English in New York City - An Empirical Case Study

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 10 University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar) language: English abstract: To the delight of linguists and to the chagrin of almost everyone else language is forever changing (Gordon 2001: 2). Generally change may occur in all parts of language e.g.in its phonology morphology syntax or semantics. Traditionally however the linguistic focus has been placed on sound change whose progress can be observed by studying language in its social context and the realization by its natives (cf. Labob 1971a). While staying in New York City for a long period of time earlier this year my original topic of interest for a thesis was special grammatical features or words typical of New York City English (NYCE). However my supervisor Prof. Glauser informed me that empirical research in order to obtain useful representative data would take too much time with one of the chosen topics. Furthermore he introduced me to the Northern Cities Chain Shift i.e. to sound change which is much easier to analyze. The Northern Cities Chain Shift (NCS) strongly influences the order of six short vowels in the vowel system of General American (GA) which have not been changed much by other important chain shifts e.g. the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) in the historical development of English. The NCS has been in progress for several centuries but still has not been completed. In addition although the vowel changes triggered by the NCS are severe only a few linguists have conducted empirical research on that topic. The present thesis will contribute its share to the empirical data collected with respect to the NCS by analyzing speech samples taken of eight different speakers during a stay in New York City N.Y. with respect to the occurrence of the NCS in the dialect of New York City. Since the term dialect according to Francis (1958: 43) denominates the variety of