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  Peter Roach

Glottalization in English pronunciation

14/11/2015

9 Comments

 
I’ve been revisiting an old topic that interests me (it was the subject of my PhD thesis) – glottalization in general, and the pre-glottalization of /p, t, k, tʃ/ in English in particular. There is some improvement needed in the material that Wikipedia provides on the subject, though there is nothing really bad there apart from some of the examples given. There is a general article on Glottalization that gives a brief mention of English pronunciation, and a longer article on T-glottalization in English that necessarily ignores the other consonants that can be glottalized and deals only with /t/. At the moment I'm only concerned with pre-glottalization, rather than with the equally interesting phenomenon of glottal reinforcement.

Going over this material again reminds me that we ought to think about encouraging learners of English to learn appropriate glottalization if they are aiming at copying a native-speaker model. Within the time that I can remember, its use has increased greatly; as long ago as 1952 Paul Christophersen wrote “If we are to continue to use RP as a model, has the time not come to take cognizance of the glottal stop not only in our scientific analysis of English speech but in our teaching? Or are we to teach an artificial pronunciation?”, and I think the need to consider the question is now much stronger.

If you have the CD-ROM or App version of CEPD, you can listen to some examples - the actors employed to make the recordings sometimes produced glottalization and sometimes not, though of course the script they were given didn't direct them one way or the other. In the word 'witness' you can hear that both the British and the American speakers have glottalization; However, neither has in 'hateful'.  'Blackboard' seems to have no glottalization from the English speaker, but does have it in the American. In 'butcher' and 'background' British has it but American not.

One way to increase people’s awareness of glottalization would be to show it in pronunciation dictionaries. It would be perfectly possible to include a superscript glottal stop sign (NB I don't seem to be able to do superscript with this editor) as an indication of where a glottal stop may be pronounced before a fortis plosive or /tʃ/ (though it is never obligatory). Thus the word ‘extra’ might be transcribed /eʔk.strə/ and ‘nature’ as /neɪʔ.tʃə/. Of course, this is not a true phonemic transcription, but similar non-phonemic information is already used in CEPD and LPD, the most conspicuous example being the use of the voicing diacritic to indicate “flapped /t/” in American pronunciations. For example, CEPD transcribes ‘latter’ as /læt̬.ɚ/ while LPD gives /læt̬.ər/. Yet the marking of flapping is redundant information, showing something that is predictable by rule.

What I am suggesting is just a personal fancy of my own, and not a policy decision for the next edition of the CEPD!

The distribution of glottalization is, unfortunately, not easy to explain, and we need to describe not only where we find a glottal stop preceding a fortis plosive or affricate, but also where we find complete glottal replacement (almost always of /t/). The Wikipedia material needs to be set out more fully and more clearly.
9 Comments
Emilio Márquez
15/11/2015 11:58:26 am

Would a complete lack of glottalization seem unnatural in native speakers’ speech?

Reply
Peter
15/11/2015 02:32:53 pm

I would think it surprising to find any native speaker of English from England under the age of 50 who didn't have some sort of glottalization, though there is regional variation in its distribution. Some speakers from Wales or Ireland have no glottalization, but it's spreading very quickly among younger speakers.

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Petr
16/11/2015 06:06:43 pm

Simply go to http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ and key in the words mentioned by Peter. If you have loudspeakers attached to your computer, you can hear the native speakers.

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Emilio Márquez
17/11/2015 12:08:07 am

Thank you, Peter and Petr!

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Richard Nix
27/11/2015 08:46:31 pm

I went to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online website and listened to the recordings of the words you talked about. With "witness", I hear glottal replacement in the UK clip and an unreleased [t] in the US clip. With "hateful", I hear a released [t] in both clips. With "blackboard", I hear a released [k] in the UK clip and an unreleased [k] in the US clip. With "butcher", I hear (pre-)glottalization or glottal reinforcement in the UK clip and no (pre-)glottalization in the US clip. I'm not sure what I'm hearing in the clips of "background." I'll have to listen to them a few more times and think. I think I should say that I have no formal training in linguistics.

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Peter Roach
28/11/2015 04:07:02 pm

Thanks for the response. We seem to be pretty much in agreement, but I don't use the term "unreleased" - taken literally, an unreleased plosive would lead to the death of the speaker. Plosives differ in whether they have audible release or not. Glottalized plosives don't usually have audible release.

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Richard Nix
29/11/2015 11:50:05 am

Thank you. That part about "unreleased" plosives gave me a chuckle.

Petr link
28/11/2015 08:39:04 am

"Yet the marking of flapping is redundant information, showing something that is predictable by rule." But it's far from being simple.

Reply
Peter
28/11/2015 04:11:04 pm

Yes, I certainly agree that flapping rules are not simple, and the same applies to glottalization. The point I was making was not that supplying the appropriate pronunciation is easy and therefore not worth giving guidance on, but that from a strictly phonemic point of view it is not justified. Many devices used in giving pronunciation information in dictionaries are pragmatic solutions that violate strict theoretical procedures.

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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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