Journal Issue: Selected Papers from NWAV 38
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11/06/2010
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Publication “It’s Not That Big (Of) a Deal”: The Sociolinguistic Conditioning of Inverted Degree Phrases in Washington, DC(2010-01-01) Nylund, Anastasia; Seals, CorinneThis paper examines the significance of participant assigned acceptability ratings for the post-adjectival degree construction ADJ (of/0) NP. The majority of studies in sociolinguistic variation have investigated phonological variables, such as alveolarization of (ing) and reduction or deletion of (t/d). Studies on syntactic variation often examine multiple realizations of a variable or the distribution of several variables. However, we base our study on Rickford et al.’s (1995) finding that syntactic variables can also be successfully isolated. In the present study, we describe a current change in progress involving a previously unstudied syntactic variable: post-adjectival (of) in degree constructions such as “It’s not that big (of) a deal.” We analyzed 3,600 tokens collected from 150 participants in the Washington, DC, area, and found significance in participant age, participant ethnicity, and the linguistic conditioning of the phrase, all affecting the acceptability rating given to the construction. Most notably, we found that acceptability of (of) is negatively correlated with age. The younger participants showed a strong preference for constructions with (of), whereas older informants overall preferred (0) constructions. Our findings suggest that this feature is part of an ongoing change in progress in Washington, DC.Publication Representations of Blackness by White Women: Linguistic Practice in the Community versus the Media(2010-01-01) Fix, SonyaUse of African American English features among whites with significant social contact with African Americans may signal familiarity and alignment with African American loved ones and peers. But larger cultural ideologies surrounding the use of an ethnically-marked language variety by a phenotypic outsider may cause a performance to be judged inauthentic, especially by those outside of speakers’ immediate intimate social networks. This paper examines the linguistic practices of urban white women from Columbus, Ohio with life-long affiliations and alignments with African Americans, and compares them to popular media depictions of “white women who act black.” Metalinguistic commentary from fieldwork suggests that the practices of these real-life speakers are assumed to match the social and linguistic practices of current popular television figures such as Buckwild from the Flavor of Love, and Rita, a character on the 2003 NBC sitcom Whoopi, both of whom create an iconic white female embodiment of blackness through use of selective syntactic, phonological, lexical, and discursive features of African American English. These media performances have generally been labeled as inauthentic. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between AAE features used by these media personalities and speech data gathered from the white women with African American ties in my subject sample indicate hyperperformance on the part of the media personas that surpasses the “real” community members.Publication Mapping Production and Perception in Regional Vowel Shifts(2010-01-01) Kendall, Tyler; Fridland, ValerieDrawing from data from a multi-region US vowel production and perception study, we investigate the extent to which vowel production and perception are related for talkers from Memphis, Tennessee. Focusing on the mid-front vowels and the variable degree of Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) exhibited productively by thirteen individuals, the study investigates the role of individual variation in perception. We show both that individuals who participate more strongly in the SVS have more shifted perceptual systems and that perceptual shift can operate somewhat independently from productive shift. We further consider our data in terms of the proposal by Sumner and Samuel (2009) that dialects should be understood as having three components, production, perception, and representation, and not simply in terms of production.Publication ‘Bad’ Grammar and the Language Faculty(2010-01-01) Chambers, J.K.Usage variables usually involve superficial aspects of linguistic structure, but those that are stable and persistent reach deeper into the language faculty. Two grammatical niceties of standard English that are frequently botched even by people who are nominally standard-bearers are Subject-Verb Agreement with dummy subjects (as in There's twelve months in a year for There are twelve months...) and Accusative Case Concord with Conjoined Pronouns (as in Between John and I, we won three games for Between John and me...). Unlike normal variation, the nonstandard variants are not seen as stylistic choices but as mistakes. These usage variables persist not because of failings of the education system but because of the futility of its expectations. The prescribed grammatical forms invoke scope mechanisms that tax human processing capabilities in specific structural configurations. Grammars prescribe forms that the language faculty cannot reliably produce in the multiple tasks involved in ordinary conversation. The discovery of cognitive limitations that override grammatical processing qualifies the strong version of Chomsky's concept of the Language Faculty as an autonomous 'mental organ', and the concept of grammatical processing as hierarchical rather than linear. The persistence of these unstable constructions as grammatical prescriptions reinforces key concepts in variation theory, especially Kroch's concept of standard grammars as ideologically-motivated social constructs.Publication The Gradient Nature of S-Lenition in Caleño Spanish(2010-01-01) File-Muriel, Richard J.; Brown, Earl K.Previous studies of s-weakening in Spanish have relied almost exclusively on the impressionistic coding of /s/. Not only is auditory transcription invariably influenced by the transcriber’s background, but temporal and gradient acoustic details about the sound are concealed when tokens are represented symbolically. The present study examines the production of /s/ by eight females from Cali, Colombia during informal sociolinguistic interviews. We propose a metric for quantifying s-realization by employing three scalar dependent variables: s-duration, centroid, and voicelessness. The results of linear regressions indicate that the dependent variables are significantly conditioned by local speaking rate, lexical frequency, stress, word position, and the preceding and following phonological contexts. This study sheds light on how each independent variable impacts s-realization acoustically. For example, as local speaking rate increases, duration, centroid, and voicelessness decrease, indicative of lenition. We