Systematic co-variation of monophthongs across speakers of New Zealand English

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

“…4. In fact, this considerable intraspeaker variation is not only limited to the SFVS-in recent work by the second author, we find that other vowel changes co-vary with this chain shift (Brand et al, 2019; see also the longer under-review manuscript at https://osf.io/q4j29/). 5.…”

“…Two anonymous reviewers suggest that the articulatory account would be strengthened by a finding that SFVS vowels show cross-vowel priming with "a vowel that is diachronically stable and not (as far as we know) socio-stylistically linked to the chain shift"-in other words a control vowel. We wanted to perform this analysis, but it turns out that there are basically no suitable control vowels in this speech community; Brand et al (2019) show that in NZE, other vowels co-vary with the SFVS and there are basically no diachronically stable vowels. This question thus remains open for future work in speech communities in which the diachronic vowel variation is better suited to such an analysis.…”

“…This complex set of interrelated changes is also variously constrained by several social and linguistic factors, such as a speaker's gender, age, and social class, and the phonological environment following the vowel and lexical frequency (Hay et al, 2015). Finally, it is important to point out that the SFVS is still a change in progress (Brand et al, 2019;Hay, et al, 2015), and potentially as a result, a fairly wide range of variability is still tolerated in NZE today. While overall mean F1 and F2 values for the SFVS vowels today are significantly different than they were 100 years ago, a synchronic NZE corpus will evidence considerable intraspeaker variation in trap, dress, and kit.…”

Phonological mergers have systemic phonetic consequences:palm, trees, and the Low Back Merger Shift

“…While there is undoubtedly parallel movement of [−Peripheral] vowels in LBMS varieties, like Victoria, a structural motivation for that movement remains an hypothesis rather than a fait accompli . Brand, Hay, Clark, Watson, and Sóskuthy (2021:20–22), exploring another parallel movement in New Zealand English, found “absolutely no evidence…for covariation that could be linked to the phonetic implementation of a single feature” and conclude that “just because there is a plausible structural link between vowels, it does not follow that the observed linkage is indeed solely structural.” Further, the authors’ analysis reveals that speakers who are leaders in one vowel change are not consistently leaders in all vowel changes, as might be expected if vowels are truly moving in parallel due to structural pressure. In contrast to Brand et al (2021), in this paper, we aim to view the LBMS through a wide lens, recognizing that we are looking at phonological patterns as they express themselves within the aggregate population (see also Labov, 2001:34).…”

“…Further, the authors' analysis reveals that speakers who are leaders in one vowel change are not consistently leaders in all vowel changes, as might be expected if vowels are truly moving in parallel due to structural pressure. In contrast to Brand et al (2021), in this paper, we aim to view the LBMS through a wide lens, recognizing that we are looking at phonological patterns as they express themselves within the aggregate population (see also Labov, 2001:34). For individuals, the specific relationship between the phonological inventory and Cartesian means in an F1/F2 vowel space is undoubtedly highly idiosyncratic.…”