3 Results .1 Reading task
4.2 Variability of initial mutation patterns in present-day Irish
Our second main goal was to examine variability in patterns of initial mutation. The
realization of these mutations appears to be style- or register-dependent, similar in some ways to that of French liaison. It was clear from our pre- and post-experiment discussions with our participants that some initial mutations are present in their spontaneous speech. In addition, although most participants do not produce mutations consistently in the semi-spontaneous speech of the card game task, they were fully comfortable reading sentences containing initial mutations, consistently producing the mutations specified by the orthography, even when they were immediately preceded by a pause or a hesitation. Participants also did not have any difficulty in understanding the speech of the experimenters BÓR and PW, who have more conservative patterns of initial mutations.
The realization of initial mutations in semi-spontaneous speech differed dramatically from the expectations of the traditional grammar. The following observation of Ball & Müller (1992) for Welsh holds also for Irish: "Teachers lay great stress on 'correct' (i.e. standard) mutation usage; however…first-language speakers consistently replace certain mutation contexts by non-mutation…" (p. 221). The only participant who produced eclipsis in most (88%) of the eclipsis contexts in the game task (Speaker 1) was working as an Irish-English interpreter, in addition to studying for a master's degree. To obtain certification as an
interpreter, one needs to demonstrate mastery of the prescriptive grammar, including the system of initial mutations. Another participant (Speaker 7) was clearly influenced by the prescriptive grammar. As discussed in § 3.2.1, his pattern of mutations changed mid-way through the game task. He produced more eclipsed consonants in expected contexts, but he also produced séimhiú-lenition consonants in unexpected contexts. In the post-recording discussion, this participant volunteered without prompting that his non-native speaker classmates from Dublin had better Irish than he and his native speaker friends from his Gaeltacht community, explicitly referring to knowledge of the official standard grammar (An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, Translation Office 1958). That said, explicit corrections in the game task
were exceedingly rare; there were only two cases in which participants "corrected"
themselves to produce the eclipsed form called for by the prescriptive grammar.
In the card game task, we found some evidence that eclipsis may vary by consonant type.
A number of speakers produced more eclipsis forms for labials than for velars, a pattern that may be in part due to the much greater frequency of /kɣ/- and /kj/-initial words in the
language. We are not aware of any mention in the literature of a tendency to produce more eclipsis forms for labial-initial than for velar-initial words, although there is some discussion about the reluctance of Irish speakers to séimhiú-lenite /fɣ/ and /fj/ (which are deleted in séimhiú-lenition, see Stenson 1990, Frenda 2012 and references therein). In the literature on
other Celtic languages and other contexts, there is some discussion of the effect of lexical frequency. For example, working on the then moribund East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic, Dorian (1973) notes that since most irregular verbs are very frequent and begin with mutatable consonants, there is "inordinately heavy reinforcement of its mutational
phenomena" (pp. 417–418). She makes a similar argument about the stability of mutation in
"obligatory-lenition adjuncts", commenting that it is "difficult to understand why the
variability is not further advanced…unless the sheer statistical frequency of these morphemes has a braking effect on the process of change" (p. 418).
Spontaneous speech corpora will be essential to advancing our understanding of the variability in the realization of initial mutations. For example, we will be able to look beyond the limits of the experimental materials of the current study, which included only one eclipsis context. We therefore do not have the data to examine variation potentially due to factors such as linguistic structure, functional load, and prosodic phrasing. For example, in most contexts, eclipsis and the other initial mutations have very little functional load: they rarely convey semantic or syntactic information. One exception is the third person pronouns, which are segmentally identical (amasc. sg., a fem. sg., a pl.: all [ə], but distinguished by the initial mutations that follow them (e.g., adheirfiúr [jɾjɪfjuɹɣ] 'his sister' (séimhiú-lenition), adeirfiúr [ḏjɾjɪfjuɹɣ]
'her sister' (no mutation), andeirfiúr[ṉjɾjɪfjuɹɣ] 'their sister' (eclipsis)) (see Frenda (2012), also Thomas & Gathercole 2007 on the acquisition of the comparable pronominal/mutation system in Welsh). Corpus studies will also allow us to examine whether the imbalance in eclipsis observed in the current study is due to the consonant type (velar vs. labial) or to the
experimental items themselves. A similar phenomenon, French liaison, is known to be in part item-dependent. Corpora available for future investigations include the GaLa/Comhrá corpus of spoken Irish (Uí Dhonnchadha, Frenda & Vaughan 2012) and the GaelChaint corpus of conversations between pairs of native speakers of Connemara Irish (Ó Raghallaigh, Ní Chiosáin & Welby 2014).
