Schwa deletion in the conversational speech of English: The role of linguistic factors

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Na-Young Ryu Sung-Hoon Hong
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제30권 제2호, 313~333쪽, 전체 21쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2013.08.31

영문 초록

In this study we investigate schwa deletion and the role of three linguistic factors based on the Buckeye Speech Corpus (Pitt et al. 2007). This study provides evidence that schwa deletion is strongly influenced by stress environment (pre-stress position vs. post-stress position), sonority distance between two consonants surrounding an unstressed vowel [ǝ], and lexical frequency of the word containing the schwa. Stress environment affects schwa deletion in such a way that schwa is more likely to delete in post-stress position than in pre-stress position. As for the effect of sonority, schwa deletion is more likely to occur when there is a greater difference in sonority between the two consonants that appear before and after the schwa. With respect to word frequency, schwa deletion is less frequent in low frequency words than in high frequency words. We conduct a logistic regression analysis to find out how influential these factors are. The results of the regression analysis show that stress environment is the most pervasive, sonority the next, and lexical frequency the least influential factor that affects schwa deletion. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

목차

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Previous studies on schwa deletion

3. Data and method

4. Results

5. Conclusion

References

Appendix

키워드

schwa deletion stress sonority lexical frequency the Buckeye Speech Corpus