Pub Date : 2021-07-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9412530
Natalie Schilling
This article presents an exploration of the discourse-level phenomenon known as ‘backwards talk’ in Smith Island, a small, endangered dialect community in Maryland’s Chespaeake Bay, on the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast. The article examines how backwards talk, basically pervasive, highly creative irony, compares with irony more generally; how it patterns across generations and contexts; how important it is to island residents, who view backwards talk as the defining feature of their dialect; and why the feature has gained such importance in the face of dialect loss - and potential loss of community continuity as well. Because backwards talk is irony, it has important solidarity functions. As playful, nonliteral language, it serves as a symbol of the performed ‘islandness’ that islanders increasingly take up as they come into more and more contact with outsiders. Finally, as a means of offering critical evaluation of outsiders, backwards talk can be seen as a form of anti-language or counterlanguage, with a central function of resistance against outside forces.
{"title":"‘Backwards talk’ in Smith Island, Maryland","authors":"Natalie Schilling","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9412530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9412530","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an exploration of the discourse-level phenomenon known as ‘backwards talk’ in Smith Island, a small, endangered dialect community in Maryland’s Chespaeake Bay, on the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast. The article examines how backwards talk, basically pervasive, highly creative irony, compares with irony more generally; how it patterns across generations and contexts; how important it is to island residents, who view backwards talk as the defining feature of their dialect; and why the feature has gained such importance in the face of dialect loss - and potential loss of community continuity as well. Because backwards talk is irony, it has important solidarity functions. As playful, nonliteral language, it serves as a symbol of the performed ‘islandness’ that islanders increasingly take up as they come into more and more contact with outsiders. Finally, as a means of offering critical evaluation of outsiders, backwards talk can be seen as a form of anti-language or counterlanguage, with a central function of resistance against outside forces.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47935410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9308362
R. Hargrave, Amy Southall, Abby Walker
Two apparently contradictory observations have been made about consonantal voicing in Southern US English: compared to other US varieties, Southern speakers produce more voicing on “voiced” stops, but they also “devoice” word-final /z/ at higher rates. In this paper, regional differences in final /z/ realization within Virginia are investigated. 36 students from Southwest and Northern Virginia were recorded completing tasks designed to elicit /z/-final tokens. Tokens were acoustically analyzed for duration and voicing, and automatically categorized as being [z] or [s] using an HTK forced aligner. At the surface level, the two approaches yield incompatible results: the single acoustic measures suggest Southwest Virginians produce more [z]-like /z/ tokens than Northern Virginians, and the aligner finds that Southern-identifying participants produce the most [s]-like tokens. However, both analyses converge on the importance of following environment: Southwest Virginians are relatively least voiced pre-pausally, and more voiced in other environments. These combined findings confirm previous work showing that Southern “voiced” consonants generally have more voicing than other regional US varieties but also suggest that the dialect may exhibit greater phrase-final fortition. There are also differences within Southwest Virginian speakers based on differences in their rurality, or in their orientation to the South.
{"title":"Differences in final /z/ realization in Southwest and Northern Virginia","authors":"R. Hargrave, Amy Southall, Abby Walker","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9308362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9308362","url":null,"abstract":"Two apparently contradictory observations have been made about consonantal voicing in Southern US English: compared to other US varieties, Southern speakers produce more voicing on “voiced” stops, but they also “devoice” word-final /z/ at higher rates. In this paper, regional differences in final /z/ realization within Virginia are investigated. 36 students from Southwest and Northern Virginia were recorded completing tasks designed to elicit /z/-final tokens. Tokens were acoustically analyzed for duration and voicing, and automatically categorized as being [z] or [s] using an HTK forced aligner. At the surface level, the two approaches yield incompatible results: the single acoustic measures suggest Southwest Virginians produce more [z]-like /z/ tokens than Northern Virginians, and the aligner finds that Southern-identifying participants produce the most [s]-like tokens. However, both analyses converge on the importance of following environment: Southwest Virginians are relatively least voiced pre-pausally, and more voiced in other environments. These combined findings confirm previous work showing that Southern “voiced” consonants generally have more voicing than other regional US varieties but also suggest that the dialect may exhibit greater phrase-final fortition. There are also differences within Southwest Virginian speakers based on differences in their rurality, or in their orientation to the South.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49603254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9412541
Lewis Esposito, Emily Lake
Prevelar raising and fronting has been documented as a “defining feature” of Pacific Northwest English yet its status nearby in California remains unclear. This paper investigates prevelar raising/fronting across four Californian field sites. Examining wordlist data from 276 white speakers, and sociolinguistic interview data from 64 white speakers, the current study shows that - contrary to previous assumptions - prevelar conditioning is not confined to the Pacific Northwest, but extensive throughout California. Results suggest that, in line with previous work in Washington and Oregon, this prevelar pattern is also on the decline among younger Californians, although the trajectory of change appears to differ from that observed in Washington (e.g. Riebold 2015). This paper complicates the notion of prevelar tensing, showing that F1 and F2 are not always operating in tandem: speakers who raise BAG, for example, do not always front BAG to the same degree, and vice versa. As this is yet more evidence that the West is broadly participating in similar vocalic patterns, this study tentatively explores historical migration events as one possible source for the contemporary Western vowel system.
