Variation and change in the trap and strut vowels of RP

A Real Time Comparison of Five Acoustic Data Sets

Bibliographic Data

ID7865459
AuthorsAnne H Fabricius, Alexis Fabricius (0000-0002-0472-0203, Roskilde University, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume37
Issue3
Pages293-320
Publication date2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the International Phonetic Association (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0025-1003 • E-ISSN: 1475-3502
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s002510030700312x
OpenAlexW2116896547
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited31

The present study examines evidence for change in real time within the short vowel subsystem of the RP accent of English over the course of the twentieth century. It compares plots of average formant positions for the short vowels, stemming from several data corpora. It furthermore describes a change over time in the juxtaposition of the trap and strut vowels as captured in the calculated angle and distance between the two, using trap as a fixed point. This representation of a relationship in a single measurement by means of angle calculation is a methodological innovation for the sociophonetic enterprise. A value specifying the geometric relationship between two vowel positions is precise and replicable, as well as abstract enough to be comparable across data sets. Differences between ‘phonetic’ and ‘sociolinguistic’ stances on the interpretation of acoustic vowel data in formant plots and the issue of suitable vowel normalisation procedures for sociophonetics will also be discussed

Acoustics · Change detection · Formant · Geometry · Interpretation (philosophy · Meteorology · Mid vowel · Physics · Point (geometry · Representation (politics · Speech recognition · Stress (linguistics · Trap (plumbing · Vowel · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Phonetics and Phonology Research

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