Rhoticity, Part Two: Symbol Confusion

This post is a part two of an answer to a question posed by Kim Mappleswitch. Part one is here.

As a reminder, Kim writes:

At The High Standards Academy of Dramatic Art (HSADA) we're required to teach Standard Stage as a basis for learning IPA. I have asked the faculty here how they teach the /ɜ˞/ sound. On one hand - it's that the tongue tip stays behind the lower teeth and on the other hand it's that the tongue tip is not on the lower teeth, but rather "floats" because the body of the tongue is slightly retracted. What do you guys think? Rhoticity is a difficult topic and I'd like to have some clarity with this symbol and get some other opinions on how to teach it. In the course packet we are supposed to teach out of it says this is a "pure vowel" but I don't see how it can be with an r-hook. This is where I'm hitting a wall with this sound.

I dealt with the question of the physicality in the last post. This post will be specifically about the transcription questions around rhoticity (post-vocalic /r/ sounds to you).

This is a vexed area, to say the least.

Most folks in the theatre voice and speech world use ɜ˞ to represent the phoneme in So-Called General American NURSE, just like Kim's HSADA colleagues. This is a widespread, deeply-rooted convention. It can be found in Kenyon and Knott, Skinner, Patricia Fletcher’s Classically Speaking, Louis Colaianni’s Joy of Phonetics, Paul Meier’s treatment of ‘General American’ and many, many other resources. Even John Wells, in Accents of English, uses /ɜr/ for the ‘GenAm’ phoneme. (Wells’ idiosyncratic use of the ‘all-purpose’ /r/ here, rather than a rhoticity diacritic, is perhaps best left for another discussion. The important point for now is that he concurs with everybody else in using the basic ɜ symbol for the vowel.) ɜ˞, in other words, is a very well-established usage.

This same basic symbol, ɜ, is used to represent the NURSE phoneme in RP, and has been at least since Gimson. It is at least as well-established as the use of ɜ˞ for the equivalent American vowel. This is interesting. Now of course SCGA and RP differ in the all-important aspect of rhoticity. SCGA is rhotic, RP is not. But is this, in fact, the only difference between the two realizations? The widespread practice of using the same basic symbol for both vowels would seem to indicate that we’re talking about the same tongue position, and that the SCGA and RP NURSE vowels differ only in whether or not the sides of the tongue are reaching up for the molars or not. Is this the case? Let’s hold onto that question for a moment while we have a quick look at the IPA vowel chart as it is currently configured.

Since 1993, when the current version of the IPA vowel chart was adopted, the unrounded central vowel situation has been this:

There is one symbol at the same height as Cardinal 2, one symbol at the same height as Cardinal 3, and one symbol halfway in between.

Let’s do a little experiment here. Release your jaw, tongue and lips. Let everything flop open and see if you can let go of any tension or holding in your articulators. Send a little voiced sound through there. Congratulations, you've just produced [ə], the only truly relaxed sound possible in human languages. Every other speech sound in existence must necessarily involve some degree of muscular engagement somewhere in the vocal tract. Now say a few NURSE words in a 'General' American accent of some kind. "Bernie the pervert learned curses from stern circus girls," perhaps. Freeze your tongue in the middle of one of those vowels. Feel where it is in your mouth. Compare it to [ə]—relax into [ə] and feel whether your tongue moves or not. Did it raise or lower when it moved from SCGA NURSE to [ə]?

I’m going to guess that it probably lowered. Yes, there's an extra thing going on—the tongue-bracing action I discussed in the last post. But speak one of these words again in an SCGA accent and hold on the vowel. See whether you can relax the sides of the tongue down while keeping the body in the same position in your mouth. Again, compare it to a [ə]. Dollars to doughnuts it's higher.

Now, if you're an RP speaker, or have a killer RP accent (an RP NURSE vowel can be a tricky one for a lot of Americans), speak a few NURSE words in RP. Hold, as before, on the vowel, and feel where your tongue is. Then relax it into an [ə]. Compare and contrast. The result, I'd imagine, is that you discovered your tongue was lower for RP NURSE than for [ə]. So we've got three different tongue positions here. Going from lowest (slightly cupped) to highest (slightly arched), we have RP NURSE, then [ə], then SCGA NURSE.

Look again at the chart above. We have three symbols on the IPA vowel chart corresponding more or less perfectly to the tongue heights of these three vowels.

Now, assuming you're with me so far, please tell me what earthly sense it makes to use the same basic symbol for both RP and SCGA NURSE?

And even more importantly, how can we not expect this to be confusing to students? On the one hand we're teaching them that the IPA functions on the bedrock principle of one and only one symbol for each unique physical action, and each unique physical action will have only one symbol to represent it. Now we're telling them that ɜ indicates a vowel lower than [ə], but all you have to do is add a rhoticity diacritic to the basic symbol, ɜ˞, and now we're describing a vowel that is higher than [ə]. But higher than [ə] is not where ɜ is on the chart! Furthermore, there is a symbol occupying that precise position on the chart, ɘ!

