Abstract The Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, although several studies have suggested that this historical contrast is weakening for Scottish English speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Little is known about whether the /ʍ/-/w/ contrast is maintained in supraregional Scottish Standard English (SSE). This study sets out to explore, based on the phonemically transcribed ICE-Scotland corpus, the distribution of [ʍ] and [w] in SSE, their acoustic properties and potentially influencing social and language-internal factors. A total of 1,241 <wh-> tokens were extracted from the corpus, together with a matching number of <w-> tokens, and the median of harmonicity was measured. The results show that [ʍ] and [w] produced for words beginning with <wh-> are acoustically distinct from [w] produced for words beginning with <w->. [ʍ] is relatively frequent in SSE, but most speakers use both [ʍ] and [w] interchangeably for <wh-> and some never use [ʍ]. The realisation of <wh-> as [ʍ] is determined by preceding phonetic context and speaker gender.

中文翻译：

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/w/和/ʍ/在苏格兰标准英语中的分布

摘要 苏格兰英语音素清单通常声称具有 /ʍ/-/w/ 对比，尽管一些研究表明，在格拉斯哥、爱丁堡和阿伯丁的城市地区，这种历史对比对于说苏格兰英语的人来说正在减弱。关于 /ʍ/-/w/ 对比是否在超区域苏格兰标准英语 (SSE) 中保持，我们知之甚少。本研究基于音素转录的 ICE-Scotland 语料库，探索 [ʍ] 和 [w] 在 SSE 中的分布、它们的声学特性以及可能影响社会和语言内部的因素。共从语料库中提取了 1,241 个 <wh-> 标记，以及匹配数量的 <w-> 标记，并测量了谐波的中位数。结果表明，[ʍ] 和 [w] 对以 < 开头的单词产生 wh-> 在声学上与为以 <w-> 开头的单词产生的 [w] 不同。[ʍ] 在 SSE 中相对频繁，但大多数说话者同时使用 [ʍ] 和 [w] 来表示 <wh->，有些人从不使用 [ʍ]。<wh-> 实现为 [ʍ] 取决于前面的语音上下文和说话者性别。