University of Canterbury Home
    • Admin
    UC Research Repository
    UC Library
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
    View Item 
    1. UC Home
    2. Library
    3. UC Research Repository
    4. Faculty of Arts | Te Kaupeka Toi Tangata
    5. Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    6. View Item
    1. UC Home
    2.  > 
    3. Library
    4.  > 
    5. UC Research Repository
    6.  > 
    7. Faculty of Arts | Te Kaupeka Toi Tangata
    8.  > 
    9. Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    10.  > 
    11. View Item

    Isolation, identity, and gender : an investigation of vowel variation in the Gloriavale Christian Community. (2021)

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Hurring, Gia_final Master's Thesis.pdf (5.172Mb)
    Type of Content
    Theses / Dissertations
    UC Permalink
    https://hdl.handle.net/10092/102362
    http://dx.doi.org/10.26021/11415
    
    Thesis Discipline
    Linguistics
    Degree Name
    Master of Linguistics
    Publisher
    University of Canterbury
    Language
    English
    Collections
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations [1822]
    Authors
    Hurring, Gia
    show all
    Abstract

    This thesis explores the Gloriavale Christian Community, an isolated religious community currently living on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand. The social structure of the community differs significantly to modern urban communities - their ‘us vs them’ ideology results in heightened isolation, intense gender segregation is part of their philosophy, and their Christian principles have allowed the community’s population to grow at an exponential rate. Given the interesting dynamics of the community, little attention has been given to the linguistic consequences which may occur. In turn, this thesis is the first to fully investigate how identity, isolation, and gender have influenced monophthongal vowel shifts in Gloriavale over three generations (settlers, first generation, second generation). This thesis takes speech data from Gloriavale documentaries and conducts sociophonetic analysis on eight monophthongal vowel shifts over three generations. This process is replicated with a North Canterbury corpus, a less isolated community, to compare the effects of Gloriavale’s unique social landscape. The results found greater degree of variation in the Gloriavale speakers than the North Canterbury speakers over three generations. An investigation into the Gloriavale data assured that this degree of variation is not an artefact of assumed Australian settlers in the data. Closer investigation into Gloriavale finds intriguing gender differences. Gloriavale women are shifting their vowels in a progressive, monotonic manner, with each generation producing vowels in different acoustic spaces. Meanwhile, the men appear to be reversing many of their vowels, with the younger men realising some vowels in similar acoustic spaces of the older men. The findings here are supported by data modelling procedures, using linear regression models with age, gender, and corpus as predictors. This thesis accounts for the key findings, with the gender findings reviewed under two paradigms. First, the gender results are accounted for under the intended apparent time construct which assumes language change over time, while the second account investigates how differences in life stages result in vowel variation over a speaker’s lifespan. The former account supports the women’s findings, while the latter account supports the men’s. This thesis identifies that regardless of different accounts for gender variation, isolation and identity are at the forefront of variation in Gloriavale. In turn, this research bridges gaps within the literature and opens possible avenues for future research.

    Rights
    All Rights Reserved
    https://canterbury.libguides.com/rights/theses

    Related items

    Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

    • Vowel Change in New Zealand English - Patterns and Implications 

      Langstrof, Christian (University of Canterbury. Linguistics, 2006)
      This thesis investigates change in a number of phonological variables in New Zealand English (NZE) during a formative period of its development. The variables under analysis are the short front vowels /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, the ...
    • Vowel identity conditions the time course of tone recognition 

      Shaw JA; Tyler MD; Kasiopa B; Ma Y; Proctor M; Han C; Derrick, Donald; Burnham D (2013)
      Using eye-tracking in a visual world paradigm, we sought converging evidence for the time course of Mandarin Chinese tone recognition as predicted by the availability of information in f0 and past results from a ...
    • Effects of the prominence of first harmonic on the perception of breathiness and vowel identity. 

      Sloane, Samuel David (University of Canterbury. Communication Disorders, 2013)
      Title:EFFECTS OF THE PROMINENCE OF FIRST HARMONIC ON THE PERCEPTION OF BREATHINESS AND VOWEL IDENTITY Authors: Emily Lin, Samuel Sloane,and Donal Sinex Background: Human communication relies on adequate speech ...
    Advanced Search

    Browse

    All of the RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThesis DisciplineThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThesis Discipline

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics
    • SUBMISSIONS
    • Research Outputs
    • UC Theses
    • CONTACTS
    • Send Feedback
    • +64 3 369 3853
    • ucresearchrepository@canterbury.ac.nz
    • ABOUT
    • UC Research Repository Guide
    • Copyright and Disclaimer
    • SUBMISSIONS
    • Research Outputs
    • UC Theses
    • CONTACTS
    • Send Feedback
    • +64 3 369 3853
    • ucresearchrepository@canterbury.ac.nz
    • ABOUT
    • UC Research Repository Guide
    • Copyright and Disclaimer