Convention aside, if we were choosing a symbol from scratch to represent a central vowel about the height of Cardinal 2, which one would we choose? The answer is obvious—we’d choose [ɘ]. It’s right there on the chart! The choice for RP NURSE is similarly obvious—we should go with [ɜ]. Again, it’s right there on the chart, an unrounded central vowel about the height of Cardinal 3. That’s the quality we want to describe, and the IPA has provided us with a symbol that lives right there.

So, my preferred usage is:

SCGA NURSE vowel: /ɘ˞/
RP NURSE vowel: /ɜ/

This usage has the advantage of making clear that we’re talking about two completely different tongue positions for the two vowels—one higher than [ə] and one lower. Rhoticity is not the only difference between the two.

Of course, if we teach this, we still have to explain the convention so that students understand what they’re reading when they come across it elsewhere. But it’s far better to go this route, I think, than to just go on pretending that we’re talking about the same thing when we’re really talking about two different things. If one of the main points of teaching phonetics is to allow students to begin to untangle perceptual confusions, then we are certainly not serving that goal if we’re teaching ɜ˞ for American NURSE.

As long as this post has now become, there is still more to say on this subject. In NURSE words, Joe Yankee probably uses some kind of 'braced' or 'molar' 'r', (discussed in the last post), which I'm now choosing to transcribe as [ɘ˞]. But what does he use when a spelled 'r' precedes a vowel, as in rutabega?

The answer will have to wait for part three. (Though discussion, as always, is welcome in the comments.) 

The Bird is the Word

Kim Mappleswitch writes:

At The High Standards Academy of Dramatic Art (HSADA) we're required to teach Standard Stage as a basis for learning IPA. I have asked the faculty here how they teach the /ɜ˞/ sound. On one hand - it's that the tongue tip stays behind the lower teeth and on the other hand it's that the tongue tip is not on the lower teeth, but rather "floats" because the body of the tongue is slightly retracted. What do you guys think? Rhoticity is a difficult topic and I'd like to have some clarity with this symbol and get some other opinions on how to teach it. In the course packet we are supposed to teach out of it says this is a "pure vowel" but I don't see how it can be with an r-hook. This is where I'm hitting a wall with this sound.

(names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

There's much to respond to here. I imagine that Kim is not alone in finding herself in an institution that has yet to join the 21st century as far as speech-training is concerned. But perhaps that's a subject best left for another post. I’m going to tackle the question about physicality first, and leave the transcription question for a bit later.

To be clear, what we're talking about here is the way /r/ is realized after a vowel in rhotic American English, and especially in words like NURSE (the relevant lexical set). Though there is some variation here—some Americans do, in fact, use a strongly retroflexed [ɻ] in words like bird and murder—generally speaking Americans realize post-vocalic /r/ as a 'bunched' /r/, also known as a 'molar' or 'braced' /r/. In Speaking with Skill, Dudley describes it as follows:

Unlike the alveolar /ɹ/ or the retroflex /ɻ/, the tip and blade of the tongue are relaxed down with the tip of the tongue behind the lower teeth and the jaw relaxed open. The middle of the dorsum or body of the tongue is raised and the side edges of the tongue are braced vigorously against the inside of the upper teeth in the area of the rear bicuspids and first molars. Considered in terms of its orientation to the roof of the mouth, this action is taking place in the palato-velar area. The muscular bracing of the tongue has the effect of further tensing and thickening the midline of the tongue, bringing it even closer to the border of the palate and the velum.

JC Catford, in the invaluable A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, describes the same sound as follows:

This vowel was formerly described as ‘retroflexed’ but this is not a correct description. It does not usually have the upward curling of the tongue that is characteristic of retroflexion. Instead, the main body of the tongue is bunched up into a kind of half-close-central position, but with two peculiar modifications: one modification is a moderate degree of deep pharyngalization: the root of the tongue is drawn back into the pharynx just above the larynx. The second modification is a fairly deep depression in the surface of the tongue opposite the uvular zone. This sub-uvular concavity can be acquired as follows. Produce a uvular trill. Note that in order to do this you have to form a longitudinal furrow in the tongue within which the uvula vibrates. Now move the whole body of the tongue slightly forward, while retaining precisely that deeply furrowed configuration. The result should be a close approximation to the typical American ‘bird vowel’, for which the phonetic symbols [ɜ˞] and [ə˞] have been used — both representing a central vowel with an r-like modification.

As we saw, this very strange American vowel involves not only a concavity — or ‘sulcalization’ (from the Latin sulcus `a furrow, or trench') — of the tongue in the neighborhood of the uvula, but also some slight degree of pharyngalization. It is because of this that a series of vowel-sounds with modification of this rhotacized type in some languages spoken in the Caucasus area of Russia, notably Tsakhur and Udi, are known as ‘pharyngalized’ vowels.

