CHAIN SHIFTS AND MERGER IN NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH

Abstract

The vowels of New Zealand English have been developing for over a century, though the vowel system is phonemically identical to that of RP. While the chain shift of short front vowels and the rotation of closing diphthongs maintain vowel contrasts, the merger of front centering diphthongs eliminates them and collapses the vowel system. This paper demonstrates that these sound changes are all ascribed to dominance relations between the constraints on contrasts, and that the NZE constraint ranking achieves a vowel system with at most three phonologically significant degrees of height.