6 - Lexical Stress in Varieties of Australian English: A Corpus-Based Exploration

Summary

0 Introduction

Australian English has received much attention with a view to describe and model the components of its lexicon and phonology while assessing its role and status in the English-speaking world. Recently, possibly because the Australian science of linguistics thoughtfully relies on national programmes of spoken corpus-making as well as on a broad landscape of laboratory phonology, some perceptual and acoustic analyses of stress and pitch accent have regularly been published, notably about High Rising Terminal (HRT) (for example Guy and Vonwiller 1989; Fletcher and Harrington 2001; Fletcher et al. 2002; Horvath 2004; Jespersen 2016). Other linguistic works have investigated the issue of lexical stress in Australian English phonology (Tabain et al. 2004).

Australian English is no homogeneous variety. The demonstration that multiple British dialectal origins at the root of its endogenous development led to a common systemic core (one transported English) under a determined evolutionary process of native Englishes must be balanced with the contemporary reality of phonological variation in Australian English (Przewozny and Viollain 2016). Furthermore, while language contact between British dialects of English has constantly played a crucial role from the early days of Proto-Early Australian English (for example Mitchell 1940; Turner 1966; Hill 1967; Bernard 1969; Fielding and Ramson 1973; Horvath 1985; Gunn 1992; Przewozny 2016), the influence of the Aboriginal input has to be considered too, both from the point of view of lexical stress in Aboriginal loanwords in Standard Australian English (Dixon 2002; Dixon et al. 2006; Martin 2011b) and that of the lexicon of Standard Aboriginal English (Malcolm and Kaldor 1991; Eades 1993; Vinson 2008 among others).

The scope of this chapter is (i) to analyse the nature of lexical stress patterns in Aboriginal loanwords in Standard Australian English (SAusE), (ii) to present a systemic account of lexical stress in SAusE based on dictionary data, and (iii) to examine the common hypothesis that speakers of Standard Australian Aboriginal English (SAbE) have a tendency to stress words initially in contemporary spoken data.

Our theoretical stance is a Guierrian one (see Chapters 2 and 5 of this volume) inasmuch as dictionary data, morphological and orthographic information can support the systematic study of the Australian lexicon.