Selected Papers from NWAV 51
Volume
30
Number
2
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Date Published
2024
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 18
Publication Place Orientation and Language Practice: An Update on the Use of Neutral Tone Among Beijing Professionals(2024-10) Dong, Xiao; Liu, Fengming; Nesbitt, Monica; Lin, Chien-Jer CharlesNeutral tone plays a crucial role in shaping the Beijing Mandarin accent. Recent studies have revealed varied usage of neutral tone among Beijing speakers, conditioned by various linguistic and social factors. Crucially, its counterpart, full tone appears to be linked to the internationally/outwardly oriented Beijing residents. This study focuses on Beijing local professionals, a group predominantly engaged in interactions within the local marketplace, to investigate the current usage of the neutral tone and its correlation with place orientation. By conducting sociolinguistic interviews with 36 Beijing natives, we found that speakers with a higher orientation towards Beijing use significantly more neutral tone in their speech than those with a lower orientation. This highlights the important role of place identity in neutral tone variation, even for professionals in the local marketplace. We also observe an overall decrease in the use of neutral tone over the past 30 years among local professionals, highlighting the real-time change of this variant in Beijing toward a less locally marked feature—full tone. These findings confirm previous findings which suggest that place orientation is a significant driver of local dialect maintenance/death. It also demonstrates how orientation functions throughout the community. For Beijing, we see that place orientation has shifted from being a conditioning factor between international and local marketplaces, to being a conditioning factor within the local marketplace.Publication Wiggly Lifespan Change in a Crisis: Contrasting Reactive and Proactive Identity Construction(2024-10) Stefánsdóttir, Lilja Björk; Ingason, Anton KarlIn the present study, we analyze the speech of two individuals, each of whom goes through a crisis while serving as a member of the Icelandic Parliament. Connecting our analysis to our previous case study, we find that an MP who assumes a proactive leadership role during a crisis style-shifts toward formal style while the crisis is ongoing. In contrast, we also look at new data from another MP, whose crisis is more personal and characterized by his lack of control, and we find that his reactive response to this situation leads to him shifting toward informal style until the crisis has passed. We hypothesize that these findings are linked to a more general pattern such that a proactive response to a crisis is linked to formal style whereas a reactive response to a crisis is linked to informal style.Publication The Actuation of Unstressed /a/-raising in Modern Hebrew(2024-10) Cohen Priva, Uriel; Gafter, Roey J.This paper investigates an unexplored variation pattern in Modern Hebrew: unstressed /a/-raising. While existing research confirms that unstressed Hebrew vowels are typically shorter than stressed vowels, data that we elicited from 30 Hebrew speakers show that unstressed /a/ is often realized higher as well. While this is in line with the general articulatory bias to raise non high vowels when their duration is short (Flemming 2004; Cohen Priva and Strand 2023), for some of the speakers the tendency appears to be phonologized. Furthermore, we show that there are considerable differences in the degree to which speakers yield to this articulatory bias, with many appearing to be able to resist the phonetic pressure altogether. We argue that these findings are not consistent with a view of sound change in which yielding to contextual effects is random (Ohala 2003). We therefore call for a combined model that extends current variationist approaches, integrating the extent of speakers’ compliance with phonetic biases as an additional parameter in the study of sound change.Publication Pitch Variability Cues Perceptions of Singlish: A Perceptually-guided Approach to Sociophonetic Variation(2024-10) Tan, Yin Lin; Lin, Ting; Sumner, MeghanMultiple models have been proposed to understand variation in the use of English in Singapore, many of which posit a distinction between Singlish, a colloquial variety of English in Singapore, and standard Singapore English. In contrast, an indexical, feature-based model does not draw such distinctions, but instead requires linguists to identify relevant linguistic features and the social meanings indexed by them. Using a perceptually-guided approach for prosodic features, this paper investigates the prosodic features that are associated with listeners' perceptions of Singlish. In an online study, 132 participants completed a speeded forced-choice