Little is known about factors that influence dialect perception and the cues listeners rely on in telling apart two accents. This thesis will shed light on how accurate New Zealanders and Australians are at identifying each other's accents and what vowels they tune in to when doing the task. The differences between New Zealand and Australian English mainly hail from the differing production of the short front vowels, some of which have reached the status of being stereotyped in the two countries. With the help of speech synthesis, an experiment was designed to test the perception of vowels produced in a typically New Zealand and a typically Australian fashion. Forty New Zealanders and sixty Australians took part in the study. Participants were asked to rate words on a scale from 1 (definitely NZ) to 6 (definitely Australian). The words contained one of eight different vowels. Frequency and stereotypicality effects as well as nasality were also investigated. The results demonstrate that dialect identification is a complex process that requires taking into account many different interacting factors of speech perception, social and regional variation of vowels and issues of clear speech versus conversational speech. Although overall performing quite accurately on the task, New Zealanders and Australians seem to perceive each other's speech inherently differently. I argue that this is due to different default configurations of their vowel spaces. Furthermore, a perceptual asymmetry between New Zealanders and Australians concerning the type of vowel has been observed. Reinforcing exemplar models of speech perception, it has also been shown that frequency of a word influences a listener's accuracy in identifying an accent. Moreover, nasality seems to function as an intensifier of stereotypes.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is concerned with the realm of the interpersonal: broadly, those linguistic phenomena involved in the negotiation of social relations and the expression of personal attitudes and feelings. The initial contention is that this realm has been consistently marginalised not only within linguistic theory, but more broadly within western culture, for cultural and ideological reasons whose implications extend into the bases of classical linguistic theory. Chapter 1 spells out the grounds for this contention and is followed by two further chapters, constituting Part I: Language and Social Relations. Chapter 2 identifies and critiques the range of ways in which the interpersonal has been conventionally interpreted: as style, as formality, as politeness, as power and solidarity, as the expressive, etc. This chapter concludes with an argument for the need for a stratified model of language in order to deal adequately with these phenomena. Chapter 3 proposes such a model, based on the systemic-functional approach to language as social semiotic. The register category tenor within this model is extended to provide a model of social relations as a semiotic system. The basis for the identification of the three tenor dimensions, power, distance and affect, is the identification of three modes of deployment or realisation of the interpersonal resources of English in everyday discourse: reciprocity, proliferation and amplification. Parts II and III turn their attention to one significant issue in the negotiation of social relations: address. The focus is explicitly on Australian English, but there is considerable evidence that most if not all of the forms discussed in Part II occur in other varieties of English, especially British and American, and that some at least of the practices discussed in Part III involve the same patterns of social relations with respect to the tenor dimensions of power, distance and affect. Because most varieties of contemporary English do not have a set of options for second-person pronominal address, as is the case in many of the world's languages, English speakers use names and other nominal forms which need to be described. Part II is descriptive in orientation, providing an account of the grammar of VOCATION in English, including a detailed description of the nominal forms used. Chapter 4 investigates the identification and functions of vocatives, and includes empirical investigations of vocative position in clauses and vocative incidence in relation to speech function or speech act choices. Chapter 5 presents an account of the grammar of English name forms, organised as a paradigmatic system. This chapter incorporates an account of the processes used to produce the various name-forms used in address, including truncation, reduplication and suffixation. Chapter 6 consists of an account of non-name forms of address, organised in terms of the systemic-functional account of nominal group structure. This chapter deals with single-word non-name forms of address and the range of nominal group structures used particularly to communicate attitude, both positive and negative. Part III is ethnographic in orientation. It describes some aspects of the use of the forms described in Part II in contemporary address practice in Australia and interprets such practice using the model of social relations as semiotic system presented in Part I. The major focuses of attention is on address practice in relation to the negotiation of gender relations, with some comment on generational relations of adults with children, on class relations and on ethnic relations in nation with a diverse population officially committed to a policy of a multiculturalism. Part III functions simultaneously as a coda for this thesis, and a prologue for the kind of ethnographic study that the project was originally intended to be, but which could not be conducted in the absence of an adequate linguistically-based model of social relations and an adequate description of the resources available for address in English.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is concerned with the realm of the interpersonal: broadly, those linguistic phenomena involved in the negotiation of social relations and the expression of personal attitudes and feelings. The initial contention is that this realm has been consistently marginalised not only within linguistic theory, but more broadly within western culture, for cultural and ideological reasons whose implications extend into the bases of classical linguistic theory. Chapter 1 spells out the grounds for this contention and is followed by two further chapters, constituting Part I: Language and Social Relations. Chapter 2 identifies and critiques the range of ways in which the interpersonal has been conventionally interpreted: as style, as formality, as politeness, as power and solidarity, as the expressive, etc. This chapter concludes with an argument for the need for a stratified model of language in order to deal adequately with these phenomena. Chapter 3 proposes such a model, based on the systemic-functional approach to language as social semiotic. The register category tenor within this model is extended to provide a model of social relations as a semiotic system. The basis for the identification of the three tenor dimensions, power, distance and affect, is the identification of three modes of deployment or realisation of the interpersonal resources of English in everyday discourse: reciprocity, proliferation and amplification. Parts II and III turn their attention to one significant issue in the negotiation of social relations: address. The focus is explicitly on Australian English, but there is considerable evidence that most if not all of the forms discussed in Part II occur in other varieties of English, especially British and American, and that some at least of the practices discussed in Part III involve the same patterns of social relations with respect to the tenor dimensions of power, distance and affect. Because most varieties of contemporary English do not have a set of options for second-person pronominal address, as is the case in many of the world's languages, English speakers use names and other nominal forms which need to be described. Part II is descriptive in orientation, providing an account of the grammar of VOCATION in English, including a detailed description of the nominal forms used. Chapter 4 investigates the identification and functions of vocatives, and includes empirical investigations of vocative position in clauses and vocative incidence in relation to speech function or speech act choices. Chapter 5 presents an account of the grammar of English name forms, organised as a paradigmatic system. This chapter incorporates an account of the processes used to produce the various name-forms used in address, including truncation, reduplication and suffixation. Chapter 6 consists of an account of non-name forms of address, organised in terms of the systemic-functional account of nominal group structure. This chapter deals with single-word non-name forms of address and the range of nominal group structures used particularly to communicate attitude, both positive and negative. Part III is ethnographic in orientation. It describes some aspects of the use of the forms described in Part II in contemporary address practice in Australia and interprets such practice using the model of social relations as semiotic system presented in Part I. The major focuses of attention is on address practice in relation to the negotiation of gender relations, with some comment on generational relations of adults with children, on class relations and on ethnic relations in nation with a diverse population officially committed to a policy of a multiculturalism. Part III functions simultaneously as a coda for this thesis, and a prologue for the kind of ethnographic study that the project was originally intended to be, but which could not be conducted in the absence of an adequate linguistically-based model of social relations and an adequate description of the resources available for address in English.

