CURE-Lowering: a current phonological change in RP
Résumé
The paper discusses the phenomenon informally referred to as CURE-lowering where the closing diphthong /ʊə/ becomes a monophthong /ɔ:/ in words like tour, cure, pure, etc in contemporary RP. The paper discusses how the change can be modelized and how the variant forms are shown to have spread in the lexicon on the basis of various pronouncing dictionaries.