 1022-8195/Online 1753-5395 Language Matters 38 (1) 2007 pp. 26±45# Unisa PressDOI: 10.1080/10228190701640017

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place or manner of articulation variation, particularly affricates realised as

fricatives and fricatives realised as plosives, final devoicing and a predominantly

trilled realisation of [r]. The results are mainly valid for the mesolect form of

BSAE, while a few observations are made to suggest differences between the

mesolect and the acrolect (see Schmied 1991, 47). Coetzee-Van Rooy and Van

Rooy (2005) compare these two varieties of BSAE to each other and find that

they are not equally intelligible, nor are they perceived to have the same status. It

follows that it is reasonable to distinguish these varieties, but the nature of the

pronunciation differences between them is not yet known.

A phenomenon that has not yet received any serious attention in the recent

research is the phonotactic distribution of consonants in BSAE, in particular

constraints on complex consonant clusters. In previous research, I identified a

number of possible cluster simplification phenomena in passing (Van Rooy

2000, 2004), but the analyses were restricted to the mesolect variety of BSAE,

and based mainly on read speech. In this article, the investigation is taken further,

by examining the distribution of consonants in BSAE in spontaneous speech. An

attempt is made to establish whether there are characteristic features of BSAE on

this level, and also whether the acrolect and mesolect forms of BSAE are

different from each other.

Several findings from research on the acquisition of the phonology of English as

a second language have a bearing on the present research. The open syllable

structure with a single consonant (CV) is the universally preferred syllable

structure, and also appears in second language phonologies from early on. Even

when it becomes suppressed in favour of a more complete realisation of the

phonological material in the target language, codas continue to exhibit more

simplification than onsets (see e.g. Archibald 1998; Carlisle 1999; Major 1999;

Stockman and Phuut 1999). Furthermore, within consonant clusters, either in the

syllable onset or coda, there is a general trend across languages to adhere to the

sonority hierarchy, with more sonorous consonants closer to the syllable nucleus

and less sonorant ones patterning at the beginning of onsets and the ends of

codas. When the hierarchy is not observed in the target language, as in /sp-, st-,

sk-/ onset clusters, or /-ts, -ps, -ks/ coda clusters, more errors in production result

(Altenberg 2005; Archibald 1998).

Informally, this article is grounded in Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince

1993, 1995; Prince and Smolensky 1993), and particularly the understanding of

first-language acquisition as constraint demotion (Tesar and Smolensky 1993,

1998) to conceptualise the various forces that operate on the phenomena under

investigation. Within the field of second-language phonology-acquisition

studies, these forces have been investigated under headings such as markedness,

universals, typology and structural conformity (see e.g. Bley-Vroman 1983;

Consonant Clusters and Resyllabification in Black South African English 27

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Eckman 1977, 1981, 1991; Major 1999; Major and Faudree 1996). Within

Optimality Theory, these various processes are captured by the contrast between

markedness constraints that pull languages (including interlanguages) in the

direction of the most unmarked phonological forms, and faithfulness constraints

that require faithfulness to some aspect of the underlying representation of a

particular target form. This approach has been adopted by Broselow et al. (1998),

Broselow and Xu (2004) and Grijzenhout and Van Rooy (2001), and will serve

as background for the interpretation of the data. However, no formal Optimality

analysis will be undertaken, although concepts such as markedness and

faithfulness will be used in their standard Optimality senses.

Methodology

Nine speakers of Black South African English were interviewed informally in a

recording studio by different fieldworkers. The interviews were recorded with a

digital tape recorder. A segment of between five and ten minutes per speaker was

then transcribed phonetically, until at least 360 words were transcribed, giving a

total data corpus of 3 762 words. No random sampling was feasible. Each

fieldworker was simply asked to identify a speaker known to him/her who was

willing to participate in a short interview about their educational background and

financial behaviour. This was done to deflect attention from the linguistic

purpose of the study. All speakers were familiar with their interviewers and the

result was fairly informal dialogues.

The speakers in the sample are divided into two groups, applying the criteria of

Schmied (1991, 47) and Mesthrie (2002, 4345) to BSAE:

Acrolect ± three speakers (one male, two female): university lecturers of English,

with at least five years of post-school education in English.

Mesolect ± six speakers (two male, four female): four undergraduate university

students with less than two years of post-school education, who have been in

township schools with negligible contact with native speakers of English; and two

semi-skilled workers who both completed primary school and parts of their

secondary education.

