Chain shift

There has been a substantial amount of research on language maintenance and shift (LMLS) and language variation and change (LVC) in New Zealand in the last four decades and most of this research has concentrated on exploring LMLS separately from LVC. Most researchers deal with these two topics as two different fields. For example, if they study LMLS (e.g., proficiency, domains and attitudes), they don't focus on the speaker's production of a language (e.g., vowels and consonants) within the same thesis. This thesis combined both LMLS and LVC in one thesis by employing questionnaires which were gathered from 99 Arab Jordanians and Palestinians to answer three research questions related to LMLS. The first research question related to reported language proficiency and the influence of generation (1 st , 1.5 and 2 nd) and length of residence (1-10 years, 11-20 years and 21-30 years) on that. The second research question looked at language use in different domains (e.g., home, friendship and religion) and the influence of generation and length of residence on that. The third research question examined the participants' attitudes towards both Arabic and English languages in general and New Zealand English (NZE) in particular and cultures and the influence of generation and length of residence on that. 20 of the survey participants who expressed willingness to be interviewed, subsequently participated in recorded interviews, which were used to investigate the realisation of particular consonants (ING and intervocalic /t/ and NZE short front vowels (KIT, DRESS and TRAP) in the speech of Jordanians and Palestinians in Christchurch New Zealand. The interviews aimed to answer four research questions. Two research questions related to the consonants (whether social factors influence the production of these two consonants and whether attitudes collected by questionnaire predict any of the linguistic behavior), and two questions related to the vowels (whether social factors and lexical frequency influence the production of these three vowels, and whether attitudes collected by questionnaires predict any of the linguistic behavior for these vowels). By combining work in language maintenance and shift with work in language variation and change, this thesis aimed to reveal patterns which could be masked when each question was investigated separately. This is because LMLS and LVC are both driven in part by attitudes. I linked speakers' attitudes in the questionnaires to their linguistic behavior and examined the influence attitudes have on the production of the variables ING, intervocalic /t/, KIT, DRESS and TRAP. The interviews also provide some explanations for the attitudinal significant correlations iv GLOTTAL STOP realisations, those who have been living in the country from 11-20 and 21-30 years were found to produce the most FLAP, while 1 st generation participants and those who have been living in NZ from 1-10 years produced significantly more CANONICAL /t/. Attitudes were not found to have any significant bearing on the production of the intervocalic /t/ variants. The other three linguistic variables investigated in the thesis were the three NZE short front vowels KIT, DRESS and TRAP, where I tried to determine if the speakers had adopted the shift happening in these three NZE vowels and investigated the effect of social variables such as generation, gender, word frequency and attitude on the speaker's production of these vowels. A mixed effects model was used to analyse the influence of these factors on the vowels. The results showed that the social factors: generation, attitudes, word frequency and gender were significant factors affecting Jordanian speakers' production of the three NZE short front vowels. Significant differences were found for DRESS F1, TRAP F1, TRAP F2, KIT F1 and KIT F2. The results also provide evidence for vowel shift in L2 speakers for the three NZE short vowels (KIT, DRESS and TRAP), particularly among 1st and 1.5 generations more than the 2 nd generations. Attitudes were significant with DRESS F1, TRAP F2 and KIT F2 and discussed deeply in the thesis. Finally, the qualitative attitudinal results in the interviews offered some explanations for the consonant and the vowel results and matched them to the linguistic behavior (production of the vowels and consonants). Overall, the results provided evidence that attitudes can link both LMLS and LVC and that the quantitative attitudinal results from the questionnaire likely match with the qualitative attitudinal results from the interviews and all are likely to predict linguistic behavior. The findings also suggest that the role attitudes play in LMLS and LVC can be very complex. v Acknowledgments First of all, my gratitude to Allah, who helped me finish this research and for his countless favours and bounties endowing me with health, patience, and strength to finish this thesis. I am aware of the blessings that have been given to me throughout my life and during my PhD. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisors, Dr. Kevin Watson and Dr. Jeanette King. Special thanks and appreciation go to my friendly supervisor and advisor Kevin Watson. Working with Kevin who has extensive knowledge, positive attitudes and constructive feedback had a significant impact on the completion of this research. Kevin, wanted me to complete my PhD with distinguished, new contributions, and be an independent researcher. He delivered extraordinary guidance and helped me advance my way of thinking, writing and analysing, all while showing great humility and compassion and outstanding ethics, particularly when I had new born baby, feel sick, and after the 15th of March tragedy "the darkest NZ Friday". Innumerable thanks go to him for sparking my interest in Variationist Sociolinguistics in the first days of my study at the University of Canterbury. Kevin inspired me to move from focusing only on language maintenance and language shift to focus also on Variationist Sociolinguistics. As well as this, he guided me to important literature, which would later create the basis of the current thesis. Dr. Watson, thank you always and thank you for ever. Jeanette on the other hand, played a role as a secondary supervisor, and always provided valuable feedback when I talked with her especially about language maintenance and language shift. Words of thanks are not enough for both of you. My gratitude and thanks are also due to Dr. Heidi Quinn for reading my thesis. Before I completed my thesis, she offered me to read it. She was very humble; she thanked me for giving her the opportunity to read my valuable thesis and letting her learn more about it. Many thanks for her and for her valuable feedback. I also thank my internal examiner Emeritus Professor Janet Holmes and my external examiner Dr. Abdulkafi Albirini for their insightful feedback. I am grateful to my wonderful parents to whom I stay greatly and ever indebted. I am very thankful to them for their constant encouragement; emotionally and financially and for their endless love. My father was always the one who encouraged me to pursue my PhD. Thank you Dad! Your words of wisdom will keep directing me forever. And for my mum, I don't have the right words to express my feelings and gratitude for her. Her constant prayers for me are the secret behind my success. I am very happy that I have a mother like her: loving, strong, empathetic, respectful and supportive. vi Thanks for being the best, my dear wife Maha, I'm so lucky to have you. Thank you for your love, support, and care. Every little effort you did for me is simply amazing. Thank you because you proved to me that you are a strong and loved wife. Thank you for being that wife who pushed me to success. Thank you for being a good mother for our three children. Thank you for being a good interviewer. I love you! Maha helped me with data collection and did all the interviews with the females, and during this long PhD journey, she was beside me all the time. A special thank you also goes to my children who were very patient, understanding and helpful to me and their mum. Ahmad, Lara and Munther created an exceptional atmosphere for me during my PhD journey. I love you all my children! I would also like to thank my brothers, Ali, Hamada, Mahmoud, Abdullah, Amer and Ibraheem and my sister, Fotom, who gave me a lot of support and care: financially and emotionally. My thanks are also extended to my mother-in-law, sisters-in law, brothers-in-law and friends for their endless encouragement. I would like also to thank my Jordanian and Palestinian participants in Christchurch for agreeing to take part in this research. I would like also to express my appreciation

