Stress peculiarities in sub-variety of Nigerian English (Tiv-English) with gender perspectives

Abstract

AbstractStress assignment is challenging in L2 situations, especially when the L1 and L2 speakers do not have similar stress elasticity, placement, and timing. The primary concern of this study investigates stress assignment among Tiv-English (TivE) speakers. Such a rare study is available on TivE, unlike other major varieties (Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba) of Nigerian English (NE) that have widely received scholarly examination; the present study, therefore, delves into a preliminary study on the stress patterns of TivE in word isolation and passage reading with two-five syllable words. A total of 1,822 tokens were produced by fifty (50) Tiv bilinguals from the two public universities. Participants are between 18 and 65 years and satisfy the educated variety of TivE from the two institutions that accommodate Tiv bilinguals as respondents from different parts of Benue State. The audio recordings at 44,100 Hz were annotated in Praat for stress assignment transcription. Analysis of word stress by isolation and passage reading showed that 84.5% of stress in isolation is similar to other varieties, while 15.6% showed variation. The findings show more similarities than differences in two-syllabic word stress. These patterns were consistently ranked as NSR>>ROOTING>>LHR>>RHR.

Keywords

• Tiv-English
• stress assignment
• tokens
• constraint ranking
• varieties