The Accent of John Lennon 5: British and American Pronunciation in the Songs
1 The Accent of John Lennon 5: British and American pronunciation in the songs Shinji Sato 1.1 Introduction British rock singers seem to use a certain amount of American pronunciation in their songs. Considering the fact that a style of music called ‘rock’n’roll’ is said to have been originated in the United States in the nineteen fi fties, it is not surprising that British youngsters who listened to it were infl uenced in their style of singing. However, this phenomenon seems to be limited to a certain number of phonemes and lexical items. This study aims to investigate this issue in detail, using the songs of John Lennon as its material. 1.2 RP, GA and Liverpool accent John Lennon’s native accent is that of Liverpool, and there are some differences from the British standard accent sometimes referred to as Received Pronunciation( RP), and similarities to the accent called General American( GA). Some of the main diff erences and similarities are shown below. 2 Table 1 RP, GA and Liverpool accent Liverpool RP GA examples accent LOT vowel / 㷜 / / ɑ: / / 㷜 / got, not, want, what BATH vowel(1) / ɑ: / / æ / / æ / dance, laugh, path BATH vowel(2) / ɑ: / / æ / / ɑ: / can't, part, bar STRUT vowel / ʌ / / ʌ / / 㷚 / love, sun, come rhoticity non-rhotic rhotic non-rhotic hard, girl, more, there intervocalic /t/[ t ] [ 㶵 (] tap)[ 㶵 ]( tap) better, getting, let it Note: LOT, BATH, and STRUT represent the keywords used by Wells(1982) . See Watt, Trudgill & Hughes(2013) for diff erent sets of words belonging to BATH vowel.
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