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The vowels of contemporary RP: vowel formant measurements for BBC newsreaders1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2016

ANDREJ BJELAKOVIĆ
ANDREJ BJELAKOVIĆ*
Affiliation:
The English Department, Faculty of Philology, Studentski trg 3, 11000 Belgrade, Serbiab.andrej@sezampro.rs
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Abstract

The study aims to enrich the available acoustic data pertaining to vowels of what may tentatively be called contemporary RP or near-RP. The corpus comprised BBC radio and TV broadcasts of seven male and seven female newsreaders. F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthongs (kit, dress, trap, foot, strut, lot, fleece, palm, goose, thought and nurse) and 4 diphthongs (goat, price, mouth and face) were taken. The results are presented both as raw mean F1 and F2 frequencies in Hertz and on a plot normalised according to Lobanov (1971). The results, among other things, confirm our hypothesis that the onset of mouth is now decidedly fronter than and does not overlap with the onset of price. Furthermore, we sought to determine the exact extent of goose-fronting, which according to our data is, even in this variety of English, fronter than centre, as well as the quality of the goat glide, which seems to be following suit.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , November 2017 , pp. 501 - 532
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers and Patrick Honeybone for insightful and constructive comments on earlier versions of the paper.

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