NWAV48: Full Schedule

10:00am PDT

Workshop 1: Variation off the beaten track: Expanding our understanding of social structures

Variation off the beaten track: Expanding our understanding of social structures
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the intersection of documentary linguistics and sociolinguistics. This means that more and more sociolinguistic work is being done with non-Western communities, and more documentary linguists are incorporating variation and sociolinguistic patterning into their grammar writing and documentation. In this workshop, we share our experiences of analyzing linguistic variation in under-documented languages, while trying to understand the effects of social structures both familiar and unfamiliar in Western communities as they play out in surprising ways. We present case studies from Papua New Guinea, China, and Vanuatu. How can we understand an under-studied social variable such as clan and how it interacts with community contact, alliances, social networks, and obligations? How might we reconceptualize age as a variable, which may have differing meaningful divisions from culture to culture, and may vary in the role it plays in innovation and diffusion? We discuss some specific problems we have faced, which are not necessarily exclusive to those working in “exotic” locations, such as: difficulties in interpreting variation due to lack of anthropological and ethnographic background, data sparsity, the transcription bottleneck, unbalanced sampling, and challenges in reconciling variation and abstraction in describing linguistic structures. This workshop is aimed at both documentary linguists who are interested in looking at sociolinguistic variation in the languages they are working with, and at sociolinguists who have encountered similar issues in their own research. We present some of our solutions and will have a portion of the workshop dedicated to discussion with workshop participants for sharing their ideas and experience.

Speakers

Danielle Barth

The Australian National University

Dineke Schokkin

Australian National University

Catherine Travis

Australian National University

Kate Lindsey

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Boston University

I work on language documentation and description in southern Papua New Guinea, particularly of Pahoturi River languages.

James N. Stanford

Dartmouth College

Thursday October 10, 2019 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Maple

Workshop

Session type Workshop

10:00am PDT

Workshop 2: Creating interactive shiny dashboards to showcase sociolinguistic research: Seeing the forest and the trees

Creating interactive shiny dashboards to showcase sociolinguistic research: Seeing the forest and the trees
This workshop is aimed at any sociolinguist with an interest in using shiny dashboards to allow other scholars and the public to more directly engage with and learn from their work. Several new tools have come online in the last few years to make data wrangling and reproducible research more accessible. The purpose of this workshop is to provide sociolinguists an overview of these open-source tools and show several worked examples of making sociolinguistic datasets interactive with R Shiny dashboards.

Three unique datasets, spanning multiple types of sociolinguistic data, are discussed in this workshop. The first dataset that is used is from a syntactic variable from historical linguistics. The second dataset is phonetically gradient data (approximately 3000 tokens) on Spanish lateral production (DV = normalized F2) from 30 speakers, stratified by sex (2 levels), language profile (3 levels), task type (casual vs. careful speech), and 2 linguistic factors (adjacent segment context and syllable position). The third dataset will use geolocated tweets to map lexical variation of borrowings in France and Quebec, with additional social information. Furthermore, we will learn how longitudinal time data spreading over 7 calendar years can be represented on interactive figures, where raw frequency counts will be complemented with statistical estimates for the observed time period.

Participants will leave with a set of open-source and freely available tools to make their data come alive. Some background in R, Rstudio and familiarity with ggplot2 is assumed. There will be a small hands-on activity as part of the workshop. Instructions for the installation of software and data used will be sent out to registered participants a week prior to the workshop. Data and code used for the workshop will be made available to participants.

Speakers

Justin Davidson

University of California Berkeley

Joseph Roy

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Gyula Zsombok

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thursday October 10, 2019 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

Workshop

Session type Workshop

10:00am PDT

Workshop 3: A workshop for inclusion in sociocultural linguistics

A workshop for inclusion in sociocultural linguistics
The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the highest ranked and highest resourced Minority Serving Institution in the world. Considering the designation as both an honor and a call to action, the UCSB Linguistics Department is making significant changes to its faculty and student recruitment, its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and its research and outreach focus. Join faculty and graduate students from UCSB Linguistics for an interactive workshop designed to help you promote intersectional inclusion in your home department and at your home institution.

We will focus on methods and models used to engage people in linguistics from secondary school through emeritus status, and we will also share challenges that we’ve met along the way with a focus on both interdepartmental and institutional concerns. Our discussion will center around three programs that UCSB Linguistics has developed in recent years: School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics, and the Sneak Peek student recruitment event.

Founded in 2010, SKILLS is an interdisciplinary outreach program that brings together UCSB faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in Linguistics, Education, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, Sociology and other fields to collaborate with local high school students and teachers. In the program, graduate students design and teach dual-enrollment sociocultural linguistics courses, introducing topics such as language, race, and power; and prepare first-generation, college-bound students for university-level coursework. Undergraduate students earn credits as classroom mentors as they support teaching, connect with students, and share college advice. High school students receive college credit and conduct independent research projects, which they present at the end of the semester at UCSB, in a lively research fair. SKILLS connects UCSB to the community through mentorship, research, outreach, and instruction, modeling community-engaged participatory research.

The UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program is a multi-year program funded by the UC-HBCU Initiative and NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) that brings together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at UCSB, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and other colleges and universities around the U.S. Through summer research experiences at UC campuses and competitive funding for successful participants, the UC-HBCU Initiative aims to grow the relationship between UCs and HBCUs as a pathway to increase the number of Black graduate students at UCs. The summer program at UCSB teaches introductory linguistics courses, examines the role of language in social mobility through interviews and data analysis, and provides networking and mentorship opportunities to students; it aims to increase the diversity of students engaged in the linguistic sciences by involving undergraduates from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and students at institutions that do not offer linguistics as a major. Research findings from the program benefit students as well as the institutions they attend by providing information about the nature of the language and culture of Black college students, which has direct implications for teaching and mentoring.

Sneak Peek is a graduate recruitment event hosted by the Department of Linguistics for students from communities underrepresented in higher education. Participants are brought to UCSB, funded by the Department and the university’s Graduate Division, for a day of meetings, workshops, and social gatherings. Sneak Peek, which is held in late May, is designed to prepare applicants for the Fall admissions cycle with an in-depth workshop on preparing a successful graduate application, individual meetings with faculty and graduate students with shared research interests and/or community membership, a showcase of research by current graduate students, and a closed-door panel consisting of current graduate students from underrepresented communities. In the six years Sneak Peek has been running, Sneak Peek has become a successful avenue for recruiting highly competitive applicants to our graduate program.

We invite workshop participants to send us questions ahead of time as well as suggestions for topics and goals that you would particularly wish to address including but not limited to: faculty recruitment, student recruitment, curricular reform, addressing discrimination in your department, and addressing pushback against inclusion attempts.

Speakers

Anne H. Charity-Hudley

University of California Santa Barbara

Lal Zimman

University of California Santa Barbara

Tracy Conner

Visiting Assistant Professor, University of California Santa Barbara

Kendra Calhoun

University of California Santa Barbara

Jamaal Muwwakkil

University of California Santa Barbara

deandre miles-hercules

University of California Santa Barbara

Maya Keshav

University of California Santa Barbara

Joyhanna Garza

University of California Santa Barbara

Thursday October 10, 2019 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Gumwood

Workshop

Session type Workshop

11:45am PDT

Lunch break

Thursday October 10, 2019 11:45am - 12:30pm PDT
N/A

Break

12:30pm PDT

Workshop 4: Experimental design in sociolinguistics

Experimental design in sociolinguistics
The decisions involved in designing an experiment closely follow from the research question(s) being asked, and have major consequences for the kinds of analysis that are appropriate and the nature of the conclusions that can be drawn from the results. This workshop gives attendees a chance to consider the implications of a range of design decisions (e.g., stimulus development, between vs. within-subjects, randomization) for experimental studies in sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on perception and social evaluation experiments.

This workshop is aimed at researchers considering or at the early stages of incorporating experiments into their research, or researchers who simply want to be able to understand and evaluate experimental work more confidently. Rather than giving one-size-fits-all advice, the workshop provides practice in asking the kinds of questions that will lead to a design that is best suited for answering the specific research question at hand. Although some practical matters of implementation are discussed (e.g., pros/cons of different software, tasks), the workshop emphasizes conceptual-level guidance.

After an orientation to the range of factors that experimenters should consider, the first part of the workshop will discuss the process of making various methodological choices, and observing the effects of those choices on the rest of the project. We will provide pre-registered workshop participants the option to submit experiment ideas and questions in advance, and in the second part of the workshop we will workshop (as a verb) a selection of these as a group. Attendees are not required to submit their own projects for group workshopping; participants who do volunteer their project ideas for workshopping will gain personalized feedback on their own project, but all attendees will benefit from observing the process of considering the pros and cons of making various design decisions.

Speakers

Charlotte Vaughn

University of Oregon

Abby Walker

Virginia Tech

Thursday October 10, 2019 12:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
EMU Maple

Workshop

Session type Workshop

12:30pm PDT

Workshop 5: Mapping word frequencies on Twitter using R and Python

Mapping word frequencies on Twitter using R and Python
In this workshop we demonstrate how to map word frequencies on American Twitter in R and Python and discuss the relevance of this approach to the study of language variation and change.

In the first half of the workshop we go through the process of mapping word frequencies step-by-step. We first introduce a sample dataset, which consists of the relative frequencies of the top 10,000 words in a multi-billion word corpus of geolocated American Twitter collected between 2013-2014 measured across 3,076 counties in the contiguous United States (see Grieve et al. 2018). We then show how to load and map this dataset and how to conduct basic forms of global and local spatial analysis to help identify regional patterns in dialect maps. Although we provide parallel code in both Python and R, we focus primarily on implementation in R for this workshop.

In the second half of the workshop we consider the wider implications to dialectology and sociolinguistics of the analysis of word frequencies — an increasingly common approach in computational sociolinguistics (Nguyen et al., 2016). One of the fundamental methodological tenets of our field is the principle of accountability (Labov 1972), which requires that we not only identify all tokens of the form under analysis in a corpus, but all contexts where an equivalent variant form had been used in its place. Although the analysis of word frequencies violates this principle, we argue this approach offers new insights about regional lexical and grammatical variation that cannot be arrived at through the analysis of sociolinguistic alternation variables, which can be difficult to define above the levels of phonetics and phonology (Lavandera 1977).

All data and code will be shared with participants ahead of the session, making the workshop fully replicable. Although not necessary, participants are encouraged to bring a laptop with the data and code downloaded.

Speakers

Jack Grieve

University of Birmingham

David Jurgens

University of Michigan

Thursday October 10, 2019 12:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
EMU Oak

Workshop

Session type Workshop

12:30pm PDT

Workshop 6: Teaching variation: From the classroom into the field

Teaching variation: From the classroom into the field
As Labov famously noted, we find linguists working in “the library, the bush, the closet, the laboratory, and the street” (Labov 1972: 99) — but how about the classroom? In this workshop, scholars present specific assignments they use to teach about language variation at the undergraduate or graduate levels. A crucial pedagogical challenge in teaching variation is helping students connect our sociolinguistic theories to real-world data, and many of us believe the only way to learn about language in use is to get out there and study it. Yet many concepts, phenomenon, and methods require a level of sophistication and training that can make creating accessible, empirical assignments challenging. This workshop provides practical advice for getting students out of the classroom and into the field, be it online, in the laboratory, or on the streets.

Four scholars will give brief presentations on activities they use in the classroom, reviewing the assignment, discussing how it fits into their syllabus, and describing benefits and drawbacks based on their practical experience:
Anne Charity Hudley – Community engagement midterm video assignment
Aaron Dinkin – Rapid and anonymous study: Responses to thanks
Shelome Gooden – Socioprosodic variation in a field project language
Minnie Quartey – Learning to corral data with CORAAL

All materials will be made available through a shared drive. In addition, attendees will be invited to share their own materials, with the final minutes of the workshop devoted to small group discussion, sharing, and brainstorming around teaching variation.

Speakers

Kara Becker

Reed College

Kirk Hazen

West Virginia University

Thursday October 10, 2019 12:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

Workshop

Session type Workshop

12:30pm PDT

Workshop 7: Bayesian modeling for linguistic researchers

Bayesian modeling for linguistic researchers
This workshop will provide an introduction to Bayesian modelling for researchers in linguistics, including an outline of what makes a model “Bayesian”, some advantages of Bayesian modeling, and how to interpret Bayesian models reported in published articles. The intended audience for this workshop is researchers who are comfortable with multilevel (mixed-effects) models (e.g., lme4 in R), but may not be familiar with Bayesian approaches to these models. We will begin by contrasting Bayesian and frequentist estimation methods, and Bayesian inference to traditional methods based on null-hypothesis significance testing (e.g., p-values). We will then discuss the advantages to Bayesian approaches for the analysis of linguistic data, including the ability to build models with any number of “random” effects or slopes and the ability to easily build multilevel models for binomial, multinomial, and ordinal dependent variables. A Bayesian analysis (using JAGS in R) will be compared to an equivalent frequentist mixed-effects analysis using lme4, including a comparison of the outputs of these models and of the sorts of questions these models can (and can’t) help us answer. The code and data used for this analysis will be made available before the workshop so that participants can follow along if desired. Finally, we will outline some useful resources for those interested in learning to apply Bayesian models to their own data.

Speakers

Santiago Barreda

University of California, Davis

Thursday October 10, 2019 12:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

Workshop

Session type Workshop

2:30pm PDT

Bayley & Preston: Variation in second and heritage languages: Implications for sociolinguistic theory

Variation in second and heritage languages: Implications for sociolinguistic theory

Variationist studies of second and heritage languages have developed considerably in recent years. We now know that many of the constraints that govern variation in speakers’ dominant language are also present in non-dominant languages. Studies of variation in a range of second and heritage languages demonstrate that “orderly heterogeneity” is characteristic of all languages. Work on non-dominant languages also offers a way to examine language change in real time because the variants that are undergoing change in earlier stages of acquisition are unlikely to have acquired social meaning that can interfere with natural language change. Finally, given the well-documented three generational pattern of shift from immigrant languages to monolingualism in the dominant language of a new country studies of change in heritage languages can help us better understand what aspects of language are resistant to change and what aspects are subject to change under the influence of a dominant language.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Robert Bayley

University of California Davis

Dennis Preston

Oklahoma State University

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

2:30pm PDT

Kang: Spontaneous phonetic accommodation in standard Seoul Korean and Kyungsang Korean

Spontaneous phonetic accommodation in standard Seoul Korean and Kyungsang Korean

This study investigates whether the pitch accent of the Kyungsang dialect is imitated by standard Seoul Korean speakers and whether non-tonal standard Seoul Korean is imitated by Kyungsang dialect speakers. To answer this question, two groups of participants completed an auditory naming task: Twenty Kyungsang speakers and fifteen Seoul speakers. Thirty-five words as produced by a female bidialect speaker of both standard Seoul Korean and the Kyungsang dialect served as stimuli for the shadowing task. The results suggest that overall, Kyungsang participants significantly converged toward the Seoul model talker, whereas Seoul participants significantly diverged from the Kyungsang model talker. In particular, female Seoul participants diverged more than male Seoul participants. Furthermore, Seoul participants who had positive attitudes toward the Kyungsang dialect were more likely to converge toward the Kyungsang model talker. However, for Kyungsang participants, their language attitudes did not predict the pattern of accommodation.

Speakers

Yoojin Kang

Georgetown University

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Accommodation/convergence

Session type Talk
Chair: Abby Walker

2:30pm PDT

Grammon: Form, function, social action: Revisiting variable concord with Spanish haber

Form, function, social action: Revisiting variable concord with Spanish haber

This presentation connects discourse pragmatics to one of the most debated morphosyntactic variables in Spanish: variable verbal concord with presentational haber. 560 observations were submitted to mixed effects modeling, representing monolingual ‘educated speech’ from five South American cities. The best fitting model included structural priming, specificity, and topicality as significant predictors; among structurally-unprimed tokens, verbal concord is especially likely when haber presents a referent that is both uniquely identifiable to speakers and accessible (i.e. topical) within the discourse context. I argue that these results point to a discourse-pragmatic motivation for the patterning of variable concord with Spanish haber. That is, plural and singular variants aid interlocutors in distinguishing central and peripheral participants in discourse as shaped by the temporary state of speakers’ minds and structural flow of information. These findings advance our understanding of morphosyntactic variation as a repertoire of discourse strategies that are part and parcel of social action.

Speakers

Devin Grammon

University of Oregon

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Discourse/pragmatics

Session type Talk
Chair: Mokaya Bosire

2:30pm PDT

Ceolin: On functional load and its relation to the actuation problem

On functional load and its relation to the actuation problem

There have been many attempts to address the actuation problem using interspeaker variation (Baker et al. 2011), articulatory biases (Sóskuthy 2015) and informativity (Cohen Priva 2017). In this presentation we study another factor, Functional Load, by replicating the analysis in Wedel et al. (2013) and examining ongoing mergers in British English, American English and Dutch, trying to isolate the conditions under which Functional Load has a detectable effect in preventing a merger and the conditions under which instead no effect is present. The effect is clear in cases of consonant mergers, like devoicing of Dutch fricatives and th-fronting in English varieties, but unclear for vowel mergers, where phonetic confusability is the only significant predictor of a merger. We discuss the implications of these findings for the actuation problem and for phonological development.

Speakers

Andrea Ceolin

University of Pennsylvania

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Language change

Session type Talk
Chair: Ceil Lucas

2:55pm PDT

Zen & Starr: Variation in the production of Javanese by multilingual children in Indonesia

Variation in the production of Javanese by multilingual children in Indonesia

As Indonesian becomes more dominant as a first language in Indonesia, the production of regional heritage languages, such as Javanese, may be increasingly influenced by phonological transfer. The present study investigates this phenomenon through an examination of the Javanese speech production of 95 multilingual children aged 9-10. Specifically, we analyze the distinction between alveolar and retroflex coronal stops, which phonemically contrast in Javanese, but not in Indonesian.

The findings reveal that many participants merge the alveolar and retroflex phonemes of Javanese, with gender and region significantly conditioning variation. Specifically, children from Malang, a large, diverse urban area, are significantly more likely to merge these phonemes relative to children from Blitar, a smaller, more Javanese-dominant setting. Female participants are also found to significantly lead in the merger of /ʈ/ to /t/. Overall, the data suggest that increasing Indonesian dominance is leading to changes in Javanese phonology, particularly in diverse urban centers.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Evynurul Laily Zen

National University of Singapore

Rebecca Starr

National University of Singapore

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

2:55pm PDT

Gnevsheva et al.: Convergence across dialects in monolingual and bilingual speakers

Convergence across dialects in monolingual and bilingual speakers

This paper compares accommodation in first (L1) and second (L2) language speakers across dialect boundaries in a shadowing task. 4 groups of participants were recruited in Australia: L1 speakers of Australian English (AusE), L1 speakers of American English (AmE), and L1 speakers of Russian with AusE or AmE as their first English variety. Participants first recorded baseline tokens of 10 (C)CVC(C) words from each of the lexical sets BATH, PRICE, FACE, NEAR, NURSE, and then they participated in a shadowing task repeating these words after an AmE and AusE speaker. The overall results for rhoticity and diphthongs show that all participants converged to the Australian speaker, and the American group was significantly different from the other groups. There was a significant interaction predicting BATH F2, such that L2 speakers accommodated more than L1 speakers, producing a more backed BATH shadowing the Australian and a more fronted BATH shadowing the American.

Speakers

Ksenia Gnevsheva

Australian National University

Anita Szakay

Macquarie University

Sandra Jansen

Universität Paderborn

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Accommodation/convergence

Session type Talk
Chair: Abby Walker

2:55pm PDT

Deibel: Structural priming in the presence of a lexical-functional split: A closer look at Media Lengua

Structural priming in the presence of a lexical-functional split: A closer look at Media Lengua

In structural priming, syntactic structures are influenced by the abstract syntactic structure of prior sentences. Previous research shows that priming is stronger when content lexical items are repeated from prime to target (lexical boost). How does structural priming affect a mixed language, incorporating vocabulary from one source language but grammar from another?

This study investigates structural priming in Media Lengua, a mixed language spoken in Highland Ecuador, showing OV/VO word order variation. The findings indicate that repeated verbs significantly boosted the odds of the less common word order (VO); lexical boost from other content items was negligible. Furthermore, priming effects were stronger for the canonical OV variant and grew with continued exposure throughout the task. This suggests that mixed languages are robust against priming of non-canonical variants even in the presence of perfect (cognate) lexical boost, implying that cognate lexical roots have separate rather than shared syntactic representations.

Speakers

Isabel Deibel

Pennsylvania State University

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Discourse/pragmatics

Session type Talk
Chair: Mokaya Bosire

2:55pm PDT

Montemurro et al.: Sign language spatial modulation across sociohiohistoric contexts

Sign language spatial modulation across sociohiohistoric contexts

Three-dimensional space in sign language is used for marking location and argument structure. Competing theoretical accounts debate the morphosyntactic status and categorization of verbs which interact in space (Liddell 2000, 2003 for morphemic gestural-deictic analysis, Padden 1983, Lillo-Martin & Meier 2011 for morphosyntactic agreement analysis). This paper analyzes both theoretical approaches from a perspective of variation, specifically in sociohistoric development in two sign languages, unifying both diachronic and synchronic evidence. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) emerged in the late 1970s with the opening of a deaf school in Managua (Senghas 2001, 2010). In contrast, American Sign Language (ASL) is well-established, dating back to the early 1800s. We propose that the primary function of spatial modification is location marking, and as additional devices (e.g. the use of space-anchored loci and role shift) develop and are layered onto the directional signs, distinctions between person and location arise.

Speakers

Kathryn Montemurro

University of Chicago

Molly Flaherty

Swarthmore College

Marie Coppola

University of Connecticut

Susan Goldin-Meadow

University of Chicago

Diane Brentari

Univeristy of Chicago

Thursday October 10, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Language change

Session type Talk
Chair: Ceil Lucas
Award Finalist: Lillian B. Stueber Prize

3:20pm PDT

Palakurthy: The sounds of contemporary Diné Bizaad (Navajo)

The Sounds of Contemporary Diné Bizaad (Navajo)

Many studies have documented an increase in variation and frequency of change in endangered language speech communities. However, sociophonetic documentation of specific changes in minority languages is limited, and less is known about the social patterning of variation and change in these contexts. Based on analyses of data drawn from 51 interviews with bilingual speakers of English and Diné Bizaad (Navajo)—an endangered Native American language spoken in the present-day North American Southwest— this talk discusses the contemporary status of three variable features in the language: aspirated stops, lateral affricates, and sibilant harmony. Sociophonetic analyses will be presented for each feature, as well as discussions of the evidence for change. Based on these studies, I show that Diné Bizaad features are not uniformly becoming more variable or significantly changing, results that contribute to what we know about the motivations for, and diffusion of, sound change in endangered languages.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Kayla Palakurthy

Visiting Assistant Professor, San Francisco State University

Thursday October 10, 2019 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

3:20pm PDT

Tamminga et al.: The search for predictors of individual differences in VOT imitation

The search for predictors of individual differences in VOT imitation

We investigate the effects of individual differences measures on individuals’ imitation behaviors. 43 participants were recorded reading aloud 84 voiceless stop-initial words twice, once with written text and a second time after auditory words from two talkers with artificially lengthened VOT. Participants then completed surveys measuring Autism Quotient, Big Five, working memory and social network size. Participant VOTs were extracted and normalized by subtracting the model fits accounting for word, word frequency, trial number, phoneme, rest-of-word duration and participant speech rate. The difference between shadowed and baseline normalized values is Imitation. An LMER model was conducted to predict Imitation with talker, by-talker word-specific VOT, and the scores and subscales of the aforementioned individual differences measures. We found significant effects of talker and word-specific VOT, but no effects of individual differences measurements. We discuss the replicability of predictors of individual linguistic behaviors and their consequences for theories of language change.

Speakers

Meredith Tamminga

University of Pennsylvania

Lacey Wade

University of Pennsylvania

Wei Lai

University of Pennsylvania

Thursday October 10, 2019 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Accommodation/convergence

Session type Talk
Chair: Abby Walker

3:20pm PDT

Blondeau & Tremblay: Digging into lexical variation: The restructuring of consequence markers in Montreal French

Digging into lexical variation: The restructuring of consequence markers in Montreal French

This paper examines the vernacular consequence marker ça-fait-que (CFQ) and its standard counterparts donc and alors in Montréal French. Previous studies have shown the effect of time on the variation: alors has decreased sharply and is being replaced by CFQ and donc. Our apparent-time analysis based on a 2012 sociolinguistic corpus of 50 interviews shows a further restructuring of the variants, as donc and CFQ compete to replace alors as the prestige variant. The analysis shows that the use of donc was of short duration, and confirms the take over of CFQ. We further examine the two phonological variants of CFQ, [fak] and [fɛk], and show that the variation is socially conditioned. We attribute the ultimate success of CFQ to its ability to phonologically encode social variation. The loss of alors created a vacuum, first filled by donc, but then replaced by a phonological variant of CFQ: [fɛk].

Speakers

Helene Blondeau

University of Florida

Mireille Tremblay

University of Montreal

Thursday October 10, 2019 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Discourse/pragmatics

Session type Talk
Chair: Mokaya Bosire

3:20pm PDT

Ravindranath Abtahian et al.: Variation and change in Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns

Variation and change in Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns

In this paper we investigate variation in overt 1sg pronouns in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (JI), considered a contact variety between Betawi Malay and Standard Indonesian (SI). We use a corpus of colloquial naturalistic data (MPI-Jakarta Field Station) to analyze the social and linguistic factors conditioning variation between gua/gue, associated with Jakarta identity and youth; saya, the SI variant; aku, from Javanese and associated with Javanese ethnicity; and kita ‘1pl inclusive’ occasionally used as singular. The analysis is based on 3796 tokens from 40 speakers (male and female, aged 18-83, and a mix of educational and linguistic backgrounds). We observe aku and gua/gue among both JI and Betawi speakers, with particularly low rates of aku. Overall rates of gua/gue are higher among JI speakers and younger speakers, consistent with its use as a marker of youth speech. However, comparison with data from the 1960s suggests this is an age grading effect.

Speakers

Maya Ravindranath Abtahian

University of Rochester

Abigail C. Cohn

Cornell University

Ferdinan Kurniawan

Cornell University

Rachel Vogel

Cornell University

Thursday October 10, 2019 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Language change

Session type Talk
Chair: Ceil Lucas

4:00pm PDT

Terry: Beyond the classroom walls: Study abroad and the acquisition of sociostylistic variation in L2 French

Beyond the classroom walls: Study abroad and the acquisition of sociostylistic variation in L2 French

This study uses a mixed-effects model to examine the acquisition of target-like patterns of phonological variation by L2 French learners during study abroad (SA) in France. In this longitudinal study, naturalistic speech data are recorded via sociolinguistic interviews to provide empirical evidence for the incipient acquisition of a phonological variable showing sociostylistic variation in native speaker (NS) speech: the reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid consonant clusters (notre maison [no tʁœ mɛ ʒɔ̃] ~ [not mɛ ʒɔ̃] ‘our house’). Speech data include 1200 tokens of word-final consonant clusters that are compared and correlated with the results of a social network strength scale designed for SA. Results indicate that variation patterns among L2 learners are constrained by linguistic factors similar to those operating on NS speech and that social networks with NSs are a significant predictor of the emergence of sociostylistic variation patterns in L2 French.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Kristen Kennedy Terry

Santa Clara University

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:00pm - 4:25pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

4:00pm PDT

Adli: Population dynamics as a driving force of language change: results from a large-scale computer simulation

Population dynamics as a driving force of language change: results from a large-scale computer simulation

This paper presents a follow-up study to a previous simulation on scenarios of (future) language change of Spanish in New York City. We have conducted a much larger scale computer simulation – starting with 200,000 and reaching 850,000 agents, while implementing given linguistic (pronoun rates), and social data, and a usage-based approach. We have run three simulations, one with the actual immigration rates, one with lower (1/3), and one with higher (3x) rates. The results show: (i) Change in smaller-sized dialect groups can be simulated without instabilities, revealing the robustness of patterns of contact and change for smaller communities. (ii) Population dynamics is a major driving force of language change, unfolding its most visible effects in the 2nd and 3rd generation of heritage speakers. (iii) We can predict significant changes in the size of the different Spanish-speaking communities. Finally, the macro-perspective of population dynamics provides additional insight into communities of practice at the level of individual speakers.