This paper presents evidence for a chain shift in the checked vowel sub-system of modern RP over one hundred years, based on LMER analysis of over 10000 vowels from 108 speakers with birthdates from 1883 to 1990. The data confirms previously identified gender-differentiated change in F1 and F2 of TRAP, as well as date-of-birth driven incremental change in F1 of KIT, F1 of STRUT, F2 of FOOT, and, for DRESS, an (F2-(2xF1)) diagonal shift by date of birth that follows TRAP’s path. We also present evidence for an active female-driven change in the LOT vowel, an (F2-(2xF1)) diagonal shift towards the close central area of the vowel space. The paper demonstrates differing statistical patterns in these shifts over time, and suggests a possible origin in changes to TRAP early in the 20 century. All data and additional figures for this study are available via OSF.io. on application to the author.

Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and technology experts from across Australia have joined forces to organise the recording of audio-visual (AV) speech data from representative speakers of Australian English in all capital cities and some regional centres. The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC) will provide a standard recording setup and a collaboratively-designed elicitation protocol to create a corpus of AV speech data incorporating annotations and ...

Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and technology experts from across Australia have joined forces to organise the recording of audio-visual (AV) speech data from representative speakers of Australian English in all capital cities and some regional centres. The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC) will provide a standard recording setup and a collaboratively-designed elicitation protocol to create a corpus of AV speech data incorporating annotations and ...

Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and technology experts from across Australia have joined forces to organise the recording of audio-visual (AV) speech data from representative speakers of Australian English in all capital cities and some regional centres. The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC) will provide a standard recording setup and a collaboratively-designed elicitation protocol to create a corpus of AV speech data incorporating annotations and ...

