On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/

• Authors: Sylwester Jaworski , Edward Gillian
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Even though rhotics are very common sounds in the languages of the world, there is a consensus in the literature that they are articulatorily complex. Not only do they tend to be acquired at the last stages of the acquisition period, but also their distribution is usually constrained (cf. Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996; Żygis 2005). As a consequence of being complex, rhotics manifest a strong susceptibility to phonetic change. The present paper reports the results of an experiment that aimed at describing various physical realisations of the Polish phoneme /r/ placed in intervocalic position. The data presented in the article show that in this position speakers do not articulate a tap, but in most cases they produce either a fricative or an approximant. In the light of the data, high vowels constitute an environment that is more conducive to this sort of reduction than mid or low vowels.

Keywords

EN

lenition processes; rhotics; trills; taps; approximants

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 47
• Pages: 380

Dates

published

2011

received

2010-12-15

revised

2011-03-15

accepted

2011-03-16

online

2011-06-14

Contributors

author

Sylwester Jaworski

• University of Szczecin, Poland

author

Edward Gillian

• State Vocational School in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/psicl-2011-0022