Wednesday 22 August 2007

minimal pair

Compared to other companies, McDonald's "I'm loving it" ad campaign is only tolerable, though I must say they are heading in the right direction when their ads endorse you wearing that second-hand shirt. To be thrifty is a "cool" thing, today anyway. The ad in particular that I wish to comment about (and which I have come so long-windedly to say) concerns that part where someone knocks on a girl's door. When it opens, immediately, a rapper starts belting out several (impressive) lines in Spanish. The girl acts all confused, and her friends helping her move into her house stop, half out of curious shock. The boy next to the rapper then appends his own line, greeting his girlfriend. At first, it might seem that the rap didn't suit the girl's tastes. However the girl says, "I asked you to bring me a wrap, not a rap!" The boyfriend smiles cheekily and reveals that he has that too. Cue McDonald's plugging in their chicken mustard wraps or whatever, and happy youths plonked down on the couch eating.

The part that gets my attention linguistically is not the pun, but rather the different stresses on "wrap" and "rap". Under the traditional analysis of the English dialects, nearly all dialects treat both of them as homophones, save true mavericks like Scots (and not just Scottish English!). In linguistic speak, it is generally said that for the sheer majority of English dialects, there is no minimal pair to distinguish both of the words phonemically. Because we can distinguish "but" from "putt", for example -- there is a minimal pair distinguishing /b/ and /p/ (specifically, regarding voicing/aspiration). In contrast, according to the mainstream analysis of the English dialects, there usually is no minimal pair for /wr/ and /r/.

In the commercial, one can rule out suprasegmental stress, e.g. "I asked you to bring me A, not B," and stressing the A. If we had another example that went, "I asked you to bring me flour, not a flower!" the stress might even be placed on the second item, rather than the first. Furthermore, on second analysis, the girl does more than just to merely stress the word "wrap", she seems to employ extra secondary articulation, if not use a different consonant altogether.

This seems to imply that perhaps there is some distinction, even in the common dialects, considering that we can find this distinction in a McDonald's commercial. Yes, part of an ad campaign that McDonald's spends tens of millions of dollars on in order to get a rather simplistic observation of the youth demographic, while ironically seeming to support thriftiness. Anyway, the basic question to ask is, do the standard dialects (General American, Londoner, even "Singaporean Standard English" etc.) make a distinction, however fine, between, /wr/ and /r/?

In Old English, the distinction was by lip rounding. For example, "right" and "write" would be distinguished by the fact that in the first word, the consonant /r/ would be pronounced with the lips relatively relaxed, while the /wr/ of "write" would be articulated with the lips tensed in a circle (rounded). This distinction however, does not seem to be the distinction today. (This ignores the other distinction in Old English that would have been made between "right" and "write" -- the presence of the velar fricative in "right" [hence the H] and the absence of it in "write". But we're not talking about that, yo.)

Before I became interested in linguistics, I always thought there was some sort of fine distinction between "night" and "nite" (I later learned the distinction was more than subtle during Old English), "sign" and "sine", etc. The presence of silent "g" in words always made me tense my lips more -- a half-conscious strategy used to distinguish homophones while reading as a child. This however is artificial, as the distinction is inspired by writing, and usually is not noticeable soundwise in speech, save to the speaker making the distinction. "Wrap" and "rap" perhaps is the exception, a distinction inspired first by spelling but perhaps has since entered speech. Because today's /r/ tends to be rounded or labialised anyway, regardless of whether a /w/ precedes it, a distinction between /wr/ and /r/ is subtle to make. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. /wr/ can be distinguished from /r/ by rounding the lips even further. Distinguishing three levels of rounding is rare, but not impossible -- it for example occurs in Swedish.

One thing to note while viewing the IP chart of consonants is that the English native speakers can choose from two different realisations of R. Even now I realise that I may articulate the word "realise" itself a labialised consonant, but considerably less labialised than in the word "writing", for example. There's the alveolar approximant, and there's the retroflex approximant. The retroflex approximant supposedly occurs in some American English dialects only, but it is my suspicion that many English speakers, even non-American ones, may "push" their alveolar approximant R's back towards the retroflex position when they aRe tRying to stRess the R-ness of something. (The retroflex position is the area immediately somewhat behind the "alveolar ridge" itself behind the gums and teeth, but in front of the palate.) You know the Beijing Mandarin speakers with their R's (shir arh) -- one of the distinctions, besides the centralisation of some of their front vowels, is the use of the retroflex R over the alveolar R that Singaporeans tend to use more often.

So my argument after all these paragraphs is this, and perhaps an interesting tidbit of a question for linguistic fanatics like me to look into: do native English speakers -- or at least a significant lot of them -- make a phonetic, if not phonemic distinction, between /wr/ and /r/? How is this articulated? My own suspicion is that it is a mix of both even further labialisation as well as the use of the retroflex approximant over the alveolar.'

Don't try saying that I'm reading too much into a McDonald's commercial. This be linguistics we be talkin' bout here, 'yo.

(edited and reposted from my personal blog)

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