Affrication as the cause of s-retraction: Community-level change in Manchester English
In this talk we present the first large-scale community-level study of /s/-retraction in British English. We observe an apparent-time change, with /s/ becoming more [ʃ]-like across the 80 years covered by the corpus. Hierarchical cluster analysis also identifies a group of younger speakers who exhibit considerable overlap between (str) and pre-vocalic /ʃ/ suggesting that the change is particularly advanced in this community.
The causes of s-retraction have long been debated, with disagreement over the role of /ɹ/ as a trigger. We provide the first quantitative evidence of retraction in (stj) clusters (e.g. student), and in doing so show that this context is changing in parallel with (str), casting doubt on claims that s-retraction is driven by non-local assimilation with /ɹ/. Affrication in /tɹ/ and /tj/ clusters seems to be the more likely explanation.
