Asymmetrical Sensitivity to Prosodic Positions and Glottalization in Cockney

Abstract

This paper examines Cockney English, a dialect spoken among workers in southeastern London area, to show that phonological phenomena are asymmetrically sensitive to syllabic positions. The asymmetrical sensitivity of phonology to prosodic position is termed positional asymmetry in this paper. To argue for the existence of positional asymmetry, this paper focuses on the phenomenon of Glottalization in Cockney English. Glottalization in this dialect takes place in coda position rather than in onset position. This paper adopts Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) as a theoretical framework to analyze Glottalization. It is thus shown in this paper that the role of positional asymmetry in Cockney Glottalization is formalized by dynamic interaction between positional markedness constraints and positional faithfulness constraints.