Submitted by wjarek on 21 May, 2014 - 23:00.
The Department of Contemporary English Language (DoCELu) invites you to a Phon&Phon meeting:
Maciej Baranowski (University of Manchester)
The sociolinguistics of back vowel fronting in Manchester English
Thursday, 29 May 2014, 18:30, Room 109A
Abstract:
This paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change found in Manchester's long back vowels, i.e. GOOSE and GOAT. It is based on the acoustic analysis of 70 informants. The sample is stratified by age, gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity. Forty-six of the speakers identify themselves as white British; the other twenty-four informants represent the two largest ethnic minorities in Manchester, i.e., Pakistani and Black Caribbean. Five socio-economic levels are distinguished, from lower working to upper middle class.
The informants' complete vowel systems (all vowel phonemes, both nuclei and glide targets) are measured in terms of F1, F2, and F3 in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2012). For 26 speakers, the point of measurement is selected by hand, following Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The speech of 44 speakers is measured automatically, using the Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction suite developed at the University of Pennsylvania (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). The acoustic measurements are subjected to a series of multivariate analyses, with factors such as age, gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity entered as independent variables.
The results suggest a pattern of back vowel fronting in apparent time in the dialect. There is advanced fronting of GOOSE for both coronal and non-coronal onsets, involving all social groups at similar rates; it is a change nearing completion. In contrast to most dialects of English, there is considerable fronting of GOOSE before /l/, as in school and pool; it is a stable variable with a pattern of social class stratification. The fronting of GOAT is a more recent change, showing interaction between age and socio-economic status; it is led by females and upper middle class speakers, with the working class and ethnic minorities not participating in the process. GOAT fronting is argued to be a change brought in from outside the dialect by the highest social classes, in contrast to GOOSE fronting, an internal change.
References:
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. 2012. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program].
Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rosenfelder, I., Fruehwald, J. Evanini, K. and Jiahong, Y. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.
Submitted by J Weckwerth
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