A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Dphil) in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, 2016 / English is a world language. The serious concern for the study and the adaptation of English to the world in general and Nigerian and South African milieu in particular started over a century ago. The study of English has been given new dimension through debates held at conferences and workshops over the issue of standard or correctness which seemingly emerged in different countries of the world. The growing divergence and convergence of English language in the world today paved way for variations in use particularly at the level of spoken words.
The present work is one of the new crops of studies that attempts to identify and characterise the varieties of spoken English of our time. The study deals with a comparative study of variation in stress and intonation patterns in the spoken Yoruba and Zulu English. It seeks to identify the nature of Yoruba and Zulu spoken English and to account for the varieties that exist within the continuum. The study also aims to generate a pedagogical approach for the presentation of the appropriate spoken English inputs which is necessary for characterizing Yoruba and Zulu spoken English. The essence is to see the growing divergence and convergence of spoken English in these two speech communities. The subjects of the study were 120 Yoruba and Zulu speakers of English. The speakers were selected using a stratified random sampling technique. The main criteria for stratification were level education in English language and the linguistic group of the speakers. Two British (male and female) were used as the control. The elicitation instruments used for the collection of data were face to face interviews and materials for reading. The materials were divided into three parts: the word list, the sentence and a continuous reading passage. The three reading materials contained the target phonological variables which the researcher was interested in. The subjects were made to read each of the materials one after another and were recorded using PRAAT, a program for doing phonetic analyses and sound manipulations by Boersma and Weenink (2010). The study employed the framework of Metrical Phonology in the representation of stress. This was based on the view of rhythm proposed by Liberman (1975) and later developed into a theory by Liberman and Prince (1977). In this theory, the syllables are represented as having strong (S) and weak (W) stresses. The assignment of strong and weak nodes is determined by two rules: a Lexical Category Prominence Rule (LCPR), which operates on simple and compound words and Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), which covers phrases and sentences. The analysis of intonation was based on Pierrehumbert’s (1980) model of intonation which supports the independence of stress pitch. In this system, intonation contours are seen as pitch accent and are described in terms of two levels: High and Low tones. The rank of difference was calculated using Wilcoxon (1985) Statistical Test. The study revealed that the spoken Yoruba and Zulu English featured more prominent syllables than spoken British English. The difference occurred mostly at the level of syllable and utterance duration. With regard to intonation, the study showed that the spoken Yoruba English is different from Zulu counterparts and those of the British. While the British used more directional tones, the Yoruba and Zulu used unidirectional tones. The study also showed that isiZulu speakers exhibited instances of vowel lengthening system while the Yoruba speakers demonstrated the tendency to use reduced vowel system. The varieties of spoken Yoruba English are different from those of isiZulu spoken English and in some measure significantly different from the British who served as the control group (see analyses on chapters five and six). The claim that high tones are associated with lexical words and low tones with structural words as posited by Well (1982), and Gut and Milde (2000) was not conclusively accepted by the data in this study. This study contends that the observed stress and intonation patterns in the spoken of some selected Yoruba and Zulu speakers could be considered as are part of ‘Standard educated Yoruba and Zulu spoken English’. The acoustic analyses of stress and intonation clearly showed that in isiZulu spoken English, syllable duration particularly the unstressed syllables are relatively longer than in the Yoruba and those in the native variety of spoken English being represented by the control group.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uzulu/oai:uzspace.unizulu.ac.za:10530/1621 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Ayoola, Oluwafunmiso Moses |
| Contributors | Mpepo, M.V |
| Publisher | University of Zululand |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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