I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Osten Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentless comments and questions throughout. A National Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation Theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, also gave me time to pursue this project. The Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation. While working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. That is, speakers who use the more divergent (and by implication more unintelligible to a non-speaker) pronunciations are considered more proficient by the GSP community. In relation to this, the focus group discussions reveal that the various pronunciation choices that are available to speakers (as a result of phonological variation) create the possibility of levels of proficiency for the speakers. The findings indicate that free variation happens because the speakers want to create a code that is distinctive to them and as divergent from Ghanaian English (and Town Pidgin) as possible and, by extension, make GSP nearly unintelligible to the non-speaker. The data for the study was collected by recording group conversations, conducting individual interviews and two focus group discussions. This study describes phonological processes (vowel change, deletion and stress/tone variation) which are employed by the speakers of Ghanaian Student Pidgin (GSP) – a Ghanaian youth language – to create variable pronunciations existing in free variation with the original pronunciations and explores the implications of the variation for the GSP speech community.
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