The students were aged 19±21, while the other five speakers ranged from 24 to

51 years. All speakers claimed proficiency in Setswana (a Sotho language) and

in either isiZulu or isiXhosa (Nguni languages) as well. Two speakers claimed

primary proficiency in one of the Nguni languages, but the majority regarded

themselves as native speakers of Setswana. The recordings were made in an area

(the towns of Mafikeng and Potchefstroom in the North-West Province) where

Setswana is the majority language, but at least 25 per cent of the Black

population speaks another language at home according to official census figures,

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resulting in widespread multilingualism with additional African languages being

acquired from early childhood in informal conditions within the neighbourhood.

The actual primary language of the speakers is not such an important issue for

the purposes of the present research, because of the phonological similarity of the

various Sotho and Nguni languages in the relevant respects: none of the three

languages allows syllable codas or onset clusters, and all of them have a range of

voiced and voiceless obstruents, as well as sonorants, in their consonant

inventories, but none includes the dental fricatives /J, H/ in their inventories. Van

Rooy and Van Huyssteen (2000) and Wissing (2002) also find that differences in

the English of Sotho and Nguni language-speakers are marginal.

Very narrow phonetic transcriptions were made after analysing the speech

waveforms and spectrograms in Praat. Explicit acoustic criteria were used for

the various types of classifications. For an obstruent to be classified as voiced, it

had to contain uninterrupted low frequency spectral activity for at least 25 per

cent of its duration. To be classified as aspirated, it had to contain a voice onset

time of at least 40 milliseconds, which had to be filled with some low intensity

noise in the frequency region of vowel formants (300±3 000Hz), rather than in

the frequency range for the homorganic fricative. Gemination was judged in

context, with a particular segment needing to have at least 150 per cent the

duration of similar segments in the vicinity. The deletion of consonants was

fairly easy to detect when inspecting waveforms and spectrograms and presented

little difficulty.

Syllabification tends to be a property that is not always easy to judge on acoustic

criteria alone. Thus, syllable boundaries were inserted in the transcriptions on the

basis of the auditory perception of the researcher, using as much of the acoustic

evidence available as possible. Thus, if a plosive had a shorter closure, and/or

was weakly aspirated or completely unaspirated, it confirmed a coda analysis,

while a longer closure and/or more aspiration were taken to signal its status as

onset. Also, the extent to which the final transition of the preceding vowel or the

initial transition of the following vowel showed co-articulatory effects with the

consonant was taken to indicate whether it belonged to a particular syllable.

Results

The results are presented in this section. In the first subsection, the data on onset

clusters is presented (Table 1), followed by data on coda clusters in Tables 2±7 in

the next subsection, then data on singleton codas in Tables 8±9, followed by data

on the interaction between the voicing of the final obstruent and resyllabification

of codas in Tables 10±16. Throughout the presentation, the data of the three

acrolect speakers and the six mesolect speakers are presented separately.


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Onset clusters

All onset clusters in the speech of the three acrolect speakers (a total of 89 in the

corpus) were realised in ways similar to typical native speakers of English, so

there is nothing more to report. By contrast, cluster simplification occurred in the

speech of each of the six mesolect speakers. The analysis of data from these six

speakers is presented in Table 1. The pronunciation of the word English by all

speakers was excluded from the analysis. In this word, a lot of variation was

observed in the onset cluster of the second syllable, with the majority of cases

involving deletion of the obstruent /M/ in the cluster /Ml-/.

TABLE 1: Onset clusters in mesolect

Faithful means the cluster is realised in a way similar to native English, adopting a term from

Optimality Theory. Alternation means the manner of articulation of one of the consonants has been

changed, mostly by changing the second consonant into the glides [w] or [j]. Split means that the first

consonant in the cluster has been resyllabified as part of the coda of the preceding syllable. In the

table, the actual numbers are presented first, followed by the percentage of all values in each row in

brackets.

Type of cluster Example Faithful Deletion Epenthesis Alternation Split

/s/+plosive in.stant.ly 32 (80%) 1 (3%) 0 3 (8%) 4 (10%)

/s/+plosive+/r/ stream 2 (15%) 10 (77%) 0 0 1 (8%)

/s/+sonorant sleep 4 (100%) 0 0 0 0

plosive+/r/ private 23 (51%) 17 (38%) 4 (9%) 1 (2%) 0

fricative+/r/ friends 16 (41%) 23 (59%) 0 0 0

plosive +/l/ class 23 (79%) 3 (10%) 0 3 (10%) 0

fricative +/l/ n/a 0 0 0 0 0

TOTAL 100 (59%) 54 (32%) 4 (2%) 7 (4%) 5 (3%)

Unlike the acrolect speakers, mesolect speakers do not always pronounce onset

clusters in native-like ways. This is most obviously the case for three-consonant

clusters like /str-/ in street, where only 2 of the 13 clusters (15 per cent) are

realised as three-consonant onset clusters. In 10 cases, one of the consonants,

usually /r/, is deleted, and in one case, the initial /s/ was restructured to the coda

of the previous syllable, thus splitting up the cluster. In the case of two-

consonant clusters, about half of the obstruent+/r/ clusters are characterised by

the deletion of the /r/, for example, in from the onset cluster /fr-/ may be realised

simply as [f] and in traditionally, the onset cluster /tr-/ may be realised simply as

[t].

