Journal Issue: Selected Papers from NWAV 49
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09/19/2022
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Publication Sociolinguistic Factors of Mandarin-English Codeswitching: Language Attitudes, Age, and Other Factors Used for Computational Modeling(2022-09-19) Yi, IreneThis paper explores the sociolinguistic predictors of Mandarin-English codeswitching, and also tests such patterns against current syntactic constraints of codeswitching. By doing so, I demonstrate the value of incorporating sociolinguistic factors as predictors into computational models of codeswitching, explored in a companion paper (Yi 2022). The study presented here draws from novel data collected from 12 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers from Grand Rapids, Michigan. These speakers come from two generations, correlated with their age and immigration history. Speakers participated in sociolinguistic interviews that were designed to elicit codeswitching in narrative-style responses on a variety of topics, including family, school, and culture. Participants also answered metalinguistic questions about their own language practices and attitudes and completed a written Language History Questionnaire (LHQ) (Li et al. 2020), which asked for self-evaluations of language habits (proficiency, immersion, and dominance in the two languages). LHQ responses were then quantified into “scores” that served as sociolinguistic predictors for the companion paper (Yi 2022). Patterns found in this novel Mandarin-English data frequently, and potentially systematically, violate many of the currently proposed syntactic constraints on codeswitching (which mainly come from research on Spanish-English bilinguals), implying that the constraints may not be universal, and that new avenues should be considered for understanding the morphosyntax of bilingual codeswitching.Publication Multiple Social Routes: Connecting Stance Accretion to Aggregate Variation(2022-09-19) Forrest, JonConnecting individual-level stylizations to group patterns is a central concern of sociolinguistics (Eckert 2008, Labov 1963). One proposed route is through a process of accretion, where linguistic features used for stances like “toughness” or “friendliness” accrue over time to the identities of the speakers who use them, gaining higher-order indexical associations with group identities like “working class” or “Southern” (Eckert 2008). To test the hypothesis of stance accretion, this paper uses data from speakers from a single workplace in the U.S. South, where Southern features are currently receding. The overarching question is whether stance-level deployments of Southern linguistic features align with aggregate-level patterns. The dataset for this analysis is drawn from self-recorded audio collected by 16 workers of varying occupational levels at Southern Tech, a technology firm in the greater Raleigh, NC area. To gather audio data, each participant wore a recorder during their normal workday, resulting in a minimum of one hour of conversational data at work, as well as a minimum of one hour of conversational data from a casual setting. Acoustic analyses were conducted on vowels implicated in the SVS in the aggregate. In addition, three speakers with extensive self-recording data were selected to examine individuals’ token-level stylization, looking especially for statistical outliers (Van Hofwegen 2017). Aggregate-level results show that speakers who hold managerial positions within the firm show more Southern vowels, regardless of context. When looking at individuals’ highly stylized tokens, analysis shows that non-Southern vowels are deployed when speakers position themselves as professionals while in a work context. Southern vowels are deployed to indicate stances of friendliness in all recording contexts, but these never occur in interactions where authority or professionalism are required. These results suggest that indexical associations between the SVS and friendliness and professionalism may be driven by stance, but other local meanings, like managerial status at the firm, are not. Associations between Southern vowels and managerial positions may instead result from organizational-level practices (Rivera 2012), rather than stance-driven interactions. Implications are discussed for the mechanisms of maintenance and change for community-level patterns of social class.Publication Towards an Empirically-based Model of Age-graded Behaviour: Trac(ing) linguistic malleability across the entire adult life-span(2022-09-19) Mechler, Johanna; Grama, James; Bauernfeind, Lea; Eiswirth, Mirjam; Buchstaller, IsabellePrevious panel research has provided individual evidence for aspects of the U-shaped pattern, but these studies typically rely on sampling the same speaker at two points in time, usually in close proximity. As a result, our knowledge about the patterning of age-graded variables across the entire adult life-span is limited. What is needed, thus, is a data-set that captures ongoing linguistic malleability in the individual speaker across all “life experiences that give age meaning” (Eckert 1997:167). Our study is the first to add real time evidence across the lifespan as a whole on an age-graded variable. We present the results of a novel dynamic data-set that allows us to model speakers’ linguistic choices between ages 19 and 78. We illustrate the age-graded patterns in our data and draw attention to the complex, socially niched ways in which speakers react to age-specific expectations.Publication Conditioned Variation: Children Replicate Contrasts, not Parental Variant Rate(2022-09-19) Nowenstein, Iris E; Ingason, Anton K; Wallenberg, JoelOne of the fundamental questions within developmental sociolinguistics, and language acquisition research more broadly, has to do with children’s reaction to variability in their input or primary linguistic data (e.g. Labov 1989, Yang 2002, Hudson Kam and Newport 2005, Smith et al. 2009, Cournane and Pérez-Leroux 2020). As has been extensively documented, children overgeneralize and regularize both consistent (Marcus et al. 1992) and inconsistent (Hudson Kam and Newport 2005) input. Despite this tendency to go beyond the input, we