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the staff of Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge, An Cheathrú Rua, Connemara for hosting the recordings and to our speakers for their participation. We thank
Kevin Scannell for the written corpus statistics, participants of the Celtic Linguistics 6 (Dublin) and PhonLex (Toulouse) conferences for their helpful feedback, and Amandine Michelas for her advice on the LMEMs. We also thank three anonymous reviewers and JIPA editor Amalia Arvaniti for their critical reading of previous versions of the manuscript and their constructive comments. All remaining errors are, of course, our own. This work was funded under the Ulysses France-Ireland research scheme. Partial results of this study were presented in Welby et al. (2014).
Appendix: Items
bosca [bɣʌsɣkə]
*Note that in Irish the acute accent marks a phonemically long vowel (not stress). Lexical stress is on the first syllable for these (and virtually all) monomorphemic nouns.
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i Calculations by Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University based on a 1.7 million word corpus of texts show that 18% of words are realized in a mutation form. Our own calculations on a subset of two dialogues (approximately 24,000 words) from the GaelChaint corpus of spontaneous conversational Irish (Ó Raghallaigh, Ní Chiosáin & Welby, 2014) show that 17% of words are realized in a mutation form.
ii Aside from the traditional terms, there are to our knowledge no other terms that adequately describe initial mutations. We therefore use the terms urú-eclipsis or more often, simply eclipsis (Irish: urú [ʌɾɣu] 'eclipse, eclipsis', English: eclipsis) and séimhiú-lenition (Irish:
séimhiú [ʃevju] 'weakening', English: lenition). Note that we cannot follow the usage of many authors and refer to eclipsis as nasalization. The term nasalization is synchronically
inaccurate: in eclipsis environments only voiced consonants become nasals. The same is not true either for voiceless consonants or for vowels (see Table 1). Similarly, for séimhiú-lenition, although the term aspiration has often been used, it is synchronically inaccurate. In addition, we cannot use the unmodified term lenition in place of séimhiú-lenition, because the voicing of voiceless consonants in eclipsis environments (see Table 1) is also a type of
lenition (see Honeybone 2008 and references therein; see also Ó Raghallaigh 2010: 55, for a more complete discussion of this terminological issue, as well as Hannahs 2013 on
"Terminological confusion: Labels for mutations", Martinet 1952 (cited in Hannahs 2013), and Hamp 1951). Our choice of terminology has the advantages of being synchronically accurate and understandable to Celticists and non-Celticists alike.
iii Note that in present-day Irish, /rj/ is not consistently palatalized, particularly among younger speakers. Traditional speakers of the dialect in question generally realize non-initial /rj/ as an apico-postalveolar fricative. See Ní Chasaide (1999) on Gaoth Dobhair Irish.
ivIn the Celticist tradition, these consonants are referred to as "broad" and "slender", respectively. By convention, broad consonants are left unmarked in the phonemic
transcription and slender consonants are marked with a prime (e.g., naoi /niː/ 'nine', ní /nʹiː/
(negative particle)). This phonemic contrast is not relevant to the aims of this study. For more details, see Ní Chiosáin (1991), Ní Chasaide (1999), and Bennett et al. (2014). For
transcription conventions for Connemara Irish, see Ó Raghallaigh (2014).
v We decided to code the initial mutation process of séimhiú-lenition, because some speakers produced séimhiú-lenition forms even when there was no context licensing this mutation.
vi In the interest of replicability, we give the R syntax for the maximal model for the VOT analysis. In the interest of brevity, we do not give the maximal models for the other analyses.
Note however that for these models only the dependent variable changes (vot, etc.).
vii The significance threshold is standardly assumed to be t > |2|. It is currently not possible to obtain pMCMC values for recent versions of lme4 for models with random correlation parameters.
Table 1 The initial mutation alternations of Connemara Irish. The three main columns represent the
radical consonants and corresponding séimhiú-lenition and eclipsis consonants. Each main column contains a pair of phonemically contrastive consonants, followed in angled brackets by the grapheme used to orthographically represent these consonants. We use phonemic representation here in order to represent the opposition of the secondary articulations in Irish. Consonants in parentheses appear
radical consonants and corresponding séimhiú-lenition and eclipsis consonants. Each main column contains a pair of phonemically contrastive consonants, followed in angled brackets by the grapheme used to orthographically represent these consonants. We use phonemic representation here in order to represent the opposition of the secondary articulations in Irish. Consonants in parentheses appear