Clusters involving other types of combinations, either obstruent+/l/ clusters, for

example place and fly or /s/+consonant clusters, for example sky, are under less

pressure to simplify than obstruent+/r/ clusters. Furthermore, when consonant

clusters are not realised in a native-like way, deletion of the sonorant /r/ is the

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preferred simplification strategy, for example friend realised as [fand], rather

than the alternatives of epenthesis, for example friend realised as [fIrand],

splitting up into two syllables or changing one of the consonants into a glide, for

example [fwbm]. As far as the onset clusters in the mesolect are concerned, these

findings confirm the provisional comments of Van Rooy (2004). The extent to

which onset clusters are simplified through deletion appears to be an important

difference between the acrolect and mesolect varieties of BSAE.

Coda clusters

Consonant clusters in the syllable codas are subject to much more extensive

simplification, and acrolect speakers also make use of coda simplification. This

is not unexpected, and is a well-attested phenomenon in second-language

research, as has already been pointed out in the introduction. In view of this, the

focus of the discussion in this subsection is on the nature and extent of

simplification, rather than the mere fact of its occurrence. Table 2 presents the

basic results for the realisation of plosives and fricatives in coda clusters for all

speakers.

TABLE 2: Basic results for coda clusters in acrolect and mesolect BSAE

In the table, the actual numbers are presented first, followed by the percentage of all values in each

row in brackets.

No deletion Pre-final

consonant

deleted

Final

consonant

deleted

Both

consonants

deleted

Total

Acrolect 81(73%) 0 34 (27%) 0 115

Mesolect 114 (49%) 40 (16%) 77 (32%) 6 (2%) 237

The data for the word and has been omitted from consideration in the remainder

of this paper. Van Rooy (2000) suggested that the deletion of obstruents after

nasals in coda clusters may be related to specific lexical items. In total, the word

and occurred 84 times in this corpus. The acrolect speakers deleted the final

obstruent in 63 per cent of their uses of the word, while the mesolect speakers

deleted it in 88 per cent of their uses. Every single speaker deleted the final

obstruent in more than half of his/her realisations of the word. The data confirm

the suggestion about lexical effects as far as and is concerned, but we fail to

observe similar patterns for other lexical items. This might be due to the small

number of tokens for other lexical items, and awaits further research on larger

corpora before substantial conclusions can be drawn.

While acrolect speakers clearly make use of consonant deletion in coda clusters

from time to time, they do it less frequently than mesolect speakers. Acrolect

speakers realise their coda clusters in native-like ways about three-quarters of the


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time, while this proportion drops to below 50 per cent in the case of mesolect

speakers. Another major difference between the two varieties is that acrolect

speakers only delete the final consonant in a coda cluster when they simplify, for

example last realised as [lOs], while mesolect speakers sometimes delete the first

of the two consonants as well, for example contract realised as [kbndz:t].

In order to understand the factors that may contribute to deletion, the influence of

manner of articulation and voicing of the deleted consonant itself is examined

next. There does not appear to be any effect of voicing for the acrolect speakers.

The mesolect speakers tend to delete underlyingly voiced obstruents in the final

position of their codas (e.g. friend) a little less often (26 per cent) than

underlyingly voiceless obstruents (e.g. difficult, 39 per cent), as is clear from

Table 3.

TABLE 3: Influence of voicing on obstruent deletion in codas by acrolectand mesolect speakers of BSAE


row in brackets.

No deletion Pre-final

consonant

deleted

Final conso-

nant deleted

Both conso-

nants deleted

Acrolect: voiced 26 (74%) 0 9 (26%) 0

Acrolect: voiceless 65 (72%) 0 25 (28%) 0

Mesolect: voiced 30 (56%) 10 (19%) 14 (26%) 0

Mesolect: voiceless 80 (42%) 30 (16%) 73 (39%) 6 (3%)

While the effect of voicing probably does not warrant detailed explanation, there

is a case to be made for the effect of manner of articulation. Plosives are far more

likely to be deleted than fricatives. As is clear from Table 4, fricatives behave

more like sonorants in that they almost never delete in the mesolect, while

deletion affects more than half of the plosives in the coda clusters of the

mesolect, and half of the plosives in the final position in codas of the acrolect.