do expect children to learn their caregivers’ dialect, and they have in fact been known to match the rates of variation found in their environment (Labov 1989, Johnson and White 2019). The literature therefore shows both regularization and matching, but under different circumstances. In this paper, we argue for a third scenario and present a case where children neither regularize nor match their caregiver. Instead, they replicate the systematic contrasts they encounter and regularize within matched conditions. This is what happens in the acquisition of Icelandic Dative Substitution (DS), a stigmatized but widespread instance of grammatically conditioned morphosyntactic variation. We investigated DS in 99 children aged 3–13 and their caregivers (80 dyads) by using forced-choice tasks and grammaticality judgments across multiple items as a proxy for case use. The results show that caregivers’ general DS rate did not predict the rate at which their children selected DS, regardless of age. On the other hand, when analyzing the data within conditioning factors, we found that children replicate the contrasts present in their caregivers’ speech, both at the group and individual level, and that this was in part dependent on age.Publication The Effect of Vowel Height on the Nasalization of Postposed Determiners in Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen)(2022-09-19) Legerme, ChristopherResults from variationist analyses suggest that Haitian Creole (HC) is on the cusp of a change to the morphophonological organization of its postposed determiner clitic, LA. Speakers systematically surface nasal forms of LA in the absence of the expected conditioning environment, that is, the systematic surfacing of the nasal forms following oral nuclei according to language internal and external (social) motivators. In this study, I coded independent linguistic factors for 9,789 tokens of LA following an oral syllable. Tokens were automatically retrieved from transcribed data provided by the IARPA Babel Haitian Creole Language Pack (Andrus et al. 2017). This yielded 847 tokens of nasal variants following oral syllables. My analysis of oral versus nasal variants of LA suggests an overwhelming preference for high contexts (i.e., preceding [+high] nucleus) which I argue is due to the historical loss of a high nasal contrast in the language. To overcome this preference and glean reliable information about the patterning of nasalized LA after oral syllables, we must isolate non-high from high contexts. In doing so, we can better illustrate the rising popularity of the nasal variants over time and affirm the change taking place in HC postposed determiners.Publication An Analysis of the Yeísmo Merger in Córdoba, Argentina: A synchronic co-existence of all diachronic processes of lleísmo to yeísmo sound change(2022-09-19) Archer, Carolina; Regan, BrendanWhen two phonemes merge in a language, this does not entail that each language variety follows the same allophonic changes thereafter. One such case is the merger of lleísmo into yeísmo, which displays great allophonic variation across varieties of Spanish. In Buenos Aires Spanish, this merger has undergone allophonic change to a voiceless prepalatal fricative (Chang 2008, Fontanella de Weinberg 1978, Rohena-Madrazo 2015). Córdoba, however, appears to maintain a voiced prepalatal fricative (Colantoni 2001, Lang-Rigal 2015, Supisiche 1994). The current study examines (pre)palatal consonant variation in Córdoba to shed light into social and linguistic rationales for similar or distinct paths of sound change between dialect varieties. As no single acoustic measure distinguishes the multiple variants, the authors developed a replicable classification by coding each token based on known acoustic cues. 13,015 tokens of syllable-initial and produced by 65 speakers (37 women, 28 men) in a four-part sociolinguistic interview (semi-directed conversation, passage reading, word list, picture-naming task) were subject to mixed effect logistic regressions. The study finds that the speech of Córdoba presents five different variants, including the maintenance of the two-phoneme lleísmo distinction among older speakers in more formal styles, as well as four allophonic variants of yeísmo. Different from Buenos Aires, the dominant norm in Córdoba remains the voiced prepalatal fricative, although the voiceless prepalatal fricative is favored by women from wealthier neighborhoods. Thus, Córdoba presents a synchronic coexistence of all diachronic processes of the lleísmo to yeísmo sound change, indicatingeither a possible change from above (Labov 2001) towards the devoiced porteño norm or perhaps a maintenance of the voiced variant among most of its population due to Córdoba’s desire to preserve a unique identity from the capital (Bischoff 1979).Publication Ideologies of Intelligibility Onscreen: The Sociolinguistics of Intralingual Subtitling(2022-09-19) Yu, Jessie; Purtill, Molly; Carroll, Lily; Carter, Sara; Taylor, Jessica; Walker, AbbyIntralingual subtitling—specifically, translation of audio in one language into non-optional text of the same language—can be used when a speaker’s dialect is considered difficult for target audiences to understand. Thus, these subtitles and the commentary surrounding them offer insights into ideologies of within-language intelligibility. In the present study, we investigate such ideologies from two approaches: by documenting how intralingual subtitles are being used in practice in two reality-based, US cooking shows, and by looking at published complaints about intralingual subtitles (primarily in US/UK English contexts). We find more subtitles for L2-English vs. L1-English speakers in the shows, and metacommentary around subtitling similarly suggests that L1-English subtitling is perceived as more salient and offensive, reflecting broader associations of unintelligibility with non-native speech. The use of subtitles for L1 English outside of noisy environments appears to be limited to certain varieties, such as Scottish or Indian English, suggesting that some L1 varieties of English can be acceptably codified as unintelligible. While the purpose of intralingual subtitles is ostensibly to facilitate communication and have