Speakers

Aria Adli

University of Cologne

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:00pm - 4:25pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Computational sociolinguistics

Session type Talk
Chair: Jack Grieve

4:00pm PDT

Ren et al.: A perception study of mediatized Osaka dialect: Variation, indexicality, and enregisterment

A perception study of mediatized Osaka dialect: Variation, indexicality, and enregisterment

This perception study investigates the social indexicality of Osaka dialect, a highly recognizable variation of the Japanese language. In the 2013 film Soshite Chichi ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son), Osaka dialect appears to resignify a new style of affective and hands-on fatherhood as opposed to the hegemonic masculinity model of a salaryman that is often absent in child-rearing (SturtzSreetharan, 2017a, 2017b). With a mixed-method approach, this study advances the previous research by addressing the following questions: (1) whether the audience associates the targeted indices of fatherhood and masculinity with Osaka dialect in this mediatized context as previously argued, and (2) if so, to what extent; and (3) what other social meanings Osaka dialect indexes, such as social class, affect, and/or personality. The results revealed graded effects of Osaka dialect indexing affective fatherhood and masculinity, and further consolidated the role of mediatization in the social indexicality of Osaka dialect.

References
SturtzSreetharan, C. (2017a). Language and masculinity: the role of Osaka dialect in contemporary ideals of fatherhood. Gender and Language, 11(4).
SturtzSreetharan, C. (2017b). Resignifying the Japanese father: Mediatization, commodification, and dialect. Language & Communication, 53, 45-58.

Speakers

Yi Ren

University of Oregon

Sara King

University of Oregon

Cindi SturtzSreetharan

Arizona State University

Kaori Idemaru

University of Oregon

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:00pm - 4:25pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Iconicity & indexicality & enregisterment

Session type Talk
Chair: Sharese King

4:00pm PDT

Sóskuthy et al: Shifting dynamics in the closing diphthong system of New Zealand English

Shifting dynamics in the closing diphthong system of New Zealand English

We present a dynamic acoustic analysis of over a century of changes in PRICE, MOUTH, FACE and GOAT in New Zealand English. We consider these diphthongs as parts of a system evolving as a coherent whole, and present a non-parametric analysis of full formant contours using generalised additive models. Our oldest speakers show an unremarkable system: PRICE/MOUTH start with low central nuclei, while FACE/GOAT start with mid front/back nuclei; both sets of vowels end in high offglides (front for PRICE/FACE and back for MOUTH/GOAT). This system undergoes dramatic restructuring over the course of 100 years. The final system consists of vowels that are all similar in height, but show (i) a broad distinction between centring diphthongs with lengthened nuclei (PRICE/MOUTH) and closing-fronting diphthongs (FACE/GOAT); (ii) different starting points but identical endpoints in PRICE and MOUTH; and (iii) FACE and GOAT distinguished mainly by a difference in frontness.

Speakers

Márton Sóskuthy

The University of British Columbia

Jennifer Hay

University of Canterbury

James Brand

Universit of Canterbury

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:00pm - 4:25pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Vowel change

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlie Farrington

4:25pm PDT

Li: Object pronominal expression in L2 Mandarin Chinese

Object pronominal expression in L2 Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese allows null form in object position as the following example indicates.

Shànghăi, wŏ qù guò Ø
Shanghai, I go EXP Ø
I have been to Shanghai。

This is the first variationist study to investigate L2 Chinese null object use in oral discourse and compare with native speaker patterns. Multivariate analysis of almost four thousand L2 Chinese tokens and over 3,700 L1 tokens revealed that learner patterns are similar to native speakers’ on most dimensions except that they tend to overuse overt objects. Specifically, coreference and object animacy are the two main constraints of L2 Chinese null object use. Other significant factors include speech mode, length of stay in China, referent specificity, learners’ L1, and proficiency level. The results indicate that the learners have acquired the Chinese null object use pattern rather successfully, but still need work on using null forms to further develop their sociolinguistic competence.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Xiaoshi Li

Michigan State University

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

4:25pm PDT

Willis et al.: Apparent-time and spatial diffusion in large social-media corpora

Apparent-time and spatial diffusion in large social-media corpora

Social media offers a historically-unparalleled data source for sociolinguistics and dialectology. The problem with these datasets for language change research is the difficulty of identifying enough metadata to trace diffusion. Previous variationist work using Twitter data deals largely with geography, raising the concern that patterns interact with non-geographic confounds. Here, we estimate user ages and consider the interaction between space and time.

Using a corpus of 104,657,500 Tweets from 1,734,260 users in the UK and Ireland, we assign 25.6% of users an age or age-category from mentions of birth year, age, family relationships and employment status. We consider the performance of these predicted ages over a set of variables in British English: loss of the preposition ‘to’ with ‘go’ and certain nouns (“go __(the) pub”); paradigmatic levelling to ‘was’ (“you was”); and de-levelling of “I/he/she were” to ‘was’. Apparent-time effects emerge that add to our understanding of each variable.

Speakers

David Willis

University of Cambridge

Adrian Leemann

University of Bern

Deepthi Gopal

University of Cambridge

Tam Blaxter

Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Computational sociolinguistics

Session type Talk
Chair: Jack Grieve

4:25pm PDT

Bigelow et al.: Why are wasteyutes a ting?

Why are wasteyutes a ting?

This paper examines lexical enregisterment through TH/DH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect emergent in the Greater Toronto Area. Sociolinguistic interview data from young MTE speakers reveals an overall ~10% rate of stopping, with teenage males being the primary stoppers. However, despite the presence of stopping in the vernacular of most speakers, certain terms referring to character archetypes - e.g. wasteyute, mandem - have become sites of enregisterment of TH/DH-stopping in MTE rather than enregisterment of stopping in more frequent words or of stopping itself. We argue that this is because these lexical items implement reflexive tropes, as speakers thought to be stoppers are those who might be labeled wasteyutes or mandem: young, male, suburban, typically non-white, and typically low status. As such, performance of these stereotypical personae fosters indexical linking between sound (TH/DH-stopping) and culturally salient identities (wasteyutes, mandem), cementing enregisterment of these terms in MTE.

Speakers

Lauren Bigelow

University of Toronto

Timothy Gadanidis

University of Toronto

Lisa Schlegl

University of Toronto

Pocholo Umbal

University of Toronto

Derek Denis

University of Toronto

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Iconicity & indexicality & enregisterment

Session type Talk
Chair: Sharese King

4:25pm PDT

Sneller: There's no place like home: Ideology of place in the adoption of a sound change

There's no place like home: Ideology of place in the adoption of a sound change

The sociolinguistic meaning of place plays a major role in variation and change (Johnstone 2004; Labov 1963; Reed 2014; Carmichael 2017). The effect of local orientation – while in principle similar across different places – relies on the specific ideology connected to place, and how well a speaker aligns with that ideology.

Here, I examine the role of local orientation for a group of 59 Philadelphia English speakers using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. I begin with a historical and synchronic account of the ideology of “Philadelphia”, demonstrating a long history of it being characterized as rude, underdog, and opposition to authority. Participants’ orientation to Philadelphia is rated along these ideological lines.

I find that while speakers’ productions may be influenced by the networks they participate in, speakers’ orientation toward the ideology of Philadelphia also plays an important role in their use of Philadelphia-specific phonology.

Speakers

Betsy Sneller

Georgetown University

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Vowel change

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlie Farrington

4:50pm PDT

Davidson: On (not) acquiring a sociolinguistic stereotype: L2-Catalan lateral production by L1-Spanish bilinguals

On (not) acquiring a sociolinguistic stereotype: L2-Catalan lateral production by L1-Spanish bilinguals

The production of alveolar /l/ as respectively light or dark in Spanish and Catalan is a salient distinction, afforded overt social value by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (Arnal 2011; Davidson forthcoming; Sinner 2001). The acquisition of Catalan laterals accordingly illustrates the intersection between second language acquisition and sociolinguistics: How do L2-learners navigate the native-like acquisition of a feature that is a sociolinguistic stereotype (cf. Labov 2001) in the target language?

Laterals were elicited from 16 L1-Spanish and 16 L1-Catalan speakers from Barcelona, Spain via a word-list reading task and sociolinguistic interviews conducted in both languages. While L2-learners do not produce native-like Catalan laterals, they nonetheless velarize significantly more in Catalan than in Spanish, as well as in more casual speech. Far from unsuccessful acquisition, we argue that L2 learners’ production of stylistically stratified and distinctly Catalan laterals demonstrates their capacity to fully acquire native-like sociolinguistic speech patterns while avoiding stigmatized speech variants.

Session abstract: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech: Cross-linguistic Perspectives

This session brings together scholars working on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a variety of non-dominant languages. The first paper outlines how such studies can contribute to sociolinguistic theory. The next papers examine the influence of Indonesian on children’s Javanese and the influence of English and communication networks on Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Other studies focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by U.S. students in France and the acquisition of the constraints on object deletion in Mandarin. The final study examines the (non)-acquisition of a socially stigmatized variant by Spanish L1 speakers in Catalonia. Taken together, the papers in this session illustrate the contributions to our understanding of the effects of language contact on second and heritage languages and to identifying the types of linguistic and social factors that are common across contexts or pairs of languages and those that are specific to particular languages or social contexts.

Speakers

Justin Davidson

University of California Berkeley

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:50pm - 5:15pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Variation in Second and Heritage Language Speech

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Robert Bayley

4:50pm PDT

Zsombok: Sharp/click words: Regional variation of prescribed variants on Twitter in France and Quebec

Sharp/click words: Regional variation of prescribed variants on Twitter in France and Quebec

The cultural and linguistic practices on Twitter has interested scholars since its launch. English became a dominant language on Twitter, which resulted in intensive lexical borrowings of computer terminology in French. Language planning bodies in France and Quebec demonstrate strong intentions to control the lexicon and intervene whenever they deem necessary. Nonetheless, the successful uptake of state-promoted intervention depends greatly on the region. This research investigates the use of Twitter’s emblematic word, hashtag, and its officially recommended variants: mot-dièse (‘sharp word’, prescribed in 2013 in France) and mot-clic (‘click word’, prescribed in 2011 in Quebec) in a corpus of tweets from January 2010 to December 2016, measuring variation between the English and the prescribed variant respective to their region. Statistical analyses were implemented on a sample set, including variables of sex (male or female users), social media influence score, and urban areas from where the tweet was posted.

Speakers

Gyula Zsombok

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:50pm - 5:15pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Computational sociolinguistics

Session type Talk
Chair: Jack Grieve

4:50pm PDT

D'Onofrio & Eckert: Experimental evidence for iconicity in variation

Experimental evidence for iconicity in variation

Iconicity is fundamental to sociolinguistic variation: intensification of a variant, whether through increased frequency of occurrence or phonetic intensification, intensifies its indexicality. Iconicity can also be involved in the choice of variant, playing on a variety of phonetic features such as hyperarticulation, fortition, lenition, acoustic frequency, and rhythm. Based on a series of social evaluation experiments, we provide evidence that hearers perceive a relation between acoustic frequency of a vowel and affective stance. We then move beyond the frequency code to show that consonant fortition — the coalescence of increased duration and amplitude of a stop burst — has a similar effect. Finally, we show that that rhythm — in particular, the presence of post-tonic lengthening in a word — can heighten that effect.

Speakers

Annette D'Onofrio

Northwestern University

Penelope Eckert

Stanford University

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:50pm - 5:15pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Iconicity & indexicality & enregisterment

Session type Talk
Chair: Sharese King

4:50pm PDT

Maddeaux: Individual cognitive differences as predictors of participation in sound change

Individual cognitive differences as predictors of participation in sound change

Models of sound change rely on the individual to initiate, adopt and propel change. But sociolinguistic core principles refer mainly to the groupings of age, gender, and class; they stop short of being able to predict which individuals within these groups will be advanced in a change and which will be delayed. As a starting point for investigating the role of individual differences, I test for correlations between F2 of /u/ among 110 white L1 English speakers in Toronto aged 18–40, and two cognitive measures. Empathy Quotient (EQ) quantifies our ability to identify people’s emotions and to respond appropriately, and Systematizing Quotient (SQ) is our ability to construct and analyze rule-based systems. Significant main effects of both cognitive measures, as well as interactions with age, indicate that alongside macrosocial group membership and identity, we need also look to individuals’ cognitive profile as predictors of their participation in language change.

Speakers

Ruth Maddeaux

University of Toronto

Thursday October 10, 2019 4:50pm - 5:15pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Vowel change

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlie Farrington

5:30pm PDT

D'Arcy: Language history, language synchrony, and kids these days

Language history, language synchrony, and kids these days
Synchronic language is simultaneously a reflection of history and a window to future directions of change. In this talk I explore the relation between diachrony, synchrony, and futurity. Language change unfolds constantly, instantiated “over a series of synchronic states which constitute a succession of present moments” (Joseph & Janda 2003:86), and Labov (1975, 1989, 1994) has consistently argued against the Saussurian separation of diachronic and synchronic linguistics. In enabling scrutiny in short-term increments, apparent time arguably ranks among the most important methodological advances of twentieth-century linguistics (cf. Chambers 2003:164; see also Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2013:240). However, it is a powerful lens, not a wholesale replacement for the careful study of linguistic structure and usage beyond a single synchronic time slice. Current states of language do not emerge context free. They represent ongoing and continuous change and development, leaving both footprints from earlier stages across synchronic practice as well as indicators of possible future states. The result is variation that is constrained by diachronic factors and entails the distribution of older and newer layers across contextual factors in ways that reflect their route into the language. At the same time, the grammatical system is regularly being renewed and reorganized as children participate in ongoing advancement of linguistic change. Following Romaine (1982), I take the position that the development of a viable theory of language change is critically dependent on the ability to link past and present, including active directions of change. Drawing on a series of case studies, I aim to showcase the analytical, empirical, and theoretical gains that are possible when the diachronic and the synchronic are harnessed and subsequently coupled with evidence from child language modelling and incrementation.

Speakers

Alexandra D'Arcy

University of Victoria

Thursday October 10, 2019 5:30pm - 7:00pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Plenary

Session type Plenary talk

7:00pm PDT

Opening Reception

Thursday October 10, 2019 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

Social

8:30am PDT

Kasstan & Stanford: Session introduction: What's so standard about standards?

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Jonathan R. Kasstan

University of Westminster

James N. Stanford

Dartmouth College

Friday October 11, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)

8:30am PDT

Ciancia & Patrick: Revealing new phonological insights into (t,d) deletion: An ol’ variable unexplored in the South East of England

Revealing new phonological insights into (t,d) deletion: An ol’ variable unexplored in the South East of England

(t,d) deletion - word-final consonant clusters C(C)T/C(C)D – has been widely investigated in US English dialects (e.g. Labov, 1989), yet received comparably little attention in the UK (Tagliamonte & Temple 2005; Baranowski & Turton 2016). We investigate (t,d) in three East Anglian communities: Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich. 4879 tokens, analysed through mixed-effects Rbrul regression analysis, were collected among 36 speakers stratified by class, sex and age. The obstruent category of following phonetic segments is subdivided into stops, nasals, sibilants, and non-sibilant fricatives: sibilants favour deletion, yet non-sibilant fricatives disfavour it, with following consonantal [h] playing a notable role. Results from linguistic factors (preceding and following environments, morphological class, voicing agreement, and stress) are consistent across the three locations, despite slight constraint ranking differences. However, the behaviour of liquids is inconsistent. Word frequency, stress and social factors are not significant, except for sex in Norwich.

References
Labov, W. (1989). The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change, 1, 85-97.
Baranowski, M. & Turton D. (2016). The morphological effect in British English T/D-deletion. Paper presented at the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 7th September 2016, University of York.
Tagliamonte, S., & Temple, R. (2005). New perspectives on an ol’variable: (t,d) in British English. Language Variation and Change, 17, 281-302.

Speakers

Carmen Ciancia

University of Essex

Peter Patrick

University of Essex

Friday October 11, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Constraints

Session type Talk
Chair: Volya Kapatsinski

8:30am PDT

Oushiro & Guedes: Usage rates and variable rules: what changes in migrants’ speech

Usage rates and variable rules: what changes in migrants’ speech

This paper analyzes the acquisition of abstract variable rules (Guy, 1980) in a dialect contact situation in Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the use of definite articles before possessive pronouns (minha mãe vs. a minha mãe ‘(the) my mother’). Definite articles differ between Northeastern and Southeastern varieties of Brazilian Portuguese in usage rates and favoring linguistic contexts (Callou; Silva, 1997). The analysis of a speech sample of 11 migrants, contrasted with 24 native speakers from both place of origin and destination, shows that the migrants have not only raised their rates of definite articles and but also use them in the same contexts as the host community, entailing that adult speakers in a dialect contact situation may learn new abstract grammatical rules.

Speakers

Livia Oushiro

University of Campinas

Shirley Guedes

University of Campinas

Friday October 11, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Contact

Session type Talk
Chair: Rebecca Starr

8:30am PDT

Esposito & Lake: How far do Pacific Northwest features spread? Evidence of prevelar raising/fronting across California

How far do Pacific Northwest features spread? Evidence of prevelar raising/fronting across California

We explore the extent to which California and the Pacific Northwest are vocalically distinct through an exploration of BEG/BAG raising and fronting, features typically associated with the PNW. Wordlist data were analyzed from 378 speakers (White/Latinx) across five California field-sites. We overall find higher and fronter BEG/BAG vowels than BET/BAT vowels in California, although younger speakers are lowering/backing BAG and backing BEG in apparent time. Euclidean distances for BEG/BET and BAG/BAT show that distances are greatest for middle generation speakers, indicating a delay between the lowering/retraction of BET/BAT and the later movement of BEG/BAG. BAG/BEG raising/fronting also shows surprising local conditioning. Redlands, the southernmost site analyzed patterns closest to the PNW in BAG-raising/fronting — not Humboldt, the nearest site to Oregon — raising questions as to the geographic spread of change for these features.

Speakers

Lewis Esposito

Stanford University

Emily Lake

Graduate student, Stanford University

Friday October 11, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: CWSL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Alicia Wassink

8:55am PDT

Strong et al.: Linking prestige with power: Gender, oration, and variable affrication in Ende

Linking prestige with power: Gender, oration, and variable affrication in Ende

Women tend to use standard variants more than men (Labov, 1990), possibly to access symbolic power when traditional avenues to power are unavailable (Eckert, 1989:256). We present results from a study examining variable affrication of retroflex obstruents (ʈ͡ʂ)~(ʈ) and (ɖ͡ʐ)~(ɖ) in Ende, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Despite no written standard, Ende speakers have strong opinions on what constitutes “good” Ende. Men, older speakers, and community orators hold positions of prestige. A variationist analysis of the speech of 16 Ende speakers demonstrates that the variable is more likely to be realized as a stop when produced by orators. Among the orators, older speakers and women are more likely to produce tokens as stops compared with younger speakers and men. We argue both that the observed patterns arise because the stopped variants are linked with power and that women orators use the variants to assert symbolic power.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Katherine Anne Strong

PhD Student, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Kate Lindsey

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Boston University

I work on language documentation and description in southern Papua New Guinea, particularly of Pahoturi River languages.

Katie Drager

Associate Professor, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Friday October 11, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

8:55am PDT

Van Herk & Childs: Stops making sense: Cross-linguistic conflict sites and the socio/linguistic constraint interface

Stops making sense: Cross-linguistic conflict sites and the socio/linguistic constraint interface

Although linguistic and social constraints usually operate independently, interesting socio/linguistic interaction effects are possible, e.g., salience/frequency and social meaning (Van Herk & Childs 2015), phonetic (un)naturalness and social class (Kroch 1978).

We investigate such interactions by exploiting a cross-linguistic quirk: both Arabic and English feature socially-conditioned variation in interdentals (that thing vs. dat ting, mathalan vs. matalan ‘for example’), but in opposite directions: English stigmatizes the stop variant (Dubois & Horvath 2000), Arabic the fricative (Abdel-Jawad 1986, Al-Wer 1999). Thus, linguistic constraints affecting social patterning might produce different cross-linguistic results.

Analyses of similar urbanizing communities in Jordan (N=1756) and Newfoundland (N=1524) demonstrate similar social and purely linguistic constraints, but precisely opposite effects for voicing and stress. Stressed syllables and voiceless contexts favour fricatives in NLE, but stops or a new sibilant form in JA. We argue that these factors increase the salience of tokens, and thus their potential socio-symbolic value.

Speakers

Gerard Van Herk

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Becky Childs

Coastal Carolina University

Friday October 11, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Constraints

Session type Talk
Chair: Volya Kapatsinski

8:55am PDT

Livio & Critchfield: A comparative account of variable number concord in Brazilian Portuguese and Mosquito Coast Spanish

A comparative account of variable number concord in Brazilian Portuguese and Mosquito Coast Spanish

Though widely discussed for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (Scherre and Naro 2014), number variation in Spanish verb morphology has been the subject of few studies with some notable exceptions: Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Spanish in contact with English, and Dominican Spanish. The objectives of our paper are: (1) to analyze a case of variable subject-verb concord in a variety of Spanish in contact with Miskitu spoken in Nicaragua: Mosquito Coast Spanish (MCS), and (2) discuss the notion of parameter change vastly investigated in BP and how this original data set is comparable to that. The data is oral in nature and was collected from narratives and interviews with speakers of MCS. The results of the regression model confirm that several factors show predictive power, particularly the order of the verb in relation to the subject, phonic saliency of the verb, intervening material between subject/verb, and gender and education level of the speaker.

Speakers

Camila Livio

University of Georgia

Madeline Critchfield

University of Georgia

Friday October 11, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Contact

Session type Talk
Chair: Rebecca Starr

8:55am PDT

Peterson: The participation of women of color in back vowel fronting in Portland, Oregon

The participation of women of color in back vowel fronting in Portland, Oregon

This study suggests widespread fronting of both GOOSE and GOAT and confirms that Women of Color (WoC) in Portland, Oregon do participate in regional dialectology, with clear evidence of Back Vowel Fronting. This study provides evidence for the existence of GOAT fronting in Portland, Oregon. The findings of this research demonstrate the need for expanding the diversity of sampling with respect to race and ethnicity in North American dialectology. Minority or non-white speakers of English have been historically overlooked in sociolinguistic dialectology, the result of both ideological and practical choices (Chambers & Trudgill, 1980; Labov, Ash and Boberg, 2006; Labov, 1966). In this study, fourteen natives of Portland, Oregon who identified as WoC (binned into the categories Black (n = 4), Latina (n = 4), Asian American (n = 5), and Native American (n = 1)) participated in sociolinguistic interviews that included spontaneous speech, a reading passage, and a word list.

Speakers

Manamaya Peterson

Reed College

Friday October 11, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: CWSL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Alicia Wassink

9:20am PDT

Tse: Does standard Chinese mean anything for Cantonese vowel variation?

Does standard Chinese mean anything for Cantonese vowel variation?

Unlike many communities studied by variationists in which SLI means convergence of spoken and written language, for Cantonese speakers, language ideology historically meant the opposite. In this presentation, I show how traces of this ideological distinction between written and spoken codes (cf. Snow 2004) remain present in both Hong Kong and in Toronto. I focus on two sets of sound correspondences found with (Standard) Mandarin cognates: Cantonese /i/ to Mandarin /ə/ and Cantonese /y/ to Mandarin /u/). Only Cantonese /y/ shows convergence, but only for second-generation Toronto speakers who are least likely to speak Mandarin. Toronto English influence, thus, better accounts for this change. The lack of standard Chinese influence on vowel pronunciation can be understood in terms of a historic distinction between codes and in terms of how speakers understand these distinctions (as I show from sociolinguistic interview excerpts) even as these distinctions continue to evolve under Western influence.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Holman Tse

St. Catherine University

Friday October 11, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

9:20am PDT

Mendes & Walker: The fate of unstressed vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

The fate of unstressed vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper examines social and linguistic factors conditioning variable realization of unstressed word-final vowels (as voiced, devoiced or deleted) in São Paulo Portuguese. A total of 5,413 tokens from 46 sociolinguistic interviews were coded nominally and continuously (proportion of pulses). Results from mixed-effects logistic and linear regression suggest stylistic and phonetic conditioning of the variation: more casual styles (conversation) favor devoicing and deletion over more formal styles (word list). High vowels and surrounding voiceless segments favor devoicing. Devoicing and deletion appear to be divided in social meaning, with devoicing associated with women and deletion with men. The lack of significance for age argues against the interpretation that these forms are on the rise, and the lack of a relationship between the two variants leaves a question about whether a major change is taking place in the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese.

Speakers

Ronald Beline Mendes

University of São Paulo

James Walker

La Trobe University

Friday October 11, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Constraints

Session type Talk
Chair: Volya Kapatsinski

9:20am PDT

Bancu: Morpho-syntactic variation in a multilingual setting: how contact varieties can shed light on the structure of under-documented languages

Morpho-syntactic variation in a multilingual setting: how contact varieties can shed light on the structure of under-documented languages

Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax) is an endangered Germanic language, used along socially dominant languages (i.e. German and Romanian) in multilingual settings predictive of structural borrowing among languages. There are two areas that display morpho-syntactic variation in TrSax: word order in verbal constructions, and the use of two coordinating conjunctions that fulfill the function of ‘and’. In each case one of the variants has structural/ functional overlap with German and the other with Romanian. The frequency distributions of auxiliary/modal + verb constructions in subordinate clauses are influenced by speakers’ language dominance in German and Romanian (assessed via a questionnaire). However, conjunction choice is determined by specific categories each conjunction favors and speakers with different levels of language dominance use the two conjunctions in a similar way. This research addresses the role of structural factors in contact-induced language change and proposes that frequently occurring structures may be more resistant to such change.

Speakers

Ariana Bancu

University of Michigan

Friday October 11, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Contact

Session type Talk
Chair: Rebecca Starr

9:20am PDT

Cardoso et al.: Different means to a similar end: Apparent time change in British Columbian Englishes

Different means to a similar end: Apparent time change in British Columbian Englishes

Canadian English has been described as relatively homogenous with small differences between regional accents. We seek to broaden the map of Canadian English as spoken in British Columbia (BC), the farthest west province, describing select vowel patterns for two southern BC regions using data collected online from 149 speakers (107 Females, 42 Males; age range = 14-78, mean age = 41) to determine apparent time changes. Data are analyzed with Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to identify differences in F1 and F2 vowel trajectories, focusing on the Canadian Shift, Canadian Raising, and pre-velar raising. Results suggest that regional differences in vowels across apparent time with variables showing unique patterns. While the vowel systems of younger speakers are currently similar, the apparent time trends suggest these similarities have converged via different routes, underscoring the importance of apparent time investigations.

Speakers

Amanda Cardoso

The University of British Columbia

Kaining Xu

The University of British Columbia

Molly Babel

University of British Columbia

Robert Pritchard

The University of British Columbia

Friday October 11, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: CWSL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Alicia Wassink

9:45am PDT

Povilonis & Guy: Deconstructing ‘standard’ in a minority language: Variation in Chanka Quechua

Deconstructing ‘standard’ in a minority language: Variation in Chanka Quechua

Formal public spheres in Peru require the majority language (Spanish). This essentially renders all registers of Quechua nonstandard. Quechua communities thus lack prescriptive norms from the widely accepted standards that guide stylistic variation in majority languages. In fact, the lack of a universally familiar Quechua standard means that variation ideologies are often independent of it. This paper compares uvular deletion rates in two Chanka Quechua styles across four urban and rural communities. Casual sociolinguistic interviews and formal audiovisual repetition tasks were recorded with 64 speakers. Casually, urbanites exhibit fewer uvulars than rural dwellers. Consciously, both groups have high rates of uvulars: rirqanki ‘I went’ over rir∅anki (for example). While Quechua-literate urban speakers value uvular-full “pure” Chanka, from Ministry of Education orthography, rural dwellers’ authenticity—essentially non-conscious orthographical adherence—does not afford them higher status. Compared to majority languages, education has reverse effects: idealized, pure Chanka is associated with socially-subordinate speakers.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Natalie Povilonis

New York University

Gregory Guy

New York University

Friday October 11, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

9:45am PDT

Erker: Is lexical frequency overrated?

Is lexical frequency overrated?

Are lexical frequency effects similar across grammatical domains? How does the strength of frequency effects compare to that of other constraints on variation? Has the role of frequency been exaggerated? This study addresses these questions by examining lexical frequency in two variable phenomena in Spanish: (1) coda /s/ weakening and (2) subject pronoun use. Multivariate analysis indicates that lexical frequency shapes patterns of variation in both variables. However, while frequency effects are comparable in terms of strength -- statistically significant for each variable but weakly predictive compared to other factors -- the nature of the effects is different. Higher frequency promotes increased similarity in the phonetic domain but increased differentiation in the morphosyntactic domain. These results support a conservative position, one that acknowledges the capacity of lexical frequency to shape patterns of linguistic variation while also recognizing its explanatory limits and resistance to generalization across different levels of grammatical structure.

