Singing to a Genre: Constraints on Variable Rhoticity in British Americana

Abstract

This study focuses on accent shift or stylization to American English features in Anglophone pop-rock music and examines linguistic constraints alongside music-related considerations, as well as the effect of changes in musical genre on variable accent shift. The case study is the British band Mumford and Sons and their variable production of non-prevocalic rhotics as either present or absent. Mumford and Sons is of interest because they have displayed a change in their musical style throughout their career from Americana to alt-rock. The band’s four studio albums were auditorily analyzed and coded for rhotic vs. non-rhotic with aid from spectrograms. The linguistic factors considered were word class, preceding vowel according to the word’s lexical set, complexity of the preceding vowel, syllable complexity, stress, and location within the word and phrase. In addition, the effect of singing-related factors of syllable elongation and rhyming, and of the specific album, were also explored. Results show that rhoticity is favored in content words, stressed contexts, complex syllables, and NURSE words. This pattern is explained as stemming from the perceptual prominence of those contexts based on their acoustic and phonological characteristics. Results further show that syllable elongation leads to more rhoticity and that rhyming words tend to agree in their (non-)rhoticity. Finally, the degree of rhoticity decreases as the band departs from Americana in their later albums, highlighting the relevance of music genre for accent stylization.