Effects of Prescriptivism on the Pronunciation of American English (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,5, Saarland University, language: English, abstract: In this thesis, nationwide phonetic phenomena found in the United States of America will be analyzed. Namely, g-dropping, dissimilation of the voiced postalveolar approximant /¿/, when /¿/ occurs frequently in a word, unreleased plosives in consonant clusters and omitted /t/-sounds in <-nt-> sequences.

Instead of a radio talk show, interviews of the daytime talk show Megyn Kelly TODAY will serve as the corpus for this analysis. The television talk show host is Megyn Kelly and the show focuses on social topics.

For the analysis, a transcription of the different interviews had to take place, as the corpus is in video format. Only the words and segments that contained the specific phonetic characteristics were phonetically transcribed according to the IPA system.

In the first chapter, the terms prescriptivism and descriptivism will be explained. The following section will give a brief introduction to the standardization of American English as a social and historical process. This will give a better idea of how prescriptive rules are conveyed and portrayed. Additionally, this section gives possible answers as to why prescriptivism is still embedded in society's mind. Section 2.2 goes into more detail on what standard American English is and when it is used. "The superiority of one pronunciation" explains when the "better" pronunciation can be expected, what social groups tend to speak in this accent, and which situations usually demand a more formal pronunciation. Chapter 4 describes the different phonetic phenomena that were chosen for this analysis.

Finally, the phonetic occurrences are analyzed and evaluated.