task, where they chose which of two audio clips sounded 'More Singlish', and a post-task questionnaire. Listeners' descriptions of more Singlish-sounding speakers and clips were leveraged to identify prosodic features associated with Singlish. The results showed that a clip was more likely to be chosen as 'More Singlish' if it had more local pitch variability, less global pitch variability, and faster speech rate. We argue that pitch variability and speech rate cue perceptions of Singlish and are important for an indexical account of English in Singapore. The present study also underscores the utility of speeded forced-choice tasks in investigating sociophonetic variation. Future work can more precisely control for the features of pitch variability and speech rate, identify the specific social meanings indexed by these features, and disentangle the indexical pathways by which these features and their social meanings are connected.Publication The Social Meanings of Definite Articles with Proper Names in Spanish(2024-10) Fernández-Lizárraga, EvelynIn Spanish, the use of a definite article before a proper name (e.g., La Sara 'the Sara', El Juan 'the Juan', etc.; henceforth, DA+PN) can convey a wide range of social meanings concerning a given referent, from affection to condescension. DA+PNs can also serve other discourse functions without expressing an extreme attitude towards the referent. The present paper argues that these pragmatic effects can be derived from the meanings of definite articles and proper names; DA+PNs mark a referent as both salient (via the definite article) and hearer-old (via the proper name). Where use of a DA+PN is in competition with a bare proper name, the marked co-occurrence of an article with a name invites inferences concerning the relation between a referent and the conversation participants. In using DA+PNs, speakers draw heavily on the common ground to convey a range of meanings regarding their referents. Using experimental data, I first demonstrate the important role of common ground by manipulating the hearer-old status of referents. The results indicate that DA+PNs can be felicitous without an extreme attitudinal context if a proper name is in the common ground. Building on these results, I then analyze how speakers can exploit the common ground, giving rise to a variability of social meanings for DA+PNs.Publication Rapid and Introspective Processing of Sociolinguistic Associations of (ING) in Context(2024-10) Gao, Xin; Wade, LaceyThis study investigated the rapid and introspective processing of sociolinguistic associations with the (ING) variable in context. Using a within-participant design and parallel paradigms for implicit and explicit tasks, we measured these processes in maximally similar settings. Participants completed tasks under varying levels of time pressure to elicit implicit and explicit responses to sociolinguistic cues. Our results show that implicit and explicit measures of the strength of sociolinguistic linkages do not significantly correlate, suggesting distinct processing mechanisms for these two types of associations. Furthermore, while context influenced explicit sociolinguistic evaluations, it did not significantly affect implicit processing. These findings indicate the complexity of sociolinguistic processing and point to the need for further research into the role of context, particularly its differential impact on implicit versus explicit sociolinguistic processing.Publication Investigating Accommodation and Endonormativity: TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic /r/ in Malaysian English(2024-10) Chan, Le XuanThis exploratory study examines the endornormative stability of Malaysian English features through the lens of accommodation in natural speech. This paper reports data from L1 Malaysian English and compares rates of TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic rhoticity between a baseline task with an in-group L1 Malaysian English experimenter, and an critical condition task with an out-group L1 Canadian English experimenter. The results show that postvocalic rhoticity undergoes convergence and towards the exonormative standard, while TH/DH-stopping is maintained between both tasks. In addition, evidence from both the baseline and critical tasks indicate that TH/DH-stopping are regular features used almost categorically by all speakers, while postvocalic rhoticity is more variable both between speakers and within speakers. Drawing from previous evidence of norm orientation as a factor of accommodation and convergence, I argue that maintenance of TH/DH-stopping is indicative of its status as a stabilized, endonormative feature of MalE, while convergence of postvocalic rhoticity towards an exonormative standard points towards ongoing sound changes in Malaysian English from a non-rhotic standard to a rhotic