A Corpus-Based, Pilot Study of Lexical Stress Variation in American English

• Authors: Alice Henderson
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Phonological free variation describes the phenomenon of there being more than one pronunciation for a word without any change in meaning (e.g. because, schedule, vehicle). The term also applies to words that exhibit different stress patterns (e.g. academic, resources, comparable) with no change in meaning or grammatical category. A corpus-based analysis of free variation is a useful tool for testing the validity of surveys of speakers' pronunciation preferences for certain variants. The current paper presents the results of a corpus-based pilot study of American English, in an attempt to replicate Mompéan's 2009 study of British English.

Keywords

EN

phonological free variation; corpus; American English

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 8
• Pages: 1-15

Dates

published

2010-09-30

online

2010-10-19

Contributors

author

Alice Henderson

• Université de Savoie

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10015-010-0002-9