Corpus‐Based Morphophonemic Study of the ‘S’ Morph in Yoruba‐English Newscasters’ Speech
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Date
2020
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Publisher
Association of Phoneticians and Phonologists
Abstract
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.
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Keywords
Morphophonemic, ICE-Nig, Allomorph, Newscasters, Nigerian English