Selected Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 43

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10/01/2015
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  • Publication
    Public Legacies: Spanish-English (In)authenticity in the Linguistic Landscape of Pilsen, Chicago
    (2015-10-01) Lyons, Kate; Rodríguez-Ordóñez, Itxaso
    The present study examines the linguistic display of Spanish and English in Pilsen, Chicago, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. The space of Pilsen is characterized by its strong Latino diasporic presence (mostly from Mexico) since the 60s, but also for the increase of a white population in the last decade that has lead to a strong perception of gentrification in the neighborhood. With the aim of capturing potential gentrification effects and to empirically study the relationship between language, sign and space, we adopt Coupland’s (2012) adaptation of Goffman’s (1974) theory of frames and propose a replicable and scalar quantifiable method of frames, combining it with a qualitative analysis of space that we refer to as The Holistic Model of Frame Analysis. To this aim, we analyze 414 signs according to LANGUAGE, LOCATION (street) and FRAMES of Authentication Processes (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) (Migrant, Familial, Established and Alternative). Results show that there is a scalar relationship between frame and language: the more alternative the frame, the more English is used, whereas the use of mixed Spanish and English fluctuates between Established Community and Familial Authentication Processes. Although all frames were equally distributed in all of the main streets, the proportions of language use vary significantly. We argue that the static use of frames and dialogic relationship between languages and location are strongly linked to the social dynamics of specific areas of Pilsen, a variation that we capture using a variationist sociolinguistic approach.
  • Publication
    Multiple Mergers: Production and Perception of Three Pre-/l/ Mergers in Youngstown, Ohio
    (2015-10-01) Arnold, Lacey
    Mergers have been a much-researched topic in sociolinguistics (e.g., Baranowski 2013, Thomas and Hay 2005, Hall-Lew 2013), including in pre-lateral contexts (Bowie 2000, Faber & Di Paolo 1995, Thomas 2001). However, aside from Thomas and Bailey’s (1992) study on “competing mergers” in Texas, little work has been done on the interaction among several mergers involving some of the same phonemes and occurring in the same contexts when they coexist in a given community. Even less research has addressed the role of perception in competing-merger contexts. This study examines the status of mergers among /ul/, /ol/, and /Ul/ in Youngstown, Ohio. Although at least three forms of the merger have been cited in this community—/ul/-/Ul/, /ol/-/Ul/, and /ul/-/ol/-/Ul/—not all speakers in the community are merged, and those who are merged do not all merge the same phonemes. Using acoustic analyses and multiple-forced-choice perception task results from 26 speakers from the Youngstown area ranging from ages 9-81, this project examines 1) whether these mergers are all progressing in production and/or perception (and at the same rate) in this region and whether production directly correlates with perception, 2) whether they are motivated by the same internal linguistic forces, 3) how the presence of multiple patterns of pre-/l/ merger affects both the realizations and progression of these variants in the community, and 4) whether there is evidence to suggest that alternative patterns of distinction are maintained in cases of qualitatively merged vowels. Acoustic analyses of F1 and F2 measured 25% into the vowel-liquid sequence, as well as multivariate statistical analyses, suggest that the /ol/-/Ul/ merger is progressing in apparent time, mainly with respect to F1, while the /ul/-/Ul/ merger is remaining relatively steady. Additionally, the /ul/-/Ul/ merger appears to exhibit features unique to Youngstown in that it is realized more closely to /ul/, unlike what has been typically described of this merger throughout the United States (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Triple mergers, on the other hand, are so scarce in the community that generalizations about the merger’s progression cannot be made. However, those who are triple merged realize the merger closer to /Ul/ than those merged only between /ol/ and /Ul/ or /ul/ and /Ul/. Initial analysis of perception data suggests that production does not directly correlate with perception, perhaps as a result of exposure to multiple patterns of merger. Though this region does not show a simultaneous progression of the three “competing mergers,” it does exhibit considerable inter-speaker variation that, though puzzling, allows for another angle from which to examine sound change.
