A Socio-Phonological Analysis of Estuary English

• Main Authors: Shih-Chuan Wang, 王世銓
• Other Authors: Hsiao-tzu Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18738205697705797157

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 102 === Estuary English, which originated from London, Kent and Essex, has been found to feature the vowel shift from /a/ to /ɑ:/ in the BATH lexical set (Rosewarene, 1984). Although earlier studies have identified the codas that triggered the vowel shift (Wells, 1982; Trudgill, 1984), such a linguistic description was mainly drawn from the observers’ experiences and impressions. Therefore, this study conducted an empirical study to investigate in what phonetic environments the phoneme /a/ is realized as /ɑ:/ and how frequently the vowel shift occurs in different codas identified by prior researchers. It also examines how the occurrence rate of each coda related to the speakers’ sociolinguistic backgrounds. To this end, this study retrieved test words from Franklin Electronic Dictionary and the corpus of spoken English that Yang (2006) constructed based on 60 episodes of Oprah Winfrey show. Two speakers, who came from London and Kent respectively, were recruited to read the test words for sound analysis. The results show that the codas triggered the vowel shift with varying occurrence rates. Of all, the two codas, /ntʃ/ and /sn/, lead to the vowel change 100% of the time, whereas the coda /mp/ does not result in the vowel shift at all. In addition, the recordings of the two speakers were similar to each other. Specifically, the male speaker pronounced the back vowel for the test words less often than the female speaker. Such a difference might be caused by the male speakers’ twelve-year residence in Taiwan, where American English has been taught in Taiwan since World War II (Cheng, 2009). This study concluded by discussing the limitations of this study.