88 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
weakly resonated), which are potentially accessible, have been exploited for social
meaning in Scottish English, but seem to remain unattached in American English.
More generally, using these different phonetic representations of postvocalic
/r/ provides a good illustration of what we call here the ‘speaker-hearer triangle’,
composed of auditory, acoustic, and articulatory representations (Ogden 2009;
Heselwood & Plug 2011 looks at auditory, acoustic and psychoacoustic views of
rhoticity). Figure 13 shows auditorily strong postvocalic /r/: each representation
gives a different picture of the ‘same’ phenomenon. In many ways each is as valid
as the other, and of course, as we have seen, they are all interconnected but not
necessarily in straightforward ways.Figure 13. An illustration of the ‘speaker-hearer triangle’ of auditory, acoustic, and
articulatory representions of the auditorily-strong postvocalic /r/ in a middle-class
Edinburgh girl’s production of the word far.Ideally, representing sociophonetic variation would be able to refer to all three
dimensions of the speaker-hearer triangle. Adding articulatory data can prove
very fruitful (also Wright & Kerswill’s 1989 conclusions for using electropalato-
graphic data in conjunction with auditory transcription). This can also help us
to reflect on the different kinds of representation – and their intersections – that
might be involved in the transmission and propagation of sociophonetic variation,
which is also of crucial importance in modeling language variation and change
(e.g. Marotta this volume). The traditional notion of the speaker-hearer chain (e.g.
Denes & Pinson 1993) assumes that articulatory gestures from the speaker give
rise to acoustic objects, which in turn become auditory objects for the listener to
decode (see also Ohala, e.g. 1989). How variation which appears to be so auditorily
subtle, yet can be acquired and transmitted such that it can carry social meaning
for a community, requires substantial further investigation.