Setting New Standards

Abstract

Social dialect data demonstrates that women tend to lead linguistic change in New Zealand English over a range of linguistic variables. This paper describes some current sound changes in New Zealand English, discusses their potential sources, and suggests possible mechanisms by which they percolate through the system. Women's role in language change is a controversial area. The final section examines a range of explanations which have been proposed to account for the patterns identified by researchers and assesses their relevance to the New Zealand data.

Patterns of late rising in New Zealand English: Intonational variation or intonational change?

“…There are two reasons why we might be suspicious of such an interpretation. One is that it implies that men are leading the change, whereas the majority of changes that have been observed for NZE have been instigated by women (Holmes, 1997), including the increased incidence in HRTs (Ainsworth, 1994;Britain, 1992;Warren & Britain, 2000). The other is that it suggests that the late-aligned rise is a standard rise shape, and the earlier alignment an innovation, whereas previous observations have been that Antipodean HRT rises climb from the accented syllable through to the end of the phrase (Guy & Vonwiller, 1989;Ladd, 1996).…”

Getting in a Flap or Turning off the Tap in Dunedin?

“…A version of Varbrul which can handle multivariate variables, M-Varb, is available, but does not "provide satisfacto rily interpretable weightings for multiple variants", and one must rely on the simple percentages it produces (Bell 1997: 248;p.c); these percentages were easily available to me through SPSS X . Secondly, as outlined above, I considered only a limited number of linguistic environments; Holmes (1994) provides a full account of the effects of nine linguistic constraints on flapping/voicing, and interested readers should consult her study. Most importantly, Varbrul would not allow the direct comparison of (-t-) to the 15 other phonological variables already analysed for these same 141 informants and published earlier.…”

“…2nd: Next, simple histograms and chi-squares were produced to compare my results with those in Holmes (1994) and(1995a). In doing these analyses, I used a dichotomous <30 / 30+ division for age (paralleling Holmes' 18-30 vs. 40-55 groups, but covering wider age ranges), and WC vs. MC for class; these were cross-tabulated with my four flap categories.…”

“…This feature is of course endemic to and almost categorical in North American English (AmE), and is also spreading in Australian English (AusE; Horvath 1985). As a result of recent research (Holmes 1994;1995a) based on the extensive Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WCSNZE), we are now in a position to say quite a bit about the distribution of this variable in NZE. Holmes selected her samples for analysis from the conversational and interview data within the corpus because such material from the corpus had not been studied previously.…”

The effect of speaker gender and talker proficiency on the realization of Taiwan Min /dz/ among young speakers

“…Previous studies on /dz/ variation mainly focused on geographical/dialectal differences [e.g., Ang 洪惟仁 (2003Ang 洪惟仁 ( , 2012, Chang 洪惟仁, 張素蓉 (2008), Chen 陳淑娟 (1995), Chen 陳雅玲 (2010Chen 陳雅玲 ( , 2012, , Hung 洪慧鈺 (2007), Khng 康韶真 (2014), Lin 林珠彩 (1995), Thoo 涂文欽 (2009), and Wang 王薈 雯 (2014)], and little has been discussed on the potential effect of gender. However, as gender has always been a prominent factor for sound changes and variations [e.g., English: Holmes (1999); Japanese: Kong et al (2012); Mandarin: Baran (2014), Fon et al (2011), andZhang (2005); Tibetan: Reynolds (2012); Yami: Rau et al (2009)], it is surmised that there might also be a gender difference in the realization of Min /dz/. Previous research showed that the effect of gender on sound changes is not always straightforward and has more to do with the nature of the change and how it interacts with the two genders (Labov 1990;Maclagan et al 1999;Trudgill 2000).…”