Clear trends emerge when one considers the contexts in which plosives are

deleted. In Table 5, the effect of the final consonant on the deletion of the first

consonant is analysed for the mesolect variety. As noted above, this process did

not take place in the acrolect.

The results indicate that plosives are deleted 47 per cent of the time when they

occur as first consonant of a coda consonant cluster. However, plosives are far

more likely to be deleted when they are followed by a fricative (52 per cent), and

less likely to be deleted when the cluster consists of two plosives (12 per cent).

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TABLE 4: Influence of obstruent manner on deletion in codas by acrolectand mesolect speakers of BSAE


row in brackets.

Pre-finalconsonantfaithful

Pre-finalconsonantdeleted

Finalconsonantfaithful

Finalconsonantdeleted

Acrolect: plosive 32 (50%) 32 (50%) 32 (100%) 0

Acrolect: fricative 58 (97%) 2 (3%) 13 (100%) 0

Acrolect: nasal n/a n/a 68 (100%) 0

Acrolect: sonorant n/a n/a 13(100%) 0

Mesolect: plosive 63 (42%) 86 (58%) 33 (48%) 38 (52%)

Mesolect: fricative 87 (93%) 7 (7%) 63 (94%) 4 (6%)

Mesolect: nasal n/a n/a 71 (96%) 3 (4%)

Mesolect: sonorant n/a n/a 20 (95%) 1 (5%)

TABLE 5: Influence of context on deletion of pre-final consonant insyllable coda in the mesolect

The numbers in this table are the number of deletions of the first consonant, divided by the total

number of times a particular context occurred, followed in brackets by the percentage of deletions for

that context.

Final consonant Pre-final consonant

Plosive Fricative Nasal Lateral Total

Plosive 2/12 (17%) 4/66 (6%) 3/50 (5%) 1/11 (9%) 10/149 (7%)

Fricative 36/69 (52%) 0/1 (0%) 0/14 (0%) 0/10 (0%) 36/94 (38%)

Total 38/81 (47%) 4/67 (6%) 3/74 (4%) 1/21 (5%) 46/243 (19%)

The number of cases where any other consonant is deleted is so small that the

only significant inference to be drawn is that it is in general unlikely for other

consonants to be deleted. No patterns can be detected, except that in the rare

cases where a consonant other than a plosive is deleted, the other consonant in

the consonant cluster is a plosive itself. It reinforces the finding that a plosive

with another consonant in a coda cluster is the unwanted structure, but in a small

number of exceptional cases, the plosive is realised and the other consonant

deleted. A fricative in combination with another fricative, a nasal or a lateral, is

not under pressure to delete. It seems as if the violation of the sonority hierarchy

creates a site for much more divergence between native and non-native varieties

of English, particularly for those speakers whose native languages do not have

any syllable codas.


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The situation becomes more complex when it is the second (final) of the two

consonants in a coda that deletes, because the type of onset (or absence of an

onset) of the following syllable may also influence the results, and not only the

type of consonant that occurs in the pre-final position in the coda cluster. In

Table 6, data are presented that illustrate the influence of the following syllable

on the deletion of the second consonant of a coda cluster.

TABLE 6: Influence of following syllable on deletion of final consonant incoda clusters

For each of the two varieties of BSAE, the number of deletions divided by the total number of times

that particular context occurred is reported, followed by the percentage deletions in brackets. The

lexical item and is excluded from the analysis.

Following syllable starts with: Acrolect Mesolect

Vowel 5/144 (3%) 18/253 (7%)

Glide 1/59 (2%) 7/56 (13%)

Sonorant (non-nasal) 7/27 (26%) 2/26 (8%)

Nasal 2/25 (8%) 19/83 (23%)

Similar obstruent 13/14 (93%) 21/29 (72%)

Identical obstruent 23/29 (79%) 66/76 (87%)

Another plosive 19/81 (23%) 36/166 22%)

Another fricative 8/61 (13%) 22/103 (21%)

Another affricate 0/1 0%) 2/11 (18%)

Clause-final word 1/41 (2%) 8/78 (10%)

The data in Table 6 suggest that the following onset mainly has an effect if it

starts with an obstruent that is identical or similar to the final obstruent in the

coda. In such cases, the vast majority of the final consonants in the preceding

coda are deleted. There are no strong effects for any other type of onset. If the

following syllable does not have an onset, or if its onset is a glide, deletion

occurs very rarely (three per cent and seven per cent for onsetless syllables, two

per cent and 13 per cent for glide onsets), compared to consonant onsets, where

most values are in the region of 20 per cent deletion, with some variation that

does not appear to be significant or consistent.