  • Publication
    Perceiving Personae: Effects of Social Information on Perceptions of TRAP-backing
    (2015-10-01) D'Onofrio, Annette
    Studies have shown that perceived macro-social categories like location of origin, age and class can influence listeners’ perceptions of linguistic variables. Other work in sociolinguistics has demonstrated that variables can index multiple social meanings, often associable with personae that are more specific and complex than macro-social categories. This paper brings together these lines of inquiry, testing how persona-based social information influences linguistic expectations in a vowel categorization task. The experiment examines multiple social meanings of one sociolinguistic variable: the backing of the TRAP vowel. By virtue of its patterning in California, TRAP-backing has social meanings related to macro-social Californian location of origin, as well as to Californian social types like the Valley Girl. The feature has separately been associated with professional, formal personae. In a vowel categorization task, listeners categorized continua of ambiguous auditory words as either containing a TRAP vowel (e.g., SACK) or a LOT vowel (e.g., SOCK). Prior to the task, listeners were either told that the speaker was from California (macro-social information), the speaker had ‘been described as’ a Valley Girl, or a Business Professional (persona-based information), or they were not given any speaker information (Baseline). Listeners in both the macro-social and persona-based information conditions were more likely to respond to a given token as TRAP than listeners in the Baseline condition, indicating an expectation of TRAP-backing created by all three social meanings of the feature. The effect was strongest in the Business Professional condition overall, but when the token was particularly backed, the Business Professional effect disappeared, while a strong effect emerged in the Valley Girl condition. These findings demonstrate that persona-based information about a speaker can lead listeners to expect an associated linguistic feature as strongly, if not more strongly, than macro-social information. Crucially, the strength of the effect depends upon the phonetic manifestation of the variable, among other aspects of the speaker voice, listener background, and situational context.
  • Publication
    English Prosody and Native American Ethnic Identity
    (2015-10-01) Newmark, Kalina; Walker, Nacole; Stanford, James
    Across the continent, many Native American and Canadian First Nations people are linguistically constructing a shared ethnic identity through English dialect features. Although many tribes and regions have their own localized English features (e.g., Leap 1993, Bowie et al. 2013, Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998, Coggshall 2008), we suggest that certain features may be shared across much wider distances, particularly prosodic features. Our study is based on cultural insiders’ research, analysis, and interpretation of data recorded in Native communities on Standing Rock Reservation, Northwest Territories, Canada, and among the Native community at Dartmouth (Hanover, New Hampshire). By investigating speakers from diverse tribes and regions, we find evidence that Native identity is indexed to English prosodic features: contour pitch accent (L*+H), high-rising, mid, or high-falling terminals, lengthened utterance-final syllables, and syllable timing. In this way, modern Native Americans are using English, a foreign language, to construct a shared ethnic identity across vast distances.
  • Publication
    A Convergence of Dialects in the St. Louis Corridor
    (2015-10-01) Friedman, Lauren A.
    In the study of dialect geography, boundaries of many types appear at the edges of dialects (ANAE, Dinkin 2013). However, the disruption of a dialect boundary at a single point by a non-linguistic change does not necessarily change the dialect boundary but creates a new type. The present study examines the influence of the Inland North dialect on the St. Louis Corridor, a geographically Midland area located between Chicago and St. Louis across the state of Illinois. The Corridor is also the home of Route 66, which in 1926 was the first paved highway in Illinois. In analyzing data from original interviews, the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006), and archival resources (Wood 1996), I situate the Inland North influence in time, namely for those born in the 1920’s through 1940’s. Based on corroborating evidence from population statistics, traffic patterns, and the history of Route 66, I demonstrate a timeline for Inland North influence and how it interacts with the Midland features. I also show that the Inland North influence rises and retreats alongside a major change in transportation patterns from water to land (cf. Trudgill 1974 for a similar dialectal change). Based upon the distinctions between the findings in this study and other situations of dialect boundaries, I propose a new boundary type: a dialect “breach.”
