Selected Papers from NWAV 49
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09/19/2022
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Publication Sociolinguistic Factors of Mandarin-English Codeswitching: Language Attitudes, Age, and Other Factors Used for Computational Modeling(2022-09-19) Yi, IreneThis paper explores the sociolinguistic predictors of Mandarin-English codeswitching, and also tests such patterns against current syntactic constraints of codeswitching. By doing so, I demonstrate the value of incorporating sociolinguistic factors as predictors into computational models of codeswitching, explored in a companion paper (Yi 2022). The study presented here draws from novel data collected from 12 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers from Grand Rapids, Michigan. These speakers come from two generations, correlated with their age and immigration history. Speakers participated in sociolinguistic interviews that were designed to elicit codeswitching in narrative-style responses on a variety of topics, including family, school, and culture. Participants also answered metalinguistic questions about their own language practices and attitudes and completed a written Language History Questionnaire (LHQ) (Li et al. 2020), which asked for self-evaluations of language habits (proficiency, immersion, and dominance in the two languages). LHQ responses were then quantified into āscoresā that served as sociolinguistic predictors for the companion paper (Yi 2022). Patterns found in this novel Mandarin-English data frequently, and potentially systematically, violate many of the currently proposed syntactic constraints on codeswitching (which mainly come from research on Spanish-English bilinguals), implying that the constraints may not be universal, and that new avenues should be considered for understanding the morphosyntax of bilingual codeswitching.Publication Multiple Social Routes: Connecting Stance Accretion to Aggregate Variation(2022-09-19) Forrest, JonConnecting individual-level stylizations to group patterns is a central concern of sociolinguistics (Eckert 2008, Labov 1963). One proposed route is through a process of accretion, where linguistic features used for stances like ātoughnessā or āfriendlinessā accrue over time to the identities of the speakers who use them, gaining higher-order indexical associations with group identities like āworking classā or āSouthernā (Eckert 2008). To test the hypothesis of stance accretion, this paper uses data from speakers from a single workplace in the U.S. South, where Southern features are currently receding. The overarching question is whether stance-level deployments of Southern linguistic features align with aggregate-level patterns. The dataset for this analysis is drawn from self-recorded audio collected by 16 workers of varying occupational levels at Southern Tech, a technology firm in the greater Raleigh, NC area. To gather audio data, each participant wore a recorder during their normal workday, resulting in a minimum of one hour of conversational data at work, as well as a minimum of one hour of conversational data from a casual setting. Acoustic analyses were conducted on vowels implicated in the SVS in the aggregate. In addition, three speakers with extensive self-recording data were selected to examine individualsā token-level stylization, looking especially for statistical outliers (Van Hofwegen 2017). Aggregate-level results show that speakers who hold managerial positions within the firm show more Southern vowels, regardless of context. When looking at individualsā highly stylized tokens, analysis shows that non-Southern vowels are deployed when speakers position themselves as professionals while in a work context. Southern vowels are deployed to indicate stances of friendliness in all recording contexts, but these never occur in interactions where authority or professionalism are required. These results suggest that indexical associations between the SVS and friendliness and professionalism may be driven by stance, but other local meanings, like managerial status at the firm, are not. Associations between Southern vowels and managerial positions may instead result from organizational-level practices (Rivera 2012), rather than stance-driven interactions. Implications are discussed for the mechanisms of maintenance and change for community-level patterns of social class.Publication Intralinguistic and Crosslinguistic Variation in the Turn-taking Organization Between Deaf-blind Signers: new evidence from Bay Islands Sign Language(2022-09-19) Rocketship, Fae; Ali, Kristian; Braithwaite, BenThis paper examines the turn-taking organization between two deaf-blind signers of Bay Islands Sign Language (BISL) and discusses how this language presents unique intra- and cross-linguistic variation. Following the framework of conversation analysis adapted to tactile sign languages, a case study was done on an extract of a conversation in the BISL corpus. One area of intra-linguistic variation is influenced by whether signers can perceive the language visually as well as tactilely. Signers use non-manual markers like nodding to backchannel when interacting with others who may be able to perceive them visually, but tactile-proprioceptive backchanneling techniques with blind interlocutors. Variation is also influenced by the type of co-formation employed by the signer. Cross-linguistically, this paper introduces several features which differ from previous descriptions of tactile languages. BISL signers are seen to nod with conversational purpose. Also, a novel technique for turn yielding in BISL involving throwing the hands of the interlocutor