Journal Issue: Selected Papers from NWAV 41
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10/17/2013
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Publication Ethnicity and Sound Change: African American English in Charleston, SC(2013-10-17) Baranowski, MaciejThis study investigates the degree to which African Americans participate in the sound changes currently in progress in the dialect of Charleston, South Carolina. It is based on a sample of 60 African Americans native to the area, recorded during sociolinguistic interviews; spontaneous speech is supplemented with word list reading and minimal-pair tests. The speech of 20 of the informants has been analyzed acoustically. The paper focuses on two sets of sound changes found earlier in the white population, three vocalic mergers: the cot-caught merger, the pin-pen merger, the beer-bear merger, and the fronting of the back upgliding vowels /uw/ and /ow/, as in two, goose, and so, goat, respectively, and compares the progress of the changes in the two populations. The oldest generation of African American Charlestonians share the distinctive features of the traditional dialect, such as very back /ow/, with the oldest white speakers. The younger generations, however, are not participating in the fronting of the back vowels advanced by white Charlestonians. The two groups are acquiring the cot-caught merger and the pin-pen merger, but African Americans are more conservative in the unmerging of the bear-bear merger found in the traditional Charleston dialect, now largely unmerged in the white population.Publication Retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh, NC: Social Factors(2013-10-17) Dodsworth, RobinNew automated methods for large-scale acoustic analysis bring expanded opportunities for investigating social factors influencing variation and change in vowel systems. This paper explores social factors in a 108-speaker subset of a 250-speaker conversational corpus from Raleigh, North Carolina, where the community has shifted in nearly uniform fashion from a Southern vowel system to an aregional standard system. Age, occupation, parents' occupation, sex, and neighborhood are evaluated using linear mixed-effects models, with Z2-Z1 for each of the 5 front vowels as a separate dependent variable. While there are some significant occupational effects, year of birth is the strongest and most consistent social factor, indicating considerable uniformity during the course of change. Adding more speakers from the corpus will facilitate the use of other socioeconomic variables such as education level as well as finer-grained occupation variables, which may provide insight as to the mechanisms by which professional speakers lead the shift.Publication TH-stopping in New York City: Substrate Effect Turned Ethnic Marker?(2013-10-17) Newlin-Łukowicz, LuizaTH-stopping, reported in the speech of working-class and immigrant groups across the U.S., has long been considered a regional feature of New York City English (NYCE). Its origins in NYCE have been anecdotally attributed to the non-native speech of the first immigrants to the area, such as the Irish, Italians, and Poles (Babbitt 1896, Labov 1966). This paper seeks to provide conceptual and acoustic evidence for substrate origins of TH-stopping in one ethnic community in New York City. I analyze interdental fricatives produced by bilingual Polish Americans who were born in NYC (Generation 2) or have resided there since their early teens (Generation 1). An acoustic analysis of underlying and “substituted” stops reveals that the latter employ the Polish voicing contrast. Stopping rates are also found to vary according to style, generation, and gender. Specifically, TH-stopping is favored in sociolinguistic interviews (relative to reading tasks), and in the speech of first generation men and second generation women. Lastly, speakers’ cultural orientation and use of Polish correlate strongly with stopping rates. Taken together, these results suggest that TH-stopping in the Polish community did originate as a substrate effect, but has since developed into a female-led ethnic marker.Publication Changing Pronunciation but Stable Social Evaluation?(2013-10-17) Thøgersen, Jacob; Pharao, NicolaiThe study of phonetic variation and change in sociolinguistics predominantly focuses on ‘the vernacular’ or at least on speech occurring in spontaneous conversations. While such studies are obviously vital to understand the patterns of change in a speech community, it is also desirable to understand how patterns of variation and change develop in a ‘prestige’ standard language which may function as a model for normative language. In order to study on-going sound change in standard spoken Danish and their socio-linguistic consequences, the paper investigates the production of a series of front vowels in the news broadcasts of the national Danish radio, DR, arguably the model for the ‘best’ language to the majority of speakers of Danish. The study focuses on changes in the production of two vowel variables, the short (a) and long (æ:), by studying their position in the vowel space relative to neighboring vowels as well as relating these results to the realization of (a) and (æ:) as observed in sociolinguistic interviews. These variables are of particular interest because they have been discussed as emblematic of substandard pronunciation for generations, and