Let us also consider the context preceding the final obstruent. In Table 7, the

influence of the preceding context is reported, but all cases where the deletion

may rather be attributed to the following consonant (being identical or similar)

have been excluded. An analysis of the data reveals that after the deletions due to

similar or identical consonants in the following syllable onset have been

discarded, only one fricative out of a total of 224 final fricatives in the acrolect is

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deleted, and the proportion rises very slightly to 13 out of 361 (a mere four per

cent) in the mesolect. For the purposes of analysis, all fricative deletions are

ignored; the analysis will concentrate on the deletion of final plosives.

TABLE 7: Influence of previous sound on deletion of final plosives in codaclusters


that particular context occurred is reported, followed by the percentage deletions in brackets. The

lexical item and is excluded from the analysis.


Nasal 18/38 (47%) 27/56 (48%)

Lateral 2/2 (100%) 5/10 (50%)

All sonorant+plosive clusters 20/40 (50%) 32/66 (48%)

Plosive 1/6 (17%) 7/11 (64%)

Fricative 4/10 (40%) 23/49 (47%)

All obstruent+plosive clusters 5/16 (31%) 30/60 (50%)

Unfortunately, as the total number of coda clusters with a lateral+plosive is

relatively small, it would be unwise to draw any firm conclusions. It seems safer

to group the data with the nasals. Likewise, plosive+plosive clusters are

relatively few, and perhaps a clustering of all sonorants and all obstruents is more

meaningful. These clustered results are included in Table 7, alongside the results

for the smaller subclasses. However, even when the data is clustered like this, the

trend remains towards a deletion rate of 50 per cent for all syllable-final plosives

in clusters, apparently without too much influence of the consonant that precedes

it. This contrasts quite significantly with the deletion rates closer to one quarter

of plosives that occur as singletons in syllable codas, as shown in Table 8. The

fact of the occurrence of a consonant+plosive cluster is the problem for the

speakers, acrolect and mesolect alike, and not the particular prefinal consonant in

the cluster.

Singleton codas

It is important to also consider the deletion of singleton coda consonants to

complete the picture about the realisation of codas. The basic data are presented

in Table 8.

The acrolect and mesolect varieties delete a fair proportion of plosives and the

mesolect also a noticeable number of fricatives. The overall frequency of

affricates ([tf] as in church, [de] as in badge) is very low, so one should be

careful not to attach too much importance to the deletion rates there. The picture


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TABLE 8: Deletion of singleton codas in BSAE


that particular class of obstruent occurred is reported, followed by the percentage deletions in

brackets.

Type of obstruent Acrolect Mesolect

Affricates 3/23 (13%) 1/24 (4%)

Plosives 35/159 (22%) 72/309 (23%)

Fricatives 5/174 (3%) 38/305 (12%)

Total 43/356 (12%) 111/638 (17%)

becomes a bit clearer once one considers the contexts in which deletion takes

place, as represented in Table 9.

TABLE 9: Contexts in which deletion of singleton codas occur in BSAE


that particular context occurred is reported, followed by the percentage deletions in brackets.


Identical consonant 17/23 (74%) 43/50 (86%)

Similar consonant 9/10 (90%) 18/24 (75%)

Plosive (if the coda obstruent is a plosive) 14/25 (56%) 15/47 (32%)

Other contexts 3/298 (1%) 35/517 (7%)

Resembling the deletion of final consonants in coda clusters, singleton coda

consonants are deleted more often than not when the following syllable starts

with a similar or identical consonant, for example wanted to. Plosives are also

deleted very often when the following syllable starts with a plosive with a

different place of articulation, for example that kills. Otherwise, underlying

singleton obstruents are usually realised on the phonetic surface, in some way or

another. There are a few more random exceptions in the mesolect (35 or seven

per cent), while the acrolect almost never deletes a plosive or fricative outside of

the three contexts identified here (only 3 deletions, or one per cent).

The principal findings as far as coda clusters are concerned are that deletion

affects mainly plosives in both the acrolect and the mesolect, and that the

mesolect deletes plosives not only in the final position of a coda cluster, for

example the /t/ in just, but also in the initial position, for example the /t/ in its,

while the acrolect restricts deletion to the final position in codas. A similar or

identical consonant following the final coda obstruent increases the likelihood of

deletion. Deletion of singleton codas also takes place mostly when the following

syllable starts with a similar or identical consonant, and rarely elsewhere, except

when the following syllable starts with a plosive.

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Interaction between voicing and syllabification

The final type of data that is investigated in this article relates to the realisation ofthe voicing properties of the final obstruent in BSAE and the interaction thereofwith resyllabification. While voicing properties received some attention in VanRooy and Wissing (1996, 2001), their interaction with syllabification has not yetbeen investigated, nor have they been investigated for acrolect speakers ofBSAE. The basic data are presented in Tables 10 and 11 for the acrolect andmesolect varieties of BSAE respectively.

