Selected Papers from NWAV 39
Volume
Number
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Date Published
09/13/2011
Journal Volume
Description
Keywords
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 19
Publication Verbal -s in Vernacular Newfoundland English: A Combined Variationist and Formal Account of Grammatical Change(2011-01-01) Comeau, PhilipWhile most studies of generalised verbal –s report the effects of the Northern Subject Rule (subject type and adjacency between the subject and the verb condition verbal –s), work on this feature in Vernacular Newfoundland English (VNE) report a lack of NSR effects. Instead, verbal –s in VNE is associated with habitual aspect and verb stativity. This paper integrates generative and variationist approaches to account for variation and change in the VNE aspect system. Quantitative results confirm a change in progress: there is a decrease in overall rate of verbal –s and a change in constraints across apparent time. Older consultants’ use of verbal –s is constrained by both habituality and stativity while the middle-aged cohort’s system involves only verb stativity. Younger consultants show a different system within which particular adverbials favor verbal –s. Formally, since both habituals and statives are imperfective, I posit that verbal –s is an imperfective marker in this variety. The linguistic change can be accounted for under Minimalism by positing a change in the featural specification of the Aspect head from one which is intrinsically specified for the imperfective feature prior to syntax to one which must be bound by an operator, in this case, quantificational adverbials.Publication A Study of Rhythm in London: Is Syllable-timing a Feature of Multicultural London English?(2011-01-01) Torgersen, Eivind; Szakay, AnitaRecent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may lead to varieties of English becoming more syllable-timed. We hypothesized that MLE speakers would also show suprasegmental innovations, having more syllable-timed rhythm than what has been reported for British English. Narratives as told by teenagers of different ethnic backgrounds, elderly speakers born between 1920 and 1935 and speakers born between 1874 and 1895 were extracted from interviews. The speech was segmented into consonantal and vocalic elements by forced phonemic alignment. Measurements of vocalic nPVI, as an indicator of rhythmic patterns, were calculated. Overall, the inner-London speakers were more syllable-timed than what has been found for British English. The results revealed that young speakers of non-Anglo background were significantly more syllable-timed than young Anglo speakers. The relatively low nPVI for all inner-London speaker groups may indicate the capital’s status as a centre of linguistic innovation and long-standing migration. The results of the present study combined with work on other varieties reinforces the idea that the tendency for English to become more syllable-timed is a global phenomenon fuelled by language and dialect contact.Publication Back to Back: The Trajectory of an Old Borrowing(2011-01-01) King, RuthIn this paper I explore changes in varieties of North American French resulting from a) loss in productivity of the re- prefix in French; and b) availability of the English particle back in contact varieties. We see that addition of back to speakers’ repertoires is dependent upon social factors while its integration into the grammar of vernacular varieties may involve both semantic and syntactic reanalysis of the English lexical item. Under the right social conditions, back becomes a French aspectual adverb.Publication Variation in the voseo and tuteo Negative Imperatives in Argentine Spanish(2011-01-01) Johnson, Mary; Grinstead, JohnAmong the many voseante countries in the Spanish-speaking world, there is much variation in the verb forms affected. Despite the use of the pronoun vos, some verb inflections may remain in the tu form, while others take the vos form. Argentine Spanish is a dialect that is mostly voseante, but includes an alternation between the negative imperative that comes from the tuteo and the voseo negative imperative. Previous studies have indicated that these alternating imperatives are accompanied by a difference in pragmatic meaning. The present study expands on the work that has already been done on the alternation found among these imperatives. Data is presented from an online survey with 151 native speakers of Argentine Spanish, and a multivariate analysis using Rbrul explores the degree to which the pragmatic difference is manifested through a variety of social variables including gender, age and geography. Results indicate that along with speaker effects, gender is the most relevant social factor governing the choice between negative imperatives in this variety.Publication Nasal Short-a Systems vs. the Northern Cities Shift(2011-01-01) Dinkin, Aaron J.Labov et al. (2006) discuss a taxonomy of configurations of short-a in American English, including the nasal system (in which the prenasal allophone of short-a is relatively high and discretely different from the low non-prenasal allophone), the continuous system (in which short-a is spread out over a continuous area of phonetic space, from higher prenasal tokens to lower non-prenasal tokens), and the raised system associated with the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), in which all tokens of short-a are high. This paper uses this taxonomy as a starting point for an analysis of the status of short-a in the different dialect regions of Upstate New York (Dinkin 2009). The data show that a fourth pattern needs to be added to the three listed above: a raised nasal short-a system, in which there is a sharp phonetic difference between prenasal and non-prenasal allophones, but even the non-prenasal allophone is located quite high in the vowel space. The raised nasal system is most frequent in the Inland North Fringe, the dialect region where some but not most speakers exhibit advanced NCS. In the Hudson Valley region, where nasal short-a patterns are extremely prevalent, NCS features are present at high degrees of advancement except the raising of short-a. An analysis based on the “life cycle of phonological patterns” (Bermudez-Otero 2007) suggests that the nasal system itself may be responsible for blocking the general raising of the non-prenasal allophone here.Publication Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese: The Influence of Common Ground(2011-01-01) Oushiro, LiviaThis paper analyzes the influence of common ground (Clark 1996, Stalnaker 2002) on the variable use of Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese, in which four different structures are employed with semantic-pragmatic equivalence: (1) Onde você mora? (Where you live?); (2) Onde que você mora? (Where that you live?); (3) Onde é que você mora? (Where is-it that you live?); and (4) Você mora onde? (You live where?) ‘Where do you live?’