This chapter examines the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supraregional accent of English. Engaging in detail with phonological history, it documents the increased salience of delocalisation in representations of speech from the mid eighteenth century onwards while exploring the intersection between formal prescription and private practice. An abundance of primary texts on the need for a normative model of speech was in existence by the late nineteenth century while popular culture, and an emerging national system, also addressed desiderata of this kind. The advent of the pronouncing dictionary, an influential sub-genre in the history of lexicography, is a further important strand in the attempted dissemination of one accent for all, though broadcast English brought other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English were both implemented and encouraged. If the social, cultural and linguistic hegemonies of a ‘standard’ accent were originally embedded in formally democratic models, the chapter also provides a critical examination of both the rhetoric and praxis of ‘received’ English in this respect, alongside its legacies in Present-Day English.

The Old English poem Beowulf is a particularly valuable source of information about early features of the English language. In its present form the poem is recorded in a manuscript of unknown provenance made, in all probability, shortly after the millennium. Yet it evinces linguistic features that are highly conservative, suggesting that the extant text was copied, perhaps directly, from a much older exemplar, and that the poem was composed in a more northerly dialect than the Late West Saxon one in which it is preserved. Some of the poem’s conservative linguistic features are detectable only on the basis of poetic meter. Other of the poem’s archaic features include some that are orthographic in nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and metrical. Beowulf is not the only linguistically conservative poem preserved in Old English, but in many ways it reveals, more than any other poem, a great deal about what the language was like at a much earlier time than that at which all but a minuscule portion of the total extant corpus of Old English was recorded. It is thus an invaluable window on the prehistory of the English language.

This chapter focuses on how sounds can shift when they occur in particular environments. It introduces key concepts from the field of phonology, such as phonemes and allophones, and demonstrates how sounds commonly change during speech production. The major types of sound shifts discussed in this chapter include assimilation, deletion, insertion, and dissimilation. By the end of the chapter, you will be asked to apply phonological rules to a small data set and create a set of potential phonological shifts you can incorporate into your language.

In this chapter, we will look at the writing system, why the Latin alphabet used by English and many other languages is not ideal, as it does not provide letters for all sounds, and what tools phoneticians have at their disposal to accurately write down the pronunciation of words. This textbook takes a hands-on approach. Therefore, in this chapter, you will also be introduced to a free software used by many phoneticians. With this, you can listen to stretches of speech and annotate them. In a later chapter, you will also learn how to perform simple measurements with it. Finally, just like there is standard English grammar and vocabulary, there are also two main pronunciation standards for English, which will be introduced here.

This chapter firstly outlines the phonological structure of Gaelic and aspects of phonetic implementation. I then consider methods used so far in the study of Gaelic phonological acquisition and review work in this area. The journey of language acquisition is varied across different sectors of the Gaelic-speaking population, as well as individuals. For example, while some children acquire Gaelic and English virtually simultaneously in the home, other children acquire Gaelic sequentially through a form of immersion schooling known as Gaelic Medium Education (GME). Many lie somewhere on a simultaneous-sequential continuum. Adult acquirers of Gaelic are a hugely diverse population, which naturally leads to a range of differing outcomes in the acquisition of phonology. In this overview of the field, I consider the different factors associated with multilingual phonological acquisition, and how they have predicted or challenged results obtained from data-driven studies of Gaelic. The chapter ends with a discussion about the multiple future directions needed for research in this area, including larger studies of primary-aged populations, and more focus on universities as an important locus of adult language acquisition.

The chapter starts by presenting a sketch of the phonology of Irish. This covers first the segmental phonology dealing with consonants and then vowels. The importance of the palatalised–non-palatalised distinction in the consonant system is stressed. The phonotactics of Irish are described and the range of possible consonant clusters outlined. Attention is then turned to prosodic aspects of Irish phonology, with a description of both stress and intonation.

Phonological processes such as allophonic variation and sandhi phenomena are also included, and a description of the initial consonant mutation system is given in phonological terms. In all these sections of the chapter, important dialect differences are noted. Following the description of Irish phonology, a review is presented of studies of the acquisition of Irish as a first (or joint first) language. Two diary studies provided some information on order of acquisition of segments and on patterns of simplification. A longitudinal, group study is also reviewed and the results of this add much more to our knowledge of phonological acquisition in Irish. The chapter concludes with a look at the development of new, urban, forms of Irish, and at the need for more research into phonological acquisition norms in Irish.

Describe the challenges children face in learning language; understand key features of child language development; explain the strategies children use to learn sounds, words, and grammar.

This chapter lays out the theoretical devices on which the subsequent analysis builds. The first section introduces the phonological architecture used in the book, and in particular the distinction between the phonological, phonetic-phonological, and phonetic levels of representation, which underpin the notion of the life cycle that is central to the book’s argument. The second section recaps current views on the mechanisms of language contact and the role that phonological patterns can play under different contact scenarios. This is followed by a discussion of areal effects in phonology generally and some case studies beyond northern Europe, which exemplify various possibilities for recovering the history of contact from attested phonological patterns. The third section discusses the mechanisms of phonological convergence and the possible uses of sound patterns in diagnosing language contact in the past. Finally, the fourth section lays out the theory of the life cycle of phonological processes and introduces key related notions such as rule scattering and rule generalization, and lays out a proposal for how the life cycle can be used in examining language contact in the past.

As in music, stress and accent in natural language are phenomenal prominences. A phenomenal prominence is always the most salient aspect of an acoustic contrast. A stress or accent might consist of a higher pitch, a greater amplitude, or a longer duration. It might also arise from differences in aspiration, vowel quality, or voicing. The primary purpose of stress and accent is to indicate a form’s temporal structure. It does this by indicating the positions of metrical prominences on the metrical grid. When phenomenal prominences correspond to metrical prominences, as they do in both music and language, they indicate the locations of metrical prominences and overall temporal organization. The key difference between metrical patterns in music and metrical patterns in language is that the former are typically more cyclic – or repetitive – than the latter with a more even distribution of prominences. Metrical organization is always rich and constructed automatically. Even when presented with a series of identical isochronous pulses, a hearer will automatically construct an analysis with multiple metrical levels. Stress and accent indicate which metrical analysis a listener should construct. This typically requires minimal information. A single accent per form can distinguish between the four perfect grid patterns, the simplest binary metrical patterns.

Chapter 9 summarizes the main points addressed in previous chapters. The main issues addressed in Chapter 1 are phenomenal prominence, metrical prominence, and the relationship between them. Chapter 2 addresses the Prosodic Hierarchy and structural prominence. Chapter 3 examines the typology of word stress. Chapter 4 examines two correspondence relationships: the relationship between prosodic categories and grid entries and the relationship between syntactic categories and prosodic categories. Directionality effects are addressed in Chapter 5, and grid well-formedness are addressed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines boundary effects, and Chapter 8 focuses on feet.

What is memory? Scientists have proposed a wide variety of spatial metaphors to understand it. These range from the 2D wax tablets proposed by Plato and Aristotle and subsequently Freud, with his magic writing pad, to the 3D physical spaces that one can walk around inside, such as the subway of Collins and Quillian. If memory has such a spatial structure, then it suggests a simple rule: items in memory can be near or far from one another. Anything with a near-and-far structure lends itself to a network representation. Such spatial structure also lends itself to being in the wrong place at the wrong time: remembering things that never happened and forgetting things that did. This chapter explores how structure facilitates memories and also looks at a specific case of false memory to highlight how modeling the process of spreading activation on networks can enrich our understanding of structure beyond degree.