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Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language

Domain:

natural language processing

Record type:

paper
Creator:
KayChaTyl
Publisher:
Cam
Host:
Abstract Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tɹ/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stɹ/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /ʃ/). Meanwhile, analyses across multiple corpora have shown that /s/ and /ʃ/ also show within-community variability, beyond /stɹ/ contexts (Stuart-Smith et al., 2019, 2020). Intersecting these approaches, this paper explores sibilant variation and change across /stɹ/, /s/, and /ʃ/ using a corpus of Washington D.C. African American Language (AAL). Results indicate that /stɹ/-retraction is a stable variant in this variety of AAL and /s/ and /ʃ/ show evidence of socially stratified variation and change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the need to examine the sibilant space more holistically when examining changes in /stɹ/.

Visit

doi.org

Licenses

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

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