{"title":"Complicating prevelar raising in the West","authors":"Lewis Esposito, Emily Lake","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9412541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9412541","url":null,"abstract":"Prevelar raising and fronting has been documented as a “defining feature” of Pacific Northwest English yet its status nearby in California remains unclear. This paper investigates prevelar raising/fronting across four Californian field sites. Examining wordlist data from 276 white speakers, and sociolinguistic interview data from 64 white speakers, the current study shows that - contrary to previous assumptions - prevelar conditioning is not confined to the Pacific Northwest, but extensive throughout California. Results suggest that, in line with previous work in Washington and Oregon, this prevelar pattern is also on the decline among younger Californians, although the trajectory of change appears to differ from that observed in Washington (e.g. Riebold 2015). This paper complicates the notion of prevelar tensing, showing that F1 and F2 are not always operating in tandem: speakers who raise BAG, for example, do not always front BAG to the same degree, and vice versa. As this is yet more evidence that the West is broadly participating in similar vocalic patterns, this study tentatively explores historical migration events as one possible source for the contemporary Western vowel system.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46544726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9308373
Allison Burkette, Lamont D. Antieau
This paper discusses the linguistic, social, and geographic distribution of a-prefixing data in the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) of North America. Over 3800 instances of the a-prefix were extracted for analysis from the LAP interview data of 1527 speakers from across the United States, collected between 1931 and 2006. While the LAP a-prefix data do not generally deviate from patterns observed in the sociolinguistic literature, they do offer a more nuanced picture of infrequent prefixed forms, including uncommon constructions and verbs that appear as a-prefixed forms less frequently. A-prefixers in LAP tended to be white men, although it should be noted that between 30-47% of the female speakers in four of the surveyed LAP projects also used this feature. The geographic distribution of the feature suggests that the a-prefix is not Southern so much as it is Eastern, with pockets of lesser and greater usage as one moves westward across the country. Additionally, this paper casts the a-prefix as a rural phenomenon, rather than as a strictly Southern one, which opens the door to discussions of the feature as a means of indexing participation in (or affinity for) a rural lifestyle. Overall, this paper demonstrates that LAP data are a tremendous resource and a key piece of the puzzle of understanding regional and social variation.
{"title":"A-prefixing in Linguistic Atlas Project data","authors":"Allison Burkette, Lamont D. Antieau","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9308373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9308373","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the linguistic, social, and geographic distribution of a-prefixing data in the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) of North America. Over 3800 instances of the a-prefix were extracted for analysis from the LAP interview data of 1527 speakers from across the United States, collected between 1931 and 2006. While the LAP a-prefix data do not generally deviate from patterns observed in the sociolinguistic literature, they do offer a more nuanced picture of infrequent prefixed forms, including uncommon constructions and verbs that appear as a-prefixed forms less frequently. A-prefixers in LAP tended to be white men, although it should be noted that between 30-47% of the female speakers in four of the surveyed LAP projects also used this feature. The geographic distribution of the feature suggests that the a-prefix is not Southern so much as it is Eastern, with pockets of lesser and greater usage as one moves westward across the country. Additionally, this paper casts the a-prefix as a rural phenomenon, rather than as a strictly Southern one, which opens the door to discussions of the feature as a means of indexing participation in (or affinity for) a rural lifestyle. Overall, this paper demonstrates that LAP data are a tremendous resource and a key piece of the puzzle of understanding regional and social variation.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42396362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9089613
Michelle D. Devereaux, C. Palmer, V. Thompson
{"title":"Pandialectal Learning","authors":"Michelle D. Devereaux, C. Palmer, V. Thompson","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9089613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089613","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"235-252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42778628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9142460
S. Lanehart
{"title":"The Struggle is Real Every Single Day","authors":"S. Lanehart","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9142460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9142460","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"286-292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43060853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9089652
A. Tseng
{"title":"Toward an Affective Perspective in Minoritized Youth-Centered Research and Education","authors":"A. Tseng","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9089652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089652","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"280-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49668068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9089639
Nicoleta Bateman
{"title":"Teaching the Value of Language Variation and Linguistic Diversity through the “Standard English Challenge”","authors":"Nicoleta Bateman","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9089639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089639","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"266-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45019250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9089626
Katie Welch
{"title":"Discovery Learning in the Sociolinguistics Classroom","authors":"Katie Welch","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9089626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089626","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"253-265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42340390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-24DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9116262
Lieselotte Anderwald
This article challenges the accepted opinion that the American English perfect form HAVE gotten is a straightforward historical retention of an earlier British English form. Although HAVE gotten was presumably part of the settler input in North America, it (almost) died out in American English as well, but was then revived in the nineteenth century, as historical corpus data show. Contrary to expectations, this revival was not an innovation from below. Instead, the rise of HAVE gotten was promoted by careful writers who deliberately avoided the highly stigmatized stative HAVE got. This explains why perfect HAVE gotten appears in more formal text types first, and how it became specialized to dynamic contexts only. The morphological Americanism HAVE gotten is thus a curious case of an (unintended) side-effect of marginally successful prescriptivism.1
{"title":"The Complex History of Have Gotten in American English","authors":"Lieselotte Anderwald","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9116262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9116262","url":null,"abstract":"This article challenges the accepted opinion that the American English perfect form HAVE gotten is a straightforward historical retention of an earlier British English form. Although HAVE gotten was presumably part of the settler input in North America, it (almost) died out in American English as well, but was then revived in the nineteenth century, as historical corpus data show. Contrary to expectations, this revival was not an innovation from below. Instead, the rise of HAVE gotten was promoted by careful writers who deliberately avoided the highly stigmatized stative HAVE got. This explains why perfect HAVE gotten appears in more formal text types first, and how it became specialized to dynamic contexts only. The morphological Americanism HAVE gotten is thus a curious case of an (unintended) side-effect of marginally successful prescriptivism.1","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46876801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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