Pub Date : 2021-03-24DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9116273
Pocholo Umbal
The fronting of the back vowel /u/ is an on-going sound change in many varieties of English. While /u/-fronting is argued to be primarily phonetically constrained, many studies report the significant role of various social factors including ethnicity. This paper investigates the linguistic and social conditioning of /u/-fronting in Toronto English. A sociophonetic analysis of /u/, extracted from spontaneous speech data of second-generation Filipinos and age-matched Anglos, was conducted to determine whether Filipinos exhibit /u/-fronting and to what extent coarticulatory and social factors affect degree of fronting. Results of a multivariate analysis show that male and female Filipinos produce fronted realizations of /u/ as their Anglo peers. However, Filipinos exhibit greater fronting than Anglos in coronal and palatal contexts, which may be explained by cross-language influence from Tagalog. Taken together, this study suggests that although Filipinos join other Torontonians in /u/-fronting, they nonetheless exhibit finer-grained differences when phonetic conditioning is taken into account.
{"title":"Filipinos front too! A sociophonetic analysis of Toronto English /u/-fronting","authors":"Pocholo Umbal","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9116273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9116273","url":null,"abstract":"The fronting of the back vowel /u/ is an on-going sound change in many varieties of English. While /u/-fronting is argued to be primarily phonetically constrained, many studies report the significant role of various social factors including ethnicity. This paper investigates the linguistic and social conditioning of /u/-fronting in Toronto English. A sociophonetic analysis of /u/, extracted from spontaneous speech data of second-generation Filipinos and age-matched Anglos, was conducted to determine whether Filipinos exhibit /u/-fronting and to what extent coarticulatory and social factors affect degree of fronting. Results of a multivariate analysis show that male and female Filipinos produce fronted realizations of /u/ as their Anglo peers. However, Filipinos exhibit greater fronting than Anglos in coronal and palatal contexts, which may be explained by cross-language influence from Tagalog. Taken together, this study suggests that although Filipinos join other Torontonians in /u/-fronting, they nonetheless exhibit finer-grained differences when phonetic conditioning is taken into account.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43235231","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: 10.1215/00031283-8791736
Dagmar Deuber, Stephanie Hackert, Eva Canan Hänsel, Alexander Laube, Mahyar Hejrani, C. Laliberté
This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.
{"title":"The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean","authors":"Dagmar Deuber, Stephanie Hackert, Eva Canan Hänsel, Alexander Laube, Mahyar Hejrani, C. Laliberté","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791736","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48143934","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: 10.1215/00031283-9116251
Marie Bissell, W. Wolfram
This study considers the dynamic trajectory of the back-vowel fronting of the BOOT and BOAT vowels for 27 speakers in a unique, longstanding context of a substantive, tri-ethnic contact situation involving American Indians, European Americans, and African Americans over three disparate generations in Robeson County, North Carolina. The results indicate that the earlier status of Lumbee English fronting united them with the African American vowel system, particularly for the BOOT vowel, but that more recent generations have shifted towards alignment with European American speakers. Given the biracial Southeastern U.S. that historically identified Lumbee Indians as “free persons of color” and the persistent skepticism about the Lumbee Indians as merely a mixed group of European Americans and African Americans, the movement away from the African American pattern towards the European American pattern was interpreted as a case of oppositional identity in which Lumbee Indians disassociate themselves from African American vowel norms in subtle but socially meaningful ways.
{"title":"Oppositional Identity and Back-Vowel Fronting in a Tri-ethnic Context","authors":"Marie Bissell, W. Wolfram","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9116251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9116251","url":null,"abstract":"This study considers the dynamic trajectory of the back-vowel fronting of the BOOT and BOAT vowels for 27 speakers in a unique, longstanding context of a substantive, tri-ethnic contact situation involving American Indians, European Americans, and African Americans over three disparate generations in Robeson County, North Carolina. The results indicate that the earlier status of Lumbee English fronting united them with the African American vowel system, particularly for the BOOT vowel, but that more recent generations have shifted towards alignment with European American speakers. Given the biracial Southeastern U.S. that historically identified Lumbee Indians as “free persons of color” and the persistent skepticism about the Lumbee Indians as merely a mixed group of European Americans and African Americans, the movement away from the African American pattern towards the European American pattern was interpreted as a case of oppositional identity in which Lumbee Indians disassociate themselves from African American vowel norms in subtle but socially meaningful ways.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47196864","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 : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8186897
Daniel Villarreal, Mary Kohn
While the retraction of trap is found throughout the American West, it is primarily associated with California and supposed Californian values in both the popular media and the ears of Californian listeners. This study investigates the local construction of meaning for a supralocal sound change by examining perceptions of trap backing in Kansas, a locale that has also undergone front lax vowel retraction. Thirty-five college students heard matched-guise stimuli differing only by trap F2, guessed speakers’ regional origin, and rated speakers on 14 affective scales. Listeners associated trap backing with California (despite local participation in the sound shift) and general prestige. The authors suggest that this association with general prestige may help to explain the presence of this vowel shift in Kansas despite considerable ideological differences with California. They argue that these results highlight the interaction between local construction of meaning and broader national discourses for a sound change: while stereotypical associations with a sound change can spread rapidly through means like popular media, stance and identity associations are constructed at the local level.
