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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

A phonological study on stress assignment: the case of Indigenous Languagesof Australia loanwords in standard Australian English

Résumé

The variety of Standard Australian English (SAusE) has been seen as “unmusical, unexpressive, thin, nasal, drawling, lazy and inefficient in the transmission of meaning." (Mitchell, p.12, 1951). It is only in the 60’s, with the arrival of new approaches that SAusE was considered by linguists from an endocentric viewpoint and no longer systematically compared to the mother variety, British English. Thanks to late studies on the pronunciation of SAusE (Cox and Evans 2017; Harrington, Cox and Evans 1997; Malcolm 2001), we now have a precise view of the phonetical and phonological features of this variety which “is dear to the hearts of those of us who are Australian” (Butler, 2001, p.151). Yet, one of the particularities of Australian English has not been thoroughly considered: its specific vocabulary borrowed from Indigenous Languages of Australia (ILA) focusing on native fauna and flora as well as other artefacts linked to the Indigenous people of Australia’s culture. Following a first study by Martin 2011, we have decided to take a closer look at these particular loanwords from ILA in SAusE from a phonetical and phonological point of view. Based on a dictionary study, typical of Guierre’s school, we have built a corpus containing 803 words (including 282 common toponyms) borrowed from 101 ILA covering all of Australia’s territory. Major references for this study are the Macquarie Dictionary (5th edition and online), Australian Aboriginal Word in English: Their Origin and Meaning (Dixon et al. 2006) and several ILA dictionaries. Our study will focus on 520 lexical items in SAusE and in the source languages to compare the position of lexical stress both in ILA and SAusE. Given the treatment Indigenous people of Australia had to undergo, and even though things have started to change lately, the data concerning the ILA contains gaps and inaccuracies (regarding key descriptions such as stress, spellings, consonants, vowels (and recordings)). This presentation aims to show, at first, how we filled in some gaps using more general descriptions as well as on site and online recordings. In a second time, we will give a detailed account of the comparison of stress placement in ILA and in SAusE and see how these words are adopted in the general stress assignment system of today’s Australian English or have preserved traces of their specific ILA origin. To finish, we will take a closer look at compound words in the corpus which can be composed of both an ILA and and English base. Bibliography: Butler, S. (2001). Australian English—An identity crisis. In English in Australia (p. 151 161). John Benjamins publishing company. Cox, F., & Fletcher, J. (2017). Australian English; Pronunciation and Transcription (2ème édition). Cambridge University Press. Malcolm. (2001). Two-way English and the bicultural experience. In MOORE, Who’s Centric Now? (p. 219 240). Macquarie Dictionary (5ème). (2009). Pan Macmillan. Macquarie Dictionary (on line). (s. d.). Pan Macmillan. Martin, M. (2011). De l’accentuation lexicale en anglais australien standard contemporain [Thèse de doctorat]. Université de Tours. Mitchell, A. G. (1951). Australian English. The Australian Quarterly, 23(1), 9 17

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Linguistique
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hal-04604642 , version 1 (07-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04604642 , version 1

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Marjolaine Sophie Martin, Stéfany Thierry. A phonological study on stress assignment: the case of Indigenous Languagesof Australia loanwords in standard Australian English. 21th Conference on Spoken English, Mar 2024, Villetaneuse (Université Paris 13), France. ⟨hal-04604642⟩
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