Scottish Liquid Consonants with Reference to RP

This dissertation examines the distribution of liquid consonants and the processes influencing this class of sounds in Scots and Standard Scottish English. The issues addressed in the thesis explore two main aspects: sociolinguistic and phonological. The sociolinguistic perspective focuses on shifts in rhoticity in Standard Scottish English and /l/ vocalisation in Scots, investigating social factors, such as age or gender of the informants as well as linguistic factors, such as the phonological contexts of occurrence. The phonological perspective in the thesis is founded on the fact that liquid consonants often follow a similar route of development, with such processes as liquid vocalisation and linking potentially leading to liquid epenthesis. The phonological investigation focuses on a formal analysis of the distribution of /r/ in Received Pronunciation, which exhibits an extensive set of processes affecting this sound. The analysis is carried out in the framework of Derivational Optimality Theory. This thesis is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 offers a general description of the relationship between Scots and Standard Scottish English. It also provides an overview of sociolinguistics and generative phonology (Optimality Theory), the two perspectives presented in later portions of the dissertation. Chapter 2 analyses the affiliation of sounds to the class of liquids, focusing on the phonetic, articulatory, and phonological characteristics of liquid sounds. It also discusses such processes as liquid vocalisation, linking, and intrusion, using examples from varieties of English across the world. Chapter 3 focuses on my sociolinguistic investigation into the usage of /r/ among middle-class Scottish speakers from Glasgow and Edinburgh, based on the speech samples from the SCOTS corpus (Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech). The chapter provides quantitative and statistical results as well as methodological background of the study. Chapter 4 examines traditional and modern types of /l/ vocalisation in Scots, offering a comparison of the two versions of the process from the historical and sociolinguistic perspectives. The analysis is based on the data extracted from 4 historical dictionaries of Scots as well as previous reports of the process in the literature. Finally, Chapter 5 offers my analysis of the distribution of /r/ in Received Pronunciation in the framework of Derivational Optimality Theory. The analysis places special focus on such issues as ambisyllabicity as well as linking and intrusive /r/.