been framed in the literature as tools for breaking down boundaries, both the practice and commentary around these subtitles highlight the largely negative connotations of marking someone as unintelligible.Publication Adjusting to the New Normal(ization): Adapting Atlas of North American English Benchmarks to Lobanov-Normalized Data(2022-09-19) Dinkin, Aaron JThe Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) defines criteria for participation in certain dialect features in terms of formant benchmarks; e.g., a speaker is considered to have a raised TRAP vowel if their mean normalized F1 of TRAP is less than 700 Hz. Other researchers often compare their own findings to these benchmarks; but the majority of recent research in North American sociophonetics uses the Lobanov (1971) method to normalize formant measurements, producing values that are formally incomparable with Atlas benchmarks. This paper proposes a method of transforming benchmarks into Lobanov-comparable values. Benchmarks are expressed as z-scores relative to the entire Atlas corpus of normalized formant measurements, whose mean F1 is 650.7 Hz (s.d. 150.0 Hz) and mean F2 is 1595.5 Hz (s.d. 435.2 Hz). Thus, for example, a benchmark of 700 Hz in F1 is converted to 0.329 in Lobanov terms. This method is evaluated by comparing the effectiveness of the Lobanov-transformed benchmarks at distinguishing dialect regions to that of the original Atlas benchmarks. Fourteen such benchmarks are evaluated against three isogloss parameters; in 76% of cases, the Lobanov-transformed benchmarks are at least as effective as the original Atlas benchmarks at characterizing the Atlas' dialect regions. Therefore, this transformation can be recommended for researchers who want to compare Lobanov-normalized data to Atlas benchmarks.Publication Intralinguistic and Crosslinguistic Variation in the Turn-taking Organization Between Deaf-blind Signers: new evidence from Bay Islands Sign Language(2022-09-19) Rocketship, Fae; Ali, Kristian; Braithwaite, BenThis paper examines the turn-taking organization between two deaf-blind signers of Bay Islands Sign Language (BISL) and discusses how this language presents unique intra- and cross-linguistic variation. Following the framework of conversation analysis adapted to tactile sign languages, a case study was done on an extract of a conversation in the BISL corpus. One area of intra-linguistic variation is influenced by whether signers can perceive the language visually as well as tactilely. Signers use non-manual markers like nodding to backchannel when interacting with others who may be able to perceive them visually, but tactile-proprioceptive backchanneling techniques with blind interlocutors. Variation is also influenced by the type of co-formation employed by the signer. Cross-linguistically, this paper introduces several features which differ from previous descriptions of tactile languages. BISL signers are seen to nod with conversational purpose. Also, a novel technique for turn yielding in BISL involving throwing the hands of the interlocutor in the air has not been previously documented. The particular demographics and social history of the BISL community seem to be responsible for a number of features which differ from other tactile languages.Publication Creaky, She Spoke: Examining f0, Vocal Creak, and Perceptions of Young Women’s Professionalism(2022-09-19) Conner, Katie ARecent sociolinguistic work on creak (also known as vocal fry, vocal creak, and creaky voice) has generally focused on its gendered use and perceptions, and more specifically on creak and young women. While Yuasa (2010) found creaky young women to be perceived as “educated, professional, and upwardly mobile” (p.316) sounding, Anderson et al. (2014) and Gallino and Pinto (2021) found the opposite in that creaky young women were perceived to be “less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hireable” (p.5). However, all of these works consider creak in isolation, eschewing analyses that examine creak in tandem with other linguistic variables. As voices are perceived as a whole unit, and not singular linguistic features, this leads to an incomplete understanding of the ways in which listeners might perceive creak differently when it is paired with other features such as f0, prosody, and phonetic variation related to dialect, etc. Work examining creak interacting with other linguistic features will provide better understanding for how, when, and why creak is perceived in specific ways by listeners. This study interrogates whether there is an interaction between f0 and creak that might affect professionalism perceptions of speakers and, additionally, how a listeners’ speech attitudes about women and creak might mediate f0 and creak’s effects on professionalism ratings. 125 participants rated stimuli produced by five young white women from the Midland region sourced from the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2004) on six Likert scales: professional, attractive, friendly, feminine, educated, and authoritative. Additionally, participants completed a set of workplace and women’s speech attitudes Likert scale measures (e.g., “to be successful in the workplace, young women should change how they speak to sound more professional”). The presence of creak in stimuli was determined via impressionistic listening and examining spectrograms in Praat. Factor analysis showed that ratings for the six traits patterned into two factors: “Competence” and “Warmth”. These two factors were used as dependent measures in linear mixed effects regression models, with average ratings for both factors as the dependent variables. The Competence model included main effects for Workplace Sexism attitudes (p<.001) and f0 (p<.01), but failed to reproduce findings from the aforementioned previous studies with regards to creak. This study supports previous work by Parker and Borie (2017) that calls for more nuanced and complex analyses of creak moving forward, and the need to move beyond attempting to examine creak as a variable in isolation. It also points to the possibility that the indeterminacy of previous findings on creak and social meaning can be attributed, in part, to differences in experimental design.