Chapter 7. Ejectives in English and German 193
Indeed, the situation is complicated further by our failure to know exactly
which of her/his rich set of phonetic resources a speaker is bringing to bear on a
situation when speech is being produced outside the context of naturally occurring
talk. The phonetic patterns that speakers have at their command are undoubtedly
put to their most systematic and most diversified use in the course of normal con-
versational interaction. By contrast, other activities, such as reading aloud word
lists or texts put artificial demands on speakers, leading us to expect phonetic pat-
terns at apparently the same structural place being variable because any mapping
from interactional structures to those of reading aloud texts or word lists must be
ambiguous and lead to varying degrees of unsystematic and arbitrary transfer into
such an artificial situation.
The variable presence of ejectives in English both at an inter- as well as at an
intraindividual level presents us with a similar set of problems. The suspected
increase in the prevalence of ejectives in different varieties of English over the last
few decades must correlate with patterns of sociophonetic variability involving
ejectives that were not previously present. At the same time, it is still unclear what
the structural contexts are from a linguistic or interactional point of view. Data
drawn from two non-spontaneous sources make this clear and at the same time
emphasise the ambiguity described above. The first data set is the first series of the
television comedy The Office. From approximately three hours of material a total
of eight ejectives were identified. Spectrograms and oscillograms of three examples
shown in (2) from three of the main characters are shown in Figure 1. The braces
in (2) indicate the extent of the excerpts shown in the Figure 1.
(2) a. it’s not often you get something that’s {both
thrifty}
b. he’s perfi[k’] (1.0)
c. and whether (0.1 s) they can (0.35 s) {pay (0.45 s) for i[t’]} (1.75 s)
In line with our description so far, all of these examples are word-final, but (2a) is
by no means pre-pausal as the plosive releases directly into the vowel of and. And
in the remaining two pre-pausal examples there is no sign of these pauses being
turn- holding. Indeed, we can hypothesise that turn-holding is a feature absent
in read speech, or at best will arbitrarily surface in theatrical dialogue. It has also
been suggested that due to the burst intensity (see Figure 1a) ejectives correlate
with emphasis (Wells 1982: 261) or enhance the consonantal place of articulation
(Ogden 2009: 164).
A further data set appears, on the surface at least, to present a clearer case
of sociophonetic variability in an otherwise uniform structure. Simpson (1992)
describes the “glottal piece” in the naturally occurring talk of one speaker of
Suffolk English. Put simply, the glottal piece represents a cooccurrence restriction