{"title":"Local Meanings for Supralocal Change","authors":"Daniel Villarreal, Mary Kohn","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8186897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8186897","url":null,"abstract":"While the retraction of trap is found throughout the American West, it is primarily associated with California and supposed Californian values in both the popular media and the ears of Californian listeners. This study investigates the local construction of meaning for a supralocal sound change by examining perceptions of trap backing in Kansas, a locale that has also undergone front lax vowel retraction. Thirty-five college students heard matched-guise stimuli differing only by trap F2, guessed speakers’ regional origin, and rated speakers on 14 affective scales. Listeners associated trap backing with California (despite local participation in the sound shift) and general prestige. The authors suggest that this association with general prestige may help to explain the presence of this vowel shift in Kansas despite considerable ideological differences with California. They argue that these results highlight the interaction between local construction of meaning and broader national discourses for a sound change: while stereotypical associations with a sound change can spread rapidly through means like popular media, stance and identity associations are constructed at the local level.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"96 1","pages":"45-77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42032392","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 : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-9089600
Benjamin Zimmer, Kelly Wright, Charles E. Carson
Here we continue our consideration of the nominees in the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year voting for 2020, covering items in the alphabetic range from maskto Zoom-, along with some of the emoji nominated in the Emoji of the Year category. The full list of nominees was provided in the introduction to the May 2021 installment of ATNW (AS 96, no. 2, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089600), which covered the first half of the alphabet. Details of the voting and lists of past winners are available at the ADS website (https://www.americandialect.org/2020-word -of-the-year-is-covid). The results for the WOTY votes from 2020 are also included as an online supplement to the May installment at the link above. Continuing the approach to ATNW introduced in the February 2021 installment, each headword is provided with a paragraph-length discursive assessment, with full lexicographical treatments including citational evidence available online as supplemental material to this installment at https://doi .org/10.1215/00031283-9370906. As before, the contributions of the coeditors of ATNW are identified by their initials: Benjamin Zimmer [BZ], Kelly E. Wright [KW], and Charles E. Carson [CC]. In addition, we are grateful for contributions to this installment from Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster, Inc. (for superspreader), Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee Knoxville (for sus), Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania (for 2020), independent scholar Mark Peters (for petromasculinity), and independent scholar Jane Solomon (for the emoji combination of and ). Finally, we would like to acknowledge the assistance of Kate Whitcomb in the preparation of this article.