Speakers

Daniel Erker

Boston University

Friday October 11, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Constraints

Session type Talk
Chair: Volya Kapatsinski

9:45am PDT

Abuamsha: Phonological and Morphosyntactic Variation in Palestinian Arabic: A Case of Ongoing Language Change

Phonological and Morphosyntactic Variation in Palestinian Arabic: A Case of Ongoing Language Change

This study examines phonological and morpho-syntactic variation in Palestinian Arabic spoken in Gaza City, which represents a special contact context brought by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 1948 and the influx of thousands of Palestinian refugees to Gaza. The main concern is to find out whether this variation represents a case of ongoing language change and to shed light on the principles, constraints, and mechanisms of the change and the role played by contact and speakers’ socio-linguistic characteristics. The linguistic variables under study here are the realization the Proto-Semitic *q, the raising of feminine suffix -a to -ei, and the expression of the progressive and future markers. I interviewed 72 female and male speakers from different ages, genders, and dialect backgrounds. There is evidence that language change is taking place in PA with both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors playing a role. Age, gender, accommodation, and salience and simplicity/complexity of the variable interact with speakers’ choice from among the different variants.

Speakers

Duaa Abuamsha

University of Calgary

Friday October 11, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Contact

Session type Talk
Chair: Rebecca Starr

9:45am PDT

Becker & Bahls: The Low-Back-Merger Shift in Port Townsend, Washington

The Low-Back-Merger Shift in Port Townsend, Washington

This study documents the vowel patterns of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, an understudied Western locale. We focus on the rotation of the short front vowels TRAP, DRESS, and KIT, with low back merger of LOT and THOUGHT as catalyst, adopting the term Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS). All speakers but one exceed the ANAE benchmark (Labov et al. 2006) for TRAP -backing (F2 < 1825 Hz), and all exceed the benchmark for DRESS-lowering (F1 > 650 Hz). A mixed effects regression model on the F2 of LOT demonstrates change in apparent time, with younger speakers producing a significantly backer LOT. These results lead us to question whether or not LBMS is such a recent change in the West, or if the long-time presence of low back merger in the region has produced communities with overall stability, even in rural locales.

Speakers

Kara Becker

Reed College

Cecilia Bahls

Reed College

Friday October 11, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: CWSL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Alicia Wassink

10:10am PDT

Pop-Up Mentoring

Registration for PUMP@NWAV will close on Sunday, October 6, to allow us time to match up mentors and mentees.
The Pop-Up Mentoring Program (PUMP) is a series of events that travel around from conference to conference, giving anyone who is interested a chance to have a brief meeting with a mentor outside of their official support system. Mentors and mentees are paired by a PUMP coordinator based on shared interests for a one-time, no-strings-attached mentoring session. The event is open to all, regardless of gender or career stage, and the purpose of the mentoring sessions is to help more junior colleagues with a variety of potential problems and questions that arise in a professional context, such as work/life balance, minority status, and graduate or job applications. These events have proved popular and helpful for everyone involved. PUMP events are open to all, regardless of gender or career stage.

Friday October 11, 2019 10:10am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Maple

Special event

10:30am PDT

Bleaman: Linguistic prescriptivism, social conservatism, and phonetic drift in language maintenance communities

Linguistic prescriptivism, social conservatism, and phonetic drift in language maintenance communities

This talk investigates the effects of language planning on phonetic variation in Yiddish, a minority language spoken in New York by two communities committed to its maintenance: (1) Yiddishists, a small CofP in which prescriptive standards are highly valued; (2) Hasidic Jews, a large speech community that maintains Yiddish without emphasis on standardization. An analysis of release burst duration in word-initial stops finds that Yiddishists, who are English-dominant, exhibit longer (more English-like) bursts than do Hasidim. The community effect supports the hypothesis that planning may play only a minor role in constraining variation. However, this picture is complicated by the results of a study of variable number agreement, in which Yiddishists are more linguistically conservative.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Isaac L. Bleaman

University of California Berkeley

Friday October 11, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

10:30am PDT

Wade & Roberts: Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in a laboratory experiment

Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in a laboratory experiment

Speakers may converge toward not only observed, but also expected linguistic behavior, cued by social information. This study investigates how individuals adjust their speech when observed interlocutor behavior contradicts expectations. 54 subject pairs participated in a cooperative map task, communicating in an "alien" language. Participants were assigned to one of two alien "species" that differ in their use of a linguistic variant [p] or [f]; only Species A was made aware of this dialect difference. Species A always expected [f] from their Species B partner, which they in fact observed in the Matched Condition. In the Unmatched Condition, Species A instead observed their partner using unexpected variant [v]. Species A converged toward expected behavior by producing [f] before observing Species B’s speech, but made subtle adjustments after observation by increasing [f] usage in the Matched Condition and decreasing usage in the Unmatched Condition. Species B, lacking sociolinguistic expectations, converged less.

Speakers

Lacey Wade

University of Pennsylvania

Gareth Roberts

University of Pennsylvania

Friday October 11, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: LabPhon sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Lauren Hall-Lew

10:30am PDT

Zaykovskaya: Remarkable LIKE in the non-native repertoire: Usage, judgments, attitudes

Remarkable LIKE in the non-native repertoire: Usage, judgments, attitudes

The current paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which remarkable LIKE (D’Arcy, 2017), exists in non-native sociolinguistic repertoire.

Using multiple data collection methods, the present study examined rLIKE as perceived, used and reflected upon by 26 international undergraduates on a university campus; data from local native speakers were used for comparison.

Token distribution across functions and across syntactic positions within functions was strikingly similar for NSs and NNSs. In addition to length of residence, beliefs about LIKE emerged as a factor influencing usage frequency: NNSs who perceived LIKE as specifically American were likely to use it often. Results of a naturalness judgment experiment also revealed a native-like pattern.

Interestingly, most NNSs did not recognize LIKE as a stigmatized vernacular element. The attitude pattern (judgments about speakers using/not using LIKE) displayed by NNSs, however, was based on perceived social personae of speakers and surprisingly native-like.

Speakers

Irina Zaykovskaya

Michigan State University

Friday October 11, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lexicogrammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Panayiotis Pappas

10:30am PDT

Bigelow: Neo-hosers up north: Locally constructed meaning and FACE and GOAT ungliding in rural Ontario

Neo-hosers up north: Locally constructed meaning and FACE and GOAT ungliding in rural Ontario

In this case study, I explore the phenomenon of FACE and GOAT ungliding in two communities in Northern Ontario, Dowling and North Bay. Data come from sociolinguistic interviews recorded with speakers of all ages in the towns between 2010-2018. In both communities, the strongest predictor is rural orientation; the most extreme ungliders are individuals with occupations and interests ideologically tied to notions of rurality. Taking into consideration this evidence from the production and evidence from (implicit) perception of FACE and GOAT ungliding, my findings suggest the features indirectly index rural orientation by virtue of their association with other qualities perceived to be related to this social category (e.g. being working-class and male). I argue this process of indexicalisation is motivated by rurally oriented individuals, the social group with the most extreme ungliding, and mediated by characterological performances of these individuals in alt-media as a persona I identify as the neo-hoser.

Speakers

Lauren Bigelow

University of Toronto

Friday October 11, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: O Canada

Session type Talk
Chair: Gerard Van Herk

10:55am PDT

Ravindranath Abtahian et al.: Language ideologies and language shift scenarios in Indonesia

Language ideologies and language shift scenarios in Indonesia

This paper explores the relationship between language ideologies, linguistic insecurity, and language shift, using survey data from 660 Indonesians at universities across Indonesia. We report on a model of language shift linking language regard (Preston 2010) and language practices, based on how speakers label languages in their repertoire, their reported proficiency in those languages, and their responses to 14 language attitude questions. We represent speaker attributes and language attributes in separate vector spaces, using a generalization of canonical correlation analysis for synthesizing multiple data sources. Language attitudes are modeled as a function of speaker attributes, and proficiency is modeled as a function of both speaker and language attributes. By composing these two functions we get an indicator of relationships between attitudes and proficiency for any particular language, allowing us to develop profiles of speakers and languages and explore this relationship in light of complex scenarios of language shift in Indonesia.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Maya Ravindranath Abtahian

University of Rochester

Abigail C. Cohn

Cornell University

Aaron White

University of Rochester

Yanti

Atma Jaya Catholic University

Friday October 11, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

10:55am PDT

Heaton: Distinguishing native and imitated American regional accents

Distinguishing native and imitated American regional accents

Research on distinguishing of regional American accents from one another is much more common than research on differentiating natives or imitators of regional accents. The present experiment is designed to establish whether primarily Midwestern listeners at a university with a high population of students from the Midwest and Northeast can distinguish speakers as native speakers or imitators from three American regions. Listeners categorized speakers of Northern, Northeastern, and Southern accents as native or imitators. Results showed that listeners could differentiate native and performed Northern and Northeastern accents, but not Southern accents. These results provide evidence of the difficulty listeners may have determining nativeness of accented speakers from regions the listeners are unfamiliar with, reflecting similar findings to distinction of regional accents from one another. Results and implications are primarily discussed as they pertain to media data, but also have implications for forensic linguistic study.

Speakers

Hayley Heaton

Assessment Specialist, University of Michigan

Friday October 11, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: LabPhon sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Lauren Hall-Lew

10:55am PDT

Zhang: Rethinking the choice of filled pause as a sociolinguistic variable

Rethinking the choice of filled pause as a sociolinguistic variable

The choice of filled pause has been proposed as a sociolinguistic variable, which reflects a change-in-progress in which “um” is gaining popularity relative to “uh”. This trend is not only observed in English (Tottie, 2011; Acton, 2011; Fruehwald, 2016), but also found across Germanic languages (Wieling et al, 2016). In this study, two potential covariates which could partially explain the variation in the choice of filled pause are further examined: the topic of conversations and the accommodation between interlocutors. Through a large sample of spontaneous telephone conversations compiled from the Fisher corpus, it can be shown that “uh” has greater variability in its distribution compared to “um”, when variations in speaker’s age, conversation topic, and interlocutor’s choice of filled pause are considered. This difference suggests a potential functional difference between the two filled pauses, which further implies possible effects from varying speech planning strategies in different conversation contexts.

Speakers

Hong Zhang

University of Pennsylvania

Friday October 11, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lexicogrammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Panayiotis Pappas

10:55am PDT

Pabst: Is [nuz] really the new [njuz]? Yod dropping in Toronto English

Is [nuz] really the new [njuz]? Yod dropping in Toronto English

This paper investigates yod dropping, i.e., the merger of /ju/ and /u/ after the coronals /t, d, n/, among 20 speakers of Toronto English. Results confirm that the merger is mostly complete. They further show that highly frequent variable yod words, which used to lag behind in this change, still do so. This supports the idea that frequency can have long-lasting effects on sound change, and that lexically gradual sound changes can also be phonetically gradual (Phillips 1994, 2006). Results also show that there is significant phonetic overlap between the vowels in variable yod words and no yod words with preceding coronals. This makes it difficult to distinguish between yod retention and /u/-fronting, an ongoing change (see also Roeder et al. 2018), suggesting that the common practice of using pre-determined F2 cut-off points to determine yod presence is problematic.

Speakers

Katharina Pabst

University of Toronto

Friday October 11, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: O Canada

Session type Talk
Chair: Gerard Van Herk

11:20am PDT

Barth: The right way to talk about kin in Matukar Panau

The right way to talk about kin in Matukar Panau

Matukar Panau (Oceanic, Papua New Guinea), spoken by about 300 people, shows lexical variation in kinship term expression with concomitant morphological variation in the possession of kinship terms. Three strategies are used: direct possession of traditional kinship terms, indirect possession of replacement kinship terms, and direct and indirect (doubled) possession of older kinship terms. The later pattern has been noted to ‘sound wrong’ by speakers, but is used marginally by many different speakers. A quantitative analysis shows many of the well-respected, and mostly female, ‘language keepers’ use the innovative indirect pattern most often. These women hold linguistic and household power in the community, but lack financial and community-wide political power. I discuss how language keepers can be the leaders for innovation when there is not a strong notion of standard in place.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Danielle Barth

The Australian National University

Friday October 11, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

11:20am PDT

Walker et al.: The effect of speaker-identity on dialect processing

The effect of speaker-identity on dialect processing

This study investigated the combined role of video- and voice-familiarization on dialect processing. Six white actresses were audio- and video-recorded reading the same monologues and pseudo- and real-words, in two dialect guises: Southern and Standardized US English. These recordings were used in a lexical decision task (LDT), where for a given list an actress was presented as mostly Southern, mostly Standardized, or was presented evenly in both guises. Southern and non-Southern participants were assigned to one of 4 conditions, which differed in whether there was video as well as audio, and whether participants were familiarized with the actresses’ accents through monologues before LDT. The video with monologue condition most affected listener’s performance, and these effects were most robust in Southern listeners. These results suggest that listeners can use speaker identity to form expectations about a speaker’s dialect, and that some dialect processing difficulties are about dialect expectations.

Speakers

Abby Walker

Virginia Tech

Carla B. Fernandez

The Pennsylvania State University

Janet G. van Hell

The Pennsylvania State University

Friday October 11, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: LabPhon sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Lauren Hall-Lew

11:20am PDT

Cukor-Avila et al.: General extenders and stuff like that in African American Language

General extenders and stuff like that in African American Language

Despite the widespread attention to General Extenders (GEs) over the past 40 years, none of the previous studies have investigated their use, function, and possible grammaticalization in African American Language (AAL). This study aims to fill that gap with a replication study following the methods used in Tagliamonte and Denis (2010) and Denis (2017). The data come from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) (Kendall and Farrington 2018). GEs were extracted from transcripts of all 146 speakers in CORAAL yielding a total of 1,661 forms. We found the distribution of GEs patterns similarly to what Tagliamonte and Denis (2010) found in Toronto, and when we tested the CORAAL data for the four features of grammaticalization outlined in Cheshire (2007) we found only minor differences for phonetic reduction. GE data from other AAL corpora should reveal if these results can be generalized to other regional varieties of AAL.

References
Cheshire, Jenny. 2007. Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 155-193.
Denis, Derek. 2017. The Development of and stuff in Canadian English: A longitudinal study of apparent grammaticalization. Journal of English Linguistics 45: 157-185.
Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2018. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Version 2018.10.06. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project.
Tagliamonte, Sali and D. Denis. 2010. The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 335-368.

Speakers

Patricia Cukor-Avila

University of North Texas

Kristy Wahlert

University of North Texas

Ashley Balcazar

University of North Texas

Friday October 11, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lexicogrammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Panayiotis Pappas

11:20am PDT

Neuhausen: To raise or not to raise in Pennsylvania German English in Canada

To raise or not to raise in Pennsylvania German English in Canada

This study investigates the degree to which Canadian Raising occurs in the Pennsylvania German English (PGE) speech of Old Order Mennonites (OOMs) in southern Ontario by reference to sociolinguistic interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019. Traditionally an isolated community resistant to change, there is now increasing exposure to the wider Canadian population for at least some OOMs. Adapting resources of the majority community, some OOMs are participating in the change towards Canadian Raising, a process that is largely complete in the wider CanE speech community. It seems that Raising indexes more outwards-oriented stances, whereas non-Raising indexes more community-centric stances. Impressionistically, Raising seems to be more advanced in /aʊ/ than in /aɪ/ sounds. The context of this study is perfectly suited for understanding local and translocal dynamics in a language contact situation, particularly in relation to stylistic practices in third wave sociolinguistics.

Speakers

Miriam Neuhausen

Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg

Friday October 11, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: O Canada

Session type Talk
Chair: Gerard Van Herk

11:45am PDT

Meyerhoff & Nagy: The role of standards in the field of variation

The role of standards in the field of variation

While the notion of a ‘standard’ or ‘norm’ is central to methods in sociolinguistics, an undocumented language is most unlikely to have experienced formal standardization, e.g. for use in education (cf. Vandenbussche 2007). As a result, there may be either multiple sets of norms or no defined norms within the community (Nagy 2009, Sallabank 2012, Coto Solano 2017). We comment on the state of the field and discuss the preceding contributions, focussing on two aspects of standardization. The first is the role that linguists play in setting and labelling ‘standards’. The second is the extent to which defining a standard is required in order to undertake sociolinguistic analyses of variation. These questions have practical import as well as theoretical. One barrier to increasing the frequency of writing is fear of writing/spelling the wrong way. This is especially acute when there is no ready access to institutionalized literacy resources.

Session abstract: What’s so standard about standards?

Standard language ideology (SLI) is a topic ripe for new cross-cultural comparisons, as notions of standard and prestige have been central to sociolinguistic theorizing (Meyerhoff 2019). Cheshire observes that ‘variationists have worked almost exclusively on languages that have been heavily standardized, so the potential influence of [SLI] on the selection of variables […] has been high’ (2005:87). Further, historically atypical standardized national languages of urban elites in modern stratified societies have entrenched hierarchical views of variation, that are grounded in a functional model and asymmetric power relations (e.g. Rickford 1986). These biases should be addressed if we are to build sociolinguistic universals (Guy & Adli 2019). This session continues the discussion by examining underrepresented communities where SLI is realized in different ways, or not at all. Six original research papers will explore this topic around the world, and a discussant presentation will contextualize the panel’s observations.

Speakers

Miriam Meyerhoff

LALS, Victoria University of Wellington

Naomi Nagy

University of Toronto

Friday October 11, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: What's so standard about standards?

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Jonathan R. Kasstan & James N. Stanford

11:45am PDT

Austen: Pushing the envelope of variation: Listener perceptions of the TRAP/BATH split

Pushing the envelope of variation: Listener perceptions of the TRAP/BATH split

This project investigates listeners’ sensitivity to linguistic environment in social meaning. In the TRAP/BATH split found in the south of England, BATH words (e.g. "class") contain [ɑ:], whereas TRAP words (e.g. "classic") contain [a]. British listeners perceive B[ɑ:]TH as 'posh' and prestigious (Gupta 2005). This experiment asks whether listeners limit this “[ɑ:]=posh” social meaning to BATH words: if "cl[ɑ:]ss" sounds posh, does "cl[ɑ:]ssic" also sound posh? Southern British, northern British, and American listeners completed a ‘character selection task’, matching [ɑ:]/[a] pronunciations to ‘posh’, ‘social climber’, or ‘working class’ television characters. Southerners were more likely to associate [ɑ:] with posh characters in BATH words than TRAP words, whereas northerners (whose speech lacks the split) selected posh characters equally for both word classes. Americans responded at chance, suggesting no social meaning. The northerners’ results indicate that social meaning can be “leaky”, spreading beyond the linguistic environment in which a variant actually occurs.

Speakers

Martha Austen

Ohio State University

Friday October 11, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: LabPhon sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Lauren Hall-Lew
Award Best Student Abstract

11:45am PDT

Franco & Tagliamonte: What’s going on here anyway(s)? A sociolinguistic perspective on specialization

What’s going on here anyway(s)? A sociolinguistic perspective on specialization

This paper investigates variation and change in a little-studied morphological variable, the adverbial suffix -s, in words in ‘-ward(s)’, e.g. ‘toward(s)’, ‘inward(s)’, and ‘-way(s)’, e.g. ‘anyway(s)’, ‘halfway(s)’. Explanations for variation between -s and -∅ are fraught with contradiction in the literature. Some scholars argue that language-internal factors, e.g. functional specialization, play a role, whereas others say that variation is random. Our large-scale comparative variationist analysis of these adverbs in the Ontario dialects reveals evidence of a different type of specialization, with words in ‘-ward(s)’ increasingly taking -s and words in ‘-way(s)’ generally without. ‘Anyway(s)’ is an exception with -s increasing and men and speakers of a lower education level leading this change. Thus, we have discovered a change from below. The fact that the frequency of the -s suffix differs across grammatical categories and lexical items is likely due to the fact that this systemic change is still in progress.

Speakers

Karlien Franco

postdoc, University of Toronto

Sali A. Tagliamonte

University of Toronto

Friday October 11, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lexicogrammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Panayiotis Pappas

11:45am PDT

Wagner: Prince Edward Island – a blank spot on the (socio)linguistic map

Prince Edward Island – a blank spot on the (socio)linguistic map

Attempting to fill a gap on the (socio)linguistic map, this paper offers a first survey of attitudes and perceptions of and towards Prince Edward Islanders and their variety of English. Results from 70 PEI participants, stratified by age and gender, are discussed. The survey includes a map task, sections on local vocabulary and sayings, a verbal guise test with language attitudes ratings, and an “island identity” section incorporating aspects of multidimensional acculturation scales.

The focus in this talk is the map task, where each participant on average mentioned three different regions on PEI. Associations for these regions (and their speakers) can be grouped into five major categories: attitudes, regions & places, evaluations, other varieties & languages, and people. While generally resembling map task results of other varieties, the data hold some surprises: most strikingly, young women (rather than young men) show overall more positive attitudes towards local language.

Speakers

Susanne Wagner

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Friday October 11, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: O Canada

Session type Talk
Chair: Gerard Van Herk

12:10pm PDT

Film & Panel Event: Signing Black in America: The story of Black ASL

Signing Black in America: The Story of Black American Sign Language
While African American Language is the most widely recognized ethnic variety of English in the world, the use of American Sign Language (ASL) by Black Americans has been largely ignored or dismissed as part of an assumed ASL system uniformly used by the deaf community in the United States. But ASL, like any language, may show robust diversity, including traits associated with by Black Americans.
Signing Black in America is the first documentary to highlight the development of Black American Sign Language. Based on extensive interviews with Black signers, linguistic experts, interpreters, natural conversations, and artistic performances by Black ASL users, it documents the development and description of this unique ethnic variety of ASL. Many of the same conditions that gave rise to the development of spoken African American language affected the development of Black ASL—residential, educational, and social segregation along with the internal development of an autonomous cultural community indexing black identity. At the same time, deaf African Americans had contact with the spoken African American language community, borrowing sign language analogs of unique spoken-language African American expressions.
Different uses of space, hand use, directional movement, and facial expression are exemplified by Black ASL users, including an expanded perimeter for hand movement, the differential placement of hands and their directional trajectory, the use of two-handed vs. one-handed signs, and facial expressions, leading to a variety of ASL that is an analog of the variety used in spoken African American Language. The Black Deaf Community is now embracing the notion of Black ASL as a symbol of solidarity and agency in constructing ethnolinguistic identity.
Following the presentation of the documentary, a panel discussion of the film will include the following participants:

Facilitator:
Ceil Lucas, Professor Emerita, Gallaudet University
Lucas is a pioneer in research on variation in ASL, and the author of many books and articles about language variation in ASL. She had led several research projects on the development and description of Black ASL and is a co-author of The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure

Panelists:
Joseph Hill, University of Rochester
Hill is a professor at Rochester University and an Associate Producer of Signing Black in America. He has done primary research on Black ASL and is the co-author of The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, in addition to other research articles on the nature and development of Black ASL.

Danica Cullinan, North Carolina State University
Cullinan is an award-winning producer who serves with Neal Hutcheson as the co-producer and co-director of Talking Black in America as well as Signing Black in America. Her extensive experience with various venues of media video production has given her insight into the logistical and editing challenges of producing a documentary such as Signing Black in America.

Friday October 11, 2019 12:10pm - 1:30pm PDT
EMU Redwood

Special event

12:10pm PDT

Lunch break

Friday October 11, 2019 12:10pm - 1:40pm PDT
N/A

Break

1:40pm PDT

Bailey et al.: Affrication as the cause of s-retraction: Community-level change in Manchester English

Affrication as the cause of s-retraction: Community-level change in Manchester English

In this talk we present the first large-scale community-level study of /s/-retraction in British English. We observe an apparent-time change, with /s/ becoming more [ʃ]-like across the 80 years covered by the corpus. Hierarchical cluster analysis also identifies a group of younger speakers who exhibit considerable overlap between (str) and pre-vocalic /ʃ/ suggesting that the change is particularly advanced in this community.

The causes of s-retraction have long been debated, with disagreement over the role of /ɹ/ as a trigger. We provide the first quantitative evidence of retraction in (stj) clusters (e.g. student), and in doing so show that this context is changing in parallel with (str), casting doubt on claims that s-retraction is driven by non-local assimilation with /ɹ/. Affrication in /tɹ/ and /tj/ clusters seems to be the more likely explanation.

Speakers

George Bailey

University of York

Stephen Nichols

The University of Manchester

Maciej Baranowski

The University of Manchester

Danielle Turton

Lancaster University

Friday October 11, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: /s/

Session type Talk
Chair: Erez Levon

1:40pm PDT

Dinkin: Generational phases: The low back vowels in Cooperstown, New York

Generational phases: The low back vowels in Cooperstown, New York

This paper examines the low back vowels in Cooperstown, a small village in rural central New York with heavy tourism, a relatively high middle-class population, and high in-migration from other regions. Four apparent-time phases are observable: Baby Boomers show sharp gender differentiation, with men producing fronter LOT and lower THOUGHT than women. In Generation X, the gender differentiation disappears; front LOT and high THOUGHT virtually vanish. Among Millennials, a new gender differentiation emerges: women mostly judge LOT/THOUGHT minimal pairs as merged, while men judge them distinct. In Generation Z, all speakers judge at least one minimal pair merged. The dialectal realignment after the Baby Boom generation is found not only in LOT and THOUGHT but in other vowels such as TRAP and PRICE. I argue that dialect contact due to migration may be the cause of this realignment, as well as of the relative advancement of the LOT/THOUGHT merger.

Speakers

Aaron Dinkin

San Diego State University

Friday October 11, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: ADS sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Kirk Hazen

1:40pm PDT

Green et al.: The prosody and meaning of BIN constructions in African American English

The prosody and meaning of BIN constructions in African American English

The pronunciation of Tense-Modality-Aspect markers "be", "BIN", and "dən" can differ from the pronunciation of the corresponding auxiliary/main verb forms, so, for example, resultant state marker "dən" is unstressed in African American English (e.g. He dən done his homework. ‘He has already done his homework’) although it is stressed in other varieties of English in which it occurs. Some informal observations have been made about the intonation of these markers; however, only prosodic properties of stressed "BIN", which indicates that an eventuality or part of it is in the distant past (1), have been addressed in the literature. This paper is a production study of "BIN" that contributes a first phonetic and phonological characterization of sentence-level intonation in "BIN" constructions across systematically varied semantic predicate types and explicates methodological challenges arising in studying fine-grained aspects of the semantics-prosody interface.

Speakers

Lisa Green

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Kristine Yu

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ayana Whitmal

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Anissa Neal

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Alejna Brugos

Boston University

Deniz Özyıldız

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Friday October 11, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: African American Language

Session type Talk
Chair: Sonja Lanehart

1:40pm PDT

Pollock: Toeing the Line: Indexing party identity through dialectal phonetic features in Spanish political discourse

Indexing party identity through dialectal phonetic features in Spanish political discourse

Many studies of regional political discourse have analyzed stylistic variation, revealing differences based on political leaning. Building from previous research, this study compares political speech in four southern/central Spanish cities based on four features of southern Iberian Spanish: coda /s/ deletion, intervocalic /s/ deletion, /tʃ/ deaffrication, and intervocalic /d/ deletion. Televised interviews and formal speeches from thirty-two politicians provided a representative breakdown of gender and political leaning across the four cities. Tokens were analyzed impressionistically and verified by spectrographic data to determine if politicians followed an established so-called party norm. While regional patterns most strongly governed usage, there was fluctuation dependent on speech context and for an innovative variant. Qualitative micro-analysis of this variant, an alveolarized /tʃ/, indicated that it indexed southern identity and liberal values. The lack of stylistic differentiation based on party leaning was found to be indicative of the powerful influence of regional norms on political speech.

Speakers

Matthew Pollock

Indiana University Bloomington

Friday October 11, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

T: Personae

Session type Talk
Chair: Zack Jaggers

2:05pm PDT

Regan: Advancing sociophonetic analysis of fricative merger(s) and split in Andalusian Spanish

Advancing sociophonetic analysis of fricative merger(s) and split in Andalusian Spanish

Based on 19,420 tokens from read speech (passage reading, word list) by 80 speakers (40 male, 40 female; ages 18-87), this study analyzes Andalusian coronal fricative variation in Huelva and Lepe, Spain. The aim of the study was three-fold: (i) to provide acoustic evidence of the fricative demerger; (ii) to determine which acoustic parameters best explain this variation; (iii) to promote a fricative Demerger Index, a novel methodological approach that provides degrees of demerger that avoids effects of sex-based spectral differences. Mixed effect linear regression models indicated that those with the largest demerger were females, younger speakers, those from Huelva, and in more formal styles; COG, Mean Intensity, Skewness, and Variance were the most adequate acoustic measures. Implications are that the fricative Demerger Index provides a gradient analysis that compares between-speaker variation only after calculating within-speaker variation, allowing researchers to observe degrees of demerger while avoiding sex-related spectral differences.

