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โครงการรวบรวมและจัดทําเอกสารวารสารอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์

190 Humanities Journal Vol.21, No.1 (January-June 2014)

The most common way Steinbeck used to convey consonant
substitutions feature is to employ alternation of /ɪn/. It could be implied that
this non-standard feature may cause the least misunderstanding of words

used because readers can still know what standard form of the word is.

1) Final /iŋ/ to /ɪn/
- I just thought of somethin’ [IDB, p.207]

- I'm jus' tryin' to tell you [OMM, p.62]
- Now he’s starvin’ [TGW, p.310]

The last group of Southern American English phonological
features is consonant omissions. The data in table 5 shows that there are
five non-standard features.

Table 5 The results of consonant omissions

Non-standard Excerpts Standard forms No. of
forms occurrence
1. Final /d/ or /t/ an’, jus’, tol’ and, just, told 4,225
2. Unstressed ‘member, ‘night, remember, 855
syllables ‘course, s’pose, goodnight, of

course, suppose
3. /k/ before /tʃ/ pitcher picture 22
4. /t/ or /v/ before lemme, gimme let me, give me 21

/m/
5. /t/ after /n/ wanna want to 14

The most apparent non-standard feature of consonant
omissions is the omission of /d/ or /t/ at the final position. To convey this