Journal Issue: Selected Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 46)
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10/15/2018
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Publication Dialect Identification Across a Nation-State Border: Perception of Dialectal Variants in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC(2018-10-15) Thomas Swan, Julia; Babel, MollyThe Atlas of North America English distinguishes "the West" from "Western Canada" on the basis of /æ/ retraction and Canadian Raising (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006). Since the Atlas, scholars have provided a more detailed understanding of /æɡ/ raising, /æ/retraction, and Canadian Raising throughout the Western United States and Western Canada (Boberg 2008, Fridland et al. 2016, Presnyakova, Umbal, and Pappas 2017, Roeder, Onosson, and D'Arcy 2018). In a production study, Swan (2016) found that Seattle and Vancouver, BC are differentiated primarily by Canadian Raising and pre-nasal raising of /æ/ and show minimal difference with respect to /æɡ/ raising and /æ/ retraction. Seattle and Vancouver speakers also shared different ideologies about their speech: Seattle respondents felt more confident that they could identify a Vancouver talker based on speech than vice versa. The current study builds from these observations to ask how natives of Seattle and Vancouver perceive the similarities and distinctions documented in the production literature. Can listeners differentiate a talker as being from Seattle or Vancouver? What cues are listeners relying on to judge a talker as being from Seattle or Vancouver? Do these perceptual cues align with the production differences between the cities? What does this imply for a dialectology of the West? These questions are addressed using a forced-choice dialect identification task using the variables represented by FAN, PATH, TAG, and DEVOUT. Our analysis considers signal detection theoretic measures to elucidate sensitivity and bias (Macmillan and Creelman 2005). The results suggest that differentiating Seattle and Vancouver talkers is a challenging task for listeners native to these cities. Neither Seattle nor Vancouver listeners show very accurate performance for any of the single-word stimuli or short phrase blocks of the task and are generally not able classify a talker's city of origin based on their speech. The most accurate performance emerges for Seattle listeners classifying talkers saying DEVOUT, which aligns with the production differences between the cities and is likely driven by stereotypes about Canadian English. Listeners from both cities show more own city bias for the phonetic features that are shown to be more similar across the cities (PATH and TAG) than for those shown to be more different in production (FAN and DEVOUT). A closer look at bias reveals that while Seattle listeners perform with slightly more accuracy, they also show more own-city bias. We discussion possible reasons for this pattern and implications for dialectology of the West and Western Canada.Publication Change Over Time in the Grammar of African American English(2018-10-15) Fisher, SabriyaThis paper investigates the use of 'ain't' in past tense contexts in African American English (AAE) using a corpus of recorded speech collected in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. A study of 42 speakers' rates of use of 'ain't' in past tense contexts finds increase toward 'ain't' in both real and apparent time. This increase is stronger among speakers born and raised in Philadelphia compared to those who migrated there from the South, supporting previous work linking innovation in AAE to linguistic segregation in the urban North during the Great Migration. Finally, this paper uses data from the morphological form of verbs following 'ain't' in past and perfect contexts to argue that the use of 'ain't' for 'didn't' resulted from the reanalysis of present perfect constructions containing 'ain't'.Publication Social Predictors of Case Syncretism in New York Hasidic Yiddish(2018-10-15) Nove, Chaya R.This is a pilot study investigating synchronic variation in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) object pronouns. HY is a variety that has been transmitted directly by immigrants from Eastern Europe following the second world war and is presently the everyday language of thousands of Hasidic Jews in New York and other communities around the world. In Yiddish, pronominal forms in the dative case, 'mir' (1SG) 'dir' (2SG), have historically been used in four types of syntactic constructions: 1) when the pronoun referent is the recipient of an action in a double object construction; 2) with a transitive verb that inherently selects for an object in the dative form; 3) with a dative experiencer; and 4) as the object of a