School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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Item"Old Jack Lang" in Australian English today: a study of the current knowledge and use of, and attitudes towards rhyming slang in Australian English( 2007)This study investigates the use of rhyming slang in Australian English. Rhyming slang has been used in colloquial English for centuries. But how is it used in a particular Australian community today? Which terms are known? How is it used and why? What are the attitudes towards the use of rhyming slang? Through the use of interviews and questionnaires, I have been able to attempt to provide some answers to these questions. My participants were predominantly 18-25 year olds, many of whom attended a residential college whilst at university. My aim was to look at the extent to which these young people knew and used rhyming slang. 18-25 year olds know many and varied rhyming slang terms (due to various influences), however they generally very rarely use the terms that they know. When they do use the terms, it is very often to make light of a situation, or to be ironic. Many believe that rhyming slang is only sometimes used in Australian English, and when it is used, it is only used by certain groups within the community (such as college students, older people and country people). There is also a view that is more predominant in the ‘lower classes’ (for want of a better phrase), among blue-collar workers and the like. This paper stands alone, as work on rhyming slang (especially rhyming slang in Australian English) is very scarce. It is a very small, preliminary study, and there is much scope for further and more detailed research on this topic.
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ItemWorrying and wondering: examining a case of sociophonetic variation in Melbourne speakers of Australian English( 2010)This paper takes a multi-dimensional, exploratory sociophonetic approach to examining the use of two variant pronunciations of the words worry and wonder, and their phonologically and morphologically related words (“wo-words”), by Melbourne speakers of Australian English (AusE). Traditional conceptions of variation in Australian English have relied upon the broadness continuum, first proposed by Mitchell and Delbridge (1965). More recently, though, there is a growing trend towards examining sources of variation in AusE outside the constraints of this model (See, for example, Billington, 2009; Cox, 2006; Cox & Palethorpe, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2006; Loakes, 2008a, 2008b; Loakes, Fletcher, & Hajek, 2010). The variants described in the present study contribute to this body of literature by examining data from three separate sources, enabling a clear description of the variants in phonetic terms, as well as descriptions of the speakers who use the variants under study. The two variants use two distinct phonemes – /ɐ/ and /ɔ/ – in the pronunciation of the primary stressed syllable of the target words. The study’s first phase uses data from the ANDOSL corpus, which provides evidence of both variants in a corpus collected in the early 1990s comprising data from speakers from NSW. Phases II and III use data collected from Victorian high school students. The second phase uses socio-demographic questionnaires and a self-report measure of pronunciation to demonstrate that participants (N = 198) report using the two proposed variants, and to show that use is most common to a number of groups – most notably those who have non-native speaking parents and/or grandparents, those living in the metropolitan region, and those from low and mid socioeconomic status areas. Finally, the third phase uses elicited speech production data to measure the vowels used by speakers (N = 40) in their pronunciations of the target words, enabling both impressionistic and acoustic descriptions of each of the variants. These final two phases also provide evidence of lexical and phonetic diffusion in the use of the variants which, under a usage-based model proposed by Bybee (2001), suggest that the variation under study here provides synchronic evidence of sound change in progress.
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ItemHigh rising terminals in Australian English: form and function( 2008)This study examined various aspects of both the form and function of high rising terminals in Australian English. Using both narrative and collaborative speech data, relevant intonational phrases were labeled on severals levels and an objective method to classify question and declarative utterances was also developed. In particular it aimed to examine the relationship between speech act and location of the rise onset, as past studies have shown a significant result in New Zealand English. The findings were that HRTs have a ‘continuing’ function in dialog, that previous findings of a phonological distinction between speech acts are unsupported, and that there appears to be no significant relationship between the location of the rise onset and speech act type.