Pre-aspiration and glottalisation in Manchester English

The study focuses on the relationship between preaspiration and glottalisation in Manchester English. Analyses of five speakers aged 20-22 years indicate there is a prosodically conditioned complementary distribution: pre-aspiration is found word-medially (batter [patəә]), while glottalisation occurs wordfinally (bat [pat]) in plosive contexts. In fricative contexts (e.g. mass), analysed for the word-final condition only, pre-aspiration is found obligatorily, and, if glottalisation occurs, it thus always co-occurs with pre-aspiration. The data have also shown lack of cues to the oral gesture in the acoustic signal for a number of plosives (glottal replacement/glottalling). This has been found for the fricatives as well, but very infrequently. The results furthermore suggest that unless glottal replacement and glottal reinforcement are treated as manifestations of a single property at some level of representation, the relationship between glottalisation and preaspiration may be obscured, and analyses of glottalisation in accents of British English should therefore not be limited solely to glottal replacement (‘glottalling’).