Chapter 3. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey 89
7.2 Mental representation of sociophonetic variation:
A symbolic relationship?
It is clear that the rhotic-derhotic continuum in Scottish English in the Central
Belt is undergoing shifts in fine phonetic realization. It is also clear that it is impos-
sible to describe the scope of phonological rhoticity without reference to social
factors, both macro and micro. For these speakers /r/ in this position is not just an
/r/, it is always a certain kind of socially-embedded /r/; at the descriptive level it is
extremely difficult to separate the phonological from the social. It is also difficult
to assume that these entities do not relate to each other very closely for speaker-
hearers. Data of this kind demand phonological representations which recognize
the interconnected relationships between social and phonological variation which
speakers in these communities need to store, control, access, and acquire.
The approach which recognizes such connections and which ‘embeds indexi-
cality centrally within phonological knowledge’ (Foulkes & Docherty 2006: 426),
is the range of theories of phonological representation grouped under the term
‘Exemplar Theory’ (e.g. Goldinger 1998; Johnson 2006; Hawkins 2003). These
models share the assumption that phonological representations are based in some
way on stored experiences of speech (‘exemplars’), memory clouds across which
abstractions are probabilistically derived. Increasing emphasis is placed on the
need for abstractions accrued from exemplar memory (corresponding to phono-
logical categories in other perception-production models) being stored concur-
rently and with connections to exemplars, so-called ‘hybrid’ models (Goldinger
2007; Pierrehumbert 2006).
The results from the rhotic-derhotic continuum in Scottish English also have
implications for hybrid models, particularly with respect to the relationships
between phonological and social detail and abstraction. Schematic accounts of
exemplar-based representations such as that by Johnson (2006) distinguish the
exemplar map from accruing abstractions, but interestingly also make a sepa-
ration between phonological and social categories at the abstract level. This
implies that the connections between these two kinds of abstractions (as well as
with others) are always made through exemplar memory. But it is clear that pho-
nological abstractions such as ‘postvocalic /r/’, which are accessible to speakers
especially through stereotypes, also relate to social abstractions at the same time.
Moreover if we consider the acquisition of speech variation which is necessarily
socially-embedded (e.g. Foulkes et al. 2005; Labov this volume), it seems difficult
to assume that the emerging abstractions are not linked – or linkable – if only
because the shared/simultaneous activation of phonological and social categories
would be so frequent. Rather these sociophonetic data, and those from many other