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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 →
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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”.
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).
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).
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%).
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.
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.
"[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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
