I Bag Your Pardon: The Albertan ae/ɛ Vowel Shift as a Window into Community Grammars
Abstract
This thesis explores a vowel shift by speakers in Alberta in which [æ] is shifting before [g]. A production experiment was designed to examine the direction, extent, and sources of this change. I hypothesized that differing prompt modalities might elicit productions that could be used to support the existence of a triadic grammar, where productions are influenced by the community (auditory), the self (pictorial), and the standard (orthographic) grammars. I hypothesize a refinement of Ohala’s Active Listener hypothesis to include “super” and “inactive” listeners as other possible sources of sound change. The results show this is an in-progress merger by approximation and that changing the prompt modality altered listener productions. Auditory prompts had the greatest influence on production: Those most likely to merge the vowels [æ] and [ɛ] were more likely to mimic auditory cues. This indicates that super perceivers spread sound change to a greater degree.
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, Language--Modern, Anthropology--Cultural
Citation
Jones, J. (2015). I Bag Your Pardon: The Albertan ae/ɛ Vowel Shift as a Window into Community Grammars (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26408