Intonational variation and change in York English

TY - GEN

T1 - Intonational variation and change in York English

AU - Hellmuth, Sam

AU - Farrelly, Ciara

N1 - Cite as: Hellmuth, S., Farrelly, C. (2021) Intonational variation and change in York English. Proc. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 190-194, doi: 10.21437/TAI.2021-39

PY - 2022/7/4

Y1 - 2022/7/4

N2 - The variety of English spoken in the city of York, UK, is of sociolinguistic interest due to ‘recycling’ of traditional dialectal forms such as Definite Article Reduction (‘to t’pub’) and Past-Reference come (‘I come home late last night’) by younger (typically male) speakers; in apparent time studies based on the York English Corpus (YEC), middle-aged speakers (aged 50-70) used these forms less than older speakers (>70), so the patterns had previously appeared to be falling out of use. In this paper we first argue for the existence of a distinctive ‘Yorkshire rise-fall’ nuclear contour, which is sufficiently different in form and distribution from rise-fall contours reported for other varieties of British English that it can be characterized as a traditional (prosodic) feature of Yorkshire dialects. We then explore whether the observed patterns of variation in lexical-grammatical variables are mirrored in variation and change in use of this distinctive Yorkshire rise-fall nuclear contour, in apparent time, via qualitative analysis of data from the YEC.

AB - The variety of English spoken in the city of York, UK, is of sociolinguistic interest due to ‘recycling’ of traditional dialectal forms such as Definite Article Reduction (‘to t’pub’) and Past-Reference come (‘I come home late last night’) by younger (typically male) speakers; in apparent time studies based on the York English Corpus (YEC), middle-aged speakers (aged 50-70) used these forms less than older speakers (>70), so the patterns had previously appeared to be falling out of use. In this paper we first argue for the existence of a distinctive ‘Yorkshire rise-fall’ nuclear contour, which is sufficiently different in form and distribution from rise-fall contours reported for other varieties of British English that it can be characterized as a traditional (prosodic) feature of Yorkshire dialects. We then explore whether the observed patterns of variation in lexical-grammatical variables are mirrored in variation and change in use of this distinctive Yorkshire rise-fall nuclear contour, in apparent time, via qualitative analysis of data from the YEC.

KW - intonation

KW - Yorkshire dialect

KW - language change

U2 - 10.21437/TAI.2021-39

DO - 10.21437/TAI.2021-39

M3 - Conference contribution

SP - 190

EP - 194

BT - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI2021)

PB - ISCA-INST SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC

T2 - 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI) 2021

Y2 - 6 December 2021 through 9 December 2021

ER -