Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T23:17:40.016Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Getting fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English “short” front vowel shift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2007

Margaret Maclagan  and
Jennifer Hay
Margaret Maclagan
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
Jennifer Hay
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The dress vowel in New Zealand English (NZE) has been raising for some time, so that it now overlaps the acoustic space of fleece for many younger speakers. This article presents an acoustic analysis of the dress and fleece vowels of 80 speakers and shows that dress continues to raise in contemporary NZE so that for some speakers dress has risen above fleece and can be more front than fleece. fleece has diphthongized as a consequence, making it part of the New Zealand “short front vowel” shift. This suggests that the short/long distinction in New Zealand English may have broken down, at least for the front vowels. The diphthongization of fleece is most advanced in tokens that are followed by voiceless codas. These are the tokens that are most endangered by the high dress, as they are distinguished neither in acoustic space, nor by length.We wish to thank the students who made the original recordings for the Canterbury Corpus and our research assistants Deborah Sagee and Toby Macrae for help with digitizing and marking up the data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Australian Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 2004, and we are grateful to members of the audience for useful suggestions. Christian Langstrof, Elizabeth Gordon, and an anonymous referee have made useful comments on an earlier draft, and we are also indebted to Elliott Moreton, whose suggestions considerably facilitated our ability to make sense of this data set. This work was partially funded by a grant from the University of Cantebury (U6286).

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Batterham, Margaret. (1993). Attitudes to New Zealand English. New Zealand English Newsletter 7:5–24.Google Scholar
Batterham, Margaret. (1995). “There is another type here”: Some front vowel variables in New Zealand English, unpublished doctoral dissertation. Melbourne: Latrobe University.
Bauer, Laurie. (1979). The second great vowel shift? Journal of the International Phonetic Association 9:57–66.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. (1986). Notes on New Zealand English phonetics and phonology. English World-Wide 7:225–258.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. (1992). The second great vowel shift revisited. English World-Wide 13:253–268.Google Scholar
Bayard, Donn. (1995). Kiwitalk: Sociolinguistics and New Zealand society. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Bell, Allan. (1997). The phonetics of fish and chips in New Zealand: Marking national and ethnic identities. English World-Wide 18:243–270.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan, & Holmes, Janet. (1992). H-droppin': Two sociolinguistic variables in New Zealand English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 12(2):223–248.Google Scholar
Di Paolo, Mariana, & Faber, Alice. (1990). Phonation differences and the phonetic content of the tense-lax contrast in Utah English. Language Variation and Change 2:155–204.Google Scholar
Easton, Anita, & Bauer, Laurie. (2000). An acoustic study of the vowels of New Zealand English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20(2):93–117.Google Scholar
Elley, W. B., & Irving, J. C. (1985). The Elley-Irving socio-economic index: 1981 census revision. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 20:115–128.Google Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, Campbell, Lyle, Hay, Jennifer, Maclagan, Margaret, Sudbury, Andrea, & Trudgill, Peter. (2004). New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gordon, Elizabeth, & Maclagan, Margaret. (1989). Beer and bear, cheer and chair: A longitudinal study of the ear/air contrast in New Zealand English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 9:203–220.Google Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, & Maclagan, Margaret. (1995). Making a virtue of necessity: Combining teaching and research in the study of New Zealand English. New Zealand English Newsletter 9:27–31.Google Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, & Maclagan, Margaret. (2001). “Capturing a sound change”: A real time study over 15 years of the NEAR/SQUARE diphthong merger in New Zealand English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 21(2):215–238.Google Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, Maclagan, Margaret, & Hay, Jennifer. (forthcoming). The ONZE Corpus. In J.C. Beal, K.P. Corrigan, and H. Moisl (eds.), Models and methods in the handling of unconventional digital corpora: Volume 2, Diachronic corpora. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Gordon, M. J. (2002). Investigating chain shifts and mergers. In J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 244–266.
Gregersen, Frans, & Pedersen, Ilse. (1991). The Copenhagen study in urban sociolinguistics. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag.
