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The phonology of ‘/ɔː/’ and ‘/ɑː/’ in RP English: Henry Sweet and after1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Heinz J. Giegerich
Heinz J. Giegerich
Affiliation:
Department of English LanguageUniversity of EdinburghDavid Hume TowerGeorge SquareEdinburgh EH8 [email protected]
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Extract

This paper attempts to account for the synchronic representations and surface distributions of the long low vowels (particularly of [ɔː] and [ɔə]) in present-day RP and Cockney, as well as to map in detail the twentieth-century developments that have given rise to them. It is argued that the long low vowels must still be underlyingly centring diphthongs in modern RP (as they were at Henry Sweet's time), now synchronically monophthongized by a spread-and-delink rule, while the corresponding underliers in Cockney must since have been restructured into monophthongs. The theoretical framework for this analysis is a version of Lexical Phonology that assumes an English lexicon comprising two levels, where the first level is characterized by cyclic rule application and the presence of the Strict Cycle and Structure Preservation Conditions (Giegerich, 1988; Kiparsky, 1982), and the second level by noncyclic rule application as well as the presence of neither condition (Borowsky, 1989).

Type
Articles
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1997 , pp. 25 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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