Selected Papers from NWAV 42

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10/01/2014
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  • Publication
    Comparative Complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from Early Fiction
    (2014-10-01) Brook, Marisa
    There are five verbs in present-day English that indicate the apparentness of a subsequent finite subordinate clause: seem, appear, look, sound, and feel. These verbs can be linked to the lower clause by one of five comparative complementizers: as if, as though, like, that, and null. Although like is the newest of these variants (López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 2012:177), it is overwhelmingly the predominant one in vernacular Canadian English and as if and as though have become negligible (López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 2012:185). I investigate this rapid lexical replacement with the use of two corpora: the Toronto English Archive (Tagliamonte 2003-2006) and an earlier collection of Canadian writing, drawn from Project Gutenberg Canada, primarily representing the decades between 1860 and 1930. The Toronto data shows a change in apparent time whereby like is overtaking the two remaining variants, that and null. In the earlier written materials, there are only 18 tokens of like, but all of these are in fictional dialogue written to come across as nonstandard; this suggests that like was known as a highly colloquial comparative complementizer until it started catching on across registers. The literality of the subordinate clause proves to be a key aspect of the change: in the earlier material, as if and as though are more likely with fully metaphorical subordinate clauses, that and null more often introduce the concrete ones, and like does not exhibit a clear preference. This semantic conditioning is stable over real time between 1860 and 1930, implying that one advantage that like has had over its moribund competitors is its versatility as far as literality is concerned.
  • Publication
    Dimensions of Rhythm: the multi-layered nature of rhythmic style
    (2014-10-01) Calder, Jeremy; Popova, Daria
    The paper motivates a new, musical, view on rhythmic variation that focuses on accent and pause distributions on the intonational phrase level and views accenthood broadly as an interplay between relative duration, relative intensity and pitch accentuation. The musical approach to rhythmic variation integrates the study of rhythm into the study of the rest of the prosodic landscape and aims to emphasize the importance of syntagmatic rhythmic variables: rhythmic patterns. The musical approach highlights dramatic contrasts in the use of rhythmic and prosodic resources on the part of Melody, a jock, and Judy, a burnout (Eckert 1989, 2000), two stylistic opposites and the stars of our investigation. Melody’s IPs are characterized by a single accented syllable which often corresponds to the focal accent, while Judy’s IPs contain multiple accented syllables and IP-internal pauses which together comprise a rhythmic pattern. In addition, ‘disfluencies’ in Judy’s speech perform a rhythmic function. Judy’s use of rhythmic patterns and the diversity in the phonetic realization of her accents suggest that she is more expressive in her use of prosodic resources, while Melody’s rhythmic strategies reflect information structure.
  • Publication
    Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: The Role of Rhythm
    (2014-10-01) Shousterman, Cara
    This study investigates how community change is reflected in language, by examining the English of 28 Puerto Rican-identified native English speakers across two generations. Prosodic rhythm, which has been shown to differentiate Latino Englishes from other American English varieties including contemporary African American English, is measured here using the Pairwise Variability Index (Low, Grabe and Nolan 2000). Results indicate that New York Puerto Rican English speakers in East Harlem maintain syllable-timing (a substrate influence from Spanish) across-the-board, even when contact with African American English is evident at other levels of the grammar. PVI scores are higher for younger speakers (indicating more stress-timed speech) than for older speakers (indicating more syllable-timed speech) and younger speakers show a more even spread of PVI scores than older speakers do. Age differences appear to be linked to social factors like ethnic integration of housing, Spanish usage and social networks. Finally, results point to men showing more similar, syllable-timed speech, while women show more variation when it comes to speech rhythm. The results of this study shed light on how contact between members of different ethnoracial/linguistic groups who live in close proximity may produce dialect change, and also reveal the ways in which speakers negotiate their own linguistic identities as part of a community in transition.
