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Vowel reduction in English -man compounds

  • Jeroen van de Weijer EMAIL logo , Marjoleine Sloos and Weiyun Wei
Published/Copyright: May 28, 2019
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Abstract

We investigate the pronunciation of English compounds ending in -man (e.g. policeman, clergyman, mailman), some of which are usually pronounced with a full vowel in -man (mailman), some usually with a reduced vowel (policeman), while other words vary between the two (businessman, gunman). Is it possible to predict when the vowel is reduced or not? We investigate a number of factors that could play a role in this issue: (i) the age of introduction of the word into the English language, (ii) the frequency of the word in the synchronic language, (iii) the meaning of -man in the specific compound, (iv) number of syllables, (v) stress pattern and (vi) spelling variation. Although some of these points have been discussed in the literature before, we present the first large full-scale quantitative investigation of the question whether any of these factors are reliable predictors of the pronunciation (and if so, which one predicts the pronunciation best), as well as the interaction between these factors.

Acknowledgements

We thank audiences at the Grote Taaldag (Utrecht, 2018) and Shanghai International Studies University for comments and suggestions. Many thanks to Li Yi’ou and Song Zhenjun for helping to gather some of the initial data, and to Joost van de Weijer and an anonymous TLR reviewer for comments on an earlier version.

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Published Online: 2019-05-28
Published in Print: 2019-11-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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