Flapping

Flapping or tapping, also known as alveolar flapping, intervocalic flapping, or ''t''-voicing, is a phonological process involving a voiced alveolar tap or flap; it is found in many varieties of English, especially North American, Cardiff, Ulster, Australian and New Zealand English, where the voiceless alveolar stop consonant phoneme is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap , a sound produced by briefly tapping the alveolar ridge with the tongue, when placed between vowels. In London English, the flapped is perceived as a casual pronunciation intermediate between the affricate , with higher class associations, and the glottal stop , with lower class associations. In these named varieties, outside of Britain, , the voiced counterpart of , is also frequently pronounced as a flap in such positions, making pairs of words like ''latter'' and ''ladder'' sound similar or identical. In similar positions, the combination may be pronounced as a nasalized flap , making ''winter'' sound similar or identical to ''winner''.

Flapping of is sometimes perceived as the replacement of with ; for example, the word ''butter'' pronounced with flapping may be heard as "budder".E.g. in .

In other dialects of English, such as South African English, Scottish English, some Northern England English (like Scouse), and older varieties of Received Pronunciation, the flap is a variant of (see Pronunciation of English ).

Terminology and articulation

The terms ''flap'' and ''tap'' are often used synonymously, although some authors make a distinction between them. When the distinction is made, a flap involves a rapid backward and forward movement of the tongue tip, while a tap involves an upward and downward movement. Linguists disagree on whether the sound produced in the present process is a flap or a tap, and by extension on whether the process is better called ''flapping'' or ''tapping'', while ''flapping'' has traditionally been more widely used. identify four types of sounds produced in the process: alveolar tap, down-flap, up-flap, and postalveolar tap (found in ''autumn'', ''Berta'', ''otter'', and ''murder'', respectively).

In Cockney, another voiced variant of that has been reported to occur to coexist with the alveolar tap (and other allophones, such as the very common glottal stop) is a simple voiced alveolar stop , which occurs especially in the words ''little'' , ''hospital'' and ''whatever'' . That too results in a (variable) merger with , whereas the tap does not.

In Cardiff English, the alveolar tap is less rapid than the corresponding sound in traditional RP, being more similar to . It also involves a larger part of the tongue. Thus, the typical Cardiff pronunciation of ''hospital'' as or is quite similar to Cockney , though it does not involve a neutralization of the flap with .

Distribution

Flapping of and is a prominent feature of North American English. Some linguists consider it obligatory for most American dialects to flap between a stressed and an unstressed vowel. Flapping of also occurs in Australian, New Zealand and (especially Northern) Irish English, and more infrequently or variably in South African English, Cockney, and Received Pronunciation.

The exact conditions for flapping in North American English are unknown, although it is widely understood that it occurs in an alveolar stop, or , when placed between two vowels, provided the second vowel is unstressed (as in ''butter'', ''writing'', ''wedding'', ''loader''). Across word boundaries, however, it can occur between any two vowels, provided the second vowel begins a word (as in ''get over'' ). This extends to morphological boundaries within compound words (as in ''whatever'' ). In addition to vowels, segments that may precede the flap include (as in ''party'') and occasionally (as in ''faulty''). Flapping after is more common in Canadian English than in American English. Syllabic may also follow the flap (as in ''bottle''). Flapping of before (as in ''button'') is observed in Australian English. In North American English, and ( ''t''-glottalization) were the only realizations of before , but studies in the 2020s have found in younger US speakers.

Morpheme-internally, the vowel following the flap must not only be unstressed but also be a reduced one (namely , morpheme-final or prevocalic , or preceding , , etc.), so words like ''botox'', ''retail'', and ''latex'' are not flapped in spite of the primary stress on the first syllables, while ''pity'', ''motto'', and ''Keating'' can be. The second syllables in the former set of words can thus be considered as having secondary stress.

Word-medial flapping is also prohibited in foot-initial positions. This prevents words such as ''militaristic'', ''spirantization'', and ''Mediterranean'' from flapping, despite ''capitalistic'' and ''alphabetization'', for example, being flapped. This is known as the Withgott effect.

In North American English, the cluster (but not ) in the same environment as flapped may be realized as a nasal flap . Intervocalic is also often realized as a nasal flap, so words like ''winter'' and ''winner'' can become homophonous. According to , in the United States, Southerners tend to pronounce ''winter'' and ''winner'' identically, while Northerners, especially those from the east coast, tend to retain the distinction, pronouncing ''winter'' with or and ''winner'' with .