  • Publication
    GOOSE-fronting among Chinese Americans in New York City
    (2014-10-01) Wong, Amy Wing-mei
    This paper presents an analysis on the production of the GOOSE vowel by thirty-two New York-born and raised Chinese Americans, born between 1940 and 1998. The analytic focus is on the frontness of this vowel. Although the fronting of goose in words like tooth and food is a surpra-regional feature attested in many varieties of English and among speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, there is little systematic study of this vowel in New York City among non-Anglo-speakers (except Cogshall and Becker 2010). Regression analysis on the data found that the GOOSE vowel produced by Chinese New Yorkers is consistent with the pattern observed for the region and follows known phonologically conditioning documented in existing literature. The vowel after coronals (the TOO class) is more fronted than the vowel after non-coronals (the HOOP class). However, there is little evidence that Chinese Americans continue to front TOO over apparent-time. Instead, there is a trend towards fronted HOOP. There is also a significant variation in the frontness of GOOSE across stylistic contexts: GOOSE in the reading context is more fronted than in the interview context. At the level of the individuals, there is a great deal of intra-speaker variation. Some speakers who produce very fronted tokens of GOOSE also use rather retracted tokens. Close examinations of the speech and personae of a middle-school girl reveals that she varies the frontness of GOOSE to take stances and express affects. This, along with the result on stylistic variation, suggests that this supra-regional feature that is sometimes argued to lack region-specific associations may still function as a resource to index locally relevant meanings.
  • Publication
    On the (In)Significance of English Language Variation: Cherokee English and Lumbee English in Comparative Perspective
    (2014-10-01) Wolfram, Walt; Daugherty, Jaclyn; Cullinan, Danica
    The Eastern Band of Cherokee in the western mountains of North Carolina and the Lumbee Indians in the eastern sand hills of North Carolina represent two of the most significant American Indian groups east of the Mississippi River, but the symbolic role of English language variation differs dramatically. Descriptive sociolinguistic and perceptual studies demonstrate the uniqueness of Lumbee English as an ethnolinguistic repertoire. The English spoken by the Cherokee is strongly influenced by vernacular Southern Appalachian English, complemented by some substrate features from Cherokee that results in a variety of “Cherokee English.” The narrative analysis of more than 20 hours of video footage in terms of space, place, and identity indicates that the groups share the construct of “Talking Indian” but in contrastive ways. For the Lumbee, an ethnicized repertoire of English is embraced as “Indian Talk” whereas the Eastern Band of Cherokee define this construct exclusively as a discrete, endangered heritage language that erases variation in English. The analysis indicates that “place as location” and “place as meaning” are integrated and interactive. Meaning may be emplaced in physical region but it can also supersede it. The comparison further illustrates that a dynamic, critical historical perspective and interactive discourse are critical to the perspective of Heimat in language variation, and that interpretive forms of ethnographic study are complementary to the quantitative study of language variation.
  • Publication
    Vowel Change across Noam Chomsky's Lifespan
    (2014-10-01) Kwon, Soohyun
    This study presents longitudinal acoustic evidence of how an adult speaker’s vowels change across his lifespan. Noam Chomsky was chosen as a speaker because he presents an excellent opportunity to study the effect of relocation to a different dialect area on adult phonology since he was born and raised in Philadelphia and moved to Boston in 1955. Two linguistic variables that have different phonemic systems in Philadelphia and Boston were examined in this study: i) /o/–/oh/ distinction in Philadelphia and /o/–/oh/ merger in Boston, ii) split short-a system (a phonemic distinction between tense and lax short-a with various phonological and lexical conditioning) in Philadelphia and nasal system (an allophonic alternation between a tense short-a before nasals and lax short-a before non-nasals) in Boston. Results based on Chomsky’s public speech in 1970 and 2009 show that his /o/ has significantly shifted along both F1 and F2 over 40 years, displaying a subphonemic shift, while /oh/ remained stable. For his short-a patterns, the 1970 pattern corresponds to neither a split nor a nasal system. In 2009, in contrast, a pattern similar to a nasal system emerged. It is suggested Chomsky was able to adopt features of a new ambient dialect over time as a result of contact with a second dialect well past the critical period.
  • Publication
    The (North) American English Mandative Subjunctive in the 21st Century: Revival or Remnant?
    (2014-10-01) Kastronic, Laura; Poplack, Shana
    The English mandative subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Then, in a dramatic (if still unexplained) reversal, it was reported to have revived, notably in American English, a scenario which is now widely endorsed. Observing that most references to this revival are based on the written language, we sought to replicate this result in contemporary North American English speech. Finding little evidence of the mandative subjunctive in contexts where revivalist claims would predict it, we next attempted to contextualize the current situation by tracing the trajectory of the mandative subjunctive back to the 16th century via the speech-like portions of two major corpora of English. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of the morphological form of verbs embedded under large numbers of mandative subjunctive triggers. Results show that selection of the subjunctive was already both sparse in terms of rate and sporadic in terms of triggers as far back as the Early Modern English speech surrogates investigated, and far from reviving over the course of the 20th century, has remained that way ever since. We implicate methodological inconsistencies, in particular violations of the principle of accountability, in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to the evolution and current status of the mandative subjunctive in North American English.
