Keywords

real-time vowel change, cord-card and hoarse-horse mergers, Western US English phonology

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the vowel formants of a speaker over four decades to show phonemic change through time. Other real-time studies (Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson 2000; Harrington & Reubold 2015) have found that the vowel spaces of UK English speakers shift over the lifetime, likely as a consequence of interaction with speakers of other dialects or social classes. We focus on an understudied variety of English, spoken in the western United States, to investigate a pair of phonological mergers, the cord-card merger and the hoarse-horse merger.

The cord-card merger is a result of a historical three-way contrast of /or/, /ɔr/, and /ar/ collapsing down to just two. In most varieties of North American English, /ɔr/ shifted upward to merge with /or/, forming the hoarse-horse merger. But in others, /ɔr/ moved downward and merged with /ar/ to form the cord-card merger (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). In northern Utah, both mergers occurred, in succession: first the cord-card merger and then the hoarse-horse merger. We investigate them in a real-time study, focusing on a single speaker for whom many hours of good-quality recordings are available. Our speaker is the late Tom Perry, a notable leader in the Mormon church, who was born in Logan, Utah in 1922 (cf. Bowie 2008).

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley & Margaret E. L. Renwick. “Phonetic Shift /ɔr/ Phonemic Change? American English mergers over 40 years”. Poster presentation at the 15th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon15). Ithaca, NY. July 13–16, 2016.