Speakers

Brendan Regan

Texas Tech University

Friday October 11, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: /s/

Session type Talk
Chair: Erez Levon

2:05pm PDT

Gratton: Vowel space peripherality as a sociolinguistic variable

Vowel space peripherality as a sociolinguistic variable

While work in sociolinguistics has shown that vowel space dispersion plays a role in vowel shifts, little is known about the indexical potential of changes in vowel space peripherality. This study, of 35 speakers in unscripted dyadic interactions, suggests that vowel space dispersion is iconically tied to speaker positioning. First, speakers’ vowel spaces were more centralized when they felt more comfortable in the interaction or when they ‘clicked’ more with their interlocutor. Shared common ground provides the ability to interpret ‘reduced’ signals (like centralization), and this ‘reduced’ signal itself is iconic of shared common ground. Second, vowel spaces were also more centralized when speakers enjoyed the interaction less. This proprioceptive iconic link between vowel space peripherality and speaker openness — effectively ‘fold in’ on oneself acoustically — allows speakers to indicate emotional involvement through both physiological and linguistic means. These findings motivate treating the vowel space as an interactionally meaningful sociolinguistic variable.

Speakers

Chantal Gratton

PhD Candidate, Stanford University

Friday October 11, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: ADS sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Kirk Hazen

2:05pm PDT

Fisher: Parallel development? Two cases of perfect-to-past reanalysis in African American English

Parallel development? Two cases of perfect-to-past reanalysis in African American English

This paper argues that a reanalysis of ain’t in present perfect contexts in African American English gave rise to the use of ain’t in past tense contexts, parallel to the reanalysis of pluperfect constructions (had+V-ed) as preterits. Both shifts to past meaning are examined using recordings of casual speech from 42 speakers of AAE in Philadelphia. Apparent time analysis of past tense tokens shows significant increases in use of ain’t by birth year during the 20th century. Likewise, younger corpus speakers are more likely to use had+V-ed in orientation clauses of narratives to convey past rather than pluperfect meaning. This paper questions whether these parallel shifts from past to perfect meaning could result from a single underlying change in the grammar of AAE.

Speakers

Sabriya Fisher

Wellesley College

Friday October 11, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: African American Language

Session type Talk
Chair: Sonja Lanehart

2:05pm PDT

Lake & Pratt: Stylistic curation: The use of place-based linguistic features in the construction of a personal brand

Stylistic curation: The use of place-based linguistic features in the construction of a personal brand

The curation of ‘personal brands’ on social media raises questions about the role of linguistic style in commodification of the self. In this talk we focus on Sydney Serena, a social media influencer, as she completes high school in Minnesota and moves to Los Angeles. Vowel data from YouTube videos (2016-2019) were analyzed, as well as /r/ in word-initial consonant clusters. Results indicate that Serena produces more California-like vowels over time, and labialized or fricated realizations of cluster /r/ at a rate of 22%. Serena’s vocalic changes occur before she moves to California, suggesting agentive stylistic practice rather than a contact-induced shift. We interpret Serena’s marked production of /r/-clusters as a new sociolinguistic variable and an example of bricolage. Findings indicate that place-based indexicality (e.g. California) reflects an aspirational persona that dominates the influencing industry, regardless of whether the influencer is actually Californian.

Speakers

Emily Lake

Graduate student, Stanford University

Teresa Pratt

University of Duisburg-Essen

Friday October 11, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

T: Personae

Session type Talk
Chair: Zack Jaggers

2:30pm PDT

Song & Dalola: Ssssibilant or Shhhhibilant: Dialect variation in North and South Korean

Ssssibilant or Shhhhibilant: Dialect variation in North and South Korean

Both theoretical and impressionistic studies have documented differences in the articulation of sibilants in dialects of North Korean (NK) and South Korean (SK). In SK dialects, two types of sibilants differ with respect to place of articulation: alveolar (/s/, /s’/) and post-alveolar (/tɕ/, /tɕ’/, /tɕʰ/) (Lee 1996; Shin & Cha 2003). In contrast, in NK dialects, all of the sibilants are typically classified as alveolar sounds (/s/, /s’/, /ts/, /ts’/, /tsʰ/) (Choi 1992; Kwak 2003; Kang 2005); however, little acoustic evidence has been presented to support this difference. This research investigates whether the lenis sibilants /s/ and /tɕ/ show dialectal variation in spectral measures indicating place and when conditioned by social factors. Audio data were taken from YouTube videos. Results indicate that South and North Korean show different acoustic features for the two sibilants depending on lengths of residence in South Korea and gender.

Speakers

Jiyeon Song

University of South Carolina

Amanda Dalola

University of South Carolina

Friday October 11, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: /s/

Session type Talk
Chair: Erez Levon

2:30pm PDT

Stanford et al.: Pioneering a dialect shift in the Pioneer Valley: Evidence for the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Western Massachusetts

Pioneering a dialect shift in the Pioneer Valley: Evidence for the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Western Massachusetts

Western Massachusetts is located near several important North American English dialect regions (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Boberg 2001), yet much of the previous knowledge about Western Massachusetts derives from just a handful of speakers. The present study is the largest acoustic sociophonetic project conducted in this area (70 speakers, 20,000+ vowel tokens). We examined traditional New England features as well as the Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS, also known as Elsewhere Shift or Third Dialect) (Becker in-press; Boberg 2019; Kendall & Fridland 2017; Roberts 2015; Durian 2012). Using diagnostics in Becker (in-press) and Boberg (2019), we compared older versus younger speakers, finding evidence of LBMS-related shifts in BAT/BAN, DRESS, LOT, and increasing LOT/THOUGHT overlap. The supralocal LBMS is becoming established as traditional New England features are receding. These results provide new insights into the scope of LBMS, and, more generally, the processes by which a community shifts toward supralocal patterns.

Speakers

James N. Stanford

Dartmouth College

Monica Nesbitt

Dartmouth College

James King

Dartmouth College

Sebastian Turner

Dartmouth College

Friday October 11, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: ADS sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Kirk Hazen

2:30pm PDT

Farrington: The Great Migration and the spread of a supraregional variant: Glottal stop replacement of word final /d/ in DC African American Language

The Great Migration and the spread of a supraregional variant: Glottal stop replacement of word final /d/ in DC African American Language

The Great Migration (GM) was the migration of African Americans out of the rural South between 1915 and 1970, creating language contact scenarios likely to influence African American Language (AAL). This study investigates the role of the GM as related to the spread of glottal stop replacement of word-final /d/, a sound pattern common in AAL. Data come from 68 speakers recorded in Washington DC in 1968 (Kendall & Farrington 2018). This time period provides a unique glimpse into DC AAL: the African American population was nearing its peak in DC, and the majority of this population had moved to DC within the prior thirty years. The results show that young working-class females led in this sound change and that it was a change initially led by individuals whose parents were born outside of DC, demonstrating the impact the GM had on endogenous varieties of AAL in GM destination cities.

Speakers

Charlie Farrington

University of Oregon

Friday October 11, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: African American Language

Session type Talk
Chair: Sonja Lanehart

2:30pm PDT

Love-Nichols: “We don’t like yer k[a:]nd”: Constructing a bigoted persona through mock redneck

“We don’t like yer k[a:]nd”: Constructing a bigoted persona through mock redneck

This paper explores uses of mock redneck, examining the phonetic performance and indexical work of this mock variety in both interactional and media performances. I find that within both contexts, mock redneck performances are characterized by elements of the southern vowel shift, the centralization of r-colored vowels, non-standard grammatical variables such as ain’t; and exaggerated pitch peaks (Thomas 2008). In mediatized speech, this parodic performance functions to draw on and reinforce associations between a rural, white, working-class persona and the discriminatory ideological stances presented, while in interactional contexts, performances of mock redneck function to distance the speaker from stances seen as bigoted or unethical. These uses of mock redneck illustrate how linguistic forms associated with this sociolinguistic style become enregistered as indexes of racist, homophobic, and nationalistic stances, and how the parodied performance of this style can then function to minimize the impact of these ideologies.

Speakers

Jessica Love-Nichols

University of California Santa Barbara

Friday October 11, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

T: Personae

Session type Talk
Chair: Zack Jaggers

2:55pm PDT

Brogan & Yi: Rethinking the gender paradox in El Salvador: Evidence from /s/ weakening

Rethinking the gender paradox in El Salvador: Evidence from /s/ weakening

Spanish /s/ weakening has yielded an extensive body of sociolinguistic research over the past half-century. Findings from cross-dialectal studies of this phenomenon have reliably provided support for Labovian principles: women prefer the prestige variant, typically [s], while men produce the lenited variants, [h] and [∅], at significantly higher rates. However, in the Spanish of El Salvador—a dialect that weakens /s/ in both onset and coda positions and shows allophonic variation beyond the traditional tripartite conception of [s]/[h]/[∅]—we find that gender-based patterns of /s/ weakening are decidedly inconsistent with previous findings. That is, Salvadoran women not only weaken /s/ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts overall, but also use more stigmatized allophone types and lenite in more salient prosodic positions. These results, together with our findings that younger speakers (and younger men, in particular) lenite /s/ at significantly lower rates than their older counterparts, reveal a sociolinguistic landscape in sharp contrast with other /s/ weakening dialects of Spanish. This paper presents these novel findings and argues that the contemporary sociopolitical situation of El Salvador, in tandem with forces like globalization and urbanization, is facilitating a move toward linguistic standardization led by young men.

Speakers

Franny Brogan

Pomona College

Deborah Yi

Pomona College

Friday October 11, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: /s/

Session type Talk
Chair: Erez Levon

2:55pm PDT

Strong & Roberts: An acoustic sociophonetic study of dialect changes in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom: A study of Vermont’s last frontier

An acoustic sociophonetic study of dialect changes in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom: A study of Vermont’s last frontier

This is the first sociophonetic survey of the NEK. We focus on /ai/ and /au/ raising and glottalization. 52 interviews were conducted. Interviews were transcribed and vowels (n=38,924) were extracted and aligned. Each instance of /t/ was hand-coded (n=4,229).

The results reveal parallels between the current NEK results and those found in western Vermont. The addition of social class adds information critical to a more complete understanding of phonetic change in the region. Results:

1. /au/ raising is on the decline. Lower SES females lead this change and high SES speakers did not raise /au/ at all.
2. /ai/ raising is declining in the elsewhere position. However, older, lower SES males raise /ai/ in all contexts.
3. Word-final glottal stop was common but with no social differences. Released /t/ was less frequent, but females and high SES speakers were more likely to use it. Word-medial glottal stops were less frequent.

Speakers

Isabelle Strong

Dartmouth College

Julie Roberts

Director/Professor, University of Vermont

Friday October 11, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: ADS sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Kirk Hazen

2:55pm PDT

Akin & Kohn: The promise of a Free State: A study of archival recordings of rural African American Language in Kansas from the early 20th Century

The promise of a Free State: A study of archival recordings of rural African American Language in Kansas from the early 20th Century

The study of rural communities can clarify how different structures of segregation have impacted the diachronic development of African American Language (AAL) phonology. Through archival recordings of speakers born between 1888-1933 who lived in rural farming towns of East / Central Kansas, we compare the speech of three African Americans from a county where many post-reconstruction migrants settled to six nearby European American speakers. We examine vocalic patterns known to show differences between Southern AAL and regional European American English by analyzing participants’ full vowel spaces. In this subset, the vowel systems of the African American speakers are not distinct from the European Americans, though other variables such as prosody may still distinguish ethnicity. These results may reflect the impact of integration within rural Kansas communities, in contrast to the impact of urban segregation patterns which led to distinct phonological patterns commonly associated with AAL.

Speakers

Lynsey Akin

Kansas State University

Mary Kohn

Kansas State University

Friday October 11, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: African American Language

Session type Talk
Chair: Sonja Lanehart

2:55pm PDT

Johnson & Becker: SO OFFENDED THIS TITLE IS NOT CAPITALIZED!: Variation and the Social Justice Warrior

SO OFFENDED THIS TITLE IS NOT CAPITALIZED!: Variation and the Social Justice Warrior

This project explores an ideological persona (Slobe 2018), the Social Justice Warrior (SJW), which mocks social justice-oriented online users. We used the Citizen Sociolinguistics method (Rymes and Leone 2014) to build an indexical field (Eckert 2008) for the SJW using comments from YouTube parody videos, of a young liberal activist who is easily offended, emotionally volatile, and vocal about their political stances online. The linguistic features most frequently mentioned were ALL CAPS and “buzzwords” (e.g. trigger, woke). We integrated these descriptions into a matched-guise perception survey where participants rated a short text which varied for the presence of ALL CAPS and “buzzwords.” Results confirm that the guises with these features were rated as significantly more emotional, easily-offended, irrational, and angry than the control text. The picture that emerges supports the view that variables, social meaning, and personae are in dialog as users make use of language as a semiotic system.

Speakers

Olivia Johnson

Reed College

Kara Becker

Reed College

Friday October 11, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

T: Personae

Session type Talk
Chair: Zack Jaggers

3:20pm PDT

Celebrating Undergraduate Research reception

Friday October 11, 2019 3:20pm - 3:40pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Special event

3:40pm PDT

(A1) Rodriguez: The baptist pastor persona: A sociophonetic case study of vowel stability across a lifespan

The baptist pastor persona: A sociophonetic case study of vowel stability across a lifespan

This paper investigates the vowels of John Piper, a Baptist pastor who is well known in Reformed Evangelical circles, from 15 sermons ranging from 1980 to 2017. Specifically, I analyzed eight phonological processes contrastive between Southern speech in Greenville, SC, where Piper is from, and Central Minnesota English (CMNE) in Minneapolis, MN, where Piper lived and preached for 37 years. Although Piper had extensive dialect contact with CMNE, the SVS features present in 1980 remained relatively stable over time. The lack of dialect shift in Piper’s vowels suggests that the Baptist pastor persona he identifies with is tied to being from the South and therefore sounding Southern. I propose that this may be due to the widespread reach of the Southern Baptist Convention, leading to a crucial discussion of linguistic authenticity in prepared and performed speech, as well as prescribed and ascribed identities.

Speakers

Shannon Rodriguez

Graduate Student, University of Georgia

Areas of Interest: Sociophonetics, Hispanic English in Georgia, Spanish Linguistics

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Personae & gender

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(A2) Youssef: Stance and Hyper-articulation: Vowel space expansion in Michael Savage’s stance expression

Stance and Hyper-articulation: Vowel space expansion in Michael Savage’s stance expression

Studying variation from the standpoint of stance taking allows the sociolinguist to account for strategies speakers use to orient to the content of their talk and the activities and identities they index through that talk (Du Bois 2007; Jaffe 2009). A relatively low number of studies has examined the effects of stance taking on hyper-articulation (Freeman 2010, 2014; Holmes-Elliott & Levon 2017). However, these studies regarded stance as a uniform phenomenon without distinguishing between the different evaluation polarities or its target. This paper proposes a multivariate statistical analysis of the impact on articulation of positive and negative evaluations and the variation within, according to the target of stance. Specifically, I analyze the effect of these variables on the expansion of vowel space that usually signals hyper-articulation (Tomita 2007; Whalen et al. 2004), in Michael Savage’s show The Savage Nation.

Speakers

Chadi Ben Youssef

University of California Santa Barbara

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Personae & gender

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(A3) Papineau: ‘The way it be settin’ the tone’: AAE morphosyntax and musical blackface in Ariana Grande’s thank u, next

‘The way it be settin’ the tone’: AAE morphosyntax and musical blackface in Ariana Grande’s thank u, next

This paper examines the use of AAE (African American English) morphosyntax in American singer-songwriter’s body of work thank u, next. Grande faced heavy criticism after releasing the album, with many accusing the artist of promoting herself as black in order to establish ‘street cred’. Our paper finds that Grande indeed makes extensive use of AAE morphosyntactic features in her album, including: copula deletion; third person singular {-s} deletion; AAE aspectual marking; AAE periphrastic future constructions; negative concord. Despite this, no such features are present in Grande’s speech. We argue that such usages are designed to establish Grande’s own ‘street cred’, in much the same way that using AAE has been used in hip-hop, by both black and non-black artists: in order to create a persona that benefits from the fetishisation of AAE in music, without suffering the consequences found in the lived black experience (Eberhardt and Freeman 2015, Cutler 2015).

Speakers

Brandon Papineau

The University of Edinburgh

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Personae & gender

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(A4) Conrod: Nonbinary Singular they in Apparent Time

Nonbinary Singular they in Apparent Time

I present two experiments probing the use of the singular English pronoun 'they' to refer to a definite, specific antecedent. Singular 'they' is attested for epicene and generic antecedents as far back as the 15th century (Curzan 2003), but the definite specific singular 'They' (dsT) is an emergent phenomenon.

(1) Each student admired their professor Epicine sg. 'they'
(2) Jordan admired their professor Definite specific (dsT)

Experiment 1 uses data from dyadic and solo sociolinguistic interviews; in these data dsT is far more frequent than epicene singular they, and the speakers who produced dsT the most were younger adult speakers. Experiment 2 is an acceptability-rating study comparing dsT with other singular pronouns ('he,' 'she'). Younger participants in Experiment 2 rated dsT higher in more contexts. The results of both experiments suggest that dsT is increasing in apparent time, and that it is much more frequently used than previously reported.

Speakers

Kirby Conrod

Lecturer, University of Washington

Kirby has just completed their dissertation on gendered pronouns in English as a way of learning about the socio/syntactic/pragmatic interface. How do gender features and/or pronouns index the identity and relationships between speaker, addressee, and third person referent? Ask Kirby... Read More →

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Personae & gender

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(A5) Clifford: Late Acquisition of Gendered Phonetics: Voice Feminization in Transgender Women

Late Acquisition of Gendered Phonetics: Voice Feminization in Transgender Women

With vowel data from 19 trans women participants, each of whom self-identifies as having feminized their voice, e.g. can produce forms of speech that would be perceived as both ‘physiologically male’ and ‘physiologically female’, I find evidence of wholesale vocal tract manipulation in nearly every dimension. I focus in particular on more robust, i.e. less sensitive to the area function, indicators of vocal tract length, namely the higher formants, including F4. Linear mixed effects analyses of the relationship between formant frequency and what I am calling ‘register difference’ were performed, demonstrating a significant effect of register on each formant F1-F4. The effect of register on frequency of F1-F4 was successively higher, suggesting an overall manipulation of vocal tract length apart from variable articulatory setting. These patterns have bearing on vowel normalization techniques, automated speaker identification, and theories of style within variationist study.

Speakers

Lily Clifford

Stanford University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Personae & gender

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(B2) Konnelly: Brutoglossia: democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in ‘craft beer talk’

Brutoglossia: democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in ‘craft beer talk’

Building on Silverstein’s (2003) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper proposes a closely related genre: brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as ‘elite’ and ‘classy.’ In addition to its ubiquitous presence in this relatively novel context, the ‘specialist’ lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse (such as that used in sensory and gustatory descriptions) provide the higher order of indexicality through which the more emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. This intertextuality oinoglossia and brutoglossia is transformative. Once the quintessential blue-collar beverage, the ‘craft beer revolution’ newly enregisters beer as a material symbol of white, upper-middle class experience. Taken together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer.

Speakers

Lex Konnelly

University of Toronto

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Social meaning

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(B3) Ahlers & Bohmann: Like finding that one tree in a forest: An analysis of narrative stance

Like finding that one tree in a forest: An analysis of narrative stance

Much of the current sociolinguistic work on stance (Holmes-Elliott/Levon 2017, Jaffe 2009, Kiesling 2009) is focused on specific variables. In contrast, the present study takes a broad, function-informed approach in an analysis of stance-taking behavior.

We code a re-narration task completed by 79 participants for instances of stance-marking and use these markers in a k-means cluster analysis. Of the resulting two clusters, one cluster is highly heterogeneous in members, while the other includes mainly young white speakers. The stance-marking repertoire of these individuals relies heavily on the use of (quotative) like.

Based on the data, we cannot conclude a change in apparent time, but our detailed analysis found a group of innovators that revises their interpretation of a socially meaningful task. On the level of social function, we argue that their linguistic stance-taking patterns offer a more individualistic approach to storytelling, allowing speakers to shift focus from interpersonal to affective positioning.

Speakers

Wiebke Ahlers

University of Osnabrueck

Axel Bohmann

University of Freiburg

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Social meaning

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(B4) Staley & Walker: Dialect coaching for sociolinguists: Insights on articulatory setting

Dialect coaching for sociolinguists: Insights on articulatory setting

In this poster we draw on insights from the field of dialect coaching, specifically methods like Knight-Thompson Speechwork, to contribute to discussions on the role of articulatory setting in dialectal variation. KTS is a method of voice training for performers that prioritizes oral posture over segmental features, under the reasoning that the latter often comes with the former. We reference textbooks, journals, blogs, publicly available interviews, and interviews we conducted with practitioners to explore the way that experienced dialect coaches discuss articulatory settings. Our primary focus is on how coaches are developing descriptions of oral posture: the articulators they focus on, the exercises they assign, how they use video, and how they use affectual descriptions. These insights have clear implications for less conscious performance: all speech is embodied, and in seriously exploring articulatory settings of the speakers in our studies we may more fundamentally understand how and why language changes.

Speakers

Virginia Tech

Housed in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech, the department of theatre and cinema is a jewel of a program nestled in a large, beautiful, and comprehensive campus with a long history of excellence in student educationand training. The faculty seeks, within the contexts... Read More →

Abby Walker

Virginia Tech

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Social meaning

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(B5) LaMonica: Factors in an acoustical-attitudinal account of dialect perception

Factors in an acoustical-attitudinal account of dialect perception

This study examines listeners’ perceived distances between US regional accents and investigates how acoustic-phonetic markers, attitudinal judgments, and identifiability may together impact accent perception. Responses from 80 native and 40 non-native listeners provided perceived distance scores, attitudinal judgements, and categorization results for 7 regional and 1 non-regional samples. A comparison of the regional distributions through hierarchical cluster analyses for vowel formant measurements and perceptual results, accompanied by exploratory factor analysis, reveals a combination of several factors which result in clusters similar to those evident in perceptual distances: 1) markedness, 2) attitude, 3) associations with ‘standardness’, and 4) identifiability. These demonstrate the involvement of perceptions of and pre-existing associations with an identified accent when making a judgement of similarity/difference between varieties, which may furthermore override the initial acoustic information. Based on this investigation, judgements of relatedness between accents are furthermore shown to support previous qualitative models of dialect perception and comprehension.

Speakers

Clelia LaMonica

Stockholm University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Social meaning

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(D1) Barreda: Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research

Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research

Researchers often use vowel-normalization methods to minimize between-speaker variation in production data. Typically, these methods are evaluated based on their ability to maximize the similarity the vowel spaces of different speakers. Unfortunately, this approach may favor methods that ‘overnormalize’ data, removing perceptible phonetic variation that may be linguistically meaningful. Instead, since linguists use normalized data to infer differences in vowel quality, which exists only in the minds of human listeners, we should consider the likelihood that different normalization methods will reflect listener judgments. From this perspective, methods that maximize the similarity of normalized data but do not reflect the judgments of human listeners are not useful for most purposes in linguistic research. Based on the poor theoretical support for Lobanov normalization and its poor statistical properties, we suggest that the Lobanov method is too powerful, demonstrably removes phonetic variation from data, and should be avoided for variationist research.

Speakers

Santiago Barreda

University of California, Davis

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Methods

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(D2) Cieri et al.: LanguageARC: using Citizen Science to augment sociolinguistic data collection and coding

LanguageARC: using Citizen Science to augment sociolinguistic data collection and coding

LanguageARC is a Citizen Linguist portal for collecting linguistic data and judgements built upon a toolkit used in >100 collection and coding tasks yielding >1M judgements which has been augmented for direct researcher use. LanguageARC tasks are generally short enough that participants can complete them during lunch breaks, commutes, etc. Many require nothing more than a smart phone. Tasks present audio, text, video or image and collect new linguistic content or judgements as speech, text or controlled vocabulary enabling tasks as wide ranging as collecting: read (passages, word lists, minimal pairs) and prompted (by image or audio) speech; brief transcriptions, translations; and judgements for grammaticality, dialect and variable coding. Task designers can include multimedia tutorials and reference guides and can activate discussion forums for participants. LanguageARC includes a Project Builder that allows researchers to deploy new tasks in less than one hour, given a design and appropriately formatted data.

Speakers

Christopher Cieri

University of Pennsylvania & Linguistics Data Consortium

Jonathan Wright

Linguistic Data Consortium

James Fiumara

Linguistic Data Consortium

Alex Shelmire

Linguistic Data Consortium

Mark Liberman

University of Pennsylvania & Linguistic Data Consortium

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Methods

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(D3) Brickhouse: Diachronic change in formant dynamics of California low back vowels: an improved analysis method using the Discrete Cosine Transform

Diachronic change in formant dynamics of California low back vowels: an improved analysis method using the Discrete Cosine Transform

Previous work on California English has argued that a low back merger has occurred on the basis of formant point measurements. I add to this literature by investigating whether this pattern of convergence holds for the entire formant trajectory and develop a novel method of formant trajectory comparison to do so. Vowel formants are modeled by generalized additive models with the function terms defined by the discrete cosine transform (DCT-II). The coefficients of these terms are used to represent the vowel as a vector that describes the vowel’s F1 and F2 trajectories. The similarity between any two vowels is evaluated using the 5-dimensional Euclidean distance between their vectors. With data from 438 participants from 5 field sites, I find evidence of whole vowel convergence among white speakers, marginal divergence among multiracial speakers, and no evidence of change among speakers from other racial groups.

Speakers

Christian Brickhouse

Graduate Student, Stanford University

I am interested in the phonetics-phonology interface and social influences on diachronic phonetics and phonology.

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Methods

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(D4) Cole: Class-based, linguistic distinctions in Southeast England: the role of technology in aggregating perceptual dialectology data

Class-based, linguistic distinctions in Southeast England: the role of technology in aggregating perceptual dialectology data

The difficulty in aggregating perceptual dialectology results has long been noted, particularly, in the draw-a-map task (Preston & Howe, 1987; Montgomery & Stoeckle, 2013). This study uses a graphical user interface (GUI) to carry out a perceptual dialectology paradigm. In this experiment, a total of 215 individuals (106 female; 121 White British) listened to 10 second recordings from a corpus of 102 speakers. All listeners and speakers were from the Southeast of England. This study examines to what extent individuals found it possible to geographically locate the speakers and how they perceived them socially. Those perceived to be from London and Essex were consistently interpreted as less intelligent, friendly, trustworthy, correct and to be of a lower class, whilst those perceived to be from the Western counties of the Southeast were perceived conversely. Overall, the perception of linguistic features in Southeast England was mostly strongly distributed by class and ethnicity.

Speakers

Amanda Cole

University of Essex

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Methods

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(D5) Schneier: Faster than the Speed of Lol: Examining Digital Articulatory Processes of Text-Based Paralinguistic Features in Mobile Communication

Faster than the Speed of Lol: Examining Digital Articulatory Processes of Text-Based Paralinguistic Features in Mobile Communication

This study examines how individuals compose text-messages key-by-key on mobile virtual keyboards, and how real-time performances reflect the iterative process of constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships via linguistic capital. Using keystroke logging methods, this study reports on weeklong observations of how participants (N = 10) composed text messages as part of everyday mobile communication while using LogKey, a virtual keyboard application made exclusively for this study. Analysis examined the timing of keystrokes for composing paralinguistic features—such as variants of Lol and Haha—at different discursive positions (i.e., the beginning or end of a message), with linear mixed effects models finding that these features were composed significantly faster when at the start of a message (p < 0.001). Together with textual analysis of sent messages, this study suggests that discursive processes for managing face in text messaging is entangled with cognitive and psychomotor articulation via the virtual keyboard.

Speakers

Joel Schneier

University of Central Florida

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Methods

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(E2) Kapner: Snowy days and nasal A's: The retreat of the Northern Cities Shift in Rochester, New York

Snowy days and nasal A's: The retreat of the Northern Cities Shift in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York was one of the cities first described as participating in the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), but it has received little recent attention. The present study provides an update on the NCS in Rochester and answers a growing call for sociolinguistic research that benefits the community of study. Using recordings collected in collaboration with a local community group as dual-purpose oral history/sociolinguistic interviews, I measured formants from sixteen speakers, including three generations of one family. The results confirmed recent findings that the NCS is rising above the level of consciousness and retreating in apparent time. I found evidence for the advance of both the split between the TRAP and TRAMP vowels and the merger of COT and CAUGHT, but not for the California Vowel Shift. While speakers are shifting away from the NCS and toward some supra-local norms, they are not fully reorienting toward the Elsewhere Dialect.

