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Viewing report
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Vowel Change in New Zealand English. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, April 2008, Pages: 324
This book presents a detailed acoustic analysis of a range of vowel variants in earlier New Zealand English and discusses the implications of this data for theories of sound change. The variables under analysis are the short front vowels, the front centring diphthongs, and the broad-A vowel. It is shown that the generation of New Zealanders born between the 1890s and the 1930s constitutes a crucial point in the development of New Zealand English. In addition, it is argued that a number of concepts that have previously been proposed to account for regularities in vowel change need to be abandoned in order to accommodate the patterns observed in the development of New Zealand English vowels into a general theory of vowel shifts. It is furthermore argued that vowel shifts of the type observed in New Zealand English come about by rather simple mechanisms that have a strong resemblance to functional principles found in the evolution of organisms. The author therefore proposes regarding vowel spaces as evolutionary fitness landscapes. Phonological optimisation, on the other hand, is not a driving force in this type of sound change.
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