Selected Papers from NWAV 41
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10/17/2013
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
Publication TH-stopping in New York City: Substrate Effect Turned Ethnic Marker?(2013-10-17) Newlin-Łukowicz, LuizaTH-stopping, reported in the speech of working-class and immigrant groups across the U.S., has long been considered a regional feature of New York City English (NYCE). Its origins in NYCE have been anecdotally attributed to the non-native speech of the first immigrants to the area, such as the Irish, Italians, and Poles (Babbitt 1896, Labov 1966). This paper seeks to provide conceptual and acoustic evidence for substrate origins of TH-stopping in one ethnic community in New York City. I analyze interdental fricatives produced by bilingual Polish Americans who were born in NYC (Generation 2) or have resided there since their early teens (Generation 1). An acoustic analysis of underlying and “substituted” stops reveals that the latter employ the Polish voicing contrast. Stopping rates are also found to vary according to style, generation, and gender. Specifically, TH-stopping is favored in sociolinguistic interviews (relative to reading tasks), and in the speech of first generation men and second generation women. Lastly, speakers’ cultural orientation and use of Polish correlate strongly with stopping rates. Taken together, these results suggest that TH-stopping in the Polish community did originate as a substrate effect, but has since developed into a female-led ethnic marker.Publication A Study of Variation in the BATH Vowel among White Speakers of South African English in Five Cities(2013-10-17) Mesthrie, Rajend; Chevalier, Alida; Dunne, TimothyThis paper is part of a larger project covering South African English dialectology via five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg and Durban) and four ethnicities (Whites, Black, Coloured and Indian), using a single vowel to explore and exemplify regional and ethnic similarities and differences. For reasons of space only the White speakers are analysed in this paper. BATH was chosen as exemplar since it is known to vary in the White communities between an RP-oriented central to back variant, a fully back variant with weak lip rounding and a raised and rounded variant. BATH tokens arising from interviews with 50 speakers were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT and statistical analysis via ANOVA. The results show a diversity of means per city and gender for Whites: in general females show means closer to the older prestige RP norm; while Kimberley the smallest city shows the broadest realisations of BATH (as superback and raised).Publication The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Icelandic New Passive(2013-10-17) Ingason, Anton Karl; Legate, Julie Anne; Yang, CharlesWe examine the diachronics of a New Passive construction in Icelandic and use Yang's model of language learning and change to explain its rapid rise. The New Passive has been spreading at the expense of a Canonical Passive in the recent past 50 years. Applying empirical measurements from the IcePaHC corpus, we show that our model can be used to account for the spread of the New Passive and the rate of change. The model also has implications for the actuation of the change.Publication Retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh, NC: Social Factors(2013-10-17) Dodsworth, RobinNew automated methods for large-scale acoustic analysis bring expanded opportunities for investigating social factors influencing variation and change in vowel systems. This paper explores social factors in a 108-speaker subset of a 250-speaker conversational corpus from Raleigh, North Carolina, where the community has shifted in nearly uniform fashion from a Southern vowel system to an aregional standard system. Age, occupation, parents' occupation, sex, and neighborhood are evaluated using linear mixed-effects models, with Z2-Z1 for each of the 5 front vowels as a separate dependent variable. While there are some significant occupational effects, year of birth is the strongest and most consistent social factor, indicating considerable uniformity during the course of change. Adding more speakers from the corpus will facilitate the use of other socioeconomic variables such as education level as well as finer-grained occupation variables, which may provide insight as to the mechanisms by which professional speakers lead the shift.Publication Ethnicity and Sound Change: African American English in Charleston, SC(2013-10-17) Baranowski, MaciejThis study investigates the degree to which African Americans participate in the sound changes currently in progress in the dialect of Charleston, South Carolina. It is based on a sample of 60 African Americans native to the area, recorded during sociolinguistic interviews; spontaneous speech is supplemented with word list reading and minimal-pair tests. The speech of 20 of the informants has been analyzed acoustically. The paper focuses on two sets of sound changes found earlier in the white population, three vocalic mergers: the cot-caught merger, the pin-pen merger, the beer-bear merger, and the fronting of the back upgliding vowels /uw/ and /ow/, as in two, goose, and so, goat, respectively, and compares the progress of the changes in the two populations. The oldest generation of African American Charlestonians share the distinctive features of the traditional dialect, such as very back /ow/, with the oldest white speakers. The younger generations, however, are not participating in the fronting of the back vowels advanced by white Charlestonians. The two groups are acquiring the cot-caught merger and the pin-pen merger, but African Americans are more conservative in the unmerging of the bear-bear merger found in the traditional Charleston dialect, now largely unmerged in the white population.Publication A Tale of Two Cities: Community Density and African American English Vowels(2013-10-17) Kohn, Mary; Farrington, CharlieThough variation in the African American Vowel System (AAVS) has been recognized in many communities throughout the US (Thomas 2007, Yaeger-Dror and Thomas 2010), the social and socio-geographic correlates of this system remain underexplored. To examine this issue, we compare front lax vowel production for fourteen young adult women between the ages of 20 and 22 from two communities in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Durham and Chapel Hill differ both in population size and in formal measures of segregation. The African American community in Durham is both larger and more dense than the African American community in Chapel Hill. Participants also differed in their post high school activity, here called educational profile. Three participants directly entered the workforce out of high school, six attended Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and five attended community colleges or certificate programs. While front lax vowels are raised in the AAVS, these same vowels are lowering among European Americans in the region (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012). Results indicate that Chapel Hill participants have lower BAT vowel classes than Durham participants, potentially reflecting greater participation in European American sound changes. HBCU participants do not always pattern with community cohorts and vary widely in their level of participation in the AAVS. Socio-geographic