preposition. Anecdotal observations suggest an innovative leveled paradigm with accusative forms 'mikh' (1SG) and 'dikh' (2SG) in all four historically dative positions. Moreover, while other Yiddish dialects have dative case marking on definite articles and attributive adjectives, spoken HY has largely lost these. With 'mir' and 'dir' as the sole remaining dative forms in in the pronominal paradigm, learners of HY have less evidence for positing dative case than do learners of other dialects. The data for this study come from an online controlled judgement experiment with 113 native HY speakers from New York. Regression analysis reveals an age effect, with younger speakers tending toward innovative dative forms, and an interaction between age and gender, with younger females innovating more extensively than males. However, sex is confounded with language dominance in this community, largely because of an educational model that supports HY-English bilingualism among girls but gives primacy to HY in the education of boys. The model also selects speakers from Hasidic neighborhoods in Rockland County as the most likely innovators. Overall, the results of this study suggest an emergent reduction in the HY case system where, for some young speakers, the distinction between the accusative and dative case forms has been lost. HY offers linguists a unique opportunity to observe the development of a post-coterritorial Yiddish dialect in a new language contact environment. This investigation into HY in its unique sociocultural context contributes to Yiddish linguistics by highlighting changes that have occurred since its arrival to the US and to general theories of language change by identifying the social factors that may be playing a role in these developments.Publication Attentional Load and Style Control(2018-10-15) Sharma, Devyani; McCarthy, KathleenLabov's (1966) attention-to-speech model suggested both social and cognitive elements in style-shifting: social awareness of prestige norms and cognitive defaulting to an easier style when attention is diverted. A focus on social motivations in later work has left the cognitive dimension under-explored. As the contexts elicited in sociolinguistic interviews vary in both attention and register, new methods are needed to tease these apart. In this study, we investigate the cognitive prediction: Does an increase in attentional load cause individuals to struggle to maintain a later-learned style? The novel experimental design eliminates contextual differences by requiring a formal news report style throughout. Twelve speakers of vernacular British English completed two speech production tasks (reading and recall), each with varying attentional load conditions. Higher load conditions included a cross-modal distractor task requiring simultaneous arithmetical calculations. Both of the variables examined—glottal replacement of /t/ and th-fronting—exhibited a consistent but mild trend towards an increase in vernacular forms under higher load. Speakers seem slightly less able to maintain a formal style when their attention is diverted, as suggested in Labov's original description of the vernacular as a default. However, the low level of the effect also suggests that sharp formality shifts cannot be purely due to a reduction in monitoring, but must also involve social awareness of the stylistic norms of a given register. Processing and cognitive ease should therefore be factored in alongside social motivations in the study of style variation.Publication The Changing Sounds of Exceptionally Aspirated Diné Stops(2018-10-15) Palakurthy, KaylaThis paper presents a phonetic analysis of variation and change in the production of voiceless aspirated stops in Diné bizaad, or Navajo, a Southern Dené language spoken in the American Southwest. Diné aspirated stops are typologically famous for having exceptionally long release periods (Cho and Ladefoged 1999), and earlier studies report that the variable aspiration carries social meaning (Reichard 1945). This study revisits phonetic measures of aspiration given increasing levels of English bilingualism in the Diné speech community. Voice onset time (VOT) and spectral center of gravity (CoG) were measured in tokens of aspirated velar and alveolar stops, elicited during interviews with 51 bilingual Diné bizaad-English speakers of different ages, genders, regions, and linguistic backgrounds. Results indicate that the releases of aspirated /kh/ have shortened when compared with earlier studies, while releases of aspirated /th/ have not, likely due to the salience of their affrication rendering them perceptibly distinct from English /t/. Mixed-effects linear regression models show that region, age, and gender are significant predictors of variation and that there are ongoing changes led by women, a frequent pattern