in the air has not been previously documented. The particular demographics and social history of the BISL community seem to be responsible for a number of features which differ from other tactile languages.Publication The Effect of Vowel Height on the Nasalization of Postposed Determiners in Haitian Creole (KreyĆ²l Ayisyen)(2022-09-19) Legerme, ChristopherResults from variationist analyses suggest that Haitian Creole (HC) is on the cusp of a change to the morphophonological organization of its postposed determiner clitic, LA. Speakers systematically surface nasal forms of LA in the absence of the expected conditioning environment, that is, the systematic surfacing of the nasal forms following oral nuclei according to language internal and external (social) motivators. In this study, I coded independent linguistic factors for 9,789 tokens of LA following an oral syllable. Tokens were automatically retrieved from transcribed data provided by the IARPA Babel Haitian Creole Language Pack (Andrus et al. 2017). This yielded 847 tokens of nasal variants following oral syllables. My analysis of oral versus nasal variants of LA suggests an overwhelming preference for high contexts (i.e., preceding [+high] nucleus) which I argue is due to the historical loss of a high nasal contrast in the language. To overcome this preference and glean reliable information about the patterning of nasalized LA after oral syllables, we must isolate non-high from high contexts. In doing so, we can better illustrate the rising popularity of the nasal variants over time and affirm the change taking place in HC postposed determiners.Publication Adjusting to the New Normal(ization): Adapting Atlas of North American English Benchmarks to Lobanov-Normalized Data(2022-09-19) Dinkin, Aaron JThe Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) defines criteria for participation in certain dialect features in terms of formant benchmarks; e.g., a speaker is considered to have a raised TRAP vowel if their mean normalized F1 of TRAP is less than 700 Hz. Other researchers often compare their own findings to these benchmarks; but the majority of recent research in North American sociophonetics uses the Lobanov (1971) method to normalize formant measurements, producing values that are formally incomparable with Atlas benchmarks. This paper proposes a method of transforming benchmarks into Lobanov-comparable values. Benchmarks are expressed as z-scores relative to the entire Atlas corpus of normalized formant measurements, whose mean F1 is 650.7 Hz (s.d. 150.0 Hz) and mean F2 is 1595.5 Hz (s.d. 435.2 Hz). Thus, for example, a benchmark of 700 Hz in F1 is converted to 0.329 in Lobanov terms. This method is evaluated by comparing the effectiveness of the Lobanov-transformed benchmarks at distinguishing dialect regions to that of the original Atlas benchmarks. Fourteen such benchmarks are evaluated against three isogloss parameters; in 76% of cases, the Lobanov-transformed benchmarks are at least as effective as the original Atlas benchmarks at characterizing the Atlas' dialect regions. Therefore, this transformation can be recommended for researchers who want to compare Lobanov-normalized data to Atlas benchmarks.Publication An Analysis of the YeĆsmo Merger in CĆ³rdoba, Argentina: A synchronic co-existence of all diachronic processes of lleĆsmo to yeĆsmo sound change(2022-09-19) Archer, Carolina; Regan, BrendanWhen two phonemes merge in a language, this does not entail that each language variety follows the same allophonic changes thereafter. One such case is the merger of lleĆsmo into yeĆsmo, which displays great allophonic variation across varieties of Spanish. In Buenos Aires Spanish, this merger has undergone allophonic change to a voiceless prepalatal fricative (Chang 2008, Fontanella de Weinberg 1978, Rohena-Madrazo 2015). CĆ³rdoba, however, appears to maintain a voiced prepalatal fricative (Colantoni 2001, Lang-Rigal 2015, Supisiche 1994). The current study examines (pre)palatal consonant variation in CĆ³rdoba to shed light into social and linguistic rationales for similar or distinct paths of sound change between dialect varieties. As no single acoustic measure distinguishes the multiple variants, the authors developed a replicable classification by coding each token based on known acoustic cues. 13,015 tokens of syllable-initial and produced by 65 speakers (37 women, 28 men) in a four-part sociolinguistic interview (semi-directed conversation, passage reading, word list, picture-naming task) were subject to mixed effect logistic regressions. The study finds that the speech of CĆ³rdoba presents five different variants, including the maintenance of the two-phoneme lleĆsmo distinction among older speakers in more formal styles, as well as four allophonic variants of yeĆsmo. Different from Buenos Aires, the dominant norm in CĆ³rdoba remains the voiced prepalatal fricative, although the voiceless prepalatal fricative is favored by women from wealthier neighborhoods. Thus, CĆ³rdoba presents a synchronic coexistence of all diachronic processes of the lleĆsmo to yeĆsmo sound change, indicatingeither a possible change from above (Labov 2001) towards the devoiced porteƱo norm or perhaps a maintenance of the voiced variant among most of its population due to CĆ³rdobaās desire to preserve a unique identity from the capital (Bischoff 1979).Publication Conditioned Variation: Children Replicate Contrasts, not Parental Variant Rate(2022-09-19) Nowenstein, Iris E; Ingason, Anton K; Wallenberg, JoelOne of the fundamental questions within developmental sociolinguistics, and language acquisition research more broadly, has to do with childrenās reaction