The Spread of Raising

When I finished my senior thesis some time in May last year, I took a deep sigh of relief. It was a lot of work, and the last week or two of writing it amidst all my other course work was probably the most stressful period of my academic life.

But I wasn't quite done with it yet. It got accepted to NWAV, so I went back, measured more speakers and improved my analysis, and I have to say that I am very pleased with the new and improved version.

In brief, I believe I found that Canadian Raising has lexicalized in Philadelphia because its distribution has shifted. Many words with following voiced consonants, like and spider, cider, cyberand tiny have raised onsets.

There's a whole bunch more to my analyis, including a brief review of Canadian Raising diachronically, in Philadelphia in particular, as well as suppositions as to why it has lexicalized and spread to these particular words. But rather than re-write the whole thing here, check out the full text on the Penn College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal here:

http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/73/

Read this doc on Scribd: Fruehwald2007 CUREJ

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On a side note, "College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal" seems really cumbersome. They should have put the "Electronic" in pre-position "Electronic College Undergraduate Research Journal," but then they wouldn't have gotten the nice acronym CUREJ.