Lexical Stress in Standard Aboriginal English: A comparative Corpus Based Account of Dictionary and Spoken Data

International audienceThe development of Australian English (AusE) as a New English variety has aroused much discussion over the last two decades (Schneider 2007, Trudgill 2010, Watt et al. 2018). Sociohistorical reconstructions have endeavoured to account for the specific sociophonetic flavour of the language (e.g. Horvath 1985, Cox and Palethorpe 2017), while huge corpus- based undertakings have been devoted to enlightening more recent regional and social linguistic variation (e.g. Pho 2009, Bradshaw 2010, Burnham et al. 2011) and to examining the evolution in status of AusE in its differentiating stage (Peters 2014). Throughout AusE’s relatively short history, language contact has been playing a major role in which, along with Ethnolectal varieties of AusE (Clyne et al. 2001) and LOTE (Lo Bianco 1987), Aboriginal languages and Aboriginal Englishes have contributed to mould a unique Australian linguistic situation.The scope of this paper is twofold: we present a systemic account of lexical stress in Standard Australian English (SAusE) as well as Standard Aboriginal English (SAbE) (e.g. Malcolm and Kaldor 1991, Eades 1993, Vinson 2008) as compared with SAusE (for a treatment of lexical stress in loanwords from Aboriginal languages in SAusE, see Dixon 2002, Dixon et al. 2006 among others). The second goal of this paper is to test the commonly accepted hypothesis that speakers of Aboriginal Englishes have a tendency to put stress on the first syllable of words that are not initially-stressed in SAusE (kangaroo, Toyota, see Malcolm 2004, Butcher 2008), or to elide the initial vowel in words such as along or suppose. Some authors state that this is the fact because words are usually initially stressed in Aboriginal languages (Douglas 1978, Tabain et al. 2004, Malcolm 2021).In order to address this issue, we chose to adopt two theoretical and methodological frameworks in a complementary perspective: a Guierrian approach of lexical stress relying on dictionary data, morphological and orthographic information (Guierre 1979), and that of corpus phonology (Durand, Gut & Kristoffersen 2014) which enables us to confront our preliminary Guierrian results to the lexical stress patterns in authentic spoken data.The Guierrian theoretical precondition allows for an exhaustive treatment of some pronunciation dictionaries of Standard Englishes (Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary) as well as the Macquarie Dictionary database for Australian English and Dixon et al. 2006 for the specific lexicon of loanwords from Aboriginal languages. This thorough investigation leads us to submit a reanalysis of words (dissyllabic verbs, prefixed multicategorial words and words known as exceptions in a Guierrian context) that may display lexical stress variation in contemporary English (Deschamps 2000 among others). This also enables us to build a specific corpus to test non- initially stressed words which are susceptible to show stress shift towards the left in SAbE.We then confront our preliminary Guierrian results to an analysis of lexical stress patterns in the framework of corpus phonology, and more specifically in a variationist sociophonological corpus of SAbE. We first consider lexical stress patterns from the Aboriginal English component of AusTalk (An audio-visual corpus of Australian English) corpus (Burnham et al. 2011). We then examine our results against some authentic spoken data and corresponding sociolinguistic metadata taken from the PAC-Australia Aboriginal English data (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure, Fabre 2018).Our paper shows that 94% of words that are sensitive to word-stress variation show no intervarietal stress variation in SAusE, SAmE and SBrE. As for loanwords from Aboriginal languages as pronounced in SAusE, 98% show the same stress placement. We also show that in terms of stress placement in borrowings from Aboriginal languages, the Guierrian rules account for 83% of the patterns whereas the initial stress rule inherited from the source languages does so for 78%. As for speakers of SAbE, we show that stress shift is present for a limited number of items, the great majority of which are three-syllable words that bear final stress in SAusE (according to MD). We conclude by proposing some avenues to determine if this feature is indeed typical of speakers of SAbE only, or if the trend can also be established for other speakers of SAusE and other varieties of English around the world