in sociolinguistics, but notable here due to its relevance in an indigenous minority language community, a rare site for variationist sociolinguistic research. Overall these findings suggest that despite encroaching language shift, Diné bizaad is not simply converging with English, and results underscore the importance of perceptual awareness in analyses of subphonemic linguistic change.Publication The Effect of Heritage on Canadian Shift in Vancouver(2018-10-15) Presnyakova, Irina; Umbal, Pocholo; Pappas, Panayiotis A.Modern urban communities are inherently heterogeneous (Nagy and Meyerhoff 2008), yet sociolinguistic studies often focus on the white majority (Trudgill 1974, 1986, Labov 2001), or treat different ethnic groups as distinct communities and identify divergent patterns (Horvath 1991, Santa Ana and Parodi 1998). Relatively few studies so far have looked at the participation of speakers with ethnic backgrounds in on-going sound changes that characterize the founding community (Boberg 2004, Roeder 2009, Hoffman and Walker 2010, Wong and Hall-Lew 2014, Riebold 2015). The current study investigates the status of the Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms, and Youssef 1995, Pappas and Jeffrey 2013) among the four largest heritage groups in Vancouver. Forty-seven speakers stratified according to heritage group (British/mixed European, Chinese, Filipino, and South Asian) and gender took part in sociolinguistic interviews and word list reading designed to elicit the major allophonic patterns of vowels in Canadian English (Boberg 2008). Formant analyses of 1,813 tokens from the word list were conducted in Praat using the methods by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). Results based on linear mixed effects regression models reveal that all four groups participate in the Canadian Shift as defined in Boberg (2008). We also find significant differences in specific dimensions of the change for each vowel, which perhaps are used by the different groups in the construction of ethnic identity.Publication Embodying Toughness: LOT-Raising, /l/-Velarization, and Retracted Articulatory Setting(2018-10-15) Pratt, TeresaIn this paper I examine the realization of two sociophonetic variables to explore the link between articulatory setting (Honikman 1964, Laver 1980) and stylistic practice. I show that raised variants of the LOT vowel and velarized variants of word-initial /l/, both characterized by retraction of the tongue dorsum, are used in tandem by adolescent speakers in the construction of an embodied style characterized by toughness. Data come from a year-long ethnography of a public arts high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, where students split their time between academic classes and one of twelve arts disciplines (e.g., dance, theatre, orchestra). One of these disciplines, technical theater or 'tech,' is distinct from the others in that students engage in manual labor, using professional-grade equipment to construct sets for school productions and events. These students self-describe and are described by peers as 'rowdy' 'assholes' who wear black clothes and work boots, producing a cumulative image of tech students as 'badass' and 'tough.' Acoustic analyses of interview data from 24 students indicate that tech speakers produce higher LOT tokens and more velarized /l/ variants than their non-tech peers. Because raised LOT and velarized /l/ are both characterized by the backing and raising of the tongue dorsum, I suggest that these students rely more generally on a retracted articulatory setting, and that this articulatory setting is in turn part of indexing toughness.Publication Copycats, ja dom shouf: Using hip hop to compare lexical replications in Danish and Swedish multiethnolects(2018-10-15) Young, NathanIn the contact scenarios of late-modern urban Europe, a complex interplay of predictors determine each output in the variety. They include substrate inputs, superstrate structure, social conditions, diachrony, and more; they are elusive and hard to isolate. However, if one was to attempt to isolate them, the Nordic multiethnolects would be a befitting start point because their languages, social structures, and origins of their migrants are similar. Diachrony is where they differ most: Swedish represents a later-stage muliethnolect; Danish, earlier. In this study, I compare lexical replications in Danish and Swedish hip hop because it features multiethnolect in its most flamboyant style. Hip hop is a de facto empirical isolation of the upper limits of community-accepted replication. I analyzed a corpus of 22 Danish (13,086 words) and 34 (15,668) Swedish 'hit' rap songs and found that the Swedish artists use nearly double the number of foreign lexical replications than the Danish artists. Furthermore, a higher number