Abstract This study explores the interaction between pragmatic and phonetic variation, investigating the usage of just in British English. Based on an acoustic and auditory phonetic analysis of 1,260 tokens of just spoken by 100 male speakers of Standard Southern British English, I argue that speakers utilise phonetic resources to indicate pragmatic meaning alongside predictable contextual effects. The realisation of each of the canonical segments of just (/d͡ʒ/, /ʌ/, /s/, /t/) were investigated using duration, centre of gravity and vowel formant estimates. Discourse-pragmatic uses of just were more likely to exhibit phonetic reduction than adverbial uses in terms of word duration, vowel elision and quality, but not for /s/ and /t/ duration. The realisation of /t/ was dependent on following context, but the effect of function on vowel realisation and duration remained robust despite interactions with surrounding contexts and token stress. This suggests that speakers signal different functions of just via segmental realisation. Analysing just in phonetic detail within its pragmatic and contextual environment describes how the word is shaped in its representation.
Ben Gibb-Reid (Tue,) studied this question.