Habick, Timothy. (1980). Sound change in Farmer city: A sociolinguistic study based on acoustic data. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jones, Daniel. (1950). The phoneme: Its nature and use. Cambridge: Hefner.
Klatt, Dennis. (1976). Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59:1209–1221.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, William. (1990). The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 52:205–251.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1994). Principles of linguistic change: Vol. 1, Internal factors. Oxford, Blackwell.
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of linguistic change: Vol. 2, Social factors. Oxford, Blackwell.
Labov, William, & Baranowski, Maciej. (forthcoming). 50 msec. Language Variation and Change 18.
Langstrof, Christian. (2003). The short front vowels in New Zealand English in the intermediate period. New Zealand English Journal 17:4–16.Google Scholar
Langstrof, Christian. (2004a). Acoustic evidence of rapid vowel shifting in the intermediate period of New Zealand English. Paper presented at the Language and Society Conference, Palmerston North, New Zealand, September, 2004.
Langstrof, Christian. (2004b). How to save Labov from New Zealand English: How short are short front vowels? Presentation given at the University of Canterbury, September, 2004.
Langstrof, Christian. (2006a). Acoustic evidence for a push-chain shift in the intermediate period of New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 18:141–164.Google Scholar
Langstrof, Christian. (2006b). Vowel Change in New Zealand English—Patterns and Implications. Doctoral dissertation, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Lass, Roger. (1976). English Phonology and Phonological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luce, P., & Charles-Luce, J. (1985). Contextual effects on vowel duration, closure duration, and the consonant/vowel ratio in speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 78:1949–1957.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret. (1982). An acoustic study of New Zealand vowels. The New Zealand Speech-Therapists' Journal 37:20–26.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret. (1998). Diphthongization of /e/ in NZE: A change that went nowhere? New Zealand English Journal 12:43–54.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret. (2000a). How long have women been leading language change. In J. Holmes (ed.), Gendered speech in social context: Perspectives from gown and town. Wellington: Victoria University Press. 87–98.
Maclagan, Margaret. (2000b). What does acoustic analysis say about the near/square merger in NZE? Seventh New Zealand Language and Society conference. Auckland.
Maclagan, Margaret, & Gordon, Elizabeth. (1996). Out of the air and into the ear: Another view of the New Zealand diphthong merger. Language Variation and Change 8:125–147.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret, & Gordon, Elizabeth. (1999). Data for New Zealand social dialectology: The Canterbury Corpus. New Zealand English Journal 13:50–58.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret, Gordon, Elizabeth, & Lewis, Gillian. (1999). Women and sound change: Conservative and innovative behavior by the same speakers. Language Variation and Change 11:19–41.Google Scholar
McKenzie, Jayne. (2005). But he's not supposed to see me in my weeding dress! The relationship between dress and fleece in modern New Zealand English. New Zealand English Journal 19:13–25.Google Scholar
Milroy, L. (1987). Observing and analysing natural language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Peterson, Gordon, & Lehiste, Ilse. (1960). Duration of syllable nuclei in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 32:693–703.Google Scholar
Raphael, Lawrence J. (1971). Preceding vowel duration as a cue to the perception of the voicing characteristics of word-final consonants in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51:1296–1303.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trudgill, Peter, Gordon, Elizabeth, & Lewis, Gillian. (1998). New dialect formation and Southern Hemisphere English: The New Zealand short front vowels, Journal of Sociolinguistics 2:35–51.Google Scholar
Turner, G. W. (1966). The English Language in Australia and New Zealand. London: Longmans.
Watson, Catherine, Harrington, Jonathan, & Evans, Zoe. (1998). An acoustic comparison between New Zealand and Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics 18:185–207.Google Scholar
Watson, Catherine, Maclagan, Margaret, & Harrington, Jonathan. (2000). Acoustic evidence for vowel change in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 12:51–68.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. (1962). A study of the formants of the pure vowels of British English. Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.A., University of London.
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.