Séminaire P3 avec Airelle Théveniault (Université Bretagne Sud)

Intervenant.e.s : Airelle Théveniault (Université Bretagne Sud)

My work provides an analysis of the intonation system of County Galway English (CGE) in Ireland through three prospects of reflection.
1) Document a variety of English on which only few investigations have been done especially in the prosodic field.
2) Offer an East-West comparison between CGE and Dublin English.
3) Establish a sociolinguistic profile of each speaker. In so doing, intonation patterns are analysed according to sociolinguistic variables such as identity, geographical or linguistic variables (CGE is in daily contact to Irish with Irish-speaking regions, or Gaeltacht).

The corpus (33 speakers) was recorded within the PAC programme (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain) and is comprised of 30 hours of speech fully transcribed, and partially annotated for prosody. Intonation on read sentences was analysed using the IViE (Intonational Variation in English) system of annotation with a focus on melodic contours and tonal alignment on nuclear syllables (last lexical accent of an intonational phrase).

CGE appears to share some prosodic features with Dublin English (similar tonal alignment, identical contours for interrogatives, and the L*_% [low static] pattern mostly found among younger speakers). Nonetheless, CGE also shows a system of intonation of its own with some characteristics which prove to be more West-specific (a prominent H*_L% [late fall] contour produced by non-Irish speakers of Galway city or the H*L_% [simple fall] witnessed more regularly among Irish speakers living in the Gaeltacht).
These results have been partially confirmed in a perception study.

This work therefore stands at the crossroads of several fields of study; its originality lies in the description of CGE as a bridge between Irish and English, both having been for too long studied apart.