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Aspects of change in New York City English short-a

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2021

Bill Haddican ,
Michael Newman ,
Cecelia Cutler  and
Christina Tortora
Bill Haddican*
Affiliation:
CUNY-Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center bill.haddican@gmail.com; michael.newman@qc.cuny.edu
Michael Newman
Affiliation:
CUNY-Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center bill.haddican@gmail.com; michael.newman@qc.cuny.edu
Cecelia Cutler
Affiliation:
CUNY-Lehman College, CUNY Graduate Centercecelia.cutler@lehman.cuny.edu
Christina Tortora
Affiliation:
CUNY-College of Staten Island, CUNY Graduate Center ctortora@gc.cuny.edu
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

This article focuses on change in the “short-a system” of New York City English (NYCE). Recent results suggest that a complex set of tensing rules traditionally described for NYCE are being replaced by several simpler systems. This article reports on a study of this change using a recently developed large audio-aligned parsed speech corpus (CoNYCE). This change is similar to the simplification reported for Philadelphia by Labov et al. (2016). Unlike in the Philadelphia case, however, our results do not show evidence of a single abstract process of change. Our findings, rather, suggest at least two separate changes in the community—one affecting short-a in prenasal contexts and a second affecting pre-oral obstruent contexts. In addition, the results suggest an additional independent process of lowering and retraction affecting short-a sounds in contexts not targeted by the process of phonological reorganization, that is, “trap-backing.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 135 - 163
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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