Yod in London

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to account for the reason of the different realizations of yod in the /Cju/ sequences in three social accents in London- RP, Popular London and Cockney- within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The three social accents show [tj~ʧ~t] alternation in the /Cju/ sequences with coronal consonants. Since studies on the yod in the accents in London are rare, some studies on the pronunciation of /j/ in other accents of English will also be reviewed. Through a constraint-based analysis of the [tj~ʧ~t] alternation, I will argue that the studies on you in other accents of English cannot account for the yod phenomena in London, and suggest an alternative explanation from the history of yod in English. The complex [tj~ʧ~t] alternation in the three major social accents in London can be accounted for by the interaction of the markedness constraint *COMPLEX, the faithfulness constraint UNIFORMITY, and its copycat constraint IDENT[F].