NWAV48

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.

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.

‘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).

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.

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.