---
title: "Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from"
description: "In English, /s/ in clusters like /stɹ/ (street, strong) is often pronounced closer to [ʃ]. 79 references."
authors: ["George Bailey", "Stephen Nichols", "Danielle Turton", "Maciej Baranowski"]
year: 2022
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/8026/"
doi: "10.16995/glossa.8026"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bailey-2022-affrication-as-cause-s-retraction/"
---
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# Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English

**Authors:** George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, [Danielle Turton](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/danielle-turton/) and Maciej Baranowski · **Year:** 2022 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2022](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2022/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8026) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/8026/galley/21838/download) · [DOI 10.16995/glossa.8026](https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8026) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4210445326)

**Citations:** 5 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
In English, /s/ in clusters like /stɹ/ (street, strong) is often pronounced closer to [ʃ]. Two explanations compete. One says /s/ assimilates at a distance to the /ɹ/. The other says /s/ assimilates locally to a /t/ that has already become affricated. In /stɹ/ these two causes always occur together, so that cluster alone cannot decide between them.

The authors use yod-retaining British English to separate the causes. In /stj/ (student) the /tj/ coalesces into an affricate with no rhotic present, and /stʃ/ (mischief) has an underlying affricate. They measured /s/ acoustically in a demographically stratified corpus of more than 115 sociolinguistic interviews from Manchester. Each speaker's results were set against their own pre-vocalic /s/ and /ʃ/ as reference points.

All three contexts are retracting in apparent time, at the same pace and under the same conditioning factors. This favours an account in which affrication triggers retraction and /ɹ/ plays only an indirect role. It is the first detailed community-level study of the variable in a British variety.

## Key points
- The data come from more than 115 demographically stratified sociolinguistic interviews of Manchester English, recorded with ESRC funding (grant ES/I009426/1).
- Three retraction contexts were compared: /stɹ/, /stj/ and /stʃ/. They change in parallel and now sit close to /ʃ/, which suggests the change is nearly complete.
- The change looks like a regular coarticulatory one:
  - young women lead it, and working-class speakers possibly do too;
  - higher-frequency words are further along.
- The Baker et al. (2011) actuation proposal relies on hidden articulatory variation in /ɹ/. It cannot explain retraction in contexts that contain no /ɹ/.
- Younger speakers show a larger acoustic gap between pre-vocalic /s/ and /ʃ/. It is unclear whether this is change in progress or age-related variation.

## Interesting ideas
- When two candidate causes always co-occur, look for natural contexts where one is present and the other is absent (here, an affricate without /ɹ/), and test whether behaviour still holds.
- Retraction is measured relative to each speaker's own /s/ and /ʃ/ endpoints rather than on an absolute scale, so a token's position means something within that speaker's range.
- The authors prefer a gradient acoustic measure to binary retracted/non-retracted coding, because intermediate variants exist and weak effects also occur in other clusters.
- The target change is read against the drift of the whole surrounding system, since the reference endpoints themselves may be moving.
- Testing whether different contexts move in step with each other is used as evidence that they share one underlying mechanism.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Design negative controls the same way, using sentences where only one suspected cue for a parser or repair-rule decision is present, to find which cue actually drives the behaviour.
- **I2** (answer): Calibrate a reader's confidence scores against per-text or per-genre baselines, so that "high" or "low" confidence stays comparable across very different inputs.
- **I3** (learn): Record graded agreement among witness parsers on silver data instead of a binary agree/disagree flag, so that partial consensus stays visible to training.
- **I4** (learn): When comparing model versions, also check whether baseline control sets have shifted, so that apparent gains are not just drift in the reference.
- **I5** (tree): If error rates for several constructions rise or fall together across parser versions, treat that as a hint of one shared cause and fix the common component rather than each construction separately.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Oxford](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-oxford/) — University, Oxford, United Kingdom · 122 works · 160,277 citations
- [University of Manchester](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-manchester/) — University, Manchester, United Kingdom · 93 works · 45,138 citations
- [University of York](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-york/) — University, York, United Kingdom · 18 works · 6,570 citations
- [Lancaster University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/lancaster-university/) — University, Lancaster, United Kingdom · 36 works · 1,615 citations

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,379 works

## Cite

Cite as: George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, Danielle Turton and Maciej Baranowski. 2022. Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{bailey2022affrication,
  title = {{Affrication as the cause of /s/-retraction: Evidence from Manchester English}},
  author = {George Bailey, Stephen Nichols, Danielle Turton and Maciej Baranowski},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.8026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8026}
}
```

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*Updated 2 November 2026*