Tamminga, Meredith
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Publication Persistence in the Production of Linguistic Variation(2014-01-01) Tamminga, Meredith JohannaThis dissertation, which is situated in broad debates over the delineation of abstract grammatical knowledge from the use of language in context, argues for distinct but interacting contributions from grammatical, psychological, and social factors in the production of intraspeaker linguistic variability. The phenomenon under investigation is the tendency of speakers to repeat recently-used linguistic options in conversational speech, which I refer to as persistence. I take up three major themes: the use of persistence as evidence on the mental-representational unity of variable linguistic processes; the interaction of different loci of variation with different cognitively-rooted facilitatory effects; and the contextual sensitivity of persistence to both social and grammatical expectations. The core results of this dissertation are based on data from 122 interviews drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov & Rosenfelder 2011). I argue for distinct phonological and morphological processes in the production of the common morphophonological variables ING (working/workin'), TD (old/ol'), and DH (them/dem/'em), with morphological variation showing generalized persistence while phonological variation is persistent only under conditions of lexical repetition. Specifically, I propose that verbal and nominal ING constitute distinct variables, as do past tense and monomorphemic TD, and that the alternation between stop and continuant consonants in DH is morphological in nature. The quantitative decay profiles of these variables, I suggest, tie their phonological versus morphological loci to their representation in episodic versus abstract memory systems. Although the driving force behind persistence, in this view, is the operation of various general cognitive processes, I further argue that these processes reflect speakers' sociolinguistic awareness in a way that supports a holistic expectation-based view of persistence asymmetries. The quantitative results and new questions in this dissertation set the stage for continued progress toward an integrated model of how social, grammatical, and psychological forces contribute to the production of linguistic variation.Publication Preface(2011-01-01) Tamminga, MeredithThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. 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 Colloquium. This volume contains selected papers from NWAV 39, held from November 4-6, 2010 in San Antonio, TX at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Alphabetic thanks go to Claire Crawford, Aaron Ecay, Lauren Friedman, Kyle Gorman, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Laurel MacKenzie, and Hilary Prichard for help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. 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: Acton, Eric K. 2011. On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 39, ed. M. Tamminga, 1-9. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol17/iss2/2 Ultimately, the entire back catalog will be digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. 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 619 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305 working-papers@ling.upenn.edu http://ling.upenn.edu/papers/pwpl.html Meredith Tamminga Issue EditorPublication The Impact of Higher Education on Philadelphia Vowels(2012-09-01) Prichard, Hilary; Tamminga, MeredithThis paper investigates fine-grained differences among those who go on for post-secondary education in Philadelphia. Our subjects are eight South Philadelphians whose backgrounds are similar but who differ in their pursuit of post-secondary education. We distinguish not only between high school and college education, but also between community colleges, regionally-oriented universities, and nationally-oriented universities. We examine four vowel features characterized by different degrees of social evaluation. We show that only the socially-salient vowel features, tense /aeh/ and tense /oh/, are subject to correction, while changes in progress below the level of social awareness (checked /ey/-raising and /uw/-fronting) are not. We argue that dialect accommodation is mediated by social factors, rather than the inevitable outcome of mechanistic processes. Speakers who are motivated by the promise of upward mobility and exposed to a variety of non-local accents modulate their speech away from Philadelphia features that are socially salient, but not from features below the level of consciousness.