The first question is where exactly is the tongue-tip? Is it down, behind the lower front teeth, or does it, in the words of the HSADA instructors, "float"?

The answer is, it depends. Both are possible. It is possible to make a 'molar' /r/ sound with the tongue tip down and out of the action. Only the sides of the tongue come up and make contact with the insides of the upper molars. The jaw must be fairly high (close) for these things to be true simultaneously, of course. You can feel this kind of molar /r/ if you articulate the word green slowly and attentively. Concentrate on keeping the tongue tip down until the final /n/. If you've done this successfully, you've realized the /r/ as a tongue-tip down molar /r/. In actual fact, the tip of the tongue probably does come off the teeth a bit, even if it stays down (it does for me). This is because it is true that the body of the tongue is somewhat retracted for this sound.

(Note that it is not true, pace Catford, that the tongue root must be retracted for a 'molar' /r/. It may well be true that these things often go together—general, blanket tongue-root retraction may be found all over these United States—but it is entirely possible to make a 'molar' /r/ without retracting the root of the tongue.)

Now, it is also possible to make a 'molar' /r/ in a slightly different manner. To really get the sides of the tongue inside the upper molars—enough so that they can actively push out against the teeth, it is necessary to retract the body of the tongue a bit more. The tip will thus come further away from contact with the teeth, and may in fact,"float," in a kind of neither-here-nor-there tongue-tip limbo. Marina Tyndall describes this condition as "Jabba the Hutt tongue," which I think is a very pleasing image. The tip of the tongue is receding into the body—squishing into to as the tongue shortens and gets fatter, just as Jabba the Hutt looks as if he might once have been a tall, cylindrical creature until he was stepped on and squished by some sort of gigantic sand monster. (Which is probably why he's such a sadist, but I'm veering dangerously far afield now.)

If you've tried these two strategies out for yourself—the tongue-tip down 'molar' /r/ and the Jabba the Hutt 'molar' /r/—you may have already observed that they're really just two poles, two endpoints along a single continuum. It would be equally possible to stop anywhere along the way and call that your preferred spot for a 'molar' /r/. Try it out—move smoothly and gradually from one to the other.

In the second configuration (the Jabba the Hutt one), we can vary the bracing action. If we do go ahead and actively push out with the sides of the tongue against the molars, we'll end up with a 'harder' sounding /r/, maybe one reminiscent of Oklahoma or Texas. It's equally possible to do no bracing at all with your Jabba the Hutt tongue, just light contact. So here is another continuum, varying between strong bracing and no bracing. In fact, we can join the ends of these two continua and end up with one continuous continuum, beginning at one end with tongue-tip down 'molar' /r/, moving through light-contact Jabba the Hutt 'molar' /r/, and increasing in bracing until we get to 'hard', strongly-braced Jabba the Hutt 'molar' /r/.

My sense is that when modern Skinnerians ask for 'light' rhoticity (Skinner herself specified that no rhoticity was to be used for singing and “Good Speech in classic texts”), they are asking for the tongue-tip down version. If your goal is to promote a pattern of articulation that leaves the tongue free and ready to go wherever it needs to next, this makes a certain kind of sense. I would argue that the tongue-tip down version is no better in this regard than the light contact version, but both clearly have some articulatory advantages over the strongly braced one, especially if it includes tongue root retraction, as is likely. So to specify the tongue-tip down version is to aim for the end of the continuum that is furthest away from the one that may result in some constriction and less agile articulation.

My position on this is that I feel no need to employ this kind of subtle subterfuge with my students. Not to mince words, there's something almost dishonest, it seems to me, in insisting on a particular articulatory realization as a target merely so as to keep students as far away as possible from a disfavored action. Don't we want our students to have as much fine control and awareness as possible? I certainly do—I want them to have as much understanding of and feel for their own articulators as I can give them. So if the middle point on our continuum, what I'm calling the contact-only Jabba the Hutt tongue, will allow for agile articulation and a free, open vocal tract just as well as the tongue-tip down version, why not teach that? I will admit to some personal bias here—my own NURSE vowel is formed in this way. The tongue-tip down version just doesn’t feel, well, /r/-ish enough to me.

I can point to no instrumental studies on the matter, but I suspect that contact-only Jabba the Hutt tongue is the way the large majority of contemporary Americans realize the NURSE vowel, as well 'consonant' /r/. My students have always felt this to be so as well.

Of course, as with all speech actions, I’d like my students to be able to do all of these things. I don’t mean to prescribe the ‘light contact’ version as the best alternative or the one that should be taught to everybody as the ideal. But if a given student has a strongly braced /r/ with tongue-root retraction, and a freer, more open vocal tract is desired for whatever purpose, the bracing and tongue-root retraction itself are the aspects to address. If the student has an easier time incorporating and owning the ‘light contact’ version, what exactly is the reason for getting them all the way to the tongue-tip down one?

This has turned into an exceedingly long post, so I will save the discussion of symbols for another post.

As always, comments, discussion and vituperative disagreement welcome below.