Chapter 3. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey 81
tool for investigating speech articulation, both because it is safe and non-invasive,
and because – despite the visible headset and need for technical personnel – the
method can have minimal quantitative impacts on speech style. Lawson et al.
(2008) shows that in fact stylistic variation is more dependent on the speakers’
relationships with their interlocutors, and the presence of friends and peers, than
the physical context induced by the equipment. Unlike speakers faced with just a
microphone for speech recording, articulatory participants can also be ethically
misdirected through a focus on the fact that the recordings are designed to record
“changes in the shape of the tongue”, which incidentally requires speech.
6.1 Derhoticisation and gestural timing
The UTI data from the pilot data and WL07 corpus uncovered a possible mecha-
nism for derhoticisation in terms of gestural asynchrony. Recall that the auditory
transcription was challenging because of the variable percept of sometimes hear-
ing a consonantal gesture and sometimes not, but also from strong pharyngealisa-
tion on the vowel.
The articulatory data suggest that derhoticised postvocalic /r/ in our Scottish
speech samples involves both (1) an early tongue root retraction gesture and (2) a
delayed tongue tip raising gesture, though a systematic study remains to be carried
out. An early tongue root retraction gesture could account for the modification
of prerhotic vowels, specifically retraction and pharyngealisation of these vowels.
The delayed tongue-tip raising gesture means that the maximum of the /r/ gesture
is often masked by following consonants, or, prepausally, can occur after the offset
of voicing, leaving the /r/ partially or completely inaudible.
This timing, weakening and interarticulatory dissociation of gestures may
also account for the weakening of the amplitude of formant energy above F2
observed in the acoustic data. (Exactly how this is achieved is not yet clear, but
it seems likely from Stevens’ 1998 modeling of the acoustic consequences of the
resonating cavities during the production of /r/ and /l/, that the shifts in gestures
that we are witnessing are resulting in the formation of an additional cavity with
strong damping properties on the spectrum, even before voicing has stopped.)
In some speakers, faint dipping of F3 can be seen in a weakly noisy period after
voicing has ceased, but this is not always easy to discern and timing of the covert
tongue-raising gesture is variable. For example, in Figure 9, the tongue tip only
starts to raise in frame 3, just as voicing is ceasing, and then continues to raise
during the period of frication; the maximum raising in frame 6 occurs some time
after voicing has stopped.