to variability in their input or primary linguistic data (e.g. Labov 1989, Yang 2002, Hudson Kam and Newport 2005, Smith et al. 2009, Cournane and PĆ©rez-Leroux 2020). As has been extensively documented, children overgeneralize and regularize both consistent (Marcus et al. 1992) and inconsistent (Hudson Kam and Newport 2005) input. Despite this tendency to go beyond the input, we do expect children to learn their caregiversā dialect, and they have in fact been known to match the rates of variation found in their environment (Labov 1989, Johnson and White 2019). The literature therefore shows both regularization and matching, but under different circumstances. In this paper, we argue for a third scenario and present a case where children neither regularize nor match their caregiver. Instead, they replicate the systematic contrasts they encounter and regularize within matched conditions. This is what happens in the acquisition of Icelandic Dative Substitution (DS), a stigmatized but widespread instance of grammatically conditioned morphosyntactic variation. We investigated DS in 99 children aged 3ā13 and their caregivers (80 dyads) by using forced-choice tasks and grammaticality judgments across multiple items as a proxy for case use. The results show that caregiversā general DS rate did not predict the rate at which their children selected DS, regardless of age. On the other hand, when analyzing the data within conditioning factors, we found that children replicate the contrasts present in their caregiversā speech, both at the group and individual level, and that this was in part dependent on age.Publication Towards an Empirically-based Model of Age-graded Behaviour: Trac(ing) linguistic malleability across the entire adult life-span(2022-09-19) Mechler, Johanna; Grama, James; Bauernfeind, Lea; Eiswirth, Mirjam; Buchstaller, IsabellePrevious panel research has provided individual evidence for aspects of the U-shaped pattern, but these studies typically rely on sampling the same speaker at two points in time, usually in close proximity. As a result, our knowledge about the patterning of age-graded variables across the entire adult life-span is limited. What is needed, thus, is a data-set that captures ongoing linguistic malleability in the individual speaker across all ālife experiences that give age meaningā (Eckert 1997:167). Our study is the first to add real time evidence across the lifespan as a whole on an age-graded variable. We present the results of a novel dynamic data-set that allows us to model speakersā linguistic choices between ages 19 and 78. We illustrate the age-graded patterns in our data and draw attention to the complex, socially niched ways in which speakers react to age-specific expectations.Publication A Social Meaning Perspective on Vowel Trajectories: The FEEL-FILL Merger among African Americans(2022-09-19) Mengesha, ZionStudies have shown that fine-grained phonetic details play an important role in signaling linguistic contrasts (Labov et al. 1991, DiPaolo and Faber 1990). Listeners are attuned to differences in duration (Bailey 2001, Thomas 2001), phonation type (Yaeger-Dror and Thomas 2010), and monophthongization and diphthongization (Kohn 2013). That listeners are attuned to each of these cues provides evidence that many differences in sound can be used to convey phonological distinctiveness and preserve contrasts in the linguistic system. I show that distinction in the FEEL-FILL merger is maintained by vowel contours and that, furthermore, contour emerges as socially indexical. Analysis of 24 African Americans from Bakersfield and Sacramento, California shows that African American men merge FEEL and FILL such that F1 is diphthongal and overlapping throughout the rhyme for both vowel classes while African American women maintain a distinction with a relatively flatter FILL F1 contour. Additionally, younger African Americans and African Americans with higher levels of education have a relatively flatter FILL contour. Whereas a diphthongal FILL is in alignment with the Southern Vowel System, a monophthongal FILL is aligned with California English. Thus, the gendered pattern is located within a pattern of change in which women are leading a change away from the Southern pattern in part due to an emphasis on respectability and social mobility. These findings demonstrate that the vowel contour can be distinctive and carry social meaning, as well.Publication Preface(2022-09-19) Li, Aini; Hildebrandt, GwendolynThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Graduate Linguistics Society. 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 Conference. This volume contains selected papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49 (NWAV 49), held virtually October 19-24, 2021, by the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks go to George Balabanian, May Pikyu Chan, Yiran Chen, Xin Gao, Karen Li, Lefteris Paparounas, and Christine Soh Yue for their help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. As of September 2014, 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: Legerme, Christopher. 2022. The Effect of Vowel Height on the Nasalization of Postponed Determiners in Haitian Creole (KreyĆ²l Ayisyen). In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 28.2, ed. Aini Li and Gwendolyn Hildebrandt, 71-80. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol28/iss2. 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, Department of Linguistics, 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, C Wing, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 and working-papers@ling.upenn.edu. Aini Li and Gwendolyn Hildebrandt, Issue Editors