Sociophonetic variation and the lemma

This paper reports on lemma-based phonetic variation observed during a year-long sociophonetic ethnography of an all girls' high school in New Zealand. In-depth acoustic analysis was conducted on tokens of the word like from the girls' speech. This is a word with a number of different grammatical functions, such as quotative like (I was LIKE “yeah okay”), discourse particle like (It was LIKE so boring), and lexical verb like (I LIKE your socks). The results provide evidence that the different functions of like can vary systematically in terms of their phonetic realisations and that the realisations of some phonetic variables may vary depending on a combination of a word's function and the social group of the speaker who produced it. Additionally, the results provide evidence of a relationship between phonetic reduction and an individual speaker's probability of using like when producing a quotative. This finding lends support to probabilistic models of speech production where activation is not filtered through a phonological buffer and where there is a link between lemma-based and acoustically rich information. ► The word like has different grammatical and discursive functions. ► We examine phonetic variation across the different functions of like. ► The phonetic realisation of like depends on its function. ► Social group and speaker-specific lemma probability affect the realisation of like.