factors such as spatial segregation and community density likely contribute to differences in inter-community studies of the AAVS, but the relationship between educational profile and participation is not straight-forward.Publication Lexical Frequency and Syntactic Variation: A Test of a Linguistic Hypothesis(2013-10-17) Bayley, Robert; Greer, Kristen; Holland, CoryThe role of lexical frequency in language variation and change has received considerable attention in recent years. Recently Erker and Guy (2012) extended the analysis of frequency effects to morphosyntactic variation. Based on data from 12 Dominican and Mexican speakers from Otheguy and Zentella’s (2012) New York City Spanish corpus, they examined the role of frequency in variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPP). Their results suggest that frequency either activates or amplifies the effects of other constraints such as co-reference. This paper attempts to replicate Erker and Guy’s study with a data set of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American Spanish. Analysis of more than 8,600 tokens shows that frequency has only a small effect on SPP use. In separate analyses of frequent and non-frequent verb forms, fewer constraints reach significance with frequent verb forms only than with non-frequent forms only. Moreover, in cases where constraints reach significance in both analyses, effects are stronger with non-frequent than with frequent forms. Finally, when all verb forms are combined in a single analysis, non-frequent forms are significantly more likely than frequent forms to co-occur with overt SPPs. We conclude that claims about frequency effects in SPP variation should be treated with caution and that further analyses are needed to establish whether models incorporating frequency can be extended to this area of the grammar.Publication Age of Second Dialect Acquisition and Linguistic Practice Across Ethno-racial Boundaries in the Urban Midwest(2013-10-17) Fix, SonyaWhile use of a racially and/or ethnically marked variety by an outsider is often interpreted as an act of linguistic crossing or linguistic appropriation, this paper adopts a second dialect acquisition perspective to account for instances of use of ethnically-marked dialect features by individual speakers in situations of inter-racial/ethnic contact: white women with significant social, kinship, and residential contact with African Americans in Columbus, Ohio. Linguistic data are obtained from sociolinguistic interviews and interactive speech data from white adult female speakers who participate in similar types of dense African American social networks, but differ from one another with regard to their use of morphosyntactic and phonological features associated with their second dialect, African American English (AAE), and the ages at which they began to have significant contact with native speakers of AAE, which range from early childhood to early adulthood. This paper’s general finding—that age of acquisition (AoA) of AAE matters among adult whites who use AAE-linked features—is supported by numerous previous studies that address SDA across other various other social, regional, and national boundaries (cf. Siegel 2010). However, AoA is found to impact speakers’ current use of morphological and phonological features differently and in a way that is somewhat anomalous with the SDA literature. Across the sample, a statistically significant correlation is shown between speakers’ ages of acquisition and the qualitative range of AAE-linked morphosyntactic such that the lower the speaker’s age of acquisition, the wider the range and the higher the rates of AAE features used, but the same correlation is not found for speaker AoA and use of AAE-linked phonological features. The key to understanding the patterns of use of AAE-linked phonology lies with outliers within the sample who provide additional insight into the life circumstances beyond AoA that impact SDA attainment. By considering both speaker norms and outliers, the benefits and limitations of second dialect acquisition analysis of adult use of racially/ethnically marked features across ethno-racial boundaries is explored.Publication Preface(2013-10-17) Freeman, AaronThe 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 the 41st NWAV Conference, held from October 25-28, 2012 at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Thanks go to Christopher Ahern, Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Sunghye Cho, Eric Doty, Aaron Ecay, Sabriya Fisher, Amy Goodwin Davies, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Hilary Prichard, Kobey Shwayder, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, and Elizabeth Sneller, for help in editing, uploading, and general support. 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. As of September 2013, the entire back catalog has been digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. 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: Mielke, Jeff. 2013. Ultrasound and Corpus Study of a Change from Below: Vowel Rhoticity in Canadian French. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 19.2: Proceedings of NWAV 41, ed. A. Freeman, 141-150. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol19/iss2/17 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 Aaron Freeman Issue EditorPublication East End Boys and West End Girls: /s/-Fronting in Southeast England(2013-10-17) Levon, Erez; Holmes-Elliott, SophieIn this paper, we revisit the impact of gender and social class on language (e.g., Eckert 1989, 2000, Labov 1990, Milroy et al. 1994, Dubois & Horvath 1999) through an investigation of /s/ in southeast England. Previous work on /s/ variation in English has suggested that, for a number of varieties, backer, more [-esh] like variants are associated with males while more fronted realisations are associated with women. Subsequent work in the UK has also indicated that for some speakers /s/ may also be associated with class (Stuart-Smith 2007). Our study contributes to this area through examining the possible interaction of class and gender with regards to /s/ realisation. Our data come from two British reality television programmes: Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex. The class stratified sample – upper-class Chelsea and working-class Essex – provide an interesting test site for examining how gender and class based identities may manifest linguistically in the relevant communities (e.g., Schilling-Estes 1998, Coupland 2001). Results of a multivariate analysis of 1200 tokens of /s/ produced by 24 speakers in our sample demonstrate a systematic pattern of sex-differentiation across all speakers: women have significantly higher peak frequencies than the men, as consistent with previous work on this feature (e.g., Munson et al. 2006, Stuart-Smith 2007). Further analysis reveals that this differentiation is quantitatively much more extreme in Essex than it is in Chelsea. In discussion, we suggest that Essex speakers may exaggerate their realisations to create hyper-gendered articulations of /s/ and support these interpretations with information regarding other social practices in which Essex speakers engage. More broadly, we consider the ways in which gendered indexicality interacts with social class and argue for the need to treat gender and class as interdependent sociolinguistic constructs.
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