In this paper I will be comparing Old Japanese non-back close vowels /i/ (i1 or kō-rui) and /ɨ/ (i2 or otsu-rui) in a post-nasal position with their North and South Ryukyuan cognates in order to propose Proto-Japonic reconstructions of Old Japanese [+ nasal] [+ high,-back] sequences. The paper establishes and analyzes six correspondence sets, each representing a different Proto-Japonic sequence: *mi, *muj, *me, *ni, *noj, *nuj, and briefly discusses a couple of yet different relevant Proto-Japonic reconstructions. The study is concluded with a proposal of relative chronology of the discussed changes from Proto-Japonic to Proto-Ryukyuan. A reconstruction of Proto-Ryukyuan *ɨ, a sixth segment added to Thorpe's 1983 classical five-vowel set, is argued for as a necessary development of post-nasal *oj and *uj. This is interpreted within the context of chain-shifting processes dating to Proto-Japonic as an important catalyst of mid-vowel raising in Proto-Ryukyuan.

Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) are two originally “transported” Englishes in the Southern hemisphere. Although there is currently no doubt among the scientific community that they constitute two distinct dialects of English with their own lexical, morphosyntactic, phonological and phonetic features, their description and representation have long been frozen into a unique “Australasian” dialect, in spite of an enormous amount of endocentric linguistic descriptions emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. AusE and NZE being amongst the latest varieties to have emerged in the English-speaking world, they have only recently been extensively studied and considered as valid research objects by the scientific community. In this article we first consider some historical arguments that eventually led to a misleading descriptive hotchpotch of AusE and NZE. This situation scarcely left any room for the possibility of specific phonological and/or phonetic variation within each variety, let alone the description of AusE and NZE as two separate linguistic entities in Australasia. After reconsidering a few parallel historical facts, common critical denunciations and lay theories on the origins of the two Austral varieties, the article focuses on the representation of AusE and NZE in the literature on the phonology of English accents around the world. With a view to contribute to the definition of AusE and NZE as linguistic objects in motion and to promote a dynamic portrait of each variety, we then provide contemporary oral data from the PAC programme as well as comparative analyses in favour of two major arguments for distinctiveness between AusE and NZE: rhoticity in NZE as well as the short front vowel shift in both AusE and NZE.

Starting in the Middle Ages, Norwegian and Swedish, in contrast to Danish, underwent a sweeping chain shift of long back vowels [a:] > [ɔ:] > [o:] > [u:] > [ʉ:] (> Swedish [ʉ̟:]). Several facets of this shift are typologically spectacular with numerous implications for general phonetics, phonology, and historical linguistics. The aim of the present paper is to discuss a series of controversial issues relating to the change: (1) Is the shift a case of drag or push? (2) Why does the outcome in Peninsular Scandinavian differ from that in Danish, which shows only the first phase of the process, viz. [a:] > [ɔ:]? (3) Is the main trigger of the shift structural or extra-linguistic? (4) Why do we get a chain shift rather than vowel merger or diphthongization? (5) How did Peninsular Scandinavian acquire two contrasting kinds of lip-articulation, something which in Swedish resulted in the creation of the ‘exotic’ vowel types outrounded [y:] and inrounded [ʉ̟:]?
The paper outlines the arguments for regarding the shift as a push chain as opposed, e.g., to Hock (1986, 1991), who views it as a drag chain (differently Labov 1994). The evidence for a push interpretation includes: (a) the intricate, quite specific ordering relationships between the component changes (Kock 1906–1929, Wessén 1968, Eliasson 1983), (b) varying geographical spread of the individual changes (Larsen 1926), (c) philological data pointing to an early date of the change [a:] > [ɔ:], and (d) the rise of the typologically unparalleled contrast between outrounding and inrounding (Eliasson 1983, 2000, 2005; Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). The reasons why Norwegian and Swedish, but not Danish, underwent the shift have long remained mysterious. Haugen (1970) categorically rejects a language-internal explanation, suggesting instead that “the impulses are clearly extra-linguistic”, without indicating, though, what these impulses are. Eliasson (2010) draws attention to a crucial, previously neglected, structure-internal difference between Danish, on the one hand, and the two other languages, most dialects of which possess a tenth vowel phoneme /ɞ/ of high frequency, yet severely stigmatized in the standard varieties. Jointly with the early, essentially pan-Nordic, change [a:] > [ɔ:], the emergence of the long allophone [ɞ:] triggered the chain reaction, which means that the prime cause was structural rather than extra-linguistic. The further question as to why some long back vowel pair did not simply merge or why the original high back vowel [u:] did not diphthongize is more difficult to answer. Utilizing the cleverly organized database of Lyttkens & Wulff (1916) displaying the lexical domains of each Swedish vowel phoneme and its main allophones, the paper submits that the high lexical frequencies of all relevant vowels may have constituted a substantial obstacle to merger. Moreover, the option of diphthongizing the old [u:] was in Swedish counteracted by an absolute phonotactic requirement prescribing monophthongs in native root morphemes. The odd lip-rounding contrast, finally, arose as a last expedient in severely constrained phonological surroundings. Consequently, structural factors were at work in this vowel shift to a far greater extent than envisaged by Haugen (1970). Furthermore, given its typologically unique effects, unexpected under a drag chain view, and given the specific ordering relations between the constituent individual changes, the Great Peninsular Scandinavian Vowel Shift provides an extraordinarily strong case for the existence of push chains in historical phonology.

