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Phonological Repetition Effects in Natural Conversation: Evidence from TH-fronting in Fife

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Sociolinguistics in Scotland

Abstract

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of TH-fronting, a change in progress which has rapidly spread across some of the major towns and cities of Britain in the last few decades. In Scotland, TH-fronting most commonly refers to the replacement of the voiceless dental fricative [θ] with the voiceless labiodental fricative [f] (see, for example, Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2006; Clark and Trousdale 2009). Several studies have investigated the social motivations for this phonological change in progress in Scotland (e.g. Robinson 2005; Clark 2009; Lawson, forthcoming), but much less consideration has been given to potential structural motivations. This chapter asks whether structural repetition, or priming, can help to explain variation in TH-fronting in a corpus of vernacular Scots speech.

* Thanks go to Kevin Watson for reading an earlier draft of this chapter and providing valuable feedback, and to the anonymous reviewer for their encouragement to pursue this avenue of research. Thanks also, of course, to Robert Lawson who has worked tirelessly to compile this unique collection of work on sociolinguistics in Scotland.

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Authors
  1. Lynn Clark
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Birmingham City University, UK

    Robert Lawson

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© 2014 Lynn Clark

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Clark, L. (2014). Phonological Repetition Effects in Natural Conversation: Evidence from TH-fronting in Fife. In: Lawson, R. (eds) Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034717_8

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