Speakers

Julianne Kapner

recent graduate; research assistant, University of Rochester; American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

I'm a recent graduate of the University of Rochester (B.A. in Linguistics, Minor in Classics). I'm currently a research assistant at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and planning to apply next year for PhD programs in linguistics. My undergraduate honors thesis was... Read More →

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(E3) Diskin et al.: Sociophonetic variability in the /el/-/ael/ merger in Australian (Melbourne) English: Comparing wordlist and conversational data

Sociophonetic variability in the /el/-/ael/ merger in Australian (Melbourne) English: Comparing wordlist and conversational data

A merger of /e/ and /æ/ in pre-lateral contexts is reported among Australian English (AusE) speakers in Melbourne. It appears to be completely entrenched for some speakers, but still in progress for others (Diskin et al. 2019, Loakes et al. 2014, 2017). We present an acoustic phonetic investigation of short front vowels /ɪ, e, æ/ among twelve AusE speakers in pre-alveolar stop (/t, d/) and pre-lateral contexts in a wordlist task; and sociolinguistic interviews. Findings show robust acoustic differences between /e/ and /æ/ preceding /t, d/ for all speakers and data types. However, individual differences emerge for pre-lateral /e/ and /æ/, with highly variable and gradient production patterns across speakers, and between data types, with some participants only merging in the interview and not in the wordlist; and vice versa. The findings illustrate the value of incorporating a range of data types in investigating a merger-in-progress.

Speakers

Chloé Diskin

Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne

Second dialect acquisition; Irish English; Australian English; language and identity; sociophonetics; discourse-pragmatic variation and change.

Deborah Loakes

University of Melbourne

Rosey Billington

University of Melbourne

Simón Gonzalez

The Australian National University

Ben Volchok

The University of Melbourne

Josh Clothier

University of Melbourne

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(E4) Champagne: Where the skies are not cl/aʊ/dy all day: /aʊ/ nucleus lowering and retraction across apparent time in three rural Kansan communities

Where the skies are not cl/aʊ/dy all day: /aʊ/ nucleus lowering and retraction across apparent time in three rural Kansan communities

While previous sociolinguistic studies find phonetic variation between rural and urban productions of linguistic features within an otherwise homogeneous dialect region (Callary 1975; Bernstein 1993; Thomas 1997; Dodsworth and Kohn 2012), evidence from urban and rural Kansas challenge this notion. In urban Kansas City, Strelluf (2019) finds lowering and backing of the /aʊ/-nucleus correlated to a similar movement in the /æ/ vowel. Drawing on data from 36 sociolinguistic interviews from three communities across rural Kansas, linear mixed-effects models indicate significant differences for both F1 and F2 measurements at 20% duration for both vowels across birth year, and a correlation between birth year and place for /æ/.While inter-community variation in vowel production for both the /aʊ/ nucleus and /æ/ is present, these apparent-time patterns in rural Kansas reflect apparent-time patterns in urban Kansas City. Thus, these similar rural-urban patterns suggest a supra-regional homogeneity despite previous findings of rural/urban regional dialect splits.

Speakers

Matt Champagne

North Carolina State Unvierstiy

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(E5) Lee: Topic-based style shifts of North Korean refugees in sociolinguistic interview

Topic-based style shifts of North Korean refugees in sociolinguistic interview

This study focuses on topic-based style shifts of North Korean refugee (NK) speakers’ vowel production. The merger between [ʌ] and [o] as well as [ɯ] and [u] can indicate North Korean-like production (Kang & Yun, 2018; So, 2010; Kang, 1996, 1997, 1999a, 1999b; Lee, 1990, -1991). Meanwhile, [e]-[æ] merger and [o]-[u] merger indicate South Korean-like production (Han & Kang, 2013; Shin et al., 2012; Kim et al., 2006; Moon; 2006; Seong, 2004). Sociolinguistic interviews, including reading wordlists, were conducted with six NK speakers in South Korea. 4384 vowels were analyzed in total. Results show that NK speakers tend to produce more NK-like vowels talking NK topics and SK-like vowels in SK career related topics. More interestingly, they produced more NK-like vowels in the isolation condition in general. This study sheds light on research regarding topic-based style shifts by providing vowel production patterns of NK speakers.

Speakers

Jungah Lee

PhD student, University of Oregon

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(F1) Gilbert: An acoustic study of stylistic and contact-induced variability in Uruguayan Spanish

An acoustic study of stylistic and contact-induced variability in Uruguayan Spanish

Studies of sociolinguistic variation typically compare averages/percentages of variants in different groups and styles, abstracting over within-group variability. These findings are important, but potentially miss socially and stylistically meaningful differences in amount of variability. I analyze within-group variability in two varieties of Uruguayan Spanish (monolingual Montevideo; multilingual Spanish/Portuguese Rivera) and in two speech styles (interviews; word lists). I measure intervocalic /bdɡ/ spirantization and aspiration in /sC/ clusters, processes that are near-categorical in Uruguayan Spanish but rare in local Portuguese. In both cities, word lists are (unexpectedly) more variable than interviews. Additionally, within each style, Rivera (multilingual) is more variable than Montevideo (monolingual). This two-level effect, whereby multilingualism builds on a stylistic effect, may result from conflicting social connotations associated with the variants, combined with high input variability in Rivera. The results have implications for how speakers build repertoires of allophonic variation and how linguists use word lists in research.

Speakers

Madeline Gilbert

New York University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(F2) Gradoville et al.: Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

Rivera, a Uruguayan city with an open border to Brazil in a traditionally Portuguese-speaking area, has suffered some degree of language shift to Spanish, although bilingualism remains widespread (Waltermire, 2006). The present study extends Waltermire and Gradoville's (in press) study of intervocalic /d/ by offering an analysis of the impact of cognate similarity, as measured by four measures of cognate orthographic similarity, on intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish. Results indicate that, although the four measures of cognate similarity correlated strongly, LCSR (Melamed, 1999) consistently resulted in better model fits in regression models. Additionally, as Portuguese cognate frequency and cognate similarity increased, the probability of stop-like productions of Spanish intervocalic /d/ increased. Neither of these two variables had a significant independent effect, suggesting that, although cognate similarity plays a role in the variation under study, its effect is stronger in high-frequency words, which have stronger representations in memory (Bybee, 1985).

Speakers

Michael Gradoville

Arizona State University

Mark Waltermire

New Mexico State University

Avizia Long

San Jose State University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(F3) White & Roberts: Variability in the Welsh initial consonant mutation system

Variability in the Welsh initial consonant mutation system

This study focuses on the current status of Welsh soft mutation. Using an online survey we asked Welsh speakers to listen to sentences with standard or nonstandard mutation patterns and judge in each case (a) whether they would be surprised to hear that pattern, and (b) whether they would personally use it. Most participants clustered either into a group of conservative mutaters (who prefer standard mutation) or a group of variable mutaters (who accept standard mutation and non-mutation). The amount of acceptable variability depended on the specific mutation trigger, with more conservative responses for more common triggers. Surprisingly, we did not find evidence for conditioning by obvious sociodemographic factors such as age, gender, or region. Overall, our results show evidence of widespread variability in the Welsh soft mutation system and contribute to research on variation in threatened languages, highlighting a need for further research on the factors that condition it.

Speakers

Yosiane White

University of Pennsylvania

Gareth Roberts

University of Pennsylvania

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(F4) Hejná & Kazmierski: Even Americans pre-aspirate

Even Americans pre-aspirate

This paper focuses on pre-aspiration, a period of (primarily) glottal friction found in the sequences of sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents, as in hat [haht] and cash [kahʃ]. In particular, using the NSPC database, we show that pre-aspiration is attested also in American English, in contrast to what has been traditionally reported. We find pre-aspiration in 0-17% of the relevant tokens analysed, with the vast majority of the 60 speakers pre-aspirating. The frequency of occurrence is conditioned by region, sex, and segmental properties of the tokens. Importantly, we also report pre-aspiration being conditioned by speaking style/task. The phenomenon is dispreferred in spontaneous speech and occurs most frequently in word list data. We suggest that this last finding could be explained by a combination of language external as well as internal factors.

Speakers

Michaela Hejná

Aarhus University

Kamil Kazmierski

Adam Mickiewicz University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(G1) Newman & Fernández-Mallat: Usted, tú, and occasionally vos: Variation in 2nd person singular address in New York City Spanish

Usted, tú, and occasionally vos: Variation in 2nd person singular address in New York City Spanish

New York City Spanish using a picture-caption translation task. Seventy NYC heritage/native speakers translated 40 captions—each containing you. Speaker-interlocutor pairings in pictures were stratified by age, status, gender, participant frame, and expressed affect. Participants were stratified by national heritages, childhood and adolescence locations, and gender.

2800 translations yielded 2747 2PS tokens with 275 (10.0%) using usted traditionally described as the formal variant; almost all the remainder had the predominant informal variant tú. Random forests, nested logistic regressions, and post-hoc tests show:
• maintenance of factors traditionally claimed for pan-Hispanic tú/usted alternation,
• confirmation of expected usted frequency by family origin,
• convergence to tú associated with New York adolescence.

Findings suggest the linguistic environment of adolescence to be more important than earlier family or peer language socialization for this pragmatic variable.

Speakers

Michael Newman

City University of New York

Victor Fernández-Mallat

Georgetown University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(G2) Pinta: Variable gender agreement in Correntinean Spanish

Variable gender agreement in Correntinean Spanish

Patterns of gender agreement in Spanish are generally assumed to be consistent across dialects. I provide paired qualitative and quantitative analyses of variable gender agreement in the variety of Spanish spoken by both Spanish-Guarani bilinguals and monolinguals in the province of Corrientes, Argentina.

Data are drawn from 14 hours of recorded sociolinguistic interviews carried out in Corrientes in 2017 and 2018. A mixed-effects logistic regression model reveals that this variation is conditioned by distance effects (the presence of intervening material between noun and modifier) and modifier class (determiner vs. adjective).

I attribute synchronic gender agreement variation in Correntinean Spanish to diachronic source language agentivity effects (Van Coetsem 1988) given the lack of gender inflection in Guarani. This phenomenon would be unsurprising as a contact effect if found synchronically only in bilinguals; however, its occurrence in monolinguals sets it aside as a rare instance of variable gender agreement in monolingual Spanish.

Speakers

Justin Pinta

The Ohio State University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(G3) Diaz-Campos et al.: Expressing future tense in Spanish: A comparative corpus analysis of Caracas, Malaga, and Mexico City

Expressing future tense in Spanish: A comparative corpus analysis of Caracas, Malaga, and Mexico City

The present investigation examines corpora from Caracas, Malaga and Mexico City with the goal of comparing the linguistic factors that constrain the variation between two competing future expressions (i.e., morphological vs. periphrastic future). The results indicate that, in the Caracas and Mexico City data, the PF has become more generalized than in Malaga as the default future expression. A variable rule analysis reveals that, while they share similar constraints, the magnitude and direction of effect differ. The change patterns seem more advanced in Mexico, and to some extent in Caracas, with diction and volition verbs and non-specific temporal contexts favoring PF. Malaga, however, favors the PF in contexts associated with its earlier stages of grammaticalization such as with verbs of movement, which indicates its association with meaning of movement or trajectory to a goal, and highly subjective contexts as it is favored in first person and exclamatory and interrogative contexts.

Speakers

Manuel Diaz-Campos

Indiana University Bloomington

Dylan Jarrett

Indiana University Bloomington

Juan Manuel Escalona Torres

Indiana University Bloomington

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(H1) Bigger et al.: From placeholder to hesitation marker: na in Quechua/Spanish bilingual speech

From placeholder to hesitation marker: na in Quechua/Spanish bilingual speech

The current study analyzes the lexical item na in Cusco-Callao Quechua (Southern Peru), as in Na-pi Ururu-pi ka-sa-ncheh-ña? ‘Eh…are we in Ururu yet?’. Using sociolinguistic interview data from bilingual (Quechua/Spanish) speakers from the Cusco region, we observe two primary uses of na. First, it functions as what Fox (2010) refers to as a “placeholder filler” (henceforth ‘placeholder’ similar to English ‘whatchamacallit’) to stand in for another word in the discourse. Second, Nobel and Lacasa (2007) observe that na can be “used alone as a hesitation filler while the speaker is contemplating the next word, but it must have affixed to it the particle that would be affixed to the missing word” (226). In the Quechua data, our analysis reveals patterns, not yet described in the literature, in which na is used with reference to taboo or sensitive topics. Moreover, our Spanish data demonstrate considerable borrowing of na, where it varies with other hesitation markers.

Speakers

Sarah Bigger

University of Georgia

Bethany Bateman

University of Georgia

Chad Howe

University of Georgia

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(H2) Picoral: Extension of estar in monolingual and bilingual Spanish: A word embeddings study

Extension of estar in monolingual and bilingual Spanish: A word embeddings study

This paper uses statistical word embeddings, namely Word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013; Goldberg and Levy, 2014), to study the extension of estar in three Spanish-speaking communities. Two of these are sub-corpora of PRESEEA (2014-), comprised of 97 interviews from Spain (760,929 words) and 69 interviews from Mexico (597,916 words). The third corpus is of bilingual Spanish in Southern Arizona, CESA (Carvalho, 2012-), and is comprised of 76 interviews (498,711 words). Based on word embeddings extracted from these corpora, distances between target lexical items (e.g., adjectives) and all forms of ser and estar were calculated, which were then used to measure estar preference (i.e., distance to ser minus distance to estar) for each word. Results confirm some of the previous findings (Bessett, 2015; Cortés-Torres, 2004; Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes, 2008; Salazar, 2007; Silva-Corvalán, 1986), showing significant difference in the extension of estar across the three corpora.

Speakers

Adriana Picoral

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(H3) Pfeiler & Skopeteas: Variation and change in Yucatec Maya

Variation and change in Yucatec Maya

Dialectal variation in Yucatec Maya has been mentioned since the sixteenth century in documents such as the Motul Dictionary (Martínez Hernández 1929). The first long-scale survey of variation of Yucatec Maya was carried out between 2004 and 2007 (Blaha Pfeiler & Hofling 2006).

This poster presents the results of a dialectological study on a sample of 130 Mayan speakers collected by means of a questionnaire containing issues of lexical and morphonological variation. The examined phenomena reveal different patterns of variation: VARIATION IN SPACE: e.g., in the Eastern variety, the incompletive (k) is being replaced by the progressive aspect (táan). VARIATION DUE TO LANGUAGE CONTACT: e.g., interviewees with higher exposure to Spanish simplify the numeral classifier system using only two classifiers from the 120 available in the language.

This poster presents the dispersion of linguistic features by means of feature maps and focused on the interplay between different sources of variation.

Speakers

Barbara Pfeiler

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales

Stavros Skopeteas

Universität Göttingen

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(H4) Chatten et al.: “I’ve always spoke(n) like this, you see”: Participle leveling in three corpora of English

“I’ve always spoke(n) like this, you see”: Participle leveling in three corpora of English

Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (1) and the past participle (2). These verbs may variably show paradigm leveling, where the preterite form is used in place of the participle (3).

(1) I broke the door. (2) I’ve broken the door. (3) I’ve broke the door.

We contribute the first detailed variationist study of participle leveling by investigating the phenomenon in three corpora: Switchboard, a corpus of 10-minute telephone conversations between American English speakers (Godfrey & Holliman 1997); the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Philadelphians (Labov & Rosenfelder 2011); and the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English, a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with residents of the North East of England (Corrigan et al. 2012). We find a striking degree of similarity between the three corpora in the constraints on variation. The general picture is of socially-evaluated variation affected by both syntactic and paradigmatic factors.

Speakers

Alicia Chatten

New York University

Jai Pena

New York University

Kimberley Baxter

New York University

Erwanne Mas

New York University

Guy Tabachnick

New York University

Daniel Duncan

Newcastle University

Laurel MacKenzie

New York University

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

*Withdrawn* (B1) Namboodiripad & Yu: “If it’s a bunch of English words glued together, it’s English”: Impressionistic identification of word-origins as a way to measure language boundaries

“If it’s a bunch of English words glued together, it’s English”: Impressionistic identification of word-origins as a way to measure language boundaries

While many approaches to multilingualism and language contact have demonstrated that strict language boundaries do not necessarily exist for speakers, there is some evidence for the psychological reality of these boundaries from linguistic purity, shibboleths, and linguistic differentiation. Here, we develop a method to identify the types of information speakers use to classify linguistic subpatterns as language-particular. We asked speakers of a language which has heterogeneous subpatterns originating from a variety of “languages” (English) to name the origin of low-frequency or nonce words from the game Balderdash. Participants’ guesses converged: 84 of the 282 words had 70% agreement or higher, and the average accuracy of guesses about a word’s origin correlated with the level of agreement on origin, though most words appeared fewer than 10 times in COCA. These results indicate that subjective judgments of etymology are not random, but based on a combination of top-down and bottom-up linguistic knowledge.

Speakers

Savithry Namboodiripad

University of Michigan

Diane Yu

University of Michigan

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Social meaning

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

*Withdrawn* (H5) Dollinger: Colloquialization, early mass literacy and an Emigrant Letter Corpus: the rise of 1st person will in 1830s Canada

Colloquialization, early mass literacy and an Emigrant Letter Corpus: the rise of 1st person will in 1830s Canada

This paper examines the social roles of first person modal auxiliary use in early North American/Canadian English. The independent variables of function/meaning, clause type, type of lexical verb, together with socially-inspired categories, such as “level of intimacy” between sender and receiver, are tested in logistic regressions. The data show that 1st person shall was, with 60.7%, much more frequent than in the CORIECOR data from Irish emigrants from the same decade (44.5%). Subordinate clauses act as a “last foothold” for 1stp shall. It is argued that the significantly higher use of 1stp shall represents a conservative writing style, confirming earlier work (Dollinger 2008: 236). It is suggested that the linguistic conservatism in the PEEC data is owed to the longer transatlantic passages, while colloquialization and mass schooling (often confounded as “drift’), rather than dialect contact, seem responsible for the spread of 1stp will.

Speakers

Stefan Dollinger

The University of British Columbia

Friday October 11, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session I, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

5:45pm PDT

Blake: 'When black people laugh they scatter’: Embodied communication and social perception

'When black people laugh they scatter’: Embodied communication and social perception

John R. Rickford and Angela E. Rickford’s (1976) work on “Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise,” describe a visual and oral gesture, respectively, as cultural talk within Black Diasporic communities across West Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. More than 30 years have passed since this important paralinguistic work that highlighted the body in Black communication. In this talk, I expand on this work in embodied sociolinguistics and present analyses of black gestural embodiment in United States contexts. I focus on gestures as “central to the production, perception, and social interpretation of language.” (Bucholtz and Hall 2016). I argue that studying the body in Black expression, while focused on agentive beings engaged in face-to-face interactions, must be framed within histories in which Black bodies are subjected to historical systems of oppression (hooks 2013).

Three decades after Rickford and Rickford’s seminal work, there have been few sociolinguistic studies on African American expression regarding embodied styling of speech and related indexical meanings (Barrett 1999, Goodwin and Alim 2010). This is in contrast to the study of spoken African American Language, particularly regarding linguistic variation and change, which has blossomed into an intellectual forest of sorts across social categories including sex, gender, age and their intersections, as well as style, contact, religion and education. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016) note, the logocentric nature of linguistic inquiry has led to work on the spoken word overshadowing work on the body, which is generally viewed in linguistics as secondary in communication. One exception to this has been studies of Black ASL, in which “the body supplies the grammar for the entire linguistic system.” (McCaskill, et al. 2011). Moreover, while prosody/intonation is arguably integral to the information structure of spoken language, when viewed as the integration of spoken language and the body, there has been a growing body of research on African American English prosody/intonation (Tarone 1973, Loman 1975, Wolfram and Thomas 2002, Thomas and Carter 2006, Holliday 2016, McLarty 2018).

I analyze embodied cultural and linguistic practices in Black communities via new forms of data made available through advances in commuter mediated communication. And I offer a community-based approach to the body that includes the Black ASL community. This work highlights the possibilities of conflict or oppositionality in face-to-face interactions, but also reveals critical elements of communitas. While gestures are viewed as performative acts at the intersection of styling blackness and stancetaking, I argue that they can be use by the media and in face-to-face interactions to reify social categorization (e.g., ghetto girls, thugs), as well as to challenge and break such notions and perceptions.

Speakers

Renée Blake

New York University

Friday October 11, 2019 5:45pm - 7:00pm PDT
Straub 156

Plenary

Session type Plenary talk

7:30pm PDT

Student Mixer @ Falling Sky Pizzeria

Co-sponsored by the Graduate Linguists of Oregon Student Society (GLOSS).

Friday October 11, 2019 7:30pm - 10:00pm PDT
Other

Social

8:30am PDT

Allen et al.: Insights from a longitudinal perspective on English adverb placement in the vernacular

Insights from a longitudinal perspective on English adverb placement in the vernacular

Research on English variable adverb placement (pre- vs. post-auxiliary) is largely focused on written evidence, with only rare insights from the vernacular. Moreover, no research has investigated adverb placement in longitudinal spoken data, meaning that little is understood about more historical stages in the operation of this system or how they relate to contemporary patterns. Drawing on a large multistage corpus of Canadian English, we pursue the question of what more distal stages of spoken language reveal with respect to patterns of adverb placement in vernacular English. Multivariate regression reveals that linguistic constraints condition variation in parallel to what is reported elsewhere, yet the frequency of pre-auxiliary placement drops over time. The data also indicate that women consistently use the pre-auxiliary position more frequently than do men, an effect that becomes more robust as frequency declines. The results thus suggest a complex interaction between social evaluation and retention of low frequency speaker choices.

References
Granath, S. (2002). The position of the adverb certainly will make a difference. English Today 18: 25-30.
Jacobson, S. (1975). Factors Influencing the Placement of English Adverbs. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International.
Waters, C. (2013). Transatlantic variation in English adverb placement. Language Variation and Change 25: 179-200.

Session abstract: Querying the individual and the community: New historical sociolinguistic approaches to contact, variation, and change

The theoretical and methodological problem of relating the behavior of individuals (Milroy 1992, Eckert 2000) to trends of language change in the community (Labov 2001:34) is particularly pressing for Historical Sociolinguistics. The five papers in this session, organized by NARNiHS, explore the socio-historical contexts and parameters of individual language use that have given rise to recorded patterns of linguistic variation in multiple understudied communities. A core concern shared by these studies is the broad application of variationist theory to historical data, by situating notions such as language variation, change, and contact, within a sociohistorical dimension. Overall, this session presents a broad range of datsets and tools to to explore the possibilities and limitations of sociolinguistic theory for the analysis of sociohistorical data from a broad range of periods and contexts.

References
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Speakers

Caroline JH Allen

University of Victoria

Emmanuelle Buaillon

University of Victoria

Alexandra D'Arcy

University of Victoria

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Querying the individual and the community

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Mark Richard Lauersdorf

8:30am PDT

Hazen et al.: Educational orientation and micro-choices in language change

Educational orientation and micro-choices in language change

In order to address questions of language change in rural dialects, we examine how adolescent speakers deploy both changing and stable linguistic variables to create anew the sociolinguistic fabric of their community. This paper draws from recent work in WV schools to assess the sociolinguistic choices 21st-century teenagers face in developing their own dialect identity within their educational contexts. Although the Southern Vowel Shift surged throughout WV until WWII, several stages became increasingly negatively socially marked as the 20th century wore on. This presentation examines awareness of these trends as well as the identities behind synchronic variation. We answer how adolescents’ ongoing recreation of their social meanings builds community patterns that lead to synchronic variation and language change. This study looks at the sociolinguistic space from the individual to the community—the crucible of language variation—to search for the triggering mechanisms for both maintenance of variation patterns and language change.

Speakers

Kirk Hazen

West Virginia University

Audra Slocum

West Virginia University

Caroline Toler

West Virginia University

Mary Werner

West Virginia University

Maddi Moore

West Virginia University

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: SECOL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Paul Reed

8:30am PDT

Levon et al.: Real-time evaluations of British accents: The effect of social and psychological factors on judgements of professional competence

Real-time evaluations of British accents: The effect of social and psychological factors on judgements of professional competence

We report results of an experiment designed to investigate dynamic evaluations of different British accents, focusing on how the moment-to-moment trajectories of perceptual responses contribute to the overall evaluative profile of a speech variety. Data are drawn from a verbal guise experiment in which British listeners (n=160) provided real-time evaluations of the interview performance of two “candidates” for entry-level positions at corporate law firms. The candidates were native speakers of Received Pronunciation, the national standard, or Multicultural London English, a non-standard London variety. GAMM modelling and Change Points Analyses reveal systematic perceptual variability along three main axes: 1) broad-based differences across the accents, 2) differences as a function of specific listener characteristics, and 3) differences in the relative contextual salience of particular accent features. We discuss the interrelationships between these different levels of analysis, and the ways linguistic, social and psychological factors all constrain perceptual reactions to accents in real-time.

Speakers

Erez Levon

Queen Mary University of London

Yang Ye

Queen Mary University of London

Devyani Sharma

Queen Mary University of London

Amanda Cardoso

The University of British Columbia

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Social evaluation

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlotte Vaughn

8:30am PDT

Nesbitt: Slowly changing their minds: Evidence of gradual phonologization in Michigan

Slowly changing their minds: Evidence of gradual phonologization in Michigan

Since the 1920’s in Lansing, MI, the traditional Northern Cities Shift raising of /æ/ in all phonological environments has been giving way to a nasal system whereby pre-nasal and pre-oral allophones have been moving toward different F1/F2 targets. I examine whether this change was abrupt—speakers in this initial generation posited a representational difference between the two allophones—or gradual—the representational difference was developed at some point after the phonetic target change(s). I analyzed (1) the distributions in F1/F2 space of pre-nasal and pre-oral /æ/ tokens, which were naturally produced by 36 Lansing natives, and (2) the results of a sub-phonemic judgement task (N=107). We find that though the two allophones have been moving along different phonetic targets since the 1920s in Lansing, the phonological rule is only apparent for speakers born after 1980. Therefore, this phonological change is occurring gradually: a result of phonetic (and social) variability.

Speakers

Monica Nesbitt

Dartmouth College

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:30am - 8:55am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Vowels

Session type Talk
Chair: Kara Becker

8:55am PDT

Verheyden: The myth of Frenchification? A historical sociolinguistic investigation of French influence on Late Modern Southern Dutch

The myth of Frenchification? A historical sociolinguistic investigation of French influence on Late Modern Southern Dutch

Southern Dutch language during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has often been assumed to be highly dialectal, cut off from ongoing standardization in the North, and highly influenced by French. However, in stark contrast to the importance given to French influence in histories of Dutch stands the very limited amount of empirical research, and the few exploratory studies have challenged this traditional view. To fill this empirical gap, we will present a case study investigating underdocumented material ‘from below’, focusing on French influence in Flemish soldiers letters. To measure French influence, we will focus on loan morphological, specifically derivational suffixes, following the approach advocated by Rutten, Vosters & Van der Wal (2015). By discussing the results of this case study, we will reflect on the broader context of Frenchification in Dutch language history, as such, this case study is part of a larger project focusing on Dutch-French language contact.

References
Rutten, G., Vosters, R., & Van der Wal, M. (2015). Frenchification in discourse and practice. Loan morphology in private letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In C. Peersman, G. Rutten, & R. Vosters (Eds.), Past, present and future of a language border. Germanic-Romance encounters in the Low Countries (Language and Social Life 1, pp. 143–169). Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter.

Session abstract: Querying the individual and the community: New historical sociolinguistic approaches to contact, variation, and change

The theoretical and methodological problem of relating the behavior of individuals (Milroy 1992, Eckert 2000) to trends of language change in the community (Labov 2001:34) is particularly pressing for Historical Sociolinguistics. The five papers in this session, organized by NARNiHS, explore the socio-historical contexts and parameters of individual language use that have given rise to recorded patterns of linguistic variation in multiple understudied communities. A core concern shared by these studies is the broad application of variationist theory to historical data, by situating notions such as language variation, change, and contact, within a sociohistorical dimension. Overall, this session presents a broad range of datsets and tools to to explore the possibilities and limitations of sociolinguistic theory for the analysis of sociohistorical data from a broad range of periods and contexts.

