Department of English

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Corpus‐Based Morphophonemic Study of the ‘S’ Morph in Yoruba‐English Newscasters’ Speech
(Association of Phoneticians and Phonologists, 2020) Akinola, Aderonke
This paper attempts a morphophonemic study of the 's' morph in Yoruba English newscasters' (YENs) speech. The study seeks to ascertain YENs' mastery of the realisations of the allomorphs, having been exposed to training in pronunciation. The data were extracted from the spoken part of the International Corpus of English (ICE)-Nigeria using AntConc analysis toolkit version 3.4.4.0. Twenty-two newscasts of six notable YENs were selected from the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA). The newscasts were listened to and different realisations of morpheme s by each newscaster were analysed quantitatively by counting their tokens of occurrence and converting them to percentages. Findings show that out of 1,207 occurrences of 's' morph, 840 (69.60%) were realised as [s], [z] and [ɪz] following the native speakers' patterns. In contrast, 306 (25.35%) distinctive Nigerian English variants were articulated, while 61 (5.05%) were instances of deletion. The study presents YENs as sophisticated English users and identifies with the suggestion of NTA News English as a model for standard NigE variety.