La littérature scientifique dédiée à l’accentuation en anglais australien standard contemporain (SAusE) est, contrairement à celle qui concerne la prononciation de ses voyelles, peu étendue. Après un chapitre introductif proposant le contexte historique dans lequel le SAusE est né et a été décrit, sa définition actuelle ainsi que sa description phonologique, notre étude est consacrée à un examen systémique de l’accentuation lexicale en SAusE. Un corpus test a été mis en place spécifiquement, qui comporte la quasi-totalité des verbes dissyllabiques, des préfixés pluricatégoriels et des exceptions aux règles d’accentuation des mots de deux syllabes et plus, ainsi qu’un large échantillon d’emprunts aux langues aborigènes. Ces quelques 3500 items ont été choisis précisément parce qu’ils font partie des mots les plus susceptibles de connaître une variation accentuelle en anglais contemporain. Notre approche se situe dans la lignée de Lionel Guierre et propose un traitement dictionnairique dans lequel les éléments du corpus sont tous étudiés au travers des données de chacune des éditions les plus récentes des Longman Pronouncing Dictionary, Cambridge English Pronunciation Dictionary et Macquarie Dictionary qui constituent les dictionnaires de références dans le domaine de la prononciation de l’anglais. Ces données ont été complétées, lorsque cela était nécessaire, par des données fréquentielles issues du Corpus of Contemporary American English et par des données orales enregistrées spécialement pour cette étude, selon une démarche similaire à la première partie du protocole du projet Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain. Notre analyse met en évidence une grande stabilité accentuelle intervariétale entre le SAusE, l’anglais britannique standard et l’anglais américain standard et propose un relevé étayé et détaillé des spécificités accentuelles lexicales du SAusE contenues dans le corpus étudié. / The scientific literature dedicated to word stress in contemporary standard Australian English (SAusE) is not very extensive contrary to the one dealing with the pronunciation of vowels in this variety of English. We will introduce the historical context in which SAusE first emerged and was described, its current definition as well as its phonological description. Our study is then devoted to the systemic study of lexical word stress in SAusE. A corpus was specifically put together for this particular research : it includes most of the dissyllabic verbs, of the prefixed multicategorial words and of the words that are exceptions to the rules of word-stress assignment in English, as well as a large sample of borrowings from Aboriginal languages. These 3500 items were not chosen randomly : they are words which specifically tend to show word-stress variation in contemporary English. Our approach follows Lionel Guierre’s and offers a dictionary treatment in which all the elements of our corpus are studied using the data of each of the most recent editions of the Longman Pronouncing Dictionary, the Cambridge English Pronunciation Dictionary and the Macquarie Dictionary, all reference books on English pronunciation. Frequency data extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and oral data recorded for this study (following a protocol similar to that which is applied in the first part of the project Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain) were added to the dictionary data when necessary. Our analysis brings to the fore a great accentual intervarietal stability between SAusE, standard British English and standard American English, and offers a detailed and complete list of the lexical accentual specificities of SAusE ascertained through our study.

