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Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English

Paper · 2022 · George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, Danielle Turton et al.

Summary

In English, /s/ in clusters like /stɹ/ (street, strong) is often pronounced closer to [ʃ]. Two explanations compete. One says /s/ assimilates at a distance to the /ɹ/. The other says /s/ assimilates locally to a /t/ that has already become affricated. In /stɹ/ these two causes always occur together, so that cluster alone cannot decide between them.

The authors use yod-retaining British English to separate the causes. In /stj/ (student) the /tj/ coalesces into an affricate with no rhotic present, and /stʃ/ (mischief) has an underlying affricate. They measured /s/ acoustically in a demographically stratified corpus of more than 115 sociolinguistic interviews from Manchester. Each speaker's results were set against their own pre-vocalic /s/ and /ʃ/ as reference points.

All three contexts are retracting in apparent time, at the same pace and under the same conditioning factors. This favours an account in which affrication triggers retraction and /ɹ/ plays only an indirect role. It is the first detailed community-level study of the variable in a British variety.

Key points

  • The data come from more than 115 demographically stratified sociolinguistic interviews of Manchester English, recorded with ESRC funding (grant ES/I009426/1).
  • Three retraction contexts were compared: /stɹ/, /stj/ and /stʃ/. They change in parallel and now sit close to /ʃ/, which suggests the change is nearly complete.
  • The change looks like a regular coarticulatory one:
    • young women lead it, and working-class speakers possibly do too;
    • higher-frequency words are further along.
  • The Baker et al. (2011) actuation proposal relies on hidden articulatory variation in /ɹ/. It cannot explain retraction in contexts that contain no /ɹ/.
  • Younger speakers show a larger acoustic gap between pre-vocalic /s/ and /ʃ/. It is unclear whether this is change in progress or age-related variation.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When two candidate causes always co-occur, look for natural contexts where one is present and the other is absent (here, an affricate without /ɹ/), and test whether behaviour still holds.
  • I2. Retraction is measured relative to each speaker's own /s/ and /ʃ/ endpoints rather than on an absolute scale, so a token's position means something within that speaker's range.
  • I3. The authors prefer a gradient acoustic measure to binary retracted/non-retracted coding, because intermediate variants exist and weak effects also occur in other clusters.
  • I4. The target change is read against the drift of the whole surrounding system, since the reference endpoints themselves may be moving.
  • I5. Testing whether different contexts move in step with each other is used as evidence that they share one underlying mechanism.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Design negative controls the same way, using sentences where only one suspected cue for a parser or repair-rule decision is present, to find which cue actually drives the behaviour.
  • I2 (answer): Calibrate a reader's confidence scores against per-text or per-genre baselines, so that "high" or "low" confidence stays comparable across very different inputs.
  • I3 (learn): Record graded agreement among witness parsers on silver data instead of a binary agree/disagree flag, so that partial consensus stays visible to training.
  • I4 (learn): When comparing model versions, also check whether baseline control sets have shifted, so that apparent gains are not just drift in the reference.
  • I5 (tree): If error rates for several constructions rise or fall together across parser versions, treat that as a hint of one shared cause and fix the common component rather than each construction separately.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of OxfordOxford · United Kingdom122 works · 160,277 citations🎓University of ManchesterManchester · United Kingdom93 works · 45,138 citations🎓University of YorkYork · United Kingdom18 works · 6,570 citations🎓Lancaster UniversityLancaster · United Kingdom36 works · 1,615 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, Danielle Turton and Maciej Baranowski. 2022. Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.8026

@article{bailey2022affrication,
  title = {{Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English}},
  author = {George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, Danielle Turton and Maciej Baranowski},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.8026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8026}
}

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