of Swedish replications (32) were used by >10% of the artists than Danish replications (14). High-use Danish replications were solely nouns and exclamations/tags. High-use Swedish replications included nouns, exclamations/tags, adjectives, verbs, and the first-person pronoun 'benim.' After closer analysis, I define 'benim' as a first-person 'egohonorific' pronoun and offer an explanation on its origin and social-indexical function. I argue that Swedish multiethnolect is 'richer' than Danish multiethnolect both in terms of level of replication as well as types of replications. The study provides fresh insight on two neighboring multiethnolects that have formed under similar conditions save for diachrony.Publication The FOOT-STRUT vowels in Manchester: Evidence for the diachronic precursor to the split?(2018-10-15) Baranowski, Maciej; Turton, DanielleThis study presents a large-scale investigation of sociolinguistic variation in the phonetic realisation and phonemic status of FOOT and STRUT in Manchester English. As a Northern dialect of English, Manchester speakers typically lack the distinction between the FOOT and STRUT vowels, such that 'stud' and 'stood' are homophones. The data in the present study reveal that, despite the vast majority of speakers having no difference in production and perception, there is variation both in the phonemic status and the phonetic realisation of the two vowel classes within the speech community. The study is based on the acoustic analysis of a sample of 123 speakers stratified by age, gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity, recorded in sociolinguistic interviews, supplemented with wordlist reading and minimal-pair tests. Our approach to the analysis considers the vowel classes both as one phoneme, and as the two split lexical sets. The acoustic measurements reveal that tokens in the STRUT category show a monotonic pattern of social class stratification, with higher social classes showing higher F1 values, i.e., having a lower tongue position. The minimal-pair tests of the FOOT-STRUT distinction reveal that although for most speakers there is no phonemic distinction, for 8 speakers in the two highest socio-economic levels in the sample, the two vowels do form separate categories. This is confirmed by the acoustic measurements of their vowel tokens: there is clear phonetic separation between the two vocalic categories in phonetic space. Interestingly, even when these 8 speakers are removed from the sample, regression analysis shows that for the sample as a whole, vowel category (i.e., STRUT vs. FOOT) continues to have a significant effect, with STRUT tokens having a higher F1 mean (lower tongue position). This holds in cases where there is complete overlap between the two vowels in phonetic space. We explore the possibility that this may be due to the different phonological environment in which the two vowel classes tend to be found and that it may shed light on the underlying mechanisms of the historical split between the two vowel classes in the south of England.Publication Why the Long FACE?: Ethnic Stratification and Variation in the London Diphthong System(2018-10-15) Gates, Shivonne M.This study attempts to challenge the monolithic representation of race and ethnicity in multicultural contexts in the UK. Whilst there are various descriptions of ethnic varieties of British English (e.g., Kirkham 2012, Rampton 2006, Sebba 1993, Sharma 2011), our understanding of race and ethnicity in the UK and its role in language variation and change is still rather limited. Recent work on Multicultural London English (MLE) found some evidence of ethnic stratification; for example, "non-Anglo" boys were often more likely to use innovative linguistic features (Cheshire et al. 2011). Despite this, MLE is described as an "ethnically-neutral variable repertoire" (Cheshire et al. 2013). In order to shed light on the dynamics of race and ethnicity in multicultural contexts, the present study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine a different diverse inner London adolescent community. Data were gathered at Riverton Secondary School, a multi-ethnic school in a diverse borough of East London, from 27 Year Ten students (aged 14-15). Sociophonetic analyses of FACE and PRICE reveal stark gender differences in vowel production, as well as some ethnic stratification. For example, White British girls have much longer FACE trajectories, as well as a lower, more centralised onset. However, the picture is complicated by the fact that adolescents’ constructions of ethnic identity are inextricably linked to friendship networks, orientation to school, and notions of localness and Britishness. Results complement previous findings in London, but also shine an important light on the relevance of ethnicity in multicultural British contexts.