Overview

This chapter focuses on the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift by articulating the results of a phonetic-acoustic study conducted within the PAC programme, Trudgill's new-dialect formation model, and phonological theory. A push-chain shift hypothesis has been put forward in major publications on the basis of the ONZE recordings, and has mostly been modelled within the framework of Exemplar Theory. We do not share the rejection of phonological representations often advocated within such a framework and therefore provide an account of this phenomenon inspired by the framework of Dependency Phonology. On the basis of only four primes and the dependency relation, we attempt to represent this evolution through the historical competition between different systems that is characteristic of colonial environments.

Introduction

Our starting point is New Zealand, which has a special place in the English-speaking world for two reasons. It is one of the last territories to have been colonised from the British Isles in the second half of the nineteenth century (Sinclair 1991; Hay et al. 2008), which is why the scientific community has at its disposal unique oral archives, the ONZE (Origins of New Zealand English) project's Mobile Unit and Intermediate Archive (Gordon et al. 2004; Maclagan and Gordon 2004; Langstrof 2006, 2009), which contain recordings from more than 400 informants born between 1851 and 1930; that is, the first speakers of this variety of English. In recent years, New Zealand has consequently become an exceptional laboratory for the study of linguistic evolution and change. These resources have allowed for in-depth accounts of the origins of New Zealand English (NZE hereafter), notably Trudgill's new-dialect formation model (2004), and they continue to fuel the debate on the phonological and phonetic characteristics of both early and modern NZE (Clark et al. 2015; Hay et al. 2015; Sóskuthy et al. 2017).

In particular, researchers have been able to reconstruct the scenario of change affecting eight vowels (KIT, DRESS, TRAP, FLEECE, START, STRUT, NEAR and SQUARE; Wells 1982) which have undergone progressive changes since the mid-nineteenth century. The first six have been described (Gordon et al. 2004; Watson et al. 2004) as being involved in what is called the Short Front Vowel Shift (SFVS hereafter), which is the main object of our study.