Journal Issue: Selected Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 43
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10/01/2015
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Publication Perceiving Personae: Effects of Social Information on Perceptions of TRAP-backing(2015-10-01) D'Onofrio, AnnetteStudies have shown that perceived macro-social categories like location of origin, age and class can influence listeners’ perceptions of linguistic variables. Other work in sociolinguistics has demonstrated that variables can index multiple social meanings, often associable with personae that are more specific and complex than macro-social categories. This paper brings together these lines of inquiry, testing how persona-based social information influences linguistic expectations in a vowel categorization task. The experiment examines multiple social meanings of one sociolinguistic variable: the backing of the TRAP vowel. By virtue of its patterning in California, TRAP-backing has social meanings related to macro-social Californian location of origin, as well as to Californian social types like the Valley Girl. The feature has separately been associated with professional, formal personae. In a vowel categorization task, listeners categorized continua of ambiguous auditory words as either containing a TRAP vowel (e.g., SACK) or a LOT vowel (e.g., SOCK). Prior to the task, listeners were either told that the speaker was from California (macro-social information), the speaker had ‘been described as’ a Valley Girl, or a Business Professional (persona-based information), or they were not given any speaker information (Baseline). Listeners in both the macro-social and persona-based information conditions were more likely to respond to a given token as TRAP than listeners in the Baseline condition, indicating an expectation of TRAP-backing created by all three social meanings of the feature. The effect was strongest in the Business Professional condition overall, but when the token was particularly backed, the Business Professional effect disappeared, while a strong effect emerged in the Valley Girl condition. These findings demonstrate that persona-based information about a speaker can lead listeners to expect an associated linguistic feature as strongly, if not more strongly, than macro-social information. Crucially, the strength of the effect depends upon the phonetic manifestation of the variable, among other aspects of the speaker voice, listener background, and situational context.Publication English Prosody and Native American Ethnic Identity(2015-10-01) Newmark, Kalina; Walker, Nacole; Stanford, JamesAcross the continent, many Native American and Canadian First Nations people are linguistically constructing a shared ethnic identity through English dialect features. Although many tribes and regions have their own localized English features (e.g., Leap 1993, Bowie et al. 2013, Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998, Coggshall 2008), we suggest that certain features may be shared across much wider distances, particularly prosodic features. Our study is based on cultural insiders’ research, analysis, and interpretation of data recorded in Native communities on Standing Rock Reservation, Northwest Territories, Canada, and among the Native community at Dartmouth (Hanover, New Hampshire). By investigating speakers from diverse tribes and regions, we find evidence that Native identity is indexed to English prosodic features: contour pitch accent (L*+H), high-rising, mid, or high-falling terminals, lengthened utterance-final syllables, and syllable timing. In this way, modern Native Americans are using English, a foreign language, to construct a shared ethnic identity across vast distances.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.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 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 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 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 Shtreets of Philadelphia: An Acoustic Study of /str/-retraction in a Naturalistic Speech Corpus(2015-10-01) Gylfadottir, DunaThis paper examines a relatively understudied sociolinguistic variable in English, the retraction of (str) (e.g., street pronunouced as shtreet), using a corpus of Philadelphia speakers spanning more than a century of apparent time. Using automated acoustic methods on naturalistic data allowed (str)-retraction to be evaluated for 225 speakers. Center of gravity measurements for /s/ in (str) were normalized to each speaker’s sibilant space. The results show a clear trend toward retraction of (str) in apparent time, something that no study of American English (str)-retraction has demonstrated so far. Many of the speakers in the data show evidence of phonological reanalysis of /s/ in (str) as /sh/. Lastly, evidence is given that sheds light on the plausibility of competing theories of the origins of (str)-retraction, and some connections are made that allow us to make a first approach toward understanding this variable’s social evaluation in Philadelphia.
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