References
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Speakers

Charlotte Verheyden

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Querying the individual and the community

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Mark Richard Lauersdorf

8:55am PDT

Carmichael & Dajko: Rhoticity and shifting ethnic identity in New Orleans English

Rhoticity and shifting ethnic identity in New Orleans English

New Orleans English is shifting towards non-rhoticity. We argue that ethnic affiliation is central to understanding the ways this change is progressing. Reading passage data for 102 speakers from Greater New Orleans was examined in a mixed effects logistic regression, which revealed an interaction between birth year and ethnicity/location. Older Black New Orleanians and older White suburbanites are highly nonrhotic, while older Creole and White New Orleanians both show much lower rates of non-rhoticity. However, in younger generations, White speakers from all over Greater New Orleans becoming more rhotic. Young Black New Orleanians maintain the low levels previously attested, and young Creoles now align with this population rather than with Whites. We note the ways this pattern mirrors trends in other US cities of Black and White speech diverging, while accounting for the Creole population’s shift in ethnic identity.

Speakers

Katie Carmichael

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Nathalie Dajko

Tulane University

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: SECOL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Paul Reed

8:55am PDT

Austen & Campbell-Kibler: Explicit tracking of in-the-moment sociolinguistic evaluation

Explicit tracking of in-the-moment sociolinguistic evaluation

We examine listeners’ real-time reactions to (ING) in two talkers, one from California and one from North Carolina. As participants listened to a talker, they moved a slider to indicate their developing impression of how educated the talker sounded. Each participant heard a matched-guise stimulus from one talker, containing either only ING tokens, only IN tokens, or alternating clusters of ING and IN. For the California talker, (ING) showed a consistent effect across stimuli. The North Carolina talker, however, showed an effect only in alternating-cluster guises in which IN occurred first. While this disparity between talkers could reflect a flaw in the real-time methodology, we propose that it reflects differing effects of (ING) depending on listeners’ expectations about the talker, shaped by an interaction between the talker’s previous (ING) use and other cues. This suggests that contextual effects of talker accent on social meaning occur early during sociolinguistic evaluation.

Speakers

Martha Austen

Ohio State University

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler

Ohio State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Social evaluation

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlotte Vaughn

8:55am PDT

miles-hercules & Zimman: Normativity in normalization: Methodological challenges in the (automated) analysis of vowels among non-binary speakers

Normativity in normalization: Methodological challenges in the (automated) analysis of vowels among non-binary speakers

Despite recent increases in the voices of trans and gender non-conforming speakers, sociolinguistics has not kept pace in (re)formulating its tools and models for analyzing gender more inclusively. At the same time, (socio)linguists have been increasing relying on automated analytic tools such as forced alignment and automatic transcription. This paper explores how the automation of vowel formant analysis on the basis of binary gender shapes the results obtained. Utilizing interview data from multiple studies of non-binary individuals, we find that the F1 and/or F2 of several vowels varied significantly depending on the binary gender selected during the extraction and plotting phase. While their existence is unsurprising, these differences raise questions regarding the best analytic procedures in cases where binary gender cannot be unproblematically assigned. We conclude our talk with practical recommendations for studying non-binary voices and creating automated tools for phonetic analysis.

Speakers

deandre miles-hercules

University of California Santa Barbara

Lal Zimman

University of California Santa Barbara

Saturday October 12, 2019 8:55am - 9:20am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Vowels

Session type Talk
Chair: Kara Becker

9:20am PDT

Pappas & Tsolakidis: Understanding the history of a linguistic stereotype through the speech of immigrants

Understanding the history of a linguistic stereotype through the speech of immigrants

We discuss data from the speech of Greek immigrants to Canada which can help us understand how the stereotype against the Northern Greek pronunciation of unstressed vowels (high vowel deletion and non-high vowel raising) developed. We hypothesize that we can gain insights into the stigmatization by examining the usage pattern of 40 Northern Greek speakers who immigrated from Greece during the 1950s and 1960s. For the high vowels we found that the phenomenon of deletion is virtually absent. For the non-high vowels the results show that unstressed non-high vowels are raised and that the raising is not socially conditioned. We will argue that, on the one hand, the deletion of the high vowels must have been fully proscribed in order for our participants to completely avoid it, while the raising of non-high vowels must have been evaluated more leniently and thus it has been maintained.

Session abstract: Querying the individual and the community: New historical sociolinguistic approaches to contact, variation, and change

The theoretical and methodological problem of relating the behavior of individuals (Milroy 1992, Eckert 2000) to trends of language change in the community (Labov 2001:34) is particularly pressing for Historical Sociolinguistics. The five papers in this session, organized by NARNiHS, explore the socio-historical contexts and parameters of individual language use that have given rise to recorded patterns of linguistic variation in multiple understudied communities. A core concern shared by these studies is the broad application of variationist theory to historical data, by situating notions such as language variation, change, and contact, within a sociohistorical dimension. Overall, this session presents a broad range of datsets and tools to to explore the possibilities and limitations of sociolinguistic theory for the analysis of sociohistorical data from a broad range of periods and contexts.

References
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Speakers

Panayiotis A. Pappas

Simon Fraser University

Symeon Tsolakidis

University of Patras

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Querying the individual and the community

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Mark Richard Lauersdorf

9:20am PDT

Jones: Regional variation in the vocalic system of African American English: Different than White English, and patterns with the Great Migration

Regional variation in the vocalic system of African American English: Different than White English, and patterns with the Great Migration

While African American English (AAE) is one of the most studied language varieties in sociolinguistics, until now there has never been a complete, national-level picture of regional variation in AAE comparable to the Atlas of North American English (ANAE). In this talk, I present the results of a nationally-representative survey of AAE-speakers vowel spaces, based on participation in an online survey and reading passage. 209 participants completed a demographic questionnaire and read a new passage, “Junebug Goes to the Barber,” designed specifically to elicit naturalistic AAE speech. I demonstrate that regional vocalic variation in AAE does not pattern with that of white Englishes, and that it patterns instead with pathways of the Great Migration. I also show that AAE cannot be characterized as having a single vowel system, and that the proposed African American Vowel Shift (AAVS) is characteristic of only one region of a handful.

Speakers

Taylor Jones

University of Pennsylvania

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: SECOL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Paul Reed

9:20am PDT

Stecker: Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers

Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers

Listeners are sensitive to the frequency at which speakers produce “non-standard” variants in utterances, reflected in their social evaluations of those speakers. Previous work also illustrates that women’s voices face greater scrutiny than men’s voices. However, the ways that a speaker’s gender may modulate a listener’s sensitivity to the frequency of “non-standard” variants remains to be explored. Using the variable ING, a matched-guise task was conducted to compare listeners’ evaluations of male and female speakers producing varying proportions of a “non-standard” ‘-in’ variant, investigating whether listeners evaluate men and women differently for using ‘-in’ at the same rates of production. Findings show that speakers’ greater usage of the ‘-in’ variant faces more negative evaluations from listeners, but this trend did not differ between different speaker genders. Rather, differences in evaluations of individual speakers persist across and within gendered categories, bearing implications for notions of binary gender and single-speaker matched-guise paradigms.

Speakers

Amelia Stecker

Northwestern University

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Social evaluation

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlotte Vaughn

9:20am PDT

Starr & Choo: The NEXT-TEXT split in Singapore English: Comparing self-report and speech production

The NEXT-TEXT split in Singapore English: Comparing self-report and speech production

Recent work on Singapore English has observed two parallel trends: a rising orientation towards local norms for English, and increasing exposure to non-local varieties. This study compares data from self-report and production tasks to assess the implications of these phenomena for the NEXT-TEXT split, in which raising occurs within certain words in the DRESS class. The self-report questionnaire finds variable raising in words with a following /d/ (e.g., red) and some words with a following velar (e.g., next, but not text), with younger respondents significantly less likely to report raising. In the production task, however, younger speakers were more likely to raise these vowels. Overall, the data suggest that the NEXT-TEXT split is expanding in Singapore English while awareness that this split is ‘nonstandard’ is simultaneously growing. These findings underscore the multifaceted nature of the sociolinguistic consequences that arise from greater endonormativity and expanding awareness of non-local Englishes in Singapore.

Speakers

Rebecca Starr

National University of Singapore

Amanda Shimin Choo

National University of Singapore

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:20am - 9:45am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Vowels

Session type Talk
Chair: Kara Becker

9:45am PDT

Raynor: The nativization of Spanish in the Pacific lowlands of 17th-18th c. New Granada (Colombia): The role of Amerindians in the absence of an Afro-Hispanic creole in Chocó

The nativization of Spanish in the Pacific lowlands of 17th-18th c. New Granada (Colombia): The role of Amerindians in the absence of an Afro-Hispanic creole in Chocó

This study presents a novel account of the origins of Chocó Spanish, a contact variety spoken by a majority African-descendant population in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia and central to debates surrounding the ‘missing Spanish creoles’ (cf. McWhorter 2000; Sessarego 2018). An outline of three centuries of contact between European settlers, Amerindian communities, and enslaved Africans and African-descendants in Chocó reveals crucial differences between this context and the circumstances which characterize the emergence of creole languages, including mainland South American creoles such as Palenquero, Berbice Dutch, and Saramaccan. Here I present historical and linguistic evidence highlighting two previously undiscussed characteristics of the language contact scenario in Chocó: (i) Spanish bilingualism among the Emberá- and Wounaan-speaking population prior to the introduction of enslaved Africans in the late 17th c., and (ii) extensive contact between the Amerindian and African(-descendant) populations throughout the mining boom along the Pacific littoral in the 18th c.

References
McWhorter, John. 2000. The missing Spanish creoles: Recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sessarego, Sandro. 2018. Enhancing dialogue in the field: Some remarks on the status of the Spanish creole debate. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 32: 197-202.

Session abstract: Querying the individual and the community: New historical sociolinguistic approaches to contact, variation, and change

The theoretical and methodological problem of relating the behavior of individuals (Milroy 1992, Eckert 2000) to trends of language change in the community (Labov 2001:34) is particularly pressing for Historical Sociolinguistics. The five papers in this session, organized by NARNiHS, explore the socio-historical contexts and parameters of individual language use that have given rise to recorded patterns of linguistic variation in multiple understudied communities. A core concern shared by these studies is the broad application of variationist theory to historical data, by situating notions such as language variation, change, and contact, within a sociohistorical dimension. Overall, this session presents a broad range of datsets and tools to to explore the possibilities and limitations of sociolinguistic theory for the analysis of sociohistorical data from a broad range of periods and contexts.

References
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Speakers

Eliot Raynor

Lecturer, Princeton University

Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana University. My dissertation examines variation and change in the Spanish of northwestern Colombia.

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Querying the individual and the community

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Mark Richard Lauersdorf

9:45am PDT

*Withdrawn* Sims: English prosodic rhythm variation among Miami African and Haitian Americans

English prosodic rhythm variation among Miami African and Haitian Americans

English is typically characterized as a language with high durational variability between syllable segments)— but English varieties that developed via contact with languages with low durational variability also have lower variability (e.g. Singapore English). I hypothesized that Miami African-, Cuban-, and Haitian-Americans would have low durational variability when compared with African-Americans from North Carolina because of their contact with Caribbean English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole respectively. I also expected a hierarchy of durational variability based upon the recency of language contact and languages that were in contact. I analyzed rhythm in interview speech of 34 participants. Miami Cuban-American rhythm was significantly less variable than any of the other ethnicities, but there were not consistent significant differences across rhythm measures between each of the other groups. The results suggest that linguistic differences, like phonotactics, and social differences, like identity and language attitudes, have an effect on prosodic rhythm.

Speakers

Nandi Sims

The Ohio State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: SECOL sponsored

Session type Talk
Chair: Paul Reed

9:45am PDT

Beltrama et al.: How pragmatic precision affects social perception: A socio-pragmatic study

How pragmatic precision affects social perception: A socio-pragmatic study

Recent work has unveiled a link between the semantic, pragmatic and social components of the meaning of different forms (McCready 2012, Acton & Potts 2014; Beltrama 2016). We extend this research by asking: what pragmatic factors underlie the ability of (im)precision—a phenomenon deeply embedded in pragmatic variation—to index speaker identity? Evidence from a social perception study suggests that precise expressions associated with higher ratings than approximate ones (e.g., "There's a gas station {4.14 miles / 4 miles} down the road"), confirming that variation in precision is indeed social meaningful. However, its social meaning does not seem to contain dimensions that correlate with low precision. Furthermore, the social evaluation of precision does not seem to be affected by how relevant details are in the communicative context. When a contextual effect is present, however, it suggests an inverse correlation between precision’s social salience and pragmatic relevance.

Speakers

Andrea Beltrama

Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Pennsylvania

Heather Burnett

CNRS-Université de Paris 7

Stephanie Solt

Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Social evaluation

Session type Talk
Chair: Charlotte Vaughn

9:45am PDT

Dann: Variation in the BATH lexical set in a rural British variety: Using perceptions to understand production

Variation in the BATH lexical set in a rural British variety: Using perceptions to understand production

This paper presents a study in two parts: first, a real time speech perception experiment identifies the lengthened and fronted BATH vowel as one of the most salient features of Cornish English (a variety in the South-West of England), and second, an acoustic analysis of BATH variation amongst early adolescent speakers of the same variety. It finds that the duration of the traditional variant may be linked to rurality, while the fronted quality is less stigmatized. As a result, an innovative, short, fronted BATH vowel has arisen in the region.

Overall, this demonstrates how different acoustic elements of a variable may carry subtly different meanings, and how speakers may use these creatively to project desired social traits. Additionally, this paper shows how rural adolescents have not simply succumbed to the effects of standardization; just like their urban counterparts, they are innovative in their language use.

Speakers

Holly Dann

University of Sheffield

Saturday October 12, 2019 9:45am - 10:10am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Vowels

Session type Talk
Chair: Kara Becker

10:30am PDT

Mufwene: Pidginization as we hardly ever thought about it

Pidginization as we hardly ever thought about it

The pidgin-to-creole life-cycle hypothesis has been more convenient than empirically-grounded in supporting creole exceptionalism. Putatively, pidgins are the outcomes of a break in the transmission of the relevant lexifiers, while creolization cum nativization and the concurrent structural expansion naturalized them into full-fledged languages. However, a re-examination of the history of trade colonization in especially Africa and the Pacific suggests instead that, like creoles, pidgins emerged by gradual divergence away from the closer approximations produced by those who learned the lexifiers earlier. Those individuals were interpreters, often identified as “go-betweens” or “intermediaries,” who played a critical role in the trade and exploitation colonization of the relevant territories. Textual documentation from that history, including the absence of Portuguese pidgins, disproves the received doctrine, as my presentation will show. Pidgins may in fact have emerged later than creoles.

Session abstract: Querying the individual and the community: New historical sociolinguistic approaches to contact, variation, and change

The theoretical and methodological problem of relating the behavior of individuals (Milroy 1992, Eckert 2000) to trends of language change in the community (Labov 2001:34) is particularly pressing for Historical Sociolinguistics. The five papers in this session, organized by NARNiHS, explore the socio-historical contexts and parameters of individual language use that have given rise to recorded patterns of linguistic variation in multiple understudied communities. A core concern shared by these studies is the broad application of variationist theory to historical data, by situating notions such as language variation, change, and contact, within a sociohistorical dimension. Overall, this session presents a broad range of datsets and tools to to explore the possibilities and limitations of sociolinguistic theory for the analysis of sociohistorical data from a broad range of periods and contexts.

References
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Speakers

Salikoko S. Mufwene

University of Chicago

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: Querying the individual and the community

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Mark Richard Lauersdorf

10:30am PDT

Dountsop et al.: A real-time analysis of the variable use of expletive il in Montréal French

A real-time analysis of the variable use of expletive il in Montréal French

This paper studies the variable use of expletive il ‘it’, realized as [i] in Montréal French, over 40 years. Based on two corpora of interviews collected in 1971 and 2012, the analysis of the expletive’s use with the three most frequent verbs (falloir ‘be necessary’, sembler ‘seem’ and rester ’remain’) shows an ongoing change towards omission. Omission of il is favored by falloir, main clauses,, and negative pas ‘not’, but disfavored by the presence of an auxiliary, and the complementizer que ‘that’. While the use of il is subject to the same linguistic constraints in 1971 and 2012, the steepest increases in rates of omission are found in the least favorable contexts, indicating a change towards categorical expletive omission. Our results confirm that French is a semi-prodrop language in which morphosyntactic factors affect the expression of the expletive pronoun. This contrasts with English, where phonology plays a crucial role.

Speakers

Claire Djuikui Dountsop

University of Montreal

Mireille Tremblay

University of Montreal

Julie Auger

University of Montreal

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Grammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Sali Tagliamonte

10:30am PDT

Regan & Maldonado: Place names as a site of indexical meaning: The perception of place names in Austin, TX

Place names as a site of indexical meaning: The perception of place names in Austin, TX

This study analyzes the perception of monolingual and bilingual place names in Austin, TX. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating speech from a map-task with 4 monolingual and 4 Spanish-English bilingual Austinites, varying only in place name pronunciations. Monolingual names (Manor, Burnet) varied between ‘local’ ([ˈme.nɝɹ], [ˈbɚɹ.nɪt]) and ‘non-local’ ([ˈmæ.nɝɹ], [bɚɹ.ˈnɛt]). Spanish names (Guadalupe, Manchaca) varied between English and Spanish phonology. 127 listeners in Austin evaluated the 16 guises and distractors. Mixed effects linear regressions found that for monolingual names, speakers with ‘local’ variants were perceived as more Austinite. However, for bilingual names, non-Hispanic listeners perceived speakers with Spanish phonology as less local; Hispanic listeners perceived speakers with Spanish phonology as more respectful. The implications are (i): differences in perceptions of Spanish versus English names reflect monoglot language ideologies of who is an authentic local; (ii) place name variation is a rich site of socio-indexical information.

Speakers

Brendan Regan

Texas Tech University

Megan Maldonado

University of Texas at Austin

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Place & identity

Session type Talk
Chair: Nicole Holliday

10:30am PDT

Saltzman: A Sociophonetic study of tones on Jeju Island

A Sociophonetic study of tones on Jeju Island

In this paper I discuss the results of an apparent-time sociophonetic study on the emergence of a tonal distinction in Jejueo, a critically endangered Koreanic language spoken on Jeju Island, South Korea, and the Jeju variety of Korean spoken by younger generations on the island. In developing this project I partly replicated Cho et al.’s (2002) study on Jeju, to determine whether younger generations maintained the VOT distinction that Cho et al. reported in older generations, or whether a tonal distinction was developing. The results of this apparent-time sociophonetic study show that tonogenesis has spread outward from mainland Korea and has entered Jejueo for all speakers, but to varying degrees, based on extralinguistic factors of age, language dominance in Korean or Jejueo, and attitudes toward Jejueo. This study has implications for the literature on language loss and also sound change, as language dominance and attitudes are shown to contribute to phonological attrition of heritage language in a diglossic environment.

Speakers

Moira Saltzman

PhD Candidate, University of Michigan

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Prosody & tone

Session type Talk
Chair: Kaori Idemaru
Award Finalist: Lillian B. Stueber Prize

10:55am PDT

Davis et al.: On the nature of incipient American Raising in comparison with older varieties

On the nature of incipient American Raising in comparison with older varieties

American Raising is a pan-regional phenomenon that entails the raising of /aɪ/ in prevoiceless environments with or without concomitant /aʊ/-raising. This phenomenon has long been established in areas adjacent to Canada (e.g. Vermont; Roberts 2007); incipient raising as a current change in progress is documented for Kansas City (Strelluf 2018) and Fort Wayne, Indiana (Berkson et al. 2017). In this paper we propose a number of phonetic and phonological diagnostics distinguishing incipient American Raising from older raising varieties.

Mature raising varieties are characterized by extension of raising to noncanonical contexts in items like spider and tiger, a metrical effect blocking raising in words like titanic and psychotic when the voiceless consonant begins the syllable with primary stress (i.e. a foot-based distribution), and consistent raising before t-flaps. Here, by examining in detail incipient /aɪ/-raising in Fort Wayne, we maintain that the lack of these characteristics is diagnostic of incipient raising.

Session abstract: American Raising
On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Stuart Davis

Indiana University Bloomington

Kelly Berkson

Indiana University Bloomington

Alyssa Strickler

University of Colorado Boulder

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

10:55am PDT

dos Santos & Mendes: Sounding competent: Effects of mood alternation

Sounding competent: Effects of mood alternation

This paper addresses a production/evaluation mismatch in Brazilian Portuguese: speakers from São Paulo (SP) and São Luís (SL) use subjunctive (S) instead of indicative (I) about 70% of the time, with similar linguistic and social conditioning, but SP speakers are believed not to use S, while SL speakers supposedly always do.

Through a matched-guise experiment, 217 SL- and 284 SP-listeners listened to two speakers from each city in guises based on morphology (S vs. I) and clause type (adverbial vs. complement), evaluating speakers on various scales (intelligence, education, formality, etc).

PCA and regression modeling suggest that competence is directly associated with S in SL, but is a secondary meaning in SP. Different effects of clause type and listener education across communities demonstrate not only that perception does not necessarily match production but also that grammatical variation serves for constructing social meaning (a fact that has been questioned in the literature).

Speakers

Wendel Silva dos Santos

Universidade De São Paulo

Ronald Beline Mendes

University of São Paulo

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Grammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Sali Tagliamonte

10:55am PDT

Calder & King: Race, place, and gender in the production of /s/

Race, place, and gender in the production of /s/

Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity, such that women exhibit fronter /s/ than men. While previous research has focused on White speakers, it remains unclear if the same gendered patterns exist among African-American (AA) speakers. Examining gender-balanced samples of non-urban AA Bakersfieldians and urban AA Rochesterians, we examine the social effects on /s/ frontness. Statistical analyses reveal no gender difference in /s/ articulation among Bakersfield AAs, with men being just as fronted as women. However, a gender pattern exists among Rochester AAs, with women being significantly more fronted than men. Given the history of racial tensions in Bakersfield, it is possible that Bakersfield AA men avoid using a feature ideologically linked to countryness among White speakers in the region (Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016). But in Rochester, a gender difference is likely driven by salient urban personae like the Hood Kid and the Mobile Black Professional.

Speakers

Jeremy Calder

University of Colorado Boulder

Sharese King

University of Chicago

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Place & identity

Session type Talk
Chair: Nicole Holliday

10:55am PDT

Esposito & Xu: Affect and iconicity: Cross-linguistic similarities in the meaning of final syllable lengthening

Affect and iconicity: Cross-linguistic similarities in the meaning of final syllable lengthening

Final lengthening is a well-attested cross-linguistic component of prosodic structure. But how the cross-linguistic robustness of final lengthening plays out in variation and social meaning is an open question. We identify similarities in meaning for final lengthening between English and Mandarin, calling for more cross-linguistic work on shared social meanings.

A matched-guise perception experiment on final lengthening in English identified links to exaggerated expressivity (flamboyance and emotiveness) for increased final lengthening. Similar meaning were identified for final lengthening in Mandarin. The Mandarin experiment asked participants to perform a range of character types, and those that were associated with flamboyance and exaggerated affective display had more lengthening than other character types.

We suggest that longer final syllable durations are sound-symbolically and cross-linguistically linked to heightened affect through conflations of phonetic and affective expressiveness. We comment on the significance of these findings for a theorization of cross-linguistic similarities in ideological constructions.

Speakers

Lewis Esposito

Stanford University

Robert Xu

Stanford University

Saturday October 12, 2019 10:55am - 11:20am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Prosody & tone

Session type Talk
Chair: Kaori Idemaru

11:20am PDT

Moreton: Abstract factors in English diphthong raising in a Mississippi dialect

Abstract factors in English diphthong raising in a Mississippi dialect

American Raising is one version of English Diphthong Raising, the pattern of higher diphthongs before voiceless consonants which reappears in many times and places around the English-speaking world when a concrete phonetic precursor spawns an abstract phonological pattern. Research on the concrete-to-abstract transition has focused on whether Raising is conditioned by concrete surface voicing or abstract underlying voicing of flapped-/t/ (wríter^ vs. ríder). Here, an under-studied Raising variety illustrates additional abstract conditioning by prosody (cýpress^ vs. Báikàl_) and morphology (Fìghtólogy^ vs. phỳtólogy).

Some theories hold that a freshly-phonologized pattern is phonetically conditioned, becoming more-abstractly conditioned over time; if so, Raising should add conditions in the order phonetics--prosody--morphology. Alternatively, the precursor might already be abstractly conditioned; if so, that conditioning should be seen in the unphonologized residue of the precursor. Incorporating more abstract factors into studies of American Raising may therefore significantly benefit the theory of phonologization in general.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Elliott Moreton

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

11:20am PDT

Prazeres: Profiling nominal genitive variability in Moroccan Arabic

Profiling nominal genitive variability in Moroccan Arabic

Most modern spoken varieties of Arabic make use of two syntactic configurations to express genitive/possessive relations between nouns: a synthetic form and an analytic form. This variable has received sparse study in a variationist framework. The present study fills a part of this gap by analyzing nominal genitive usage patterns in the speech of 12 Moroccan Arabic speakers in Casablanca, with a focus on linguistic factors. Using multivariate analysis, I show that there is a sharp difference between contexts with noun possessors versus those with pronoun possessors. In both contexts, however, the synthetic is strongly favoured by contexts of inalienable possession – supporting previous claims – as well as by noun complements – a new finding. By contrast, the analytic genitive appears to accommodate a wider range of linguistic situations, including code-switching environments. The results offer a clear benchmark for comparison with future studies of this variable in other varieties of Arabic.

Speakers

Robert Prazeres

University of Toronto

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Grammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Sali Tagliamonte
Award Finalist: Lillian B. Stueber Prize

11:20am PDT

King: Placing race: Constructing African American identity via vocalic variation

Placing race: Constructing African American identity via vocalic variation

This paper addresses critiques of homogenization in the study of African American Language by assessing African Americans’ use of vocalic variables to construct different identities. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews, I examine regionalized, racialized, and classed vocalic patterns among three personae: The Mobile Black Professional (MBP), The Hood Kid (HK), and The Biker. The comparison of vocalic variables across these black personae reveals complex ways in which race articulates with regional identity. The constructions of HKs rely on a regional variable that is racialized as black, while the constructions of The Biker and MBPs’ rely on the uptake of the linguistic capital racialized as white in the linguistic markets of their respective generations. I argue that vocalic variation is mediated by personae, which draw on different constellations of semiotic resources for different social ends.

Speakers

Sharese King

University of Chicago

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Place & identity

Session type Talk
Chair: Nicole Holliday

11:20am PDT

Wang & Wagner: Local identity and standardization: Evidence from Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi

Local identity and standardization: Evidence from Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi

Tianjin Chinese is in the process of standardization (Gao & Lu 2003, Gu & Liu 2003), but the current study finds that only stigmatized local features disappear, while an unmarked local feature seems to be immune to standardization. We interpret this in line with Labov’s (1972) study of Martha’s Vineyard, whereby traditional local features may come to index resistance to standardization and to the incursion of new people into the speech community. Tianjin natives may be linguistically contrasting themselves with the many migrants who have moved to the city in the last three decades, and indeed a negative attitude to migrants significantly increases the likelihood of the unmarked local feature in the regression. The project adds to the expanding number of non-Western case studies of language change (Stanford & Preston 2009) that support earlier generalizations made from Western communities.

Speakers

Xiaomei Wang

Michigan State University

Suzanne Evans Wagner

Assoc Prof Linguistics, Michigan State University

Routledge Studies in Language Change, a book series that I co-edit with Isabelle Buchstaller. Language change over the lifespan. Sound change in US English. Being a scholar-parent.

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:20am - 11:45am PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Prosody & tone

Session type Talk
Chair: Kaori Idemaru

11:45am PDT

Carmichael: /ai/ before /au/, except by the sea?: Diphthong raising in New Orleans English

/ai/ before /au/, except by the sea?: Diphthong raising in New Orleans English

Pre-voiceless /ai/ and /au/-raising are documented in North American English varieties, though /ai/-raising is more common in US varieties. This study documents both forms of raising in New Orleans English (NOE), in cooccurrence with pre-voiced /ai/-monophthongization. Speech from 57 white, working class NOE speakers demonstrates that all 3 forms of variation occur across individual speakers’ grammars in varying combinations; the presence of one form of variation neither precludes nor predicts the presence of another. Notably, the youngest speakers in the corpus demonstrate the most pre-voiceless /au/-raising, suggesting that /au/-raising is a change in progress. In contrast, /ai/- raising and -monophthongization do not demonstrate age effects, instead occurring inconsistently across the corpus. Preliminary results thus suggest that /au/-raising is an independent development from /ai/-raising, and that NOE represents another example of a dialect that features the cooccurrence of pre-voiceless /ai/-raising and pre-voiced /ai/-monophthongization for some speakers.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Katie Carmichael

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

11:45am PDT

Kerschen et al.: Another non-null subject language: Variable subject expression in German

Another non-null subject language: Variable subject expression in German

Despite the fact that Standard German is typologically classified as a non-null-subject language, variation in subject expression (SE) in German is well documented historically and in modern varieties. Following previous variationist accounts of other languages (e.g., Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019; Leroux & Jarmasz 2006), our study offers a new approach to SE in colloquial, spoken Standard German by using naturalistic speech data.