because the social evaluation of the raised variants may be changing considerably in the present.Publication A Tale of Two Cities: Community Density and African American English Vowels(2013-10-17) Kohn, Mary; Farrington, CharlieThough variation in the African American Vowel System (AAVS) has been recognized in many communities throughout the US (Thomas 2007, Yaeger-Dror and Thomas 2010), the social and socio-geographic correlates of this system remain underexplored. To examine this issue, we compare front lax vowel production for fourteen young adult women between the ages of 20 and 22 from two communities in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Durham and Chapel Hill differ both in population size and in formal measures of segregation. The African American community in Durham is both larger and more dense than the African American community in Chapel Hill. Participants also differed in their post high school activity, here called educational profile. Three participants directly entered the workforce out of high school, six attended Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and five attended community colleges or certificate programs. While front lax vowels are raised in the AAVS, these same vowels are lowering among European Americans in the region (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012). Results indicate that Chapel Hill participants have lower BAT vowel classes than Durham participants, potentially reflecting greater participation in European American sound changes. HBCU participants do not always pattern with community cohorts and vary widely in their level of participation in the AAVS. Socio-geographic factors such as spatial segregation and community density likely contribute to differences in inter-community studies of the AAVS, but the relationship between educational profile and participation is not straight-forward.Publication Lexical Frequency and Syntactic Variation: A Test of a Linguistic Hypothesis(2013-10-17) Bayley, Robert; Greer, Kristen; Holland, CoryThe role of lexical frequency in language variation and change has received considerable attention in recent years. Recently Erker and Guy (2012) extended the analysis of frequency effects to morphosyntactic variation. Based on data from 12 Dominican and Mexican speakers from Otheguy and Zentella’s (2012) New York City Spanish corpus, they examined the role of frequency in variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPP). Their results suggest that frequency either activates or amplifies the effects of other constraints such as co-reference. This paper attempts to replicate Erker and Guy’s study with a data set of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American Spanish. Analysis of more than 8,600 tokens shows that frequency has only a small effect on SPP use. In separate analyses of frequent and non-frequent verb forms, fewer constraints reach significance with frequent verb forms only than with non-frequent forms only. Moreover, in cases where constraints reach significance in both analyses, effects are stronger with non-frequent than with frequent forms. Finally, when all verb forms are combined in a single analysis, non-frequent forms are significantly more likely than frequent forms to co-occur with overt SPPs. We conclude that claims about frequency effects in SPP variation should be treated with caution and that further analyses are needed to establish whether models incorporating frequency can be extended to this area of the grammar.Publication Social Evaluation of Asian Accented English(2013-10-17) Bauman, CarinaThis paper examines evaluations of Asian accented English by American listeners. Despite widely circulating stereotypes about Asian accents, and the substantial body of work on attitudes toward different language varieties, relatively few studies have looked at American attitudes toward Asian accented English, and those that exist have produced rather ambiguous results. In an online survey, respondents from across the United States rated different voices on several traits grouped into three dimensions: Attractiveness, Status, and Dynamism. Three different Accent Conditions were tested: Mainstream US English [MUSE], Asian Accented English [AA], and Brazilian Portuguese Accented English [BP]. Results indicate generally negative evaluations of Asian accented English. RM ANOVAs (N = 69) reveal that AA voices were rated significantly lower than MUSE voices on all dimensions, and significantly lower than BP voices on Attractiveness and Dynamism. Even on intelligence, a trait that forms a cornerstone of the ‘Model Minority’ stereotype of Asian Americans, AA voices were rated significantly lower than the other two groups. There were also differences according to Speaker Gender, with a tendency for female speakers in the AA and BP conditions to be rated more favorably than male speakers. Overall, this study provides important evidence of the significant attitudinal obstacles that anyone who speaks English with an Asian accent in the US is likely to encounter, and points to the need for further work that explores the social and linguistic factors behind accent bias.Publication Preface(2013-10-17) Freeman, AaronThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. This volume contains selected papers from the 41st NWAV Conference, held from October 25-28, 2012 at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Thanks go to Christopher Ahern, Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Sunghye Cho, Eric Doty, Aaron Ecay, Sabriya Fisher, Amy Goodwin Davies, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Hilary Prichard, Kobey Shwayder, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, and Elizabeth Sneller, for help in editing, uploading, and general support. