Retroflexion of rhotic-plus-sibilant sequences at word junctions in Northern Norwegian dialects

Abstract

Retroflexion at the junction of words is an optional process. Numerous previous works devoted to this topic analysed the process of retroflexion based on researcher’s intuition or examining the behaviour of retroflexes in an artificially created environment in laboratory conditions. In this work, the retroflexion of rhotic-plus-sibilant sequences at word junctions is observed in the natural spontaneous speech of speakers of Northern Norwegian dialects. It investigates how the speaker's age, place, dialectal area, lexical element, syllabic structure, syntactic category, lexical and phrasal stress, and speech planning affect the application of retroflexion. A database containing excerpts from the speech of speakers of Northern Norwegian dialects was compiled specifically for this study. Selected phrases contain words with rhotic-plus-sibilant sequences at the junction. Statistical analysis in R and comparative analyzes were used to study the triggering environment for retroflexion at the word boundaries. The results showed the influence of the speaker's age, place, county, the chosen lexical unit in the second position, frequency of collocations, speech planning and the number of syllables in the second word on the application of retroflexion. While the influence of the dialect area turned out to be small, and the influence of stress and syntactic category was not confirmed. The significance of the performance was also found. Results suggest that older speakers, who take more pauses in speech and speak more slowly, do not plan sets of words in tandem, and often violate the phonological distance, which causes failing retroflexion at the word boundaries. Younger speakers in general use retroflexes in speech more actively. Key words: retroflexion, retroflex, phonology, speech planning.