A corpus of 89,209 words produced by 32 native speakers of German yielded 194 tokens of finite declarative clauses containing unexpressed subjects with a specific human referent, which we compared to a principled sample of 309 tokens with overt pronominal subjects produced by the same speakers.

Using stepwise logistic regression analysis, we found that three factors were significant predictors of SE: presence of preverbal material, grammatical person/number, and verb class. Our results show that German patterns with Spanish, English, and French regarding the constraints on SE.

Speakers

Katherine Kerschen

PhD Student, Pennsylvania State University

Maike Rocker

The Pennsylvania State University

M. Cole Callen

Pennsylvania State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Grammatical variation

Session type Talk
Chair: Sali Tagliamonte

11:45am PDT

Hall-Lew et al.: Breksit or Bregzit: When political ideology drives language ideology

Breksit or Bregzit: When political ideology drives language ideology

'Brexit' was coined for the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU. We analyze variation in the pronunciation of 'Brexit' ([bɹɛksɪt] vs. [bɹɛgzɪt]) to explore how that contrast has been ideologically linked to political meanings. We find that neither a production study nor a Matched Guise Study support the same indexical relations that are prevalent in Twitter metacommentary. Variation in 'Brexit' does not appear to correlate with any social factors in production and only in limited ways in perception. The social meanings indexed on Twitter are highly varied, and any ‘kernel of similarity’ (Podesva 2008) seems to be an indexing of the (political) Other, rather than a specific political stance. In contrast to variables that become politicised via non-political indexicalities (Hall-Lew et al., 2010; 2012; 2017), variation in 'Brexit' appears to be ideologised from the indexical potential of phonetic markedness in combination with a divisive political issue.

Speakers

Lauren Hall-Lew

University of Edinburgh

Julian Shen

The University of Edinburgh

Graeme Trousdale

The University of Edinburgh

Yihua Zhang

The University of Edinburgh

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Place & identity

Session type Talk
Chair: Nicole Holliday

11:45am PDT

Lai & Gooden: Socioprosodic variation in Yami: Language ecology, intonation, and identity

Socioprosodic variation in Yami: Language ecology, intonation, and identity

In contact settings, imbalanced intergroup relations and socioeconomic pressure play critical roles in determining the trajectory of language change. Yami, a moribund indigenous language spoken in Taiwan, is undergoing rapid language shift under significant cultural-economic pressure from Mandarin. In this study, we focused attention on socioprosodic variation in Yami-Mandarin bilingual speech, with a particular emphasis on Yami neutral and statement question intonation.

Given the declining use of Yami, younger Yami-Mandarin bilinguals no longer use it to fulfill communicative needs and Mandarin has permeated the Yami intonation system. The results show that younger speakers (below 40) produced prosodic innovations deviating from traditional forms, and have even “transferred” a new Mandarin question type to Yami. We argue that these hybridities index Yami ethnicity and socio-cultural belonging. Although these speakers reported limited Yami proficiency, their metalinguistic commentary and cultural practices reinforce the suggestion for strong rootedness in indigenous identity.

Speakers

Li-Fang Lai

Postdoctoral Scholar, The Pennsylvania State University

Shelome Gooden

University of Pittsburgh

Saturday October 12, 2019 11:45am - 12:10pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Prosody & tone

Session type Talk
Chair: Kaori Idemaru

12:10pm PDT

LDC data clinic: Main session

Saturday October 12, 2019 12:10pm - 1:30pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

Special event

12:10pm PDT

Lunch break

Saturday October 12, 2019 12:10pm - 1:40pm PDT
N/A

Break

12:20pm PDT

NWAV Business Meeting

Saturday October 12, 2019 12:20pm - 1:30pm PDT
EMU Oak

Other

1:30pm PDT

Pop-Up Mentoring

Saturday October 12, 2019 1:30pm - 3:10pm PDT
EMU Maple

Special event

1:40pm PDT

Thomas & Mielke: Phonetic processes behind Canadian Raising of /aj/ in eastern Ohio

Phonetic processes behind Canadian Raising of /aj/ in eastern Ohio

“Canadian raising” of /aj/ has spread widely in the United States over the past hundred years, and the eastern half of Ohio represents a microcosm of the change. DARE informants born before World War I were compared with subjects from a survey of eastern Ohioans born after 1970. Although the DARE informants showed little evidence of the process, it is widespread among the younger group, indicating a rapid progress. In non-pre-voiceless contexts, the nucleus exhibits something close to a steady-state that is usually absent before voiceless consonants. The degree of Canadian raising depends on the measurement point—i.e., what is defined as the “nucleus”—because F1 does not reach its highest value at the beginning of the near-steady-state. Its absence before voiceless consonants has allowed the nucleus in that context to be pulled closer to the already higher glide.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Erik Thomas

North Carolina State University

Jeff Mielke

North Carolina State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

1:40pm PDT

Freeman: Variation patterns of the post-velarized rhotic in Moroccan Arabic

Variation patterns of the post-velarized rhotic in Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic, like many other varieties of Arabic, has a distinction between rhotics with and without post-velar secondary articulation which is distributionally ambiguous between phonetic conditioning and phonemic contrast. The ‘emphatic’ post-velarized rhotic [ṛ] has a historically vowel-conditioned distributional pattern with respect to [r] which has been complicated by morphological regularization and lexical diffusion in contemporary spoken varieties. This study indicates that in the city of Fes, the emphatic rhotic is irregularly distributed, exhibiting patterns of occurrence that vary idiosyncratically within the speech community. Certain morphological paradigms maintain a vowel-conditioned alternation for almost all speakers, while in other paradigms either [ṛ] or [r] tends to be generalized across phonetic contexts. For certain speakers, a phonetically intermediate acoustic signature similar to that of uvular consonants was found to occur, suggesting that the rhotic post-velarization contrast is variable in both phonology and phonetics.

Speakers

Aaron Freeman

University of Pennsylvania

Saturday October 12, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Consonants

Session type Talk
Chair: Betsy Sneller
Award Finalist: Lillian B. Stueber Prize

1:40pm PDT

Bissell & Wolfram: Oppositional Identity and back vowel fronting in a triethnic context: The case of Lumbee English

Oppositional Identity and back vowel fronting in a triethnic context: The case of Lumbee English

The correlation of back vowel fronting with ethnicity raises the issue of its indexical role in ethnolinguistic alignment. In the triethnic setting of Robeson County, NC, White speakers participate in cross-generational back vowel fronting, while African American speakers do not. Lumbee Indian speakers change over time. How do we explain the social motivation of this shift, and what does it indicate about Robeson County in terms of ethnic alignment and opposition? We hypothesize that younger Lumbee Indian speakers’ convergence with White speakers’ back vowel patterning indicates social distancing from African Americans, a critical opposition for their ethnolinguistic identity given their contested status as American Indians. Alignment with whites does not threaten their identity, whereas affiliation with Blacks challenges their disputed identity.. The study demonstrates how back vowel fronting can do the work of oppositional identity when ethnic alignment is contested.

Speakers

Marie Bissell

Ohio State University

Walt Wolfram

North Carolina State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 1:40pm - 2:05pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Ethnolects

Session type Talk
Chair: Shelome Gooden

2:00pm PDT

LDC data clinic: Drop-in session

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
EMU Oak

Special event

2:05pm PDT

Rankinen: Apparent-time evidence of raised /aj/ and /aw/ in Michigan’s upper peninsula

Apparent-time evidence of raised /aj/ and /aw/ in Michigan’s upper peninsula

Canadian-like raising, also known as American raising (the raised variant of /aj/ but not /aw/), seems to be developing independent of an external model of diffusion across many American speech communities. The proximity of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) with Canada begs the question if a rural American English speech community exhibits the raised variants of /aj/, /aw/ or both, and if so, is it due to external models of diffusion or developing internal within the community itself. Toward this end, the present study focuses on a sociolinguistically stratified 85-speaker corpus of monolingual English speakers from Michigan’s Marquette County. The clear preference toward the raised variants of both /aj/ and /aw/ among younger middle-class females and a clear preference toward the non-raised variants among younger working-class females suggests these linguistic variables are changes-in-progress and hold prestige following sociolinguistic principles of sound change in this rural UP speech community.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Wil Rankinen

Grand Valley State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

2:05pm PDT

Dickerson: Albanian Rhotics & the Mapping of Region to Gender

Albanian Rhotics & the Mapping of Region to Gender

In this study I have two main objectives: (1) to document and describe the status of the two Albanian rhotics, /r/ and /rr/, in the speech and perception of participants from both northern and southern cities in Albania, and (2) to explore the social meaning(s) tied to the merger of /r/ and /rr/, particularly in the case where it seems like a regional dialectal feature has taken on a gendered meaning. I find that not only is the merger more common in the speech of southern women, but also the phonetic realization of the rhotics (even when unmerged) is different in the speech of northerners and southerners. Finally, I discuss the social meanings associated with merged and unmerged speech, and investigate whether a listener’s experience with a linguistic feature has an effect on the strength of the social meanings that a listener associates with that feature.

Speakers

Carly Dickerson

Ohio State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Consonants

Session type Talk
Chair: Betsy Sneller

2:05pm PDT

Benheim: Regional features and the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire in Chicago

Regional features and the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire in Chicago

The Jewish American ethnolinguistic repertoire (Benor 2011) has been shown to include the use of New York City (NYC) regional features, even by speakers who live elsewhere (Knack 1991; Sacknovitz 2007). Less is known about how indexical links between NYC features and Jewish identity interface with the social meanings of regional features common to the communities outside of NYC in which Jewish speakers live. This study explores how Jewish Chicagoans’ vocalic systems integrate NYC- and Chicago-linked TRAP, LOT, and THOUGHT vowel productions. Evidence from production (wordlist) and perception (phoneme categorization) tasks reveal quantitative differences between Jewish and Catholic speakers’ LOT productions, and Orthodox vs. other Jewish listeners’ LOT perceptions. I argue that these differences are guided by LOT-fronting’s social meaning in Chicago more generally, and that the use of a given element from the ethnolinguistic repertoire can be influenced by that element’s pre-existing social meaning in a particular community.

Speakers

Jaime Benheim

Northwestern University

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Ethnolects

Session type Talk
Chair: Shelome Gooden

2:05pm PDT

Beaman: The role of identity and mobility in reconciling individual and community change: Insight from a combined panel and trend study

The role of identity and mobility in reconciling individual and community change: Insight from a combined panel and trend study

Real-time trend studies of language change across the community have been the mainstay of variationist sociolinguistics since its inception (e.g., Labov 1963, 1966). Recently, increased focus has been placed on panel studies investigating individual change across the lifespan (e.g., Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). Yet little research has sought to reconcile the sometimes conflicting findings between panel and trend studies (Sankoff 2006, 2019). This paper tackles this challenge through a combined real-time panel and trend study of Swabian, an Alemannic dialect spoken in southwestern Germany. Twenty participants, interviewed in 1982 and 2017, comprise the panel component, and forty “social twins”, matched for age, sex, and education, interviewed in 2017, comprise the trend component. The findings show that, over time, speakers with high Swabian orientation retain more dialect, while those with high mobility lose more, offering new insight into the role that identity and mobility play in understanding community and lifespan change.

Speakers

Karen Beaman

Queen Mary University of London & Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:05pm - 2:30pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lifespan

Session type Talk
Chair: Suzanne Evans Wagner

2:30pm PDT

Swan: More alike than different: /aɪ/ raising in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC

More alike than different: /aɪ/ raising in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC

Raising of /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ has long been seen as a differentiator of Canadian and U.S. dialects, despite attestations in U.S. dialects. The current study compares /aɪ/ raising in two urban dialects straddling the U.S.-Canadian border. The data come from 20 Seattle, WA and 19 Vancouver, BC talkers (ages 18-36) who completed a word-list task including 50 tokens of /aɪ/. Both cities show a significant difference on both the F1 and F2 dimensions between their /aɪT/ tokens and /aɪD/ tokens. In comparing the cities, Vancouver talkers exhibit higher /aɪT/ tokens relative to /aɪD/ than Seattle, due to lower /aɪD/ tokens for Vancouver. With respect to Atlas benchmarks, 19 out of 20 Seattle talkers exhibit /aɪT/ raising. Age and gender subgroup variation does not suggest incipient change in Seattle. Rather, /aɪT/ raising is established in both urban centers, calling into question one dialect diagnostic used to distinguish the West from Canada.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Julia Swan

Assistant Professor, San José State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

2:30pm PDT

Purse: Task effects in the articulation of coronal stop deletion

Task effects in the articulation of coronal stop deletion

The various tasks for eliciting speech that form the sociolinguistic toolkit differently influence speakers’ stylistic choices. However, very little is known about stylistic variation in the articulatory domain. This study uses EMA to explore task effects in the articulation of tokens eligible for Coronal Stop Deletion: the variable surface absence of word-final coronal stops after consonants in English, e.g. ol’ ~ old (Labov et al., 1968). A classic approach to sociolinguistic style would predict participants to converge towards a standard form and eschew casual speech processes like Coronal Stop Deletion as their level of self-monitoring and metalinguistic awareness is increased (Labov, 1972). Despite this, speakers produced the least tongue tip raising in a Wordlist task, which would normally be considered to induce the greatest amount of attention to speech. I consider some potential explanations for this effect, including engagement with an interlocutor, prosodic factors, and speaker fatigue.

Speakers

Ruaridh Purse

PhD Student, University of Pennsylvania

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Consonants

Session type Talk
Chair: Betsy Sneller

2:30pm PDT

Holliday: “Sounding black” vs. “talking black”?: Racial identity performance at different levels of variation

“Sounding black” vs. “talking black”?: Racial identity performance at different levels of variation

This study examines interaction between use of selected morphosyntactic and intonational features of AAL as conditioned by interlocutor. Building on Holliday (2016), which found a relationship between how much biracial participants identify as black and greater use of AAL intonational features, this study examines the same corpus for morphosyntactic features of AAL including zero copula, negative concord, and invariant be across interlocutor conditions. An lmer model was conducted using lme4 package in R to test for differences in rate of use of features across participants and interlocutor conditions. Participants use few morphosyntactic features (N per speaker= 8.14 features). Despite low numbers, models indicate participants use most morphosyntactic features in black friend condition, followed by biracial interviewer condition (p<.001) and white friend condition (p<.001). This demonstrates interlocutor effects on use of AAL morphosyntactic features despite no correlation with intonational features, indicating speakers may use intonation independently of morphosyntax for identity construction.

Speakers

Nicole Holliday

Pomona College

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Ethnolects

Session type Talk
Chair: Shelome Gooden

2:30pm PDT

Pabst & Tagliamonte: I/0 fed the squirrels: The impact of cognitive decline on subject omission in one individual's diaries over the lifespan (1985-2016)

I/0 fed the squirrels: The impact of cognitive decline on subject omission in one individual's diaries over the lifespan (1985-2016)

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of a single individual’s diary entries, written between the years 1985 and 2016 (age 60-91). The writer, Vivian White, was born and raised in Nova Scotia but spent most of her adult life in Toronto, Ontario. In 2009, at age 84, Vivian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We investigate to what extent her cognitive decline is reflected in her writing. Our focus is on subject realization, specifically the variation between first person singular I and zero.

Results show that during the early years of writing, Vivian’s rate of subject omission is high and relatively stable. Shortly before her diagnosis, Vivian starts using the overt 1st person pronoun I almost exclusively. This suggests that speakers may revert back to a more fundamental writing style when they experience cognitive decline. Despite these drastic changes in frequency, the underlying grammar remains remarkably stable.

Speakers

Katharina Pabst

University of Toronto

Sali A. Tagliamonte

University of Toronto

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lifespan

Session type Talk
Chair: Suzanne Evans Wagner

2:55pm PDT

Dodsworth et al.: Social network correlates of /ai/ raising: A community comparison

Social network correlates of /ai/ raising: A community comparison

The leaders of linguistic change are believed to have open, diverse networks containing weak ties. This study investigates the social network correlates of the raising of the /ai/ nucleus before voiceless consonants in two distinct regions showing similar apparent-time change: urban Raleigh, North Carolina and rural Kansas. First, a network cluster detection procedure reveals no significant network correlates of /ai/ raising in Raleigh, suggesting that contact with Northern dialects does not predict adoption of the change. Second, we ask qualitatively whether the leaders of linguistic change have open social networks relative to others. In both Raleigh and Kansas, the leaders are females who have lived or gone to school in more than one area of town; however, young speakers who do not lead /ai/ raising have multiple network types, ranging from diverse and far-reaching to insulated. The network conditions promoting the adoption of multi-regional linguistic changes require further inquiry.

Session abstract: American Raising

On-going work by various researchers finds that the raising of the diphthong /aɪ/ to [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants is becoming widespread in the US, occurring in many communities in different locales (e.g. Fort Wayne, Berkson et al. 2017; Kansas City, Strelluf 2018). In U.S. varieties of English that display /aɪ/-raising, the raising generally occurs in the absence of concomitant /aʊ/-raising: we refer to this as American Raising, thereby distinguishing it from Canadian Raising. The recent emergence of American Raising in multiple, distinct locales makes it increasingly possible to document its origins and spread. This panel brings together phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists to address formal and sociolinguistic aspects of American Raising in different locales. Formal aspects include questions about which words/environments are the first to raise and how raising spreads to other words/environments. Social aspects include questions on how it spreads through social networks and the matter of what raising indexes.

Speakers

Robin Dodsworth

Professor, North Carolina State University

Mary Kohn

Kansas State University

Jon Forrest

University of Georgia

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Gumwood

S: American raising

Session type Talk (Special session)
Chair: Stuart Davis

2:55pm PDT

Maddux & Rao: Heritage Spanish /bdg/ in an underexplored social context

Heritage Spanish /bdg/ in an underexplored social context

Inspired by source input varieties, cross-generational studies on heritage Spanish, work on heritage Spanish /bdg/, and a lack of research on heritage speakers (HSs) in rural settings, we analyzed data from five HSs of Spanish and one parent of each HS, all of whom live in a rural area of the Midwestern US.

Our results reveal consistent weakening to [βðɣ] across the board. We first see that HSs weaken all three phonemes more than parents. Second, we observe that those with a higher degree of English proficiency show more weakening of /bdg/ realizations. Third, we find that those who have more exposure to English actually weaken /b/ to a greater degree. Fourth, speakers born in the US exhibit more weakening than those born in Mexico, but only for /bg/. In sum, our data suggest that segregation, isolation, and the continued influx of immigrants are key factors in minority language maintenance.

Speakers

Nate Maddux

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Rajiv Rao

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake N

T: Consonants

Session type Talk
Chair: Betsy Sneller

2:55pm PDT

Sheydaei & Purnell: Towards a transracial sociolinguistics: Ethnographic insight from Americans of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent

Towards a transracial sociolinguistics: Ethnographic insight from Americans of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent

This study contributes to transracial sociolinguistics by focusing on language practices of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent (MENA-Americans), and integrating exogenous top-down and endogenous bottom-up approaches to studying sociolinguistic communities. We contrast results of a perceptual experiment with results from ethnographic interviews. The perceptual study (300 participants) shows that people of MENA ancestry are not recognizable as a distinct ethnic community based on physical appearance while attire and linguistic features make the community more distinctive. However, ethnographic interviews with eight MENA-Americans (2nd and 3rd generation) show that they think MENA-Americans are a visible community based on appearance. Our ethnographic interviews also show a positive correlation between ethnic rootedness (measured in terms of cultural affiliation, language use and choice, and visibility) and ethnolectal pronunciations of certain sounds – like pharyngeal fricatives, trill /r/, and uvular stops in words such as Arab, Iraq, Maqloobeh, or eid.

Speakers

Iman Sheydaei Baghdadeh

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thomas Purnell

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Cedar & Spruce

T: Ethnolects

Session type Talk
Chair: Shelome Gooden

2:55pm PDT

Adli & Engel: Grammatical complexity of the very old: interplay of cognitive and social factors

Grammatical complexity of the very old: interplay of cognitive and social factors

This paper investigates grammatical complexity in the speech of 479 elderly German speakers (mean age: 86 years), drawing on a large, cross-disciplinary survey (Wagner et al., 2018) on their living situation.

We analyzed sentence length, pronoun rate, and depth of clausal embedding. The results indicate that lower cognitive performance correlates with higher pronoun rates - due to pragmatically inadequate uses with unclear reference - and shorter sentences. Furthermore, higher occupational status and higher level of education respectively lead to lower pronoun rates, longer sentences, and more complex embedding structures. Lastly, the size of the social network inhibits the overuse of pronouns.

In sum, clausal embedding correlates with socio-economic factors only, while pronoun rate and sentence length correlate both with cognitive and socio-economic factors. We discuss the protective effect of social factors against cognitive impairment (as evidenced by less frequent overuse of pronouns), as well as the possible influence of register and speech style.

Speakers

Aria Adli

University of Cologne

Eric Engel

University of Cologne

Saturday October 12, 2019 2:55pm - 3:20pm PDT
EMU Crater Lake S

T: Lifespan

Session type Talk
Chair: Suzanne Evans Wagner

3:40pm PDT

(E1): Rankinen et al.: Apparent-time evidence of American Raising in western Lower Michigan

Apparent-time evidence of American Raising in western Lower Michigan

The present study examines whether the raising of the diphthongal onset before a voiceless obstruent occurs for both /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ (``Canadian Raising") or just /aɪ/ (``American Raising") in western Lower Michigan. American Raising has been observed in several nearby areas (including eastern Lower Michigan, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and northeast Indiana), and Canadian Raising has been documented in various regions throughout Canada and the US, but the behavior of these diphthongs in western Lower Michigan is still unknown. A sample of 45 monolingual English speakers, stratified by sex, age, and ethnic heritage (Dutch vs. non-Dutch), was recruited from Michigan's Kent County. Each speaker read a 773-word reading passage containing a balanced distribution of the monophthongs and diphthongs of American English. Results were age-graded: older (age 60+) and middle-aged (age 40-59) speakers exhibited Canadian Raising but younger (age 18-39) speakers exhibited American Raising, suggesting the beginning of a change-in-progress.

Speakers

Wil Rankinen

Grand Valley State University

Taylor Neuhaus

Bowling Green State University

Aaron Albin

Kobe University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, North American dialectology

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(I1) Murphy & Monahan: Cross-dialectal perception of Canadian Raising

Cross-Dialectal Perception of Canadian Raising

This paper presents findings from a speech perception study testing auditory discrimination of dialectal allophonic variants. 148 total English speakers from three North American regions (Canada, the U.S. Great Lakes states, and the U.S. West) were tested on their ability to distinguish between raised and non-raised variants of Canadian Raising diphthongs ([aj]~[ʌj] and [aw]~[ʌw]). Canadian Raising is an allophonic alternation that is characteristic of Canadian English but is also found in some U.S. dialects, especially around the Great Lakes region. Raising features prominently in stereotypes of Canadian English, and thus it was predicted that speakers of dialects with less raising would perform better (U.S. West > U.S. Great Lakes ≥ Canada). Instead, this pattern was approximately reversed; speakers of dialects with more raising were faster and more accurate. This suggests that discrimination of dialectal allophonic variants might be predicted more by dialectal experience/exposure than by dialectal stereotypes.

Speakers

Patrick Murphy

University of Toronto

Philip Monahan

University of Toronto

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Social processing

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(I2) Weirich: Perceptual categorization of regional varieties of English in Indiana

Perceptual categorization of regional varieties of English in Indiana

Indiana is a state crossed by four dialect regions including the North, Inland North, Midland, and South. This study explores how well people in Indiana can identify talkers from these regions. In a four-alternative forced-choice task, 108 participants from four dialect regions in Indiana listened to 24 female talkers from six parts of Indiana and indicated which dialect region they believed each talker was from. Categorization accuracy for all participants was consistent and comparable to other studies in the United States but still relatively poor at 29%. Listeners were most accurate when presented with talkers from their own dialect region, and accuracy decreased the further the talkers' dialect region was from the listeners' region. The results of the study supplement the current understanding of the nature of mental representations of dialects; direct experience with dialects depends on physical proximity, and dialect categories have different specificity, from general to specific.

Speakers

Phillip Weirich

Indiana University Bloomington

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Social processing

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(I3) Lai: Visual cues facilitate talker-specific perceptual adaptation within gender

Visual cues facilitate talker-specific perceptual adaptation within gender

Studies on perception learning typically use voices of different genders to differentiate between speakers, making it unclear whether the observed perception specificity proceeds by idiosyncratic talkers or different gender groups of talkers. We report an experiment that addresses this confound by investigating whether listeners show speaker-specific perception adaptation when the talkers are two females. The experiment shows that, when Speaker A has /s/-skewed sibilants and Speaker B has /ʃ/-skewed sibilants, the distributions offset each other within a gender group when pictures of the speakers are not available, while the /s-ʃ/ boundary shift was maintained in talker-specific ways when pictures of speakers became available. These results highlight the importance of top-down speaker-identity cues in perceptual adaptation, and give us a more complete picture of potential mediating roles of talker identity in different perceptual learning contexts.

Speakers

Wei Lai

University of Pennsylvania

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Social processing

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(I4) Gao & Forrest: Mandarin full tone realization and perception of social personae

Mandarin full tone realization and perception of social personae

Zhang (2005) identifies a trend of incorporating Taiwanese full tone realization among younger speakers, and it is favored by females over males. The current study addresses whether listeners also perceive a social connection between full tone realization and the “cute” social persona. 12 initial participants were played sample sentences and asked to rate the likelihood of the sentence appearing in a given scenario, with two scenarios associated with a “cute” persona and two that were not. Each participant was also asked to complete a 10-minute survey about perceptions. Mixed-effects modeling shows a significantly higher rating for full tone tokens, regardless of scenario. Qualitative data show that most of the subjects felt the full tone tokens sounded nonnative rather than relating to social personae. We interpret these results as indicating that the full tone variable, may not yet have a strong association with higher-level social personae in the minds of listeners.

Speakers

Feier Gao

Indiana University Bloomington

Jon Forrest

University of Georgia

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Social processing

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(J1) Ruthan: Attitudes toward Jazani Arabic

Attitudes toward Jazani Arabic

Jazani Arabic is a highly stigmatized dialect among speakers of other Saudi regional dialects. The few attitudinal studies of Saudi dialects have shown that southern dialects of Saudi Arabic, to which Jazani belongs, are judged as ‘bad’, ‘unbearable’, and sound like ‘Yemeni’ Arabic. Yet, the linguistic source of the stigma for the southern dialects, and importantly for Jazani Arabic, is unclear. 183 participants from all different regions of Saudi Arabia participated in an online perception and attitude survey to determine salient socio-phonetic features of Jazani Arabic and their impact on attitudes toward the dialect. The results show that word-initial clusters and non-emphatic /r/ stood out as salient features of Jazani Arabic, which have contributed to respondents attitudes to mention general comments like ‘sounds like Yemeni’, ‘annoying’, ‘unpleasant’, linguistic comments like ‘non-emphatic /r/’, ‘word-initial clusters’ and ‘fast’. These results allow a better understanding of the stereotypes and beliefs on the dialect.

Speakers

Mohammed Ruthan

Michigan State University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Attitudes

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(J2) Freitag: The development of sociolinguistic awareness at schools in Brazilian Portuguese and reading success

The development of sociolinguistic awareness at schools in Brazilian Portuguese and reading success

National and international assessments show that Brazil fails to teach reading in its entire system of public education. This paper argues that the explanation for the success in early reading of a part of students might be related to the development of sociolinguistic awareness (Compernolle, Williams 2013). The rates of variation in four phonological variables (reduction of diphthongs, ingliding, internal -r coda deletion and vocalization of lateral palatal) in three different stylistic contexts (to - from + monitored speech: Short interview -> Picture naming -> Reading aloud task) collected in a classroom of 3rd grade show a gradual relation between the increase in stylistic monitoring and the use of standard variant. These results reveal that the development of sociolinguistic awareness can be measured by the transposition of the variant into spontaneous speech for the reading aloud, suggesting automaticity in decoding process by lexical route (Coltheart, Rastle 1994).