We re-analyse several patterns of chain shifts, so far attested in numerous literature on this topic, as evidence in favour of Minimize Satisfaction (1) in phonology.

(1) MinSat (‘Minimize Satisfaction’): Müller (2016)
An operation does not improve the satisfaction of more than one constraint.

Originally defined for analyses in Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2010), MinSat has been proposed to account for counter-bleeding phenomena such as the interaction of /k/-palatalization and /i/-deletion in Bedouin Arabic (McCarthy 2007), also extended exponence and the Merge over Move principle (Müller 2016). We show that, introduced to a parallel system such as OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993), MinSat can straightforwardly derive counter-feeding processes, represented here with case studies on vowel chain shifts (/A/ --> [B], and /B/ --> [C], but not /A/ --> [C]).

The Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL) is the linguistics society of the five Nordic countries Denmark (with the Faeroes and Greenland), Finland (with Åland), Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Founded in Austin, Texas in 1976, NAL went into operation in January 1977. It is a major organizational platform for Nordic linguists and language scholars as well as linguists outside the Nordic countries working on the languages of this particular geographical region. Two series of international conferences are organized under its auspices, the International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL) and the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (SCL). Although oriented towards modern linguistics, the former conference series has traditionally tended to place a greater emphasis on the historical and descriptive study of the Scandinavian (i.e., North-Germanic) languages, whereas the latter one has been more concerned with general linguistic and theoretical issues and a wider range of languages. Beside an impressive string of conference proceedings, the major scholarly outlet of the Association is the Nordic Journal of Linguistics (NJL), since the beginning of 2003 brought out by the Cambridge University Press. The journal is open to contributions from all branches of linguistics, but gives priority to articles of a general theoretical and methodological nature and studies of the languages of the Nordic region. For a number of years (1977-2004), the Association also issued a news bulletin, the Nordic Linguistic Bulletin (NLB), until the spread of electronic communication made this form of news dissemination largely superfluous. This article traces the major issues and the main stages in the evolvement of the Association: the first tentative airings of the idea in the early 1970s, the preparatory work in the years 1972-1976, the launching of the Association in 1977, and its subsequent development through 2006. Appendices provide supplementary details as well as a bibliographical listing of conference proceedings and thematic journal issues.

Do extra-linguistic or linguistic factors determine the direction and outcome of structural linguistic change? This is a long-standing issue in historical linguistic theory with implications for several other sub-branches of linguistics. One of the most startling chain shifts known in linguistics is the Great Peninsular Scandinavian Vowel Shift affecting long back vowels, which in Swedish produces a typologically totally unique phonological opposition between vocalic outrounding and inrounding. The first phase of the shift is attested in all the central Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, but the Danish development comes to a halt already at this stage, while the other two languages continue the shift. Haugen (1970) pointedly asks “why do like causes not produce like results?”, concluding that the reasons are “clearly extra-linguistic” and that no structural answer to the question can possibly be given. Taking up this challenge the present paper re-examines the data and identifies a major structural entity — a vigorous ‘tenth’ vowel spread in the dialects over large areas of Peninsular Scandinavia, yet stigmatized in the standard languages, and overlooked by analysts — that neatly accounts for the difference of linguistic development.