Journal Issue: Selected Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 43
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10/01/2015
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Publication A Convergence of Dialects in the St. Louis Corridor(2015-10-01) Friedman, Lauren A.In the study of dialect geography, boundaries of many types appear at the edges of dialects (ANAE, Dinkin 2013). However, the disruption of a dialect boundary at a single point by a non-linguistic change does not necessarily change the dialect boundary but creates a new type. The present study examines the influence of the Inland North dialect on the St. Louis Corridor, a geographically Midland area located between Chicago and St. Louis across the state of Illinois. The Corridor is also the home of Route 66, which in 1926 was the first paved highway in Illinois. In analyzing data from original interviews, the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006), and archival resources (Wood 1996), I situate the Inland North influence in time, namely for those born in the 1920’s through 1940’s. Based on corroborating evidence from population statistics, traffic patterns, and the history of Route 66, I demonstrate a timeline for Inland North influence and how it interacts with the Midland features. I also show that the Inland North influence rises and retreats alongside a major change in transportation patterns from water to land (cf. Trudgill 1974 for a similar dialectal change). Based upon the distinctions between the findings in this study and other situations of dialect boundaries, I propose a new boundary type: a dialect “breach.”Publication Multiple Mergers: Production and Perception of Three Pre-/l/ Mergers in Youngstown, Ohio(2015-10-01) Arnold, LaceyMergers have been a much-researched topic in sociolinguistics (e.g., Baranowski 2013, Thomas and Hay 2005, Hall-Lew 2013), including in pre-lateral contexts (Bowie 2000, Faber & Di Paolo 1995, Thomas 2001). However, aside from Thomas and Bailey’s (1992) study on “competing mergers” in Texas, little work has been done on the interaction among several mergers involving some of the same phonemes and occurring in the same contexts when they coexist in a given community. Even less research has addressed the role of perception in competing-merger contexts. This study examines the status of mergers among /ul/, /ol/, and /Ul/ in Youngstown, Ohio. Although at least three forms of the merger have been cited in this community—/ul/-/Ul/, /ol/-/Ul/, and /ul/-/ol/-/Ul/—not all speakers in the community are merged, and those who are merged do not all merge the same phonemes. Using acoustic analyses and multiple-forced-choice perception task results from 26 speakers from the Youngstown area ranging from ages 9-81, this project examines 1) whether these mergers are all progressing in production and/or perception (and at the same rate) in this region and whether production directly correlates with perception, 2) whether they are motivated by the same internal linguistic forces, 3) how the presence of multiple patterns of pre-/l/ merger affects both the realizations and progression of these variants in the community, and 4) whether there is evidence to suggest that alternative patterns of distinction are maintained in cases of qualitatively merged vowels. Acoustic analyses of F1 and F2 measured 25% into the vowel-liquid sequence, as well as multivariate statistical analyses, suggest that the /ol/-/Ul/ merger is progressing in apparent time, mainly with respect to F1, while the /ul/-/Ul/ merger is remaining relatively steady. Additionally, the /ul/-/Ul/ merger appears to exhibit features unique to Youngstown in that it is realized more closely to /ul/, unlike what has been typically described of this merger throughout the United States (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Triple mergers, on the other hand, are so scarce in the community that generalizations about the merger’s progression cannot be made. However, those who are triple merged realize the merger closer to /Ul/ than those merged only between /ol/ and /Ul/ or /ul/ and /Ul/. Initial analysis of perception data suggests that production does not directly correlate with perception, perhaps as a result of exposure to multiple patterns of merger. Though this region does not show a simultaneous progression of the three “competing mergers,” it does exhibit considerable inter-speaker variation that, though puzzling, allows for another angle from which to examine sound change.Publication The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree: Incremental Change in Philadelphia Families(2015-10-01) Fisher, Sabriya; Prichard, Hilary; Sneller, BetsyThis paper considers the relative influence of the family and peer group on an individual’s grammar in a comparison of three female undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Automatic vowel measurement is used to assess the degree of participation of these young women and their families in the local phonology. While each woman’s vowel system contains less markedly Philadelphian features than her family members’, in no case is there an abrupt jump from the Philadelphia system to an unmarked system. We therefore conclude that the phonological reorganization in progress in Philadelphia, specifically the emergence of the nasal short-a system, is accomplished via an intermediate weak-system stage.Publication Uptalk in Spanish Dating Shows?(2015-10-01) Vergara, DanielThe use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%. Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless, females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern that was not observed at all for men.Publication Investigating an Acoustic Measure of Perceived Isochrony in Conversation: Preliminary Notes on the Role of Rhythm in Turn Transitions(2015-10-01) Mooney, Shannon; Sullivan, Grace C.In a preliminary investigation of isochrony, the rhythmic integration of talk, we evaluated rhythmic phenomena previously theorized to coordinate turn-transitions for correlates in the acoustic signal. Rhythmic sequencing is one of many elaborate contextualization cues regarded as facilitating a successful turn-transition. Previous studies of rhythm in conversation have attended only to its perceptual and interactional facets. In addressing this gap, our study finds quantitative justification for such claims of rhythmic turn-taking. We selected for acoustic analysis the twelve non-task-based, dyadic conversations of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE). Following Marcus’s (1981) assertion that the onset of the vowel is the closest acoustically-measurable location to the perceptual center of the syllable where the rhythmic downbeat occurs, duration was measured between vowel onsets to