TABLE 10: Coda obstruent realisation in acrolect BSAE relative tounderlying voicing


column in brackets.

Realisation Voiced Voiceless Total

Faithful 35 (17%) 212 (72%) 247

Deleted 37 (17%) 47 (16%) 84

Coda deleted, identical onset geminated 4 (2%) 6 (2%) 10

Final Devoicing 122 (58%) n/a 122

Resyllabified ± faithful voicing 13 (6%) 14 (5%) 27

Resyllabified ± voicing changed 1 (0%) 5 (2%) 6

Regressive Voicing assimilation n/a 6 (2%) 6

Voiced n/a 4 (1%) 4

TOTAL 212 294 506

TABLE 11: Coda obstruent realisation in mesolect BSAE relative tounderlying voicing


column in brackets.

Realisation Voiced Voiceless Total

Faithful 30 (8%) 276 (48%) 306

Deleted 101 (27%) 144 (25%) 245

Coda deleted, identical onset geminated 4 (1%) 5 (1%) 9

Final Devoicing 182 (48%) n/a 182

Resyllabified ± faithful voicing 40 (11%) 67 (12%) 107

Resyllabified ± voicing changed 18 (5%) 53 (9%) 71

Regressive Voicing assimilation n/a 15 (3%) 15

Voiced n/a 9 (2%) 9

Changed to glide 3 (1%) 2 (0%) 5

TOTAL 378 571 949


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A couple of trends are apparent from a comparison of the data in Tables 10 and11. The mesolect speakers are far more likely to resyllabify a coda obstruent than

the acrolect, for example in some of us are, the [s] becomes the onset of the final

syllable, [a.sO:]. Only 33 (seven per cent) of final obstruents in the acrolect are

resyllabified to the following onset, while this happens to 178 (19 per cent) of the

final obstruents in the mesolect. Linked to resyllabification is the voicing of

voiceless obstruents in particular. A total of 53 voiceless obstruents (nine per

cent of all the voiceless obstruents in the mesolect) become voiced when they are

resyllabified, for example years ago realised as [je.zI.Mo], due to the process of

intervocalic voicing. The corresponding number in the acrolect is just five (two

per cent). The other major differences between the two varieties concern the

deletion of final obstruents. About 17 per cent of the final obstruents in the

acrolect are deleted, for example of my realised as [b mzI], while this number

rises to 25 per cent for the mesolect, largely irrespective of the underlying

voicing. Gemination of an identical or similar obstruent in the following onsetseldom takes place to retain some of the phonological material.

In an attempt to determine the significant dimensions of variation between the

acrolect and mesolect varieties of BSAE, the statistical technique of

correspondence analysis can be employed. Correspondence analysis is an

exploratory statistical technique for the analysis of the contribution that various

factors make in distinguishing between the distribution of data when comparing

groups like the acrolect and mesolect here. The results of the correspondence

analysis indicate that one can indeed distinguish reliably between the acrolect

and mesolect varieties. A comparison of the underlyingly voiceless finalobstruents indicates a statistically significant difference between the two varieties

of BSAE compared in this article, with X2=14.979 (6 degrees of freedom,

p<0.05), while the corresponding value for underlyingly voiced obstruents is

X2=14.255 (6 degrees of freedom, p<0.05), also clearly indicating a statistically

significant difference between the acrolect and mesolect.

In correspondence analysis, all the independent variables are weighted to

determine the extent to which they contribute to the understanding of the

difference between two dependent variables. Here, the two variety clusters,

acrolect and mesolect, are taken to be the independent variables, and thephonological processes the dependent variables, in order to determine if the two

varieties are different, and if so, to which extent the different phonological

processes contribute to the difference. The sum of all the weights assigned to the

variables is 1 on any given dimension. In Tables 12 and 13, the column Inertia

Dim. 1 gives the weights of all the phonological processes. Variables with the

highest values, for example Faithful, with a value of 0.320445 in Table 12 and

Resyllabify (Devoice) with a value of 0.347271 in Table 13, are regarded as

more important to the difference between the acrolect and mesolect, than

variables with values <0.1.

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Correspondence analysis attempts to construct models that identify the relativecontribution of the various factors to the overall difference between groups suchas the acrolect and mesolect. These two models are presented in Tables 12 and 13respectively. They indicate that the crucial factors for the distinction between thetwo varieties of BSAE are faithfulness versus deletion and resyllabification(including intervocalic voicing after resyllabification), rather than other specificprocesses such as final devoicing for underlyingly voiced obstruents orregressive assimilation for underlyingly voiceless obstruents. Thus, the twovarieties do not differ much as far as segmental phonological processes areconcerned. The real difference lies in the phonotactic constraints againstcomplex structure that have a much more extensive effect on the mesolect thanthe acrolect.