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. As of September 2013, the entire back catalog has been digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below: Mielke, Jeff. 2013. Ultrasound and Corpus Study of a Change from Below: Vowel Rhoticity in Canadian French. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 19.2: Proceedings of NWAV 41, ed. A. Freeman, 141-150. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol19/iss2/17 Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers. The PWPL editors can be contacted at: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 619 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305 working-papers@ling.upenn.edu http://ling.upenn.edu/papers/pwpl.html Aaron Freeman Issue EditorPublication Locating Style: Style-shifting to Characterize Community at the Border of Washington, D.C.(2013-10-17) Grieser, JessicaWhile a number of sociolinguistic studies have examined intraspeaker variation and how it allows a speaker to negotiate identities related to class, much of the existing work on speakers and their physically-delimited communities has focused on interspeaker variation. The present study examines (th) and (dh)-stopping in two sociolinguistic interviews conducted as part of the Language and Communication in the District of Columbia (LCDC) project (Schilling and Podesva 2008). It examines topic-related style-shifting in two African American speakers, matched for age, from one neighborhood in the District of Columbia known for its high integration and cross-racial acceptance. As Washington, D.C. is a city whose rate of racial segregation is increasing (US Census 2010), I argue that these speakers use this ethnoracially-marked phonological variant in topic-based style shifting as a means of aligning with the race-neutral identity of the community of Takoma. Statistical results, supported by discourse analyses of the content of both speakers' talk, reveal that both speakers vary their rates of the stopped variant to contrast constructed dialogue of Takoma residents and non-Takoma residents and in talk about their relationships with their community in ways which reinforce the indexical links they make between themselves and the reification of Takoma as racially-neutral, integrated space. Many studies have shown that processes understood to be indexical of racial and class identities on an interspeaker level also function on an intraspeaker level (e.g. Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994). This study provides evidence that speakers' indexical relationships to their physical community can be studied at the level of the individual speaker as well.Publication Age of Second Dialect Acquisition and Linguistic Practice Across Ethno-racial Boundaries in the Urban Midwest(2013-10-17) Fix, SonyaWhile use of a racially and/or ethnically marked variety by an outsider is often interpreted as an act of linguistic crossing or linguistic appropriation, this paper adopts a second dialect acquisition perspective to account for instances of use of ethnically-marked dialect features by individual speakers in situations of inter-racial/ethnic contact: white women with significant social, kinship, and residential contact with African Americans in Columbus, Ohio. Linguistic data are obtained from sociolinguistic interviews and interactive speech data from white adult female speakers who participate in similar types of dense African American social networks, but differ from one another with regard to their use of morphosyntactic and phonological features associated with their second dialect, African American English (AAE), and the ages at which they began to have significant contact with native speakers of AAE, which range from early childhood to early adulthood. This paper’s general finding—that age of acquisition (AoA) of AAE matters among adult whites who use AAE-linked features—is supported by numerous previous studies that address SDA across other various other social, regional, and national boundaries (cf. Siegel 2010). However, AoA is found to impact speakers’ current use of morphological and phonological features differently and in a way that is somewhat anomalous with the SDA literature. Across the sample, a statistically significant correlation is shown between speakers’ ages of acquisition and the qualitative range of AAE-linked morphosyntactic such that the lower the speaker’s age of acquisition, the wider the range and the higher the rates of AAE features used, but the same correlation is not found for speaker AoA and use of AAE-linked phonological features. The key to understanding the patterns of use of AAE-linked phonology lies with outliers within the sample who provide additional insight into the life circumstances beyond AoA that impact SDA attainment. By considering both speaker norms and outliers, the benefits and limitations of second dialect acquisition analysis of adult use of racially/ethnically marked features across ethno-racial boundaries is explored.
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