Given these intricacies, it is difficult to formulate a phonological rule that accurately predicts flapping. Nevertheless, postulates that it applies to alveolar stops:

*after a sonorant other than , , or , but with restrictions on ;
*before an unstressed vowel within words, or before any vowel across a word boundary;
*when not in foot-initial position.

Exceptions include the preposition/particle ''to'' and words derived from it, such as ''today'', ''tonight'', ''tomorrow'', and ''together'', wherein may be flapped when intervocalic (as in ''go to sleep'' ). In Australian English, numerals ''thirteen'', ''fourteen'', and ''eighteen'' are often flapped despite the second vowel being stressed. In a handful of words such as ''seventy'', ''ninety'', and ''carpenter'', is frequently pronounced as , retaining and voicing , although it may still become in rapid speech.

Homophony

Flapping is a specific type of lenition, specifically intervocalic weakening. It leads to the neutralization of the distinction between and in appropriate environments, a partial merger of the two phonemes, provided that both and are flapped. Some speakers, however, flap only but not . Yet, for a minority of speakers, the merger can occur only if neither sound is flapped. That is the case in Cockney, where is occasionally voiced to , yielding a variable merger of ''little'' and Lidl. For speakers with the merger, the following utterances sound the same or almost the same:

In accents characterized by Canadian raising, such words as ''riding'' and ''writing'' may be flapped yet still distinguished by the quality of the vowel: ''riding'' , ''writing'' . Vowel duration may also be different, with a longer vowel before than before , due to pre-fortis clipping.

Withgott effect

In a dissertation in 1982, M.M. Withgott demonstrated that, among speakers of American English, words seem to be chunked into pronunciation units she referred to as a foot, similar to a metrical unit in poetry. Such chunking was said to block flapping in the word ‘Mediterranean’ ( Medi[terranean">erranean.html" ;"title="Medi[terranean">Medi[terranean cf. [ [sub[terranean). How a word is chunked relates to its Morphological derivation, morphological derivation, as seen by contrasting morphologically similar pairs such as the following (where the vertical bar shows where Withgott argued there is boundary between neighboring feet):

The medial ''t'' in ''càpitalístic'' can be flapped as easily as in post-stress ''cátty'' , in contrast to the medial ''t'' in ''mìlitarístic'', which comes at the beginning of a foot, and so must be pronounced as , like a ''t'' at the beginning of a word.

Long, seemingly monomorphemic words also are chunked in English for purposes of pronunciation. In such words ’s — as well as the other unvoiced stops — are pronounced like initial segments whenever they receive secondary stress or are at the beginning of a foot.

T-to-R rule

The origins of the T-to-R rule lie in the flapping of and the subsequent reinterpretation of the flap as , which was then followed by the use of the prevailing variant of , namely the approximant . It is applied in Northern England English and it is always stigmatized. The application of that rule means that ''shut'' in the phrasal verb ''to shut up'' has a different phonemic form than the citation form of the verb ''to shut'' . The rule is typically not applied in the word-internal position.

The T-to-R rule has also been reported to occur in the Cardiff dialect (where the merged consonant can surface as either an approximant or a flap) and South African English (where only a flap is possible). In the Cardiff dialect, the rule is typically applied between any vowel (including long vowels) and or the reduced (also across word boundaries), so that ''starting'' and ''starring'' can be homophonous as . In South African English, the merger is possible only for those speakers who use the flapped allophone of (making the ''starting''–''starring'' minimal pair homophonous as ), otherwise the sounds are distinguished as a flap (or a voiceless stop) for () vs. approximant for (). There, the merger occurs word-internally between vowels in those environments where flapping is possible in North American English.

See also

*Phonological history of English consonants
* Regional accents of English

Notes

References

Bibliography

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Further reading

*Withgott, M. Margaret. 1982. Segmental Evidence for Phonological Constituents. Ph.D. Dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin.
*Iverson, Gregory K. and Sang-Cheol Ahn. 2004
''English Voicing in Dimensional Theory''
Language Sciences (Phonology of English).
*Kahn, Daniel. 1976. ''Syllable-Based Generalizations in English Phonology''. Ph.D. Dissertation for the University of Massachusetts reproduced by I.U. Linguistics Club.
* Steriade, Donca. 1999. ''Paradigm uniformity and the phonetics-phonology boundary''. In M. Broe and J. Pierrehumbert (eds.), ''Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon'', 313-334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

{{History of English

English phonology
North American English
Australian English
New Zealand English
Splits and mergers in English phonology