create prosodic syllables. Not all prosodic syllables can contain a rhythmic beat, and those that can are characterized as “prominent” in nature (Couper-Kuhlen 1993). Out of 42,807 prosodic syllables measured, our methods yielded 15,972 prominent prosodic syllables. The units of duration between prominent syllables, hereafter intervals, were judged to form an isochronous sequence when the durations between at least three consecutive intervals varied by less than the conservative measure of the perceptual threshold for tolerance of isochrony, up to a 30% variance (Couper-Kuhlen 1993). This measure revealed 564 rhythmic sequences across the twelve SBCSAE conversations, which ranged in duration between one and ten seconds and consisted of up to eleven intervals. Of these, 208 or 37% appeared within turn-transitions, and results from our preliminary analysis indicated that rhythmic sequencing was significantly more likely to appear within a turn-transition than outside of one. Our analysis shows that isochrony is not simply perceptual in nature, but that it has a quantifiable correlate in the acoustic signal. Our findings of significant isochrony in the turn-transitions of the SBCSAE, a corpus often used in discourse analysis, confirms what many interactional sociolinguists have long argued: that rhythmic cues aid the coordination of talk between speakers in turn-transitions. We can confirm that these rhythmic cues are a component of turn-transitions not only perceptually, but acoustically as well.Publication The Effect of Salience on Co-variation in Brazilian Portuguese(2015-10-01) Oushiro, Livia; Guy, Gregory R.This paper analyzes cross-correlations among six variables of Brazilian Portuguese (the pronunciation of nasal /e/, coda r-retroflexion, coda r-deletion, NP agreement, 3rd person plural subject-verb agreement, and 1st person plural subject-verb agreement), with the objective of identifying constraints that promote the co-occurrence of sociolinguistic variants in individual speakers’ speech. We focus on the perspective of structural cohesion, and show that co-variability is conditioned not only by structural similarities among dependent variables (such as agreement processes or coda weakening), but also by general linguistic constraints that operate across multiple variables, such as phonic salience (Naro 1981, Scherre 1988, Naro et al. 1999). Finally, we suggest that markedness may be a more general linguistic principle underlying co-variation.Publication Partial Mergers and Near-Distinctions: Stylistic Layering in Dialect Acquisition(2015-10-01) Johnson, Daniel Ezra; Nycz, JenniferNon-mobile individuals living in a community undergoing a linguistic change usually display a pattern of variation where citation styles are more advanced than naturalistic styles with respect to the change in progress. This suggests that speakers' intentions or norms, while they may shift only gradually, can do so more easily than their productions. Two groups of 'mobile' speakers—adults who grew up in one dialect area and moved to another, and children who acquired one dialect at home and another in the community—showed the opposite pattern: spontaneous speech approximated the dialect of the second community more closely than did word-list productions. Analysis of these speakers' low back vowels (the LOT and THOUGHT word classes) also suggest that most adults can at least partially learn a vowel distinction as well as a merger, though children are able to do both things more quickly and completely.Publication Strong Necessity Modals: Four Socio-pragmatic Corpus Studies(2015-10-01) Glass, LeliaNeed to is less ambiguous than have to or got to about the source of the obligation; need to is said to require the obligation to stem from someone’s priorities or internal needs, whereas have to and got to can tie the obligation to any contextually plausible source. This paper investigates the social reasons that a speaker might choose or avoid the less ambiguous form. In view of the semantics of need to, the speaker who utters you need to unambiguously acts as if she is familiar with the hearer’s priorities and licensed to tell him what is good for him – a socially risky move. I therefore predict that you need to will be more appropriate and thus more common from people with knowledge about the relevant domain, people in authority over the hearer, and people who play a mentoring role in the hearer’s life because these people are more likely to be licensed to tell the hearer what is good for him in the context. I find evidence consistent with these predictions by investigating corpora that contain information about how the speaker and hearer relate to each other.Publication Ethnic Orientation without Quantification: How Life “On the Hyphen” Affects Sociolinguistic Variation(2015-10-01) Newlin-Łukowicz, LuizaThe effect of ethnicity on sociolinguistic variation has been studied quantitatively from multiple angles. The existing methodological range has uncovered that ethnicity is reflected in various aspects of social life. However, the diversity of existing measures has i) prevented a direct comparison between studies and ii) relied on subjective quantification of social data. This paper introduces a novel methodology that unites previous measures and removes the need for subjective quantification. Specifically, I apply hierarchical cluster analysis to social data collected from an ethnographically-informed Polish-involvement survey to assess the impact of multiple social factors on regional variation for Polish New Yorkers. The analysis identifies the maintenance of transnational ties as the strongest predictor of linguistic variation and reveals speakers’ “hyphenated” (Polish-American) identities.Publication Maintenance of the COT-CAUGHT Contrast Among Metro Detroit Speakers: A Multimodal Articulatory Analysis(2015-10-01) Havenhill, JonathanWhile the acoustic characteristics of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) are well documented, research on the articulatory component of this shift is comparatively limited. This study combines acoustic, video, and ultrasound analysis to examine the productions of six Metro Detroit speakers in order to determine the relative contributions of lip configuration and tongue position to the production of fronted COT and CAUGHT. NCVS speakers are found to exhibit variation with regard to how this change is achieved articulatorily. While some speakers distinguish CAUGHT from COT with a combination of tongue position and lip rounding, others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who maintain the contrast with only one articulatory gesture, COT and CAUGHT are acoustically more similar than for speakers who use multiple gestures.
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