  • Publication
    Ethnic Orientation without Quantification: How Life “On the Hyphen” Affects Sociolinguistic Variation
    (2015-10-01) Newlin-Łukowicz, Luiza
    The effect of ethnicity on sociolinguistic variation has been studied quantitatively from multiple angles. The existing methodological range has uncovered that ethnicity is reflected in various aspects of social life. However, the diversity of existing measures has i) prevented a direct comparison between studies and ii) relied on subjective quantification of social data. This paper introduces a novel methodology that unites previous measures and removes the need for subjective quantification. Specifically, I apply hierarchical cluster analysis to social data collected from an ethnographically-informed Polish-involvement survey to assess the impact of multiple social factors on regional variation for Polish New Yorkers. The analysis identifies the maintenance of transnational ties as the strongest predictor of linguistic variation and reveals speakers’ “hyphenated” (Polish-American) identities.
  • Publication
    Partial Mergers and Near-Distinctions: Stylistic Layering in Dialect Acquisition
    (2015-10-01) Johnson, Daniel Ezra; Nycz, Jennifer
    Non-mobile individuals living in a community undergoing a linguistic change usually display a pattern of variation where citation styles are more advanced than naturalistic styles with respect to the change in progress. This suggests that speakers' intentions or norms, while they may shift only gradually, can do so more easily than their productions. Two groups of 'mobile' speakers—adults who grew up in one dialect area and moved to another, and children who acquired one dialect at home and another in the community—showed the opposite pattern: spontaneous speech approximated the dialect of the second community more closely than did word-list productions. Analysis of these speakers' low back vowels (the LOT and THOUGHT word classes) also suggest that most adults can at least partially learn a vowel distinction as well as a merger, though children are able to do both things more quickly and completely.
  • Publication
    The Effect of Salience on Co-variation in Brazilian Portuguese
    (2015-10-01) Oushiro, Livia; Guy, Gregory R.
    This paper analyzes cross-correlations among six variables of Brazilian Portuguese (the pronunciation of nasal /e/, coda r-retroflexion, coda r-deletion, NP agreement, 3rd person plural subject-verb agreement, and 1st person plural subject-verb agreement), with the objective of identifying constraints that promote the co-occurrence of sociolinguistic variants in individual speakers’ speech. We focus on the perspective of structural cohesion, and show that co-variability is conditioned not only by structural similarities among dependent variables (such as agreement processes or coda weakening), but also by general linguistic constraints that operate across multiple variables, such as phonic salience (Naro 1981, Scherre 1988, Naro et al. 1999). Finally, we suggest that markedness may be a more general linguistic principle underlying co-variation.
  • Publication
    Strong Necessity Modals: Four Socio-pragmatic Corpus Studies
    (2015-10-01) Glass, Lelia
    Need to is less ambiguous than have to or got to about the source of the obligation; need to is said to require the obligation to stem from someone’s priorities or internal needs, whereas have to and got to can tie the obligation to any contextually plausible source. This paper investigates the social reasons that a speaker might choose or avoid the less ambiguous form. In view of the semantics of need to, the speaker who utters you need to unambiguously acts as if she is familiar with the hearer’s priorities and licensed to tell him what is good for him – a socially risky move. I therefore predict that you need to will be more appropriate and thus more common from people with knowledge about the relevant domain, people in authority over the hearer, and people who play a mentoring role in the hearer’s life because these people are more likely to be licensed to tell the hearer what is good for him in the context. I find evidence consistent with these predictions by investigating corpora that contain information about how the speaker and hearer relate to each other.
  • Publication
    Shtreets of Philadelphia: An Acoustic Study of /str/-retraction in a Naturalistic Speech Corpus
    (2015-10-01) Gylfadottir, Duna
    This paper examines a relatively understudied sociolinguistic variable in English, the retraction of (str) (e.g., street pronunouced as shtreet), using a corpus of Philadelphia speakers spanning more than a century of apparent time. Using automated acoustic methods on naturalistic data allowed (str)-retraction to be evaluated for 225 speakers. Center of gravity measurements for /s/ in (str) were normalized to each speaker’s sibilant space. The results show a clear trend toward retraction of (str) in apparent time, something that no study of American English (str)-retraction has demonstrated so far. Many of the speakers in the data show evidence of phonological reanalysis of /s/ in (str) as /sh/. Lastly, evidence is given that sheds light on the plausibility of competing theories of the origins of (str)-retraction, and some connections are made that allow us to make a first approach toward understanding this variable’s social evaluation in Philadelphia.