TITLE: The Relevance of Australianisms in English Language Teaching AUTHOR: Markéta Hillier DEPARTMENT: Department of English Language and Literature SUPERVISOR: PhDr. Klára Matuchová, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: The proposed thesis explores the existence of Australian English, the part it plays in Australian culture, available sources on the subject, the direction in which it is heading and the relevance of its teaching to foreign students. The theoretical section of the thesis explores the development of Australian English, modern Australian English, second language acquisition and aspects and importance of teaching vocabulary. The practical part of this thesis introduces two hypotheses: "Australianisms are constantly evolving and in order to keep up with new generations, fresh texts should be developed as a reference for both foreign students and tourists" and "Australian English vocabulary is very different to other English varieties; therefore, students need to be exposed to Australianisms in order to successfully communicate in the Australian environment". Upon statistical analysis the first hypothesis is supported with the second hypothesis being partially supported. KEYWORDS: Australia, Australian English, Australianisms, Second Language Acquisition, Vocabulary

The overall aim of the present study is to investigate syntactic variation in certain Present-day English noun phrase types including the quantifiers all, whole, both and half (e.g. a half hour vs. half an hour). More specific research questions concerns the overall frequency distribution of the variants, how they are distributed across regions and media and what linguistic factors influence the choice of variant. The study is based on corpus material comprising three newspapers from 1995 (The Independent, The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald) and two spoken corpora (the dialogue component of the BNC and the Longman Spoken American Corpus). The book presents a number of previously not discussed issues with respect to all, whole, both and half. The study of distribution shows that one form often predominated greatly over the other(s) and that there were several cases of regional variation. A number of linguistic factors further seem to be involved for each of the variables analysed, such as the syntactic function of the noun phrase and the presence of certain elements in the NP or its near co-text. For each of the variables, all factors were ranked according to their strength of correlation with particular variants. The study also discusses a possible grammaticalisation process concerning NPs with half and the possibility of all sometimes having another function than expressing totality: to express large quantity. The whole idea of grammatical synonymy has been questioned by some scholars, but the conclusion drawn in the present study is that there are variables that are at least very close to each other in meaning, and that a number of linguistic and non-linguistic factors influence our choices of variant. A great deal of the information obtained was too detailed to be useful for pedagogical purposes, but in several cases the results could clearly be used to improve school and reference grammars.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-264)

This study will explore to what extent familiarity with English accents can influence compulsory school students’ attitudes towards them. Data from questionnaires completed by 98 students were analysed. The results show that the degree of familiarity with the English accent seems to affect the attitude attributed to it. More specifically, the results indicate that a higher degree of familiarity influences the ability to express an attitude. A lower degree of familiarity leads to similar attitudes being given to the accents, which shows a lack of differentiation between them. The results also indicate a bias towards RP. While it is not necessarily harmful, teachers should be aware of this and how their own teaching may influence how different accents are perceived. It is argued that teachers need to intervene in the process of stereotyping which will help develop an awareness of students’ language attitudes. To summarize, it is difficult to draw any wide conclusions from these results due to the study’s scope. Furthermore, the target group is not representative of Swedish compulsory school students as students from the chosen school generally finish with an above-average final grade. Further research is necessary to determine more specifically how familiarity affects attitudes of English accents and if these findings recur in other areas of Sweden where the final grade average is lower.

This study investigates teachers' attitudes towards aural recordings and written English from different English varieties in the Swedish upper primary school EFL-classroom. Data from 27 online surveys and four semi-structured interviews are analyzed. The results show that British and American English are the most accepted varitetis. Australian English is accepted in audio, though not necessarily recognized in writing. Indian English, while mostly recognized, is not as accepted. Swedish English, though still accepted by most, is the least approved of the studied varieties.

This study investigates how Inner Circle and Outer Circle English varieties are perceived by EFL students at two separate schools in Sweden, each with varying levels of linguistic diversity among their student bodies. The language attitude data is collected by way of verbal-guise tests followed by discussion segments. The results suggest that Inner Circle Englishes are broadly viewed more positively than Outer Circle Englishes, in particular where semantic qualities in the status category are concerned. Further, heavily accented Outer Circle speakers were evaluated to have a good sense of humor but low attractiveness by students of both schools. The school with greater linguistic diversity rated the speakers in the study lower across the board, and also rated the RP speaker in particular significantly less favorably than the school with lower linguistic diversity. The students at the more linguistically diverse school further seemed to ascribe a poor sense of humor to the Inner Circle English speakers, which was not the case with the other school which took part of the study. These results affirm that Inner Circle English accents tend to carry with them a greater sense of status than Outer Circle English accents, and further point towards the possibility that linguistic diversity in the classroom may affect how different English varieties are viewed.