Selected Papers from NWAV 51
Volume
30
Number
2
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Date Published
2024
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 18
Publication Macro, Micro, and Meso Approaches to Generalizing in Queer Linguistics: Investigating Non-Binary Pronouns in Dutch(2024-10) Vriesendorp, HielkeThe current paper presents data on the use of and variation in third-person singular personal pronouns in Dutch from macro, micro, and meso perspectives. It argues that it is possible to present generalizing macro findings about queer language (users) in a way that combats their marginalization, whilst mitigating the risks of presenting queer language (users) in an essentializing or stereotyping way. It does so by presenting the macro findings that the flexible use of the pronominal systems die/diens and hen/hun was dominant in production amongst inclusion-oriented language users, as well as the findings that they were used frequently and evaluated positively by by non-binary participants (in reference to themselves). This finding can be a tool in order to help fewer non-binary individuals be misgendered. To mitigate the risks of essentializing, additional analyses were conducted at both a micro and a meso level. The micro analysis showed the full range of production and evaluation of non-binary pronouns: other strategies than die/diens and hen/hun, such as name repetition and neologisms, were also used in production, and not all non-binary participants used die/diens or hen/hun as their own standard pronouns or evaluated them positively. Furthermore, in the analysis of the sociolinguistic variation between die/diens and hen/hun, meso categories beyond static social category labels allowed for social factors to be connected to interaction, rather than contributing to the notion that queer language users all share inherent, essential characteristics.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 /o/! They’re j/u/st about the same! Vowel Shift in Heritage and Homeland Seoul Korean(2024-10) Griffin, LauraThis study examines a case of an identical sound shift, /u/-fronting, in both the majority (Multicultural Toronto English, Denis et al. 2013) and heritage (Seoul Korean, Kang 2016) languages in Toronto. Linear mixed effects models of the spontaneous speech of heritage (n = 16) and homeland (n = 10) Seoul Korean speakers show that Generation is not a predictor of participation in the vowel shift. In addition, heritage speakers share significant predictors of vowel shift participation that are not attested in English. A second shift, /o/-raising, is investigated as a counterpoint variable, as it is only attested in Seoul Korean but not Multicultural Toronto English (Kong and Kang 2018). Heritage speakers also participate in this shift, showing similar patterns to homeland speakers. Together, these point to Korean influence, not English interference, in heritage speakers’ participation in the vowel shift in heritage Korean.Publication When Differential Object Marking is Optional: The Case of Copala Triqui(2024-10) Clemens, Lauren; Merino, Bertina F.; Rodriguez, Jamilläh; Tollan, RebeccaIn Copala Triqui, an Otomanguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico, the presence of the accusative marker is triggered by factors pertaining to animacy and specificity (Broadwell 2022), which is common for languages with differential object marking (DOM, Silverstein 1976; Comrie 1989; Kalin 2018). This paper investigates optionality in Copala Triqui DOM, specifically as it pertains to the marking of non-human animate direct objects as participants of reversible events. Copala Triqui exhibits both VSO and SVO word orders, raising the question of how DOM and word order interact. We present a 2x2 speeded acceptability judgment experiment that crossed two factors: the presence/absence of accusative marking and VSO/SVO order. Our results show an interaction of word order and accusative marking, with presence of DOM hindering an “acceptable” response for VSO. We also found that different groups of speakers responded differently to the presence of DOM in SVO clauses: only the youngest speakers responded more quickly to SVO clauses with DOM than those without. We consider how language shift in this largely bilingual population might contribute to response time variability.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 Combinatorial Effects of Southern French Features on Perception(2024-10) Richy, CéliaThis experiment tests the effects of co-occurrence of Southern features on the perception of spoken Southern French. Specifically, it investigates the perception of word-internal schwas in relation to their co-occurrence with different realisations of a nasal vowel. While nasal vowels in standard French are realised as fully nasalised, they are stereotypically realised with a consonantal nasal coda in Southern varieties. Word-internal schwas are indexically linked to both formality and Southern varieties. The different combinatorial effects of these features are analysed. This study also tests whether the absence of the Southern nasal vowel in Southern French speech can impact speech perception, using a within-subject (Linguistic Conditions) and between-subject (Regional Information Conditions) design. Results show an incremental effect of schwa and Southern nasal vowel presence on the perception of accentedness, while the perceived degree of formality is affected by schwa only when co-occurring with the Southern nasal vowel. There is no evidence that feature absence plays a role in speech perception.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 Visible Articulatory Variation Cueing Sound Change: Lip Rounding and Lip Protrusion Variability in the Mandarin Sibilant Merger(2024-10) Du, Baichen; Pfiffner, Alexandra; Johnson, KeithPhonological contrasts in speech production and perception are frequently studied with acoustic and/or auditory cues. Less is known about how visual cues are incorporated in a contrast, and how these cues are affected by an acoustic merger-in-progress, especially for changes that can be initiated by different articulatory gestures. This paper investigates the acoustic and visual cues in the ongoing Mandarin sibilant merger, where retroflexes are merging with alveolars. We analyzed audiovisual production data using Computer Vision articulography and found that speakers range from having an almost complete visual merger to a complete visual distinction. The direction of the visual cue merger was also consistent with the direction of the acoustic merger. Further, visual cues were found to be correlated with acoustic cues and strongly predicted spectral moments. We extend previous findings of cue weighting to a shared domain of audio and visual cues, and we discuss implications for the directionality of sound change.Publication Listener Factors in Accent Recognition: A Perceptual-dialectology Study of Frisian(2024-10) Voeten, Cesko; Pinget, Anne-France; Kingma, Martijn; Stefan, Nika; Van de Velde, HansWe present a perceptual-dialectological study of regional variation in Frisian, a minority language spoken in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. There is a moderate body of work on Frisian dialectology, but no known insight about how variation in Frisian is perceived and used by language users. Our work fills part of this gap by focusing on listener-related factors in the perception of regional accents. We designed a map-based accent-recognition task based on forty 20-second fragments of regionally-accented speech from twenty localities. We conducted an online experiment with 1,848 Frisian listeners, in which participants listened to the provided fragment and indicated in a Google-Maps interface where they believed the speaker to be from. These listeners’ own regional origins were highly varied, making the results geographically representative. We used a gamma location-scale GAM to test listener-related factors hypothesized to affect the magnitudes of listeners’ accent-recognition errors. In contrast to results of a study on Dutch, we did not find significant effects of listener gender nor education; however, similar to the previous Dutch results, we did obtain a curvilinear age effect, an effect of the geographical distance between speaker and listener, and an effect of listener geographical origin. We also found a small effect of the zoom level listeners used in Google Maps during the experiment. We conclude that listener-related factors shape sensitivity to language variation not only on the comparatively large scale of a country such as the Netherlands as a whole, but also in a small, complex, and highly socially cohesive language situation like that of a single province where a minority language is spoken.