  • Publication
    Perhaps we used to, but we don’t anymore: The Habitual Past in Oregonian English
    (2014-10-01) McLarty, Jason; Farrington, Charlie; Kendall, Tyler
    From a dialectological perspective, the Pacific Northwest has been massively understudied in comparison to other areas of the U.S. Recent years have seen a growing attention to expanding our knowledge of regional dialects in this part of the country, with a number of research projects and publications beginning to address speech and variation within the Pacific Northwest. However, the vast bulk of this recent work has focused on the (socio)phonetics of the region and very little recent work has examined regional variation in morphosyntax in the Pacific Northwest. Motivated by work in York, England by Tagliamonte and Lawrence (2000, “I used to dance, but I don’t dance now: The habitual past in English,” Journal of English Linguistics 28.4), the present study examines variability in the realization of past habituality in Oregonian English. Unlike previous studies, we find extremely low rates of the form used to relative to would and preterit forms. We explore the internal and external constraints that influence the realization of these forms, and, more broadly, consider possible reasons that account for these rates of use.
  • Publication
    How Conservatism and Normative Gender Constrain Variation in Inland California: The Case of /s/
    (2014-10-01) Podesva, Robert J; Van Hofwegen, Janneke
    Sociophonetic research on /s/ has revealed that sex, gender identity, sexuality, and regional identity can significantly structure the variation found in the production and perception of its acoustic signal. Relative /s/ frontness has been associated with femininity (e.g., Stuart-Smith 2007) and gay-sounding speech (e.g., Munson et al. 2006), while relative /s/ retraction has been associated with masculinity (e.g., Zimman 2013) and a Southern or country identity (e.g., Campbell-Kibler 2011). However, much of the work to date has been experimental in nature or conducted in urban centers. This paper analyzes the acoustic realization of /s/ in one inland non-urban community in Northern California, where speakers carry strong antiurban (and antiliberal) sentiment. Our acoustic analysis examines sociolinguistic interviews with 42 speakers, diverse in terms of gender, sexuality, and attitudes toward rurality (townoriented versus countryoriented). In this community, the data show a stronger polarization between men and women than found in urban settings (e.g., Hazenberg 2012, Zimman 2012), likely due to social conservatism prevalent in the community. These prominent gender norms seriously constrain the production of /s/ by gay men, who pattern much more like straight men in this community than to urban gay speakers. At the same time, variants of /s/ prevalent among straight country-oriented speakers serve as resources for sexual minorities (i.e., lesbians) to construct non-heteronormative identities without transgressing gender norms.
  • Publication
    Reanalysis and Hypercorrection Among Extreme /s/ Reducers
    (2014-10-01) Chappell, Whitney
    Western Nicaragua is an immensely understudied region, and it also represents one of the most advanced coda /s/-weakening dialects of Spanish. Coda /s/ is reduced nearly categorically before a following consonant, vowel, or pause, e.g. cesta ‘basket’ becomes [sehta], más ajo ‘more garlic’ becomes [mah aho], and misas ‘masses’ becomes [misa], respectively. These reductions result in a “breathy Spanish” with rates of reduction similar to extreme Caribbean varieties (Lipski 1994: 291). Given the nearly absolute weakening, this work investigates the present status of coda /s/ in the dialect through an exploration of (i) diachronic data to determine how [s] production has changed over time, (ii) synchronic comparisons with other /s/-reducing dialects, and (iii) [s] hypercorrections. I conclude that /s/-weakening has advanced over the past thirty years as rates of coda sibilance decrease and rates of deletion rise; that [s] in Nicaragua is not a linguistically conditioned, local variant due to its deviant behavior; and that [s] hypercorrections do occasionally emerge in formal tasks, suggesting a loosening of the association between underlying coda /s/ and surface sibilance. Based on these conclusions, I argue that sibilance serves as a social strategy to index education, power, and precision on a global scale, while linguistically, many Nicaraguan speakers are operating with underlying coda /h/ instead of /s/, which helps to account for the innovative behavior of the glottal stop. Not only does this work document a highly understudied language variety, it also elucidates the complex linguistic and social motivations for selecting a particular variant in a radical dialect.