discuss the advantages of opting for instrumental measurements over symbolic representation.Publication Linguistic Variation and Change in Atlanta, Georgia(2010-01-01) Prichard, HilaryIn spite of its unique position as a fast-growing urban metropolis in the heart of the South, little research has been conducted to uncover the effects of Atlanta’s rapid growth on the speech of its native population. This paper reports on variation and change in the speech of Atlanta, Georgia, which has occurred as a result of this growth, focusing on the current state of the Southern Shift. The evidence presented is limited to key vowel features, especially /ay/-monophthongization and the front chain shift. Drawing on regional data found in past projects (e.g., Labov et al. 2006, Montgomery and Nunnally 2008, Feagin 2003, Thomas 2001) and utilizing a variety of sociolinguistic methods, this paper analyzes a data set in which both apparent-time changes and variation can be observed. In order to more fully capture Atlantan speech, two different types of interview are presented. The first is a rapid and anonymous interview of 59 speakers which focuses on the pronunciation of /ay/ before voiced consonants. These interviews show black speakers to have a significantly higher rate of /ay/-monophthongization than white speakers, and that overall rates of /ay/- monophthongization vary between different neighborhoods. The second type consists of a longer conversation-style interview followed by a reading passage, for which data from five white native Atlantans is presented. Acoustic analysis of these interviews shows that the older speakers use more features associated with the Southern Shift than the younger speakers, but that none of the speakers exhibit a fully-shifted vowel system.Publication Do Speech Evaluation Scales in a Speaker Evaluation Experiment Trigger Conscious or Unconscious Attitudes?(2010-01-01) Grondelaers, Stefan; van Hout, RoelandThis paper challenges the exclusive reliance on speaker personality traits in experimental language attitude research. The most explicitly articulated motivation for this restriction is Kristiansen’s (2009) contention that the use of scales pertaining to the investigated varieties themselves could make listener-judges aware of the research purpose, as a result of which their attitudes would be consciously offered, shallow perceptions instead of deeper conceptualizations. On the basis of a free response experiment (in which respondents were invited to explicitly articulate their attitudes towards labelled varieties of Netherlandic Dutch), we demonstrate first that language attitudes are made up of speaker personality traits, but also, and unmistakably, of speech-related perceptions of the investigated varieties. A follow-up experiment (with scaled responses to unlabelled speech stimuli) confirms that the inclusion of speech traits in a speaker evaluation experiment does not affect the nature and structure of the attitudes observed. Building on these data, we argue against the idea that specific attitude measurement techniques should correlate with specific attitude consciousness levels, and we make a plea for a multi-modal approach to language attitudes.Publication Using Acoustic Trajectory Information in Studies of Merger(2010-01-01) Scanlon, Michael; Wassink, Alicia BeckfordThis study investigates the utility of examining acoustic trajectory information indicative of gliding in the case of mergers or near-mergers. It presents a sociophonetic analysis of conversational speech from one African American Seattle native, who perceives the pin and pen classes as merged. The study finds no difference (“merger”) between the speaker’s pin and pen classes by F1 or F2 at vowel midpoint. However, phonemic vowel distinctions are preserved in Euclidean distance and duration, and the vowel classes are more distinct pre-nasally than in non-pre-nasal contexts. A regression of the researcher’s perception of distance on vowel class corroborates this pattern. Lastly, multidimensional calculation of overlap using SOAM (Wassink 2006) for a small sample of data from 12 Seattle speakers suggests Seattle African Americans differentiate pin from pen somewhat by the amount of glide, while Seattle Whites do not.Publication A Real-time Study of Future Temporal Reference in Spoken Ontarian French(2010-01-01) Grimm, D. RickIn this paper I examine the use of future temporal reference in real-time in the majority French community of Hawkesbury, Ontario, Canada. The corpora, established in 1978 and 2005, contain sociolinguistic interviews of Francophone adolescents 15 to 18 years of age enrolled in French-medium schools. At issue in this research is the variation between the periphrastic and inflected future forms. Over the 28-year time span, the periphrastic future has assumed new prestige in this variety, now the preferred variant of the middle class. Moreover, this form has made significant gains into negative contexts, the formerly privileged and nearly exclusive site of the inflected future. In light of this unprecedented behavior, the question remains as to what will become of the inflected future. I discuss here a number of important signs discovered in the real-time data for Hawkesbury that lend further support for the waning force of the inflected future in Laurentian varieties of spoken French.Publication Stop Signs: The Intersection of Interdental Fricatives and Identity in Newfoundland(2010-01-01) Childs, Becky; De Decker, Paul; Deal, Rachel; Kendall, Tyler; Thorburn, Jennifer; Williamson, Maia; Van Herk, GerardInvestigating local linguistic norms to discover larger patterns of language behaviour has been standard practice in sociolinguistic study. Looking closely at socially salient variables reveals patterns that problematize accepted trajectories of variation as traditional and newly emerging sociolinguistic identities interact. This paper integrates findings from multiple complementary projects to describe the forces influencing the stopping of interdental fricatives (dis ting for this thing), a highly salient marker of Newfoundland English, in and around St. John’s, the province’s major city. In urbanizing communities multivariate analysis reveals variation patterns typical of dialect erosion: older men maintain traditional norms while younger women move toward the standard, especially in linguistically salient contexts. In the same communities, a timing-based approach finds that young women seem to be agentively inserting stopped forms, suggesting that they have adopted a system with fricatives as the default choice. When we contrast urban and rural communities and affiliations, we find a more complex pattern: style shifting is greatest among urban males and rural females. We posit that these seemingly divergent patterns result from efforts by speakers to position themselves within the local social landscape during a period of rapid social change.