{"title":"Among the New Words","authors":"Benjamin Zimmer, Kelly Wright, Charles E. Carson","doi":"10.1215/00031283-9089600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089600","url":null,"abstract":"Here we continue our consideration of the nominees in the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year voting for 2020, covering items in the alphabetic range from maskto Zoom-, along with some of the emoji nominated in the Emoji of the Year category. The full list of nominees was provided in the introduction to the May 2021 installment of ATNW (AS 96, no. 2, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089600), which covered the first half of the alphabet. Details of the voting and lists of past winners are available at the ADS website (https://www.americandialect.org/2020-word -of-the-year-is-covid). The results for the WOTY votes from 2020 are also included as an online supplement to the May installment at the link above. Continuing the approach to ATNW introduced in the February 2021 installment, each headword is provided with a paragraph-length discursive assessment, with full lexicographical treatments including citational evidence available online as supplemental material to this installment at https://doi .org/10.1215/00031283-9370906. As before, the contributions of the coeditors of ATNW are identified by their initials: Benjamin Zimmer [BZ], Kelly E. Wright [KW], and Charles E. Carson [CC]. In addition, we are grateful for contributions to this installment from Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster, Inc. (for superspreader), Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee Knoxville (for sus), Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania (for 2020), independent scholar Mark Peters (for petromasculinity), and independent scholar Jane Solomon (for the emoji combination of and ). Finally, we would like to acknowledge the assistance of Kate Whitcomb in the preparation of this article.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43264572","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 : 2020-12-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8791772
S. Levey, Gabriel DeRooy
In this article, the authors reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semiliterate correspondence rich in nonstandard grammatical features, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL). The primary focus is on a comparison of morphosyntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861 and 1865 by Civil War soldiers originating from Massachusetts and Alabama. Key findings include the elevated rate of was-leveling, particularly in the Alabama letters; the variable effect of the type-of-subject constraint on the selection of nonstandard was; and the scarcity of wh-relativizers in restrictive relative clauses. Contextualization of these findings in relation to an ongoing quantitative investigation of grammatical variation in four additional states represented in the CACWL (Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina) provides further evidence of structured heterogeneity in Civil War correspondence as well as the sensitivity of variable grammatical processes to regional differences. Taken together, the study’s findings demonstrate how judicious use of the CACWL can leverage new insights into nineteenth-century American English.
{"title":"North Versus South","authors":"S. Levey, Gabriel DeRooy","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791772","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the authors reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semiliterate correspondence rich in nonstandard grammatical features, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL). The primary focus is on a comparison of morphosyntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861 and 1865 by Civil War soldiers originating from Massachusetts and Alabama. Key findings include the elevated rate of was-leveling, particularly in the Alabama letters; the variable effect of the type-of-subject constraint on the selection of nonstandard was; and the scarcity of wh-relativizers in restrictive relative clauses. Contextualization of these findings in relation to an ongoing quantitative investigation of grammatical variation in four additional states represented in the CACWL (Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina) provides further evidence of structured heterogeneity in Civil War correspondence as well as the sensitivity of variable grammatical processes to regional differences. Taken together, the study’s findings demonstrate how judicious use of the CACWL can leverage new insights into nineteenth-century American English.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48904874","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 : 2020-12-11DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8791781
Michael L. Friesner, Laura Kastronic, Jeffrey Lamontagne
This study compares the effects of city and ethnicity with respect to Quebec English speakers’ participation in two ongoing changes affecting /æ/ in Canadian English: retraction as part of the Canadian Shift and tensing in prenasal environments. Quebec English speakers might be expected to differ in their behavior with regard to these two phenomena as compared to other Canadian English speakers. Based on an analysis of Cartesian distances and a mixed-effects model using spontaneous speech, the authors find that Quebec English speakers are less advanced with respect to the Canadian Shift, especially speakers from Quebec City. For tensing, British-origin speakers from Montreal and Quebec City are found to pattern similarly, participating in the more widespread patterning, while Jewish and Italian speakers are moving in the opposite direction. The authors argue that this move away from characteristically Canadian patterns is an artefact of the interplay between the two phenomena under study, reflective of differential replication of the Canadian Shift in the two environments.
{"title":"Dynamics of Short a in Montreal and Quebec City English","authors":"Michael L. Friesner, Laura Kastronic, Jeffrey Lamontagne","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791781","url":null,"abstract":"This study compares the effects of city and ethnicity with respect to Quebec English speakers’ participation in two ongoing changes affecting /æ/ in Canadian English: retraction as part of the Canadian Shift and tensing in prenasal environments. Quebec English speakers might be expected to differ in their behavior with regard to these two phenomena as compared to other Canadian English speakers. Based on an analysis of Cartesian distances and a mixed-effects model using spontaneous speech, the authors find that Quebec English speakers are less advanced with respect to the Canadian Shift, especially speakers from Quebec City. For tensing, British-origin speakers from Montreal and Quebec City are found to pattern similarly, participating in the more widespread patterning, while Jewish and Italian speakers are moving in the opposite direction. The authors argue that this move away from characteristically Canadian patterns is an artefact of the interplay between the two phenomena under study, reflective of differential replication of the Canadian Shift in the two environments.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49529522","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 : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8781773
H. Heaton
{"title":"A Little of Everything: A Comprehensive Overview for the Linguistic Study of Television Dialogue","authors":"H. Heaton","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8781773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8781773","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"95 1","pages":"529-534"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45275141","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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