or more mixed variety.Publication Variation in the Acceptability of Singular They in Singapore English(2024-10) Venkatachalam, Alamelu; Starr, Rebecca L.Previously used to refer to generic antecedents and antecedents of unknown gender, singular they has been found to increasingly occur with definite antecedents of known gender. This shift is associated with rising awareness of nonbinary gender identities and the expansion of they as a preferred pronoun. Usage of singular they has been previously examined only within Inner Circle Englishes (e.g., US English). In this study, we investigate sociolinguistic factors that influence the acceptability of singular they in Singapore English, an Outer Circle variety that is pivoting towards internal linguistic norms but also experiences frequent contact with non-local Englishes. We find that singular they is rated as significantly more grammatical by younger respondents; its rating is also constrained by definiteness and interactions between social factors, including gender and religiosity. These factors are found to be stronger predictors of singular they acceptability than linguistic prescriptivism. The diffusion of singular they to Singapore English illustrates the ongoing role of non-local contact in the evolution of this variety.Publication AM/P~OM/P Merger in Hong Kong vs. Toronto Cantonese: An Under-documented Homeland Sound Change in a Heritage Language Context(2024-10) Tse, HolmanHong Kong Cantonese has been described as having developed a dissimilatory merger in which O becomes A in pre-labial contexts (henceforth OM/P vs. AM/P). This change is also one that has been described as completed by the end of the 20th century. This paper presents what may be the first acoustic study addressing the Cantonese AM/P~OM/P merger. It also addresses the extent to which heritage speakers in Toronto, Canada also participate in this change. Analysis involved midpoint F1, F2, and F3 measurements from a total of 38 sociolinguistic interviews from the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) in Toronto Corpus (Nagy 2011). This amounted to a grand total of 889 tokens of AM/P and 816 tokens of OM/P. The Year of Birth of participants ranged from 1922 to 1998. Mixed effects modeling showed that OM/P is significantly raised (lower F1, p < 0.001), significantly retracted (lower F2, p < 0.001), and significantly more rounded (lower F3, p < 0.01) than AM/P. Pillai Scores for each individual speaker were also calculated. A Pearson Correlation test showed a significant inverse correlation between Year of Birth and Pillai Score (r(36) = -0.361, p< 0.05). While no significant difference was found in F1, F2, or F3 variation based on City or based on Generational Group, the overall results from this study show that a merger that was previously described as complete is, in fact, still ongoing in both homeland (Hong Kong) and heritage (Toronto) varieties of Cantonese.Publication VOT Merger in Progress and Speech Rate Normalization in Perception: A Case Study of Daejeon Korean(2024-10) Kang, Yoonjung; Yun, Suyeon; Ryu, Na-YoungSpeech rate normalization is a perceptual process in which identical durations are more likely to be perceived as "long" rather than "short" when embedded in fast speech compared to slow speech. In this study, we examine how rate normalization interacts with the age and gender of both the listener and the speaker when the target length contrast is undergoing a merger. Specifically, we focus on lenis and aspirated stops in Daejeon Korean, where a Voice Onset Time (VOT, a duration cue) merger is occurring while the F0 of the following vowel is becoming the primary cue. This change is being led by younger and female speakers. We explore how the age and gender of both the speaker and the listener modulate rate normalization. The study found that both VOT and F0 cues were robustly used across all speaker and listener conditions to distinguish aspirated from lenis stops. However, the relative strength of these cues depended on the age and gender of both the speaker and the listener. Regarding rate normalization, despite the robustness of the VOT cue across all contexts, evidence for rate normalization was very weak and did not align with VOT cue use. The rate effect was only significant for the older male speaker, who is expected to retain the most conservative speech pattern, where VOT differences are most useful for distinguishing stops. These findings suggest that rate normalization is not an automatic process that affects all duration contrasts equally. Instead, listeners selectively apply rate normalization based on their prior knowledge of whether the target duration dimension is useful in a given context. Future studies will explore how listeners' rate normalization is conditioned by their perception of the speaker's age at an individual level.