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Insertion and deletion in Northern English (ng): Interacting innovations in the life cycle of phonological processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2020

GEORGE BAILEY Open the ORCID record for GEORGE BAILEY [Opens in a new window]
GEORGE BAILEY*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Author’s address: University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UKk.jerro@essex.ac.uk
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Abstract

In north-western varieties of British English the historical process of ng-coalescence that simplified nasal + stop clusters in words like wrong and singer never ran to completion, with surface variation between [ŋ] and [ŋɡ] remaining to this day. This paper presents an empirical study of this synchronic variation, specifically to test predictions made by the life cycle of phonological processes; a diachronic account of /ɡ/-deletion has been proposed under this framework, but crucially the life cycle makes hitherto-untested predictions regarding the synchronic behaviour of (ng) in north-west England. Data from 30 sociolinguistic interviews indicate that these predictions are largely met: internal constraints on the variable are almost entirely accounted for by assuming cyclic application of /ɡ/-deletion across a stratified phonology. There is also evidence of apparent time change in the pre-pausal environment, which is becoming increasingly [ɡ]-favouring contrary to the life cycle’s predictions. It is argued that this reflects a separate innovation in the life cycle of (ng), with synchronic variation reflecting two processes: (i) the original deletion, overlaid with (ii) a prosodically-conditioned insertion process. These results have implications for theories of language change and the architecture of grammar and add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the effect of pause on probabilistic phenomena can be synchronically variable and diachronically unstable.

Keywords

dialects of Englishlife cycle of phonological processesphonological theorysound changevariationvelar nasal
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 465 - 497
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council during my doctoral studies at the University of Manchester (NWDTC grant number ES/J500094/1). I owe thanks to a number of people who have provided valuable feedback on this work: my supervisors Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Maciej Baranowski, and Laurel MacKenzie, my examiners Patrycja Strycharczuk and Jane Stuart-Smith, the audiences at NWAV45, FWAV4 and 25mfm, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this paper.

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