New Perspectives on Canadian English Digital Identity Based on Word Stress Patterns in Lexicon and Spoken Corpus

Abstract

The study develops our previous research reported in [17] which established the specific Canadian English (CE) lexical stress pattern of secondary stress located after the main stress as more frequent than in British English (BE) and American English (AE). The pattern was recognized and detected in sound speech by native speakers of CE in the set of most frequent words (n = 89). At the present stage of the research we applied the methods of corpus analysis and the overall lexicon analysis in national dictionaries to explore the actual usage of the pattern in CE as compared to BE and AE. The objective data was bound to test the presence of the pattern previously identified through the subjective perceptions of native speakers of CE (n = 40). National dictionaries [9, 20] were the source of word stress patterns codified in the norms (n = 12648); the corpus of spoken CE speech (IDEA) (n = 3352) provided support of the rhythmical lexical stress location. Comparison of Anglophone and Francophone areas of CE speakers’ residence gave evidence of the rhythmical tendency being the impact of the French language contact. The right edge prominence known as the effect of French borrowings in the history of English was further supported by the constant language contact on the territory of Canada. Thus the digital identity of CE compared to BE and AE, when based on the overall analysis of lexicon across the three major varieties of English and in CE corpus of spoken speech, was verified.