TABLE 12: Correspondence analysis of the underlyingly voiceless codaobstruents

Coordin.Dim.1

Mass Quality InertiaDim.1

Faithful 0.200000 0.600000 1.000000 0.320445

Delete -0.219512 0.205000 1.000000 0.131890

Delete and geminate 0.333333 0.015000 1.000000 0.022253

Regressive voicing assimilation -0.200000 0.025000 1.000000 0.013352

Resyllabify (faithful) -0.411765 0.085000 1.000000 0.192424

Resyllabify (Intervocalic voicing) -0.636364 0.055000 1.000000 0.297383

Voiced -0.333333 0.015000 1.000000 0.022253

Total Inertia =0.07490; X2=14.979; degrees of freedom=6; p<0.05

TABLE 13: Correspondence analysis of the underlyingly voiced codaobstruents

Coordin.Dim.1

Mass Quality InertiaDim.1

Faithful -0.364980 0.124378 1.000000 0.233613

Delete 0.222300 0.218905 1.000000 0.152529

Delete and geminate -0.338313 0.014925 1.000000 0.024087

Final Devoicing -0.099316 0.527363 1.000000 0.073344

Resyllabify (faithful) 0.289146 0.084577 1.000000 0.099702

Resyllabify (Devoice) 0.995037 0.024876 1.000000 0.347271

Glide 0.995037 0.004975 1.000000 0.069454

Total Inertia =0.07092; X2=14.255; degrees of freedom=6; p<0.05


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Acrolect Mesolect

The various processes that effect the realisation of the voicing of final obstruents

require more attention, in particular those factors that may increase or decrease

the likelihood of the various alternations taking place.

There are clear contexts in which resyllabification takes place and contexts in

which it does not, affecting the realisation of the coda itself and interacting with

voicing, as discussed below. The findings are unsurprising: if the following

syllable starts with a vowel, resyllabification takes place more often than if it

starts with a glide, which in turn allows for resyllabification more often than non-

nasal sonorants. In the case of nasal and obstruent onsets, resyllabification takes

place in fewer than ten per cent of the cases, and these contexts are therefore

excluded from the presentation of results in Table 14. There are differences in the

patterns of resyllabification of plosives and fricatives, so these are reported

separately. Affricates were so rare that they are excluded from consideration

altogether.

TABLE 14: Influence of following sound on the resyllabification of finalobstruents in codas

For each of the two varieties of BSAE, the number of resyllabifications divided by the total number of

times that particular context occurred is reported, followed by the percentage deletions in brackets.

Following syllable startswith: Plosives Fricatives Plosives Fricatives

Vowel 11/63 (17%) 9/82 (11%) 67/151 (44%) 55/126 (44%)

Glide 5/34 (15%) 2/25 (8%) 14/33 (42%) 6/25 (25%)

Non-nasal sonorant 3/17 (18%) 0/6 (0%) 8/17 (47%) 1/9 (11%)

In the acrolect, plosives are resyllabified about once every six times they occur

before a syllable that starts with a vowel, glide or non-nasal sonorant, but more

than twice that often in the mesolect. There is no downward trend as far as

plosives are concerned for the three types of following contexts. However, the

decrease in sonority of the first sound of the following syllable is important for

the resyllabification of fricatives. The resyllabification rate for fricatives

preceding vowels is similar to the rate for plosives, but drops substantially

before glides and but for a single fricative that was resyllabified by a mesolect

speaker, does not occur before non-nasal sonorants.

Intervocalic voicing is one possible outcome of resyllabification of obstruents

occurring between two vowels. This is more characteristic of the mesolect than

of the acrolect. In Tables 15 and 16, a closer analysis of the interaction between

resyllabification and voicing faithfulness or alternation in intervocalic positions

is presented.

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Resyllabified

Resyllabified

TABLE 15: Interaction between voicing and resyllabification in intervoca-lic positions in the acrolect

For the acrolect variety of BSAE, the number of times a particular event occurs, divided by the total

number of intervocalic codas is reported, followed by the percentage of each event in brackets.

Not resyllabifiedVoicingunchanged

Devoiced Voiced

Voiceless codas 54/59 (92%) 3/59 (5%) n/a 2/59 (3%)

Voiced codas 44/49 (90%) 5/49 (10%) 0/49 (0%) n/a

The acrolect clearly does not make very frequent use of resyllabification, and

consequently, intervocalic voicing is not a major source of voicing alternations in

this variety of BSAE.