. Two discourse-pragmatic factor groups are discussed, Type of Question (information, rhetorical, and semi-rhetorical) and Givenness of the Presupposition (when last activated in the conversation, if at all). Results of multivariate analyses contrasting wh-in-situ (4) with all other structures (1−3) show that wh-in-situ is favored by semi-rhetorical questions (.68), for which the current speaker provides an answer, which suggests that they may be part of a strategy for turn-keeping. Further, the more activated the presupposition (in one of the first two preceding clauses), the greater the tendency to employ wh-in-situ (.66). The main argument is that variation in the position of the wh-word is sensitive to the hic et nunc of conversation, as speakers make their conversational contributions and common ground is updated.Publication Meaningful Variation and Bidirectional Change in Rural Child and Adolescent Language(2011-01-01) Habib, RaniaThis study investigates the spread of two urban features used in Syrian urban centers such as Damascus and Hims to the vernacular Arabic of non-migrant, rural children and adolescents who are residing in the Syrian village of Oyoun Al-Wadi. The first of the two features is the spread of the urban glottal stop in place of the rural voiceless uvular stop. The second is the spread of the low back vowel [a] in place of the rural mid front vowel [e]. The study shows that linguistic change in this village is moving in two opposing directions. Girls continue to use their initially acquired mothers’ urban features in their adolescent years, whereas boys who initially acquired and used their mothers’ urban features start to switch to the village features around the age of eight and increase their use of these features with age. The study also shows that the observed variation and changes result from the different meanings associated with the urban and rural sounds under investigation, and that these variation and changes are gender- and age-related. In addition, the study shows that the youth’s emotional involvement in building a social identity starts in pre-adolescence, which indicates early sociolinguistic maturity and competence in kids.Publication On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh(2011-01-01) Acton, Eric K.While the so-called “fillers” um and uh share a great deal in the way of interpretation, association, and usage, they are far from perfect substitutes. Previous corpus research, focusing primarily on British English, has identified a number of social and discursive factors with which filler usage can vary, including pause length and position in an utterance and speaker age, gender, and social class (Rayson et al. 1997, Clark and Fox Tree 2002, Tottie 2011, inter alia). Building on such research, the present paper investigates social variation in the use of um and uh in the United States. In particular, the paper documents the results of two corpus-based investigations of women’s and men’s usage of um and uh demonstrating that, among the speakers represented in the corpora, women on the aggregate had a far higher ratio of um tokens to uh tokens (um/uh ratio) than did men. The first of the two corpora examined is a collection of 992 transcripts from three speed-dating events held for graduate students at an American university in 2005. In this corpus, women’s average um/uh ratio is more than 3.5 times that of men. An analysis of gendered filler usage in the Switchboard Corpus (SWBC) yields a similar result: women’s average um/uh ratio in the SWBC is more than 2.5 times that of men. Data from the SWBC likewise suggest that this general trend persists across age groups and major U.S. dialect regions and, furthermore, tends to hold for speakers regardless of the gender of their interlocutors. The SWBC also provides evidence suggesting that um is gaining currency relative to uh; i.e., that there is a linguistic change in progress whereby the use of um relative to uh is on the rise. It is noted that not all men and women in the corpora exhibit filler usage in line with the aggregate-level trends, and that gendered linguistic differentiation should not be assumed to be a direct reflection of gender per se (Eckert 1989). A thorough understanding of the dynamics of gender and filler usage calls for an examination of the meanings and associations of um and uh and of speakers’ stances, objectives, and relation to their social world.Publication Preface(2011-01-01) Tamminga, MeredithThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. This volume contains selected papers from NWAV 39, held from November 4-6, 2010 in San Antonio, TX at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Alphabetic thanks go to Claire Crawford, Aaron Ecay, Lauren Friedman, Kyle Gorman, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Laurel MacKenzie, and Hilary Prichard for help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below: Acton, Eric K. 2011. On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 39, ed. M. Tamminga, 1-9. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol17/iss2/2 Ultimately, the entire back catalog will be digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers. The PWPL editors can be contacted at: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 619 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305 working-papers@ling.upenn.edu http://ling.upenn.edu/papers/pwpl.html Meredith Tamminga Issue EditorPublication New England Borderlands: A New Investigation of the East–West Boundary(2011-01-01) Leddy-Cecere, Thomas; Baclawski, Kenneth; Walker, Nacole; Stanford, JamesKurath (1939) proposed an east-west boundary along the Green Mountains of Vermont (Linguistic Atlas of New England). Likewise, The Atlas of North American English (ANAE) (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) draws a dialect boundary between Eastern and Western New England around the Vermont/New Hampshire border. However, there are no ANAE data points along the east-west boundary itself because that project focused on larger cities. This leaves a gap in contemporary understanding of this transition zone between two major US dialect regions. Labov et al. state that “a more precise contemporary delineation of the borders between the subregions of New England awaits more detailed local studies” (2006:230). Our study helps to answer that call. With the goal of revisiting Kurath’s work along the East-West boundary 70 years later, in 2010 we recorded 42 senior citizens representing 31 small town VT/NH locations around Kurath’s line. For the FATHER/BOTHER merger, postvocalic /r/, and BATH [a], we find that East-West distinctions continue to be very strong in this age group. However, our results also suggest that, since the time of Kurath, the line of contrast has moved eastward from the Green Mountains toward the Connecticut River (VT/NH border). Other variables showed no significant east-west contrasts.