The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English. A case of near-phonemes?

Résumé En

This paper builds upon a number of studies that have focused on various processes of palatalisation in several varieties of contemporary English and equated them with changes in progress (for example, Wells 1997, Harrison 1999, Altendorf 2003, Hannisdal 2006, Durian 2004, Wells 2008, Bass 2009, Rutter 2011, Glain 2013). What the various processes have in common is that they all yield palato-alveolars. In addition, these palatalised variants started to become prominent in the second part of the 20th century and they are mostly associated with younger speakers. Therefore, I have used the label contemporary palatalisation (as opposed to historical palatalisation) as an umbrella term to refer to them collectively. From a phonological point of view, contemporary palatalisation expresses product-oriented, rather than source-oriented generalisations (cf. Bybee 2001: 126) as the various processes under study systematically yield palato-alveolars. After defining contemporary palatalisation and summarising previous research on the topic, this paper will address the ambiguous question of its linguistic status. Is it phonetic or phonemic? To go beyond the –emic/-etic opposition, I will concentrate on the cognitive status of the resulting palato-alveolar forms, by reporting on two experiments carried out with 78 British and American speakers. In a significant number of cases, the results indicate that the palato-alveolars are more than mere connected speech phenomena and that they seem to have some sort of cognitive reality for the informants. The results lead to a discussion of certain theoretical implications, as well as propositions formulated within the framework of cognitive linguistics: events happening at the interface of phonetics and phonology can account for speakers’ gradual reanalyses of previous occurrences of phonemes as different units (cf. Ohala 1989), which fossilises palatalised forms through time. In addition, an interaction between linguistic and non-linguistic factors of change seems to be necessary for the actuation of the sound change, that is, its diffusion into the community.