Speakers

Raquel Freitag

Federal University of Sergipe

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Attitudes

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(J3) Maher & Edwards: Changes in attitudes toward variation in teachers of a code-switching curriculum

Changes in attitudes toward variation in teachers of a code-switching curriculum

Multiple studies have found a relationship between dialect differences and reading achievement, leading to proposals for sociolinguistically-informed approaches to instruction. In addition to providing linguistic support for students, sociolinguistically-informed curricula have the potential to improve teachers’ attitudes toward variation. Schools in Baltimore, MD were recruited to teach ToggleTalk, a K-1 curriculum designed to teach children who speak African American English to code-shift; half of recruited schools were randomly assigned to a control condition. Teachers’ attitudes toward variation before and after curriculum implementation were measured with a survey. As predicted, teacher attitudes became significantly more favorable toward variation over the course of the school year. However, this was true regardless of condition. Though this finding does not contradict the hypothesis that teaching a sociolinguistically-informed curriculum would improve teacher attitudes, we interpret this result cautiously, discussing the limitations of our data.

Speakers

Zachary Maher

University of Maryland

Jan Edwards

University of Maryland

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Attitudes

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(J4) Levon et al.: Accent bias and judgments of professional competence: A comparison of laypeople and trained recruiters

Accent bias and judgments of professional competence: A comparison of laypeople and trained recruiters

We investigate current perceptions of accent variation in England, comparing the perceptions of the general public to those of professional law firm recruiters, in order to examine the role that accent bias plays in obstructing social mobility in Britain. We first conducted a nationwide verbal guise test with a representative sample of the English population (N=848). Results demonstrate strong effects of age and listener region on evaluations of accents, though these are mitigated by individual respondents’ motivations to control a prejudiced response. We compare these results to a similar study among 60 professional recruiters in large corporate law firms. Analyses demonstrate that law firm respondents behave unlike the general public, showing a high capacity to focus on response quality and disregard accent. Together, our results show persistent patterns of bias against working class and ethnically-marked accents in England, but also that such bias can be mitigated in specific professional contexts.

Speakers

Erez Levon

Queen Mary University of London

Devyani Sharma

Queen Mary University of London

Yang Ye

Queen Mary University of London

Dominic Watt

University of York

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Attitudes

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(J5) Hejná & Jespersen: Garbage language for garbage people? Linguistic integration of adult second-language learners in Denmark

Garbage language for garbage people? Linguistic integration of adult second-language learners in Denmark

This paper focuses on the difficulties associated with learning Danish as a foreign language in Denmark and the contribution of socio-pragmatic issues involved in particular. More specifically, we investigate the impact of L1 Danish speakers’ switches into English in conversations with non-native Danish speakers who initiate conversation in Danish. Using survey data (including a RAS study), we conclude that the socio-pragmatic situation does contribute to the difficulties learners have with Danish. Non-Danes perceive Danes’ switches into English much more negatively than Danes do. Importantly, Danes’ switches into English discourage the learners from using Danish and also learning it. In some cases, the switches initiated by L1 Danish speakers extend to negative associations with the language and the L1 speakers themselves. We also report that the background of the learners does not seem to be generally relevant, although 2% of the Danes switched because the learners “didn’t look Danish”. Language proficiency does not affect the number of reported switches.

Speakers

Michaela Hejná

Aarhus University

Anna Jespersen

Aarhus University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Attitudes

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(K1) Garrison: Not quite Canada, definitely not California: Evidence of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Moscow, Idaho

Not quite Canada, definitely not California: Evidence of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Moscow, Idaho

This study examines the presence and progression of the Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) in the community of Moscow, Idaho. Also known as the California Vowel Shift or the Canadian Vowel Shift, the LBMS represents the combination of two bodies of literature describing the same chain shift, which starts with a merger between the two low-back vowels. Data was gathered from interviews of eighteen participants native to the region, processed with Praat and the FAVE suite, and evaluated using benchmarks, regression analyses, and Pillai scores. Members of the Moscow community exhibited limited participation in the LBMS, with anecdotal variation in LBMS participation based on rural- or urban-oriented attitudes. This provides strong evidence for the presence, but not progression, of the LBMS in areas outside of the typically delineated geographical boundaries.

Speakers

Arthur Garrison

Reed College

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, North American dialectology

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(K2) Kapner et al.: Revisiting variation of elementary pronunciation in Upstate New York

Revisiting variation of elementary pronunciation in Upstate New York

In light of rising awareness and retreat of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), we investigate the status of a lexical feature in an overlapping geographic region: variable stress on the penultimate syllable in words like elementary, documentary, and complimentary. Using new data from twenty-five sociolinguistic interviews in Rochester and Buffalo, New York, and a rapid and anonymous telephone survey, we describe three pronunciations, an expansion on the two described by Dinkin and Evanini (2010). We also update Dinkin and Evanini’s isogloss, finding that the local variants roughly follow the New York state line but have, since the earlier study, spread into far-western Vermont and Massachusetts. Examining relationships between speakers’ pronunciation of elementary and their demographics, we find that elementary patterns differently from the NCS in terms of social meaning and geographic distribution. This supports Dinkin and Evanini’s earlier analysis that the NCS and elementary represent different kinds of linguistic boundaries.

Speakers

Julianne Kapner

recent graduate; research assistant, University of Rochester; American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

Theresa Kettelberger

University of Rochester

Agatha Milholland

University of Rochester

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, North American dialectology

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(K3) Schlegl: That's what we do in the North: Place identity and variation in Northern Ontario

That's what we do in the North: Place identity and variation in Northern Ontario

The importance of place identity (one’s sense of connectedness to location/community) in linguistic variation has been demonstrated since Labov’s (1963) work in Martha’s Vineyard. This factor is at play in Northern Ontario, a region geographically and culturally distinct from largely urban Southern Ontario. Statements drawn from sociolinguistic interviews indicate that the divide between north and south is a salient component of identity for Northern speakers, but what meanings place identity consists of in this region and how this identity factor is reflected in the speech of residents has not yet been examined quantitatively in any specific Northern community. This project uses sociolinguistic interviews from one Northern Ontario community, stratified by social demographic factors and coded for two aspects of place identity, to examine how these impact the realisation of three morphosyntactic variables. Results contribute to an understanding of the meaning of regional place identity and how it impacts linguistic choice.

Speakers

Lisa Schlegl

University of Toronto

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, North American dialectology

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(K4) Reed: The Southern Vowel Shift in Alabama: Regional differentiation or ecological distinction?

The Southern Vowel Shift in Alabama: Regional differentiation or ecological distinction?

In Alabama, previous research identified two broad dialectal regions— Northern and Southern Alabama. Both regions have been described as participating in the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS). The Northern region was described as having more demographic groups participating in the SVS than the Southern, where the spread of SVS features was more restricted. However, the entire state has undergone demographic shifts with an increase of in-migration and intra-state migration to urban areas, potentially changing this feature boundary. The present study shows that the SVS may be an ecological distinction, with rural speakers exhibiting more SVS features than urban speakers across both Alabama regions. Thus, these results indicate that the former North/South isogloss in Alabama may be dissolving. Instead, an ecological distinction appears to be forming, where features that index the South are now becoming indicative of speakers from rural areas, with the exception of the most iconic feature, /ay/ monophthongization.

Speakers

Paul Reed

University of Alabama

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, North American dialectology

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(L1) Haddican et al.: The arrival of back vowel fronting in New York City English

The arrival of back vowel fronting in New York City English

New York City English (NYCE) has generally been described as conservative with respect to back vowel fronting (BVF) (Labov et al., 2005). This poster reports on a production study with 97 subjects suggesting extensive diffusion of BVF in NYCE, with age effects for fronting in TOO, HOOP, GOAT and FOOT lexical sets starting with subjects born in the late 1970’s. Importantly, modeling revealed no effects of subject ethnicity, gender or occupational prestige group, unlike descriptions of similar changes in other communities. The absence of strong effects of ethnicity also makes BVF unlike two other vocalic changes recently described for NYCE, namely THOUGHT-lowering and change to a nasal short-a system. Moreover, BVF correlates weakly across speakers with use of innovative variants for THOUGHT and short-a. These results suggest that BVF indexes a different set of social meanings than the low-vowel changes, which are more prominent in local metalinguistic discourse (Cutler, 2018).

Speakers

William Haddican

CUNY-Queens College

Cece Cutler

Professor, Lehman College

My current NSF project with Christina Tortora, Michael Newman, Bill Haddican and Beatrice Santorini to create a 1M word audio aligned and parsed corpus of New York City English.

Alessa Farinella

CUNY-Queens College

Tsu Zhu

CUNY-Queens College

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(L2) Umbal: Filipinos front too! A sociophonetic analysis of Toronto English /u/-fronting

Filipinos front too! A sociophonetic analysis of Toronto English /u/-fronting

/u/-fronting is an on-going change in many English varieties. /u/ is also strongly conditioned by coarticulation, with greater fronting in postcoronal contexts and blocked in prelateral contexts. The role of ethnicity has been investigated recently, but mostly in American English and in the context of only a few heritage groups. This study broadens the scope by providing an acoustic analysis of /u/-fronting patterns among 10 Filipinos (versus 12 Anglos) in Toronto. It asks whether they participate in the change; and how consonantal context affects degree of fronting. Results reveal that Filipinos participate in the general fronting of /u/, with both groups displaying regular coarticulatory effects. However, Filipinos show significantly greater fronting than Anglos in postcoronal contexts. This study suggests that even though both groups participate in the change, ethnic patterns persist; and this finding may be explained in terms of cross-language influence or the emergent linguistic marketplace model.

Speakers

Pocholo Umbal

University of Toronto

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(L3) Braun: Degree of ‘Outdoorsyness’ as a Predictor of Language Variation in Central Wisconsin

Degree of ‘Outdoorsyness’ as a Predictor of Language Variation in Central Wisconsin

Sociolinguistic research has mainly focused on urban areas, thus largely ignored language variation in rural speech communities. The present paper addresses this gap in the literature by examining language variation in one rural central Wisconsin speech community. This paper draws on sociolinguistic interviews and wordlist data from 65 native Wisconsinites who live in and in towns around Wausau, WI. The interview data was used to code the notion of ‘outdoorsyness’ by considering each individual’s profession, preferred free time activities, as well as attitudes towards living and spending time in town versus out in the country, while the wordlist data was used for formant extraction. Results show that a raised use of MOUTH indexes a local rather than a macro-social category within this speech community: the higher the degree of ‘outdoorsyness’, the more likely MOUTH was raised while a lower degree of ‘outdoorsyness’ increased the chance for a relatively lower realization.

Speakers

Sarah Braun

University of Duisburg-Essen

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Vowels

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(M1) Eddington & Brown: A production and perception study of /t/ glottalization and oral and glottal releases of /t/ in five US states

A production and perception study of /t/ glottalization and oral and glottal releases of /t/ in five US states

This poster examines the production and perception of /t/ in five US states: Indiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont. For the production study, participants read a letter containing 24 prenasal word-medial /t/s (e.g., kitten) and 28 prevocalic word-final /t/s (e.g., not ever). Results indicate that younger speakers produce more oral releases of prenasal word-medial /t/ (e.g. button) and more glottal stops of prevocalic word-final /t/ (e.g., not ever), as do women. For the perception study, 22 speakers recorded a unique sentence, and then these recordings were presented to participants who rated the speakers in terms of their perceived age, friendliness, pleasantness, rurality, education level, and whether they were from the same state as the participants. Speakers who used glottal stops were viewed as less educated and less friendly, while speakers who used oral releases were perceived as more rustic and less educated.

Speakers

David Eddington

Brigham Young University

Earl Brown

Brigham Young University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(M2) Papineau & Hall-Lew: Hooked on Celebri[ɾ]y: Intervocalic /t/ in the Speech and Song of Nina Nesbitt

‘Hooked on Celebri[ɾ]y’: Intervocalic /t/ in the Speech and Song of Nina Nesbitt

This investigation examines the realisation of Scottish singer-songwriter Nina Nesbitt’s word medial, intervocalic /t/, a variable previously identified as an index of identity in the music of British pop musicians (Trudgill 1997, Beal 2009). We examine the entirety of Nesbitt’s discography and compare these realisations to those produced in five publicly-available interviews. We find that in speech, Nesbitt employs the glottal stop variant 90.6% of the time. In her music, however, the [t] and [ɾ] variants dominate. Further testing reveals a correlation between genre of song and realisation: [t] is associated with her acoustic music, whilst [ɾ] appears in her pop and pop-folk songs. No other independent variable (internal or external) accounts for this variation. We draw on Eckert’s (2008) notion of the indexical field to argue that Nesbitt employs these variants to construct a coherent musical identity, while also appealing to a more international, industry-mainstream audience.

Speakers

Brandon Papineau

The University of Edinburgh

Lauren Hall-Lew

University of Edinburgh

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(M3) Zhao: Language variation in regional Putonghua: A case study of Ningbo

Language variation in regional Putonghua: A case study of Ningbo

This paper investigates the production and perception of two mergers (dental-retroflex fricative/affricates /s/~/ʂ/, /ts/~/tʂ/, and /tsh/~/tʂh/ and alveolar/velar nasal finals /n/~/ŋ/) in the variety used in Ningbo, a coastal city in east China where the local non-Mandarin Wu variety (Ningbonese) co-exists with the ‘standard’ Putonghua. Production and perception data was collected through sociolinguistic interviews and a matched-guise experiment. Results show that the merger of dental-retroflex fricative/affricates is less frequent than that of the alveolar/velar nasal finals. Additionally, the former merger is more frequent in male speakers while difference across genders is smaller for the latter feature. The perception study indicates that the former merger is linked to a lack of status (e.g. education level, standardness) while the latter does not. The overall results suggest that the merger of dental-retroflex fricative/affricates is stigmatised and non-standard whereas the merger of alveolar/velar nasal finals signals a regional identity.

Speakers

Hui Zhao

University of Nottingham

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(M4) Kazmierski & Urbanek: Variability in word-final /r/-vocalization in Providence: Evidence from Crimetown

Variability in word-final /r/-vocalization in Providence: Evidence from Crimetown

Word-final /r/ is said to be less likely to vocalize when the following word begins with a vowel rather than a pause or a consonant (Labov 1966). A number of studies have shown that the phonetic shapes of words are influenced by the characteristics of the context in which they appear frequently (“contextual frequency effect”, Eddington & Channer 2010; Raymond et al. 2016; Forrest 2017). Therefore, we hypothesize that words typically occurring before consonants are more prone to r-vocalization than words typically occurring before vowels. As a data source, we used the Crimetown podcast, featuring interviews with variably rhotic speakers from Providence, RI. The recordings were force-aligned, and formant measurements were entered as a response variable into a mixed-effects linear regression model. While following vowels do favor r-full pronunciations locally, there is no evidence for a corresponding “contextual frequency effect”.

Speakers

Kamil Kazmierski

Adam Mickiewicz University

Krzysztof Urbanek

Adam Mickiewicz University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Consonants

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(N1) Kaminskaia: Speech style and rhythmic variation in two Canadian French varieties

Speech style and rhythmic variation in two Canadian French varieties

The latest analyses of rhythm focused on its timing and addressed the question of a more English-like rhythmicity in Ontario French in a minority context. Recent work using methods called rhythm metrics found that both dialects exhibit a very French-like rhythmicity in spontaneous speech. Here, we are comparing these results to text readings in order to understand whether these related, but geographically distant varieties demonstrate similar effects of speaking style on prosodic rhythm or whether variation in a contact variety is less pronounced (e.g. lesser difference between rhythm metrics values in two styles, or stylistic variation is present in a subset of speakers only). Besides style, speakers’ age and sex are also taken into consideration. In this way, this analysis explores the hypothesis of sociolinguistic discontinuity in a situation of an intense contact (Mougeon & Nadasdi 1998).

Speakers

Svetlana Kaminskaia

University of Waterloo

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Prosody

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(N2) Rogers & Rao: Exploring extended focus and meaning in Chilean Spanish intonational plateau contours

Exploring extended focus and meaning in Chilean Spanish intonational plateau contours

Studies on the intonation of Spanish have been on the rise. While much of this research has been conducted on the ramifications of F0 modifications in human speech using laboratory speech, some researchers (e.g., Hirschberg 2002, Prieto 2015) assert that when established cross-linguistic interpretations of intonation are examined in natural speech, researchers frequently find data that counter to previously established assumptions.

One specific case of this potentially contradictory variation are Chilean Spanish declarative intonational plateaus, observed in the speech of a number of social groups in Chile. The current study uses natural speech and proposes that speakers use these contours as a form of extended focus whereby emphasizing entire ideas. We propose that compression of typical F0 excursions associated with L and H targets results in phonetic undershoot of the L, thus yielding the surface form of a series of Hs, or a plateau (inspired by Cho & Flemming, 2015).

Speakers

Brandon Rogers

Ball State University

Rajiv Rao

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Prosody

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(N3) LaCasse & Trawick: Quantity and quality: Using prosodic units to apply accountability to code-switching

Quantity and quality: Using prosodic units to apply accountability to code-switching

While code-switching (CS) is highly studied, characterizing its frequency remains difficult. We utilize prosodic transcription in a bilingual corpus to detail CS types and frequency, putting forward replicable measures. A baseline is calculated through the proportions of Intonation Units (IUs) occurring at (22%) versus within (78%) the boundary of a prosodic sentence (Total N=45578 IUs). Inter- and intra-sentential CS are then compared to this baseline, revealing that CS is proportionally more likely at (38%) rather than within (62%) prosodic sentence boundaries (Total N=3650 CS). Even for intra-sentential switches, prosodic boundaries play a role, as speakers are more likely to switch languages between (63%) rather than within (37%) IUs (Total N=3569 CS). The rates of inter- and intra-sentential CS as operationalized here, together with the ratio of 2.8:1 IU-boundary to within-IU CS, allow us to estimate a replicable CS rate for the entire corpus (11%).

Speakers

Dora LaCasse

University of Montana

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Prosody

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(O1) Fagyal: Observing the actuation of phonetic change through the evolution of multiethnic urban speech styles in the French media

Observing the actuation of phonetic change through the evolution of multiethnic urban speech styles in the French media

Urban speech styles have been difficult to study systematically due to the rarity of large socially-stratified corpora. I present the results of a longitudinal analysis of variable liaison, schwa, and word-initial consonant realizations in a corpus of interview segments recorded with French artists who participated in the spread of global hip hop over thirty years in France. Results show that the omission of obligatory liaisons and the simplification of word-final consonant clusters became more frequent, while schwa realizations remained stable in thirty years. Conditioning factors, such as preceding and following phonetic contexts for schwa and lexical frequency in liaison remained significant and unchanged during the same period. The only change starting from the mid-1990s was the palatalization of word-initial /t/ and /d/ after high vowels. I discuss these results as a first step in gaining insights into the actuation and diffusion of phonetic variation in specific genres of public speech.

Speakers

Zsuzsanna Fagyal

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Language change

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(O2) Beaman et al.: Variation and change in lexical productivity across the lifespan: An interdisciplinary investigation of Swabian and standard German

Variation and change in lexical productivity across the lifespan: An interdisciplinary investigation of Swabian and standard German

This paper advances an innovative interdisciplinary approach in exploring the extent to which lexical productivity can explain change in speakers’ use of dialect across the lifespan. Positioned at the intersection of the fields of dialectology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology, this investigation of 20 panel speakers of Swabian German offers an alternative account of the ostensible changes in individual speech patterns which reflect an apparent loss of dialect. By calculating intra-speaker vocabulary growth trajectories, we show that, rather than “lose” dialect, speakers gain a vast amount of new knowledge over their lifetime that is not dialect, which exerts a cumulative and competitive influence on their lexical choice. The findings support a language development process in which speakers acquire greater awareness of the standard language throughout their lifetime, gained through participation in various educational, commercial, and public institutions (Eckert 1997; Labov 1964; Sankoff and Laberge 1978), without concomitant loss of dialect forms.

Speakers

Karen Beaman

Queen Mary University of London & Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Harald Baayen

University of Tübingen

Michael Ramscar

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Language change

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(O3) Gunter et al.: "[s~ʃ]traight up Fourthteenth [s~ʃ]treet”: /stɹ/-retraction and social class in Washington D.C. African American Language

"[s~ʃ]traight up Fourthteenth [s~ʃ]treet”: /stɹ/-retraction and social class in Washington D.C. African American Language

A large body of work on /s/ has demonstrated a change-in-progress across English varieties with retraction towards [ʃ] in /stɹ/ clusters. Despite this growing body of work, no studies have empirically examined /stɹ/-retraction over time in African American Language. Using data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall & Farrington 2018), this study asks to what extent /stɹ/-retraction is present in AAL, and how it has changed over time. We use two CORAAL sub-corpora to examine the change through separate windows into apparent-time: one recorded in 1968 and one in 2016. These time-points illustrate a pattern such that /stɹ/ fronts over time in the 1968 data, and then retracts over time in the 2016 data. We investigate the role of gender and linguistic constraints in the conditioning of this retraction, shedding light on the complexities of /s/-retraction in AAL, and as a phenomenon more broadly.

Speakers

Kaylynn Gunter

University of Oregon

Charlotte Vaughn

University of Oregon

Tyler Kendall

University of Oregon

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Language change

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(O4) Hirota: The rise of be going to: Evidence from beyond the living speech community

The rise of be going to: Evidence from beyond the living speech community

In mainstream spoken North American English, the future markers be going to and will are reported to occur at near equal frequencies. Insights from apparent-time and historical corpus studies suggest the past 150 years as a critical period in the formation of the current state of future temporal reference (e.g. Krug 2000, Denis & Tagliamonte 2018), but this observation remains unexplored with spoken data with sufficient historical depth. This paper thus addresses this gap with the Victoria English Archive (D’Arcy 2017), a spoken corpus covering the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Preliminary results show that be going to, while largely leaving intact linguistic constraints (e.g. sentence type, clause type), undergoes a rapid burst of frequency expansion from around 20% (pre-1900) to roughly 50% (post-1950). In addition, female speakers lead in adopting the incoming variant; however, as no statistically significant gender difference obtains, evidence for gender difference appears tenuous.

Speakers

Tomoharu Hirota

The University of British Columbia

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Language change

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(P1) Howe & Livio: Intensification in Brazilian Portuguese: muito, bem and beyond

Intensification in Brazilian Portuguese: muito, bem and beyond

Over the past few decades, various scholars have discussed the use of intensifiers, particularly in English (Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Tagliamonte 2008) and Spanish (Brown Cortés-Torres 2013 and Kanwit et al. 2017), exploring their evolution and variation. Among the factors that make intensifiers a locus for linguistic innovation are their versatility, inclination for “rapid change”, and constant renewal (Tagliamonte 2012:320). The current study has two primary objectives. First, we analyze the distribution of two high-frequency intensifiers, muito ‘very’ and bem ‘well’ in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), using the Corpus Brasileiro. In the second part of the paper, we turn to an emergent class of lexical items used as intensifiers, focusing on super ‘super’ (in 2) and puta ‘whore’, using data retrieved from Corpus do Português and Twitter. The results of the quantitative analysis confirm our hypotheses suggesting that, unlike muito, these two relatively innovative intensifiers are not semantically neutral and retain vestiges of their original lexical meaning.

Speakers

Chad Howe

University of Georgia

Camila Livio

University of Georgia

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(P2) Stratton: A Variationist Approach to German Intensification

A Variationist Approach to German Intensification

To date, no studies have investigated how German intensifiers are distributed within a multi-dimensional system, and no studies have empirically investigated whether their use is sensitive to social factors such as sex and age. Using a large corpus of present-day spoken German (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch ‘Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German’) the present study addresses two empirical questions. Firstly, how does the system of German adjective intensifiers currently look in terms of frequency and function? This question involves investigating the most frequently used German intensifiers, and examining whether specific types of intensifiers (i.e., Verstärker ‘amplifiers’) are more frequent than others (i.e., Begriffsminderung ‘downtoners’)? Secondly, is the use of German intensifiers sensitive to the social factors sex and age?

Speakers

James Stratton

Purdue University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(P3) Duncan: Variation in fictional dialogue: Three sources of variability in A Series of Unfortunate Events

Variation in fictional dialogue: Three sources of variability in A Series of Unfortunate Events

Although it is typically assumed that patterns of variation in written fictional dialogue do not reflect those found in community-based studies of speech, recent work has shown that dialogue may in fact share language-internal constraints (Poplack and Malvar 2007) and language-external constraints (Blaxter 2015) with spoken data. This paper expands upon these recent works by considering both language-internal and -external constraints on morphosyntactic variation in A Series of Unfortunate Events (ASOUE). ASOUE is of particular interest because the author is inserted into the story as a character in many respects. I show that depending on the variable, variation in the dialogue may involve reflection of the author’s language-internal constraints, adherence to a prescriptive norm, or style shifting to distinguish protagonists and antagonists from one another. In effect, the choice of one morphosyntactic variant over another allows for the author to align more closely with the book’s protagonists.

Speakers

Daniel Duncan

Newcastle University

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

3:40pm PDT

(P4) Carvalho & Picoral: The acquisition of preposition+article contractions in L3 Portuguese among different L1- speaking learners: A variationist approach

The acquisition of preposition+article contractions in L3 Portuguese among different L1- speaking learners: A variationist approach

This paper sheds light on differential paths of third language (L3) acquisition of Portuguese by Spanish-English speakers whose first language is Spanish (L1 Spanish), English (L1 English), or both in the case of heritage speakers of Spanish (HL). Specifically, we look at the acquisition of a categorical rule in Portuguese, where some prepositions are invariably contracted with the determiner that follows them. Based on a corpus of 841 written assignments by Portuguese L3 learners, we extracted 10,047 tokens in obligatory contraction contexts. We analyzed the impact of linguistic (type of preposition and lexical frequency) and extra linguistic factors (course level, learner’s L1 and L2), with individual as random factor, using Rbrul (Johnson, 2008). Results point to clear tendencies, albeit abundant individual differences. L1 English and HL speakers acquire contractions at higher rate than L1 Spanish speakers, revealing a non-facilitatory role of a cognate L1 in transfer patterns during L3 acquisition.

Speakers

Ana Carvalho

University of Arizona

Adriana Picoral

Saturday October 12, 2019 3:40pm - 5:30pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

Poster session II, Morphosyntax

Session type Poster

5:30pm PDT

Sharma: Style in real time: Activation, control, and change

Style in real time: Activation, control, and change
Theories of variation in speech style have moved from an early focus on attention to speech to more comprehensive models based on audience, identity, and indexicality, sometimes seen as having ‘very largely supplanted the attention to speech explanation’ (Coupland 2007:54). This interest in social constructivist processes has moved away from the cognitive underpinnings of Labov’s original (1972) model. In this talk I return to the cognitive reality of style shifting through an exploration of moment-to-moment fluctuations in speech style. The focus on real-time data and multilectal speakers forces us to consider cognitive factors such as style biography and acquisition, degrees of routinization, control, and attentional load, not as separate from social meaning but as a key part of it.

I examine several cases of real-time style control at the micro-interactional scale. I first show that increased attentional load can affect a vernacular speaker’s ability to consistently maintain formal variants, suggesting a basic processing cost that speakers must manage (Sharma and McCarthy 2018). I then show differences in how vernacular variants are reactivated when speakers revert to a casual style, also suggesting different degrees of inhibitory control (Green 1998) and a distinction between effortful and routinized style monitoring and production (Kahneman 2011; cf. Campbell-Kibler 2013 for perception). Such effects can subtly indicate a speaker’s more default, dominant, or practised style. Rather than being orthogonal to social meaning or identity, I suggest that these tiny signals of ease and effort in speech contribute to “assumed ‘real’ selves” (Giles et al. 1991: 11) during interaction. Thus, for example, where a simple group-oriented model of accommodation predicts that convergence builds rapport, I show that diverging towards one’s own default or dominant style can build credibility and trust (Sharma 2018).

Style production is thus infused with signals of lifetime style acquisition and use, as in bilinguals. These may correspond to non-agentive variation, but can also be central to interlocutors’ co-construction of credible selves. I suggest that game theoretic models (Goffman 1961; Dror et al. 2013; Burnett 2017) are well-placed to capture this expanded cognitive model of style, involving not only orientation to group and identity, but also trade-offs in processing costs (style dominance, linguistic constraints), multiple tactics for achieving a social goal, and real-time updates in interlocutors’ information. In closing, I discuss how micro-level dynamics may underpin patterns of long-term stability and change at the community level.

Speakers

Devyani Sharma

Queen Mary University of London

Saturday October 12, 2019 5:30pm - 7:00pm PDT
Straub 156

Plenary

Session type Plenary talk

7:00pm PDT

NWAV Party

Saturday October 12, 2019 7:00pm - 10:00pm PDT
EMU Ballroom

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