Random substitution : the case of glinding

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to examine a single case of random substitution which consists in the replacement of liquids by glides, that is, gliding. This process occurs in both English and Polish and it affects children’s speech as well as the speech of those adults who did not acquire the proper pronunciation of liquids. We address the following questions: is the substitution really random, why in the majority of cases it results in glides and not in something else, what is the relationship between two articulatorily distant segments which allows them to participate in substitution, among many others. It is argued that some examples of gliding can be analysed as a simple reduction in the elemental make-up of segments, e.g. [] ~ [], others like English [] ~ [] can be the effect of phonetic enhancement sometimes called phonological reinterpretation.