Rp Lexical Diversity Essay

The features of Scouse possess high levels of diversity when compared to Received Pronunciation (RP), with the RP accent assuming the position of the quintessential accent of the United Kingdom. Hughes and Trudgill (1996:14) comment, ‘RP is spoken by those at the top of the social scale…the lower a person is on the social scale the more obvious their regional accent will tend to be.’ Thus, the regional accent of Scouse, in contrast to the prestige of RP, is supposedly representative of a person of low socio-economic status. From such statement, it can be hypothesised that attitudes towards the Scouse accent will be directed towards low-skill, working class occupations.

The study involves recording spoken data to obtain primary research from

and others (1981:95) also used such technique, additionally applying ‘high and low lexical diversity’ to the South Welsh and RP accent, with high lexical diversity referring to frequent use of regional specific lexis. In my study, the participant will conduct both Scouse and RP lexical diversity to a high degree, using Scouse features such as lenition; defined by Honeybone (2007:18) as ‘underlying plosives realized as affricates and fricatives, for example, expect is articulated [exspɛxt] and stop is articulated [stɒɸ]’. Distinctive Scouse features such as the long vowel [u:] that replaces Standard English (spoken by the RP speaker) [ʊ] in ‘book’ and ‘look’ (Watson, 2007:358) will be employed by both Scouse speakers. Lexical features that the high-diversity speaker will employ in the passage include objective singular ‘me’ in replacement for the standard possessive determiner ‘my’, for example: ‘that’s me book’, ‘me mam’ (Britain, 2007: 96). It is also important to note variability in RP, with Hughes and Trudgill (1997:37) commenting ‘members of the upper social class are likely to have open final vowels in words like University, close to cardinal [ɛ].’ This will be accounted for in the high-diversity recording of the RP speaker. The matched-guise technique encourages listeners to view ‘two guises of the same speaker as two separate speakers’ (Gaies and Beebe, 1991: 156). This technique ensures variables such as prosodic and paralinguistic features, as well as

Prejudice and bias are idiosyncratic variables to account for in studies based on accent perception (Ferris, G. and others, 2006:153; Stewart, M. and others, 1985:103; Cohen, L. and others, 2007:179). This could include examples such as: family members that speak using Scouse; knowledge of Liverpool English speakers in high- or low-ranking professions; or any previous incidents and experiences involving Scouse speakers. For example, one participant may have a Scouse family member and therefore possess levels of ‘loyalty’ to the accent, which will most likely create pre-formed opinions of the accent (Giles, 1970:213). However, in this study it may be beneficial to include judgemental opinion, as it closely ties with the research aim of exploring detrimental accent discrimination.

The interview process is often dependant on meeting criteria set out by employers, with legal action being enforced in regard to discrimination within the work place in recent years. Lippe-Green (1994: 181) comments on a court case whereby a librarian was fired on the basis of her heavy