This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.

中文翻译：

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仔细观察加拿大的短前元音移位

本文研究了加拿大英语中“短前元音偏移”（SFVS）的几个方面，在大多数先前的研究中称为“加拿大元音偏移”。它基于对 61 名加拿大和 31 名美国大学生制作的 100 个单词的列表进行声学分析。分析主要围绕三个问题：（1）涉及转变的元音之间的关系，包括与传统上不被视为转变的一部分的元音之间的关系；(2)每个元音类别中单个词的行为，表现出异音变体；(3) 地区和民族认同（加拿大西部与东部，加拿大与美国人）和说话者性别在预测转变参与程度中的作用，这是用这里首次提出的转变的统一量化指标来衡量的。分析发现，前短元音（kit、dress和trap）降低和缩回为一组，但几个后元音（尤其是foot、goat和strut）的变化也有相关性，但不一定与这些有结构联系；后面的清擦音有利于 SFVS，而前面的软膜则不喜欢它；女性在转变中比男性更先进；在转变的过程中，加拿大内部没有地区差异；最令人惊讶的是，一旦美国比较组仅限于那些低背合并的人，美国人比他们的加拿大同龄人更易转变，在大多数以前关于加拿大英语的研究中，人们对这种转变与加拿大的关联提出了质疑。