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Consonantal Sound Change in American English

Consonantal Sound Change in American English

Consonantal Sound Change in American English

An Analysis of Clustered Sibilants
Wiebke H. Ahlers, Universität Dortmund
August 2023
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
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9781009080637
$125.00
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    Research on sound change often focuses on vowels, yet consonantal sound change also offers fascinating insights into language development and variation. This pioneering book provides a detailed investigation of consonantal sound change in English, by analyzing a large corpus of specifically designed field recordings from Austin, Texas. It offers one of the most in-depth analyses of /str/-retraction to date, drawing comparisons with studies of change in the distinguishing phonetic features of other varieties of English, and with studies of /str/-retraction in other Germanic languages. It further deepens our understanding of sound change by including qualitative data to position the sound change in the social reality of Austin, showing that specific sound changes are universally driven by age, gender and ethnicity. The results provide a testing ground for models of sociolinguistic and sound change, and highlight the importance of the social fabric of language in modeling language change.

    • Presents cutting-edge research on consonantal sound change
    • Combines various theoretical approaches to sound change
    • Makes the data analysis process accessible to readers and guides them from descriptive statistics to inferential statistics

    Product details

    August 2023
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9781009080637
    0 pages
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Phonetic and phonological background for sibilant analysis
    • 3. Sound change
    • 4. Methodology and data
    • 5. Results
    • 6. Discussion
    • 7. Conclusion
    • Glossary
    • References
    • Index.
      Author
    • Wiebke H. Ahlers , Universität Dortmund

      Wiebke Ahlers is a postdoctoral researcher of English Linguistics at TU Dortmund University. She is a Fulbright scholar.