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Chicago White English

In this chapter we examine the phonetics and phonology of three speakers of the Chicago white vernacular.7.1 As in other chapters, a number of issues are examined with respect to this dialect. First, the surface phonological contrasts are laid out; then impressionistic transcriptions of fully stressed tokens are presented. The Northern Cities Chain Shift is described, in which most of the non-rhotic vowels in the system are involved in a wholesale rotation of the vowel space. The overall shape of F1-F2 space is discussed. It is shown that the acoustic realizations of single vowel phonemes can be distributed over the entire vowel space. Next, the effects of stress reduction are examined and discussed with reference to theories of vowel reduction. Finally, the coarticulatory effects of certain following consonants are investigated.



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Thomas Veatch 2005-01-25