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UCLA LING 120A - Dialect Imitation

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Linguistics 120A Hayes/FleischhackerPhonology I Winter 2001Another Possible Paper Topic: Dialect ImitationFind a speaker who can imitate another dialect of her language. Your goal is to analyze your speaker’sThere are three areas to look at.1) Allophone-to-allophone mapping. This can be treated with rules. For instance, an American imitatingStandard British speech might apply a rule of the type:Diphthong FrontingoƒU → EƒUYou can test for this with words like tone, ghost, etc.2) Wipeout of Distinctions. Due to historical changes, one dialect often has one phoneme where anotherdialect has two. Thus, bother and father don’t rhyme in British English; they are [Èb•ð«] and [ÈfAð«]; thedistinction was lost historically in most American dialects. Wipeout of distinctions can be treated with rules, too, as follows:/•/ Unrounding/•/ → [-round]Here is a guess: it is harder for imitators to apply “dialect conversion” rules when the rules wipe out adistinction.3) Trying to Recover the Irrecoverable . Now consider a case where the consultant speaks a dialect in whicha distinction has been historically wiped out, and it trying to imitate a dialect that has retained the distinction. Here,you can’t write a rule—how, for instance, could an American know that her [bAðÔ] is supposed to be [Èb•ð«] butthat her [ÈfAðÔ] is supposed to be [ÈfAð«]? This information is irrecoverable from the data of American English.Presumably, a successful accent imitator must actually memorize the target words, or else figure out a strategyinvolving spelling.Note that often there are “recoverability traps” going in both directions. Thus British speakers must rely onmemorization or spelling to render American beer vs. idea correctly (these words rhyme in most British dialects).How to proceed: First, learn all you can about the phonology of the two dialects. Then, I suggest you writeabout a page of sample material for your consultant to read. Cram it full of test words involving all threepossibilities listed above (“My father was always bothered by the tone of …”). Have your speaker read it once (ormultiple times, if time available). Transcribe the target words, analyze how your speaker does accent imitation(writing rules where possible), and report what you found.Other well-known dialect differences:• /s-T/ vs. /s/ and /´-j/ vs. /j/ in Continental vs. New World Spanish• /a-A/ vs. /a/ in Quebec vs. continental French;• /E-æ/ vs. /E/, /Vù-V/ vs. /V/ in Korean dialects• /eE•o/ vs. /eo/ in Italian


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UCLA LING 120A - Dialect Imitation

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