TABLE 16: Interaction between voicing and resyllabification in intervoca-lic positions in the mesolect

For the mesolect variety of BSAE, the number of times a particular event occurs, divided by the total

number of intervocalic codas is reported, followed by the percentage of each event in brackets.

Not resyllabifiedVoicingunchanged

Devoiced Voiced

Voiceless codas 45/107 (42%) 21/107 (20%) n/a 41/107 (38%)

Voiced codas 43/74 (58%) 23/74 (31%) 8/74 (11%) n/a

The situation is different in the mesolect, where resyllabification occurs in about

half of all the possible contexts where a coda is intervocalic. Furthermore, if

resyllabification takes place, a voiced obstruent is the likely onset of the second

syllable in most cases, whether the original coda obstruent is underlyingly voiced

or voiceless. Thus intervocalic voicing either causes voicing alternations for

underlying voiceless obstruents, or maintains the voiced quality of underlying

voiced obstruents much more faithfully than when these obstruents occur in

codas.

While the acrolect exhibits final devoicing for obstruent codas, the mesolect

alternates more extensively between final devoicing and intervocalic voicing for

resyllabified codas. From an information transfer perspective, the difference is

slight, since either way round, the voicing contrast between underlyingly voiced

and voiceless obstruents in syllable codas is neutralised. However, the mesolect

clearly allows resyllabification more often, in line with expectations that open

syllables are unmarked. The acrolect resembles the phonotactic constraints of

native varieties of Engish much more closely as far as singleton obstruents in

syllable codas are concerned.


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Conclusions

The findings of the study indicate clear differences between BSAE and native

varieties of English, but equally that the extent to which unmarked syllable

structures emerge in the mesolect differentiates this variety of BSAE relatively

clearly from acrolect forms. It can be concluded on articulatory-acoustic grounds

that a distinction between an acrolect and mesolect variety of BSAE is justified,

supporting the findings of Coetzee-Van Rooy and Van Rooy (2005) that were

made on perceptual grounds.

The onset clusters of the acrolect are invariably realised like native varieties of

English, while the mesolect varieties delete about half of all instances of /r/ when

following an obstruent in the onset cluster. While biconsonantal onsets seem to

be realised faithfully, the additional complexity of triconsonantal clusters just

seems to be too severe for mesolect speakers to realise them faithfully all the

time.

Plosives that occur as final consonants in coda clusters are deleted about half the

time by acrolect and mesolect speakers. This is most likely to happen if the

following syllable starts with an obstruent that is similar or identical to the final

consonant of the coda cluster, but, particularly in the mesolect, deletion also

happens with lower frequencies in most other environments as well. There is no

obvious influence from the preceding consonant in the coda cluster. Sonority

appears to play a lesser role; it is more the markedness constraint behind the

general drive towards open syllables that accounts for the facts. Plosives are the

least sonorous sounds, which makes them good onsets, but very poor codas.

Some kind of faithfulness constraint must be stronger in the acrolect, however,

since these speakers never delete prefinal consonants in coda clusters, while

mesolect speakers delete about half of the plosives that occur in prefinal position

in coda clusters. Like acrolect speakers, though, other consonants are deleted

very infrequently in the mesolect.

A small number of singleton codas are deleted in both the acrolect (12 per cent)

and mesolect (17 per cent), usually when the following syllable starts with a

consonant that is similar or identical to the deleted coda consonant. This is

simply a typical phenomenon of connected speech, and does not warrant any

more substantial phonological interpretation. However, mesolect speakers

resyllabify about a quarter of all final obstruents in codas to the following

onsets, while acrolect speakers resyllabify less than a fifth. Fricative

resyllabification is sensitive to whether the following syllable starts with a

vowel, glide or non-nasal sonorant, whiles plosives resyllabify at similar rates

irrespective of this contrast. Resyllabification almost never takes place preceding

other onset types. Again, it seems as if connected speech is relatively sensitive to

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the preferred CV-syllable shape, and allows resyllabification of coda obstruents

to onsetless following syllables fairly regularly.

When mesolect speakers resyllabify intervocalic obstruents, they are likely to

allow intervocalic voicing to take place, whereas the acrolect speakers realise

their resyllabified plosives more faithfully to the underlying voicing.

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this article was mainly conducted while the author was

the Fellow of the Expertise Centrum Zuid-Afrika at Utrecht University, The

Netherlands (May to July 2003). Discussions with my host, Wim Zonneveld, and

his colleague, Janet Grijzenhout, and the fourth-year second-language phonology

seminar students greatly contributed to my understanding of the data, although

they cannot be held responsible for any remaining errors of analysis or

interpretation.

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Documents

Consonant Clusters and Resyllabification in Black South African English