Some of you reading this may know me as a musician. Some of you may know me as a graduate student. A few of you might know me as both. They are two pretty separate and distinct worlds. For those who don't know the linguist side of me, I decided to investigate the idea of following up on my 1994 B.A. in Linguistics/Asian Studies with an M.A. back in 2000, when my wife Annika became pregnant with our daughter Shoki. After meeting some of the new professors in the department, notably Rob Hagiwara, who has become my thesis advisor, and Jila Ghomeshi (sister of CBC's Jian Ghomeshi), who has been a big inspiration to me over the past few years, Annika and I left for a year to South Korea, where I taught English and where Shoki was born (that's another story...) On returning to Canada I enrolled in two courses at the U of M, just to get my feet wet again in academia. I took Syntactic Theory and Phonological Theory, during which I found that I was actually still interested in school, and got caught up on some of the intervening decade of linguistic progress. I decided that I would like to pursue the M.A. at that point, but as I didn't have a 4-year B.A. I need to take more courses in order to qualify. A couple of years and several classes later, I was able to finally register as a graduate student. I have since completed all the required coursework, which leaves a completed thesis as the only thing standing between me and my degree.
I took a while to pick my topic, and settled on one that is Canadian-themed. My research will investigate the properties of vowels as spoken in the population of southern Manitoba (Winnipeg), and specifically the diphthong /ai/ involved in the phonological process called "Canadian Raising". This is the change that occurs in both /ai/ and also /au/ when they occur before voiceless sounds such as /t/, /k/, /s/, /p/ etc. and give us the distinctive Canadian difference in pronunciation between words like "wide" (no raising) and "white" (with raising). Americans are known to especially comment on our pronunciation of the /au/ diphthong as in "about", or "aboot" as it is often characterized. But my thesis will focus on the raising of /ai/.
There are two aspects of /ai/ as pronounced in Winnipeg and Manitoba which have come to my attention, and that I hope to investigate in my thesis. The first is that among many of us here, raising of /ai/ is not restricted only to pre-voiceless positions, but can also occur before /r/, as in words such as "fire" and "wire". This is, as far as I have been able to find, something that has not been previously noted in anyone else's research into Canadian English (someone please tell me if they are aware of any information to the contrary!).
The second interesting aspect of raising in Manitoba concerns the raising of /ai/ before /r/ - namely, the fact that raising does not always occur. My impression is that /ai/ is much more likely to occur, and is more pronounced, when it occurs within a single morpheme, as in "fire" and "wire". When /ai/ and /r/ are separated by a morpheme boundary, as in words which contain a suffix such as "higher" or "sigher", then raising either occurs less than in other cases, or not at all.
My thesis is an attempt to research and document evidence for these phenomena. So far, I have recorded a number of volunteer speakers (though I would still like to add a few more), tagged and analyzed their recordings, and am compiling a multi-page spreadsheet which is producing some interesting results, though I am not entirely sure of their significance at this stage.
This blog is a means primarily for myself to be able to follow my own progress, but also for the sake of anyone interested in looking over my virtual shoulder. Hopefully, my posting here will keep me focused and on track, but also allow me to review my thought process over this course of this project.
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