Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8781762
I. Cushing
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8661842
J. Mcwhorter
Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. The author argues that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by Black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of Black speech that note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was present in earlier AAVE and common among Black slaves and their immediate descendants, yet had largely disappeared by World War II.
{"title":"Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English","authors":"J. Mcwhorter","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8661842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8661842","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. The author argues that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by Black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of Black speech that note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was present in earlier AAVE and common among Black slaves and their immediate descendants, yet had largely disappeared by World War II.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"95 1","pages":"379-407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47235362","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: 10.1215/00031283-8620496
Joshua Bousquette
The present work examines nominal case marking in Wisconsin Heritage German, based on audio recordings of six speakers made in the late 1940s. Linguistic data provide positive evidence for a four-case nominal system characteristic of Standard German. At the same time, biographical and demographic information show that the heritage varieties acquired and spoken in the home often employed a different nominal system, one that often exhibited dative-accusative case syncretism and lacked genitive case—features that surfaced even when Standard German was spoken. These data strongly suggest that speakers were proficient in both their heritage variety of German, acquired through naturalistic means, as well as in Standard German, acquired through institutional support in educational and religious domains. Over time, these formal German-language domains shifted to externally oriented, English-language institutions. Standard German was no longer supported, while the heritage variety was retained in domestic and social domains. Subsequent case syncretism in Wisconsin Heritage German therefore reflects the retention of preimmigration, nonstandard varieties, rather than a morphological change in a unified heritage grammar. This work concludes by proposing a multistage model of domain-specific language shift, informed by both synchronic variation within the community as well as by social factors affecting language shift over time.
{"title":"From Bidialectal to Bilingual","authors":"Joshua Bousquette","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8620496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8620496","url":null,"abstract":"The present work examines nominal case marking in Wisconsin Heritage German, based on audio recordings of six speakers made in the late 1940s. Linguistic data provide positive evidence for a four-case nominal system characteristic of Standard German. At the same time, biographical and demographic information show that the heritage varieties acquired and spoken in the home often employed a different nominal system, one that often exhibited dative-accusative case syncretism and lacked genitive case—features that surfaced even when Standard German was spoken. These data strongly suggest that speakers were proficient in both their heritage variety of German, acquired through naturalistic means, as well as in Standard German, acquired through institutional support in educational and religious domains. Over time, these formal German-language domains shifted to externally oriented, English-language institutions. Standard German was no longer supported, while the heritage variety was retained in domestic and social domains. Subsequent case syncretism in Wisconsin Heritage German therefore reflects the retention of preimmigration, nonstandard varieties, rather than a morphological change in a unified heritage grammar. This work concludes by proposing a multistage model of domain-specific language shift, informed by both synchronic variation within the community as well as by social factors affecting language shift over time.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"95 1","pages":"485-523"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43752484","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: 10.1215/00031283-8620491
Turo Vartiainen, Mikko Höglund
This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of, the study will make a methodological contribution to historical dialectology by showing that there are extensive, severely underused resources that can reveal valuable information about the geographical variation of English even if they were not originally designed for that purpose. Most crucially, the article introduces a way to investigate Early Modern English from the perspective of regional variation, thus paving the way for future research in a field that has been extremely challenging to study in the past.
本文讨论了复合介词off of（例如，I got of the bus）的历史和区域变化。本研究旨在通过从不同角度考察各种语言语料库和数据库，揭示从早期现代英语到现代英语使用该形式的详细信息。除了绘制off-of的历史和当今变化图外，这项研究还将对历史方言学做出方法学贡献，表明有大量、严重未被充分利用的资源可以揭示有关英语地理变化的宝贵信息，即使这些资源最初不是为此目的设计的。最重要的是，这篇文章介绍了一种从地区差异的角度研究早期现代英语的方法，从而为未来在这个过去极具挑战性的领域的研究铺平了道路。
{"title":"How to Make New Use of Existing Resources:","authors":"Turo Vartiainen, Mikko Höglund","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8620491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8620491","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of, the study will make a methodological contribution to historical dialectology by showing that there are extensive, severely underused resources that can reveal valuable information about the geographical variation of English even if they were not originally designed for that purpose. Most crucially, the article introduces a way to investigate Early Modern English from the perspective of regional variation, thus paving the way for future research in a field that has been extremely challenging to study in the past.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"95 1","pages":"408-440"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49620204","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: 10.1215/00031283-8221002
Charles Boberg
As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis reveals a gradual shift from East Coast patterns rooted in the speech of New York City to West Coast patterns rooted in the speech of Los Angeles. Changes include a decline in /r/ vocalization, which is restricted almost entirely to the period before the mid-1960s; a decline in the low back distinction between /o/ and /oh/ (lot and thought); a new distinction between /æ/ (trap) and its allophone before nasal consonants (e.g., ham or hand); shifts of /æ/ and /oh/ to a lower, more central position in the vowel space; and fronting of the back upgliding vowel /uw/ (goose). These and other patterns correspond closely to those identified in the speech of ordinary people, revealing an intriguing parallel between public speech in the mass media and private speech in local communities.
{"title":"Diva Diction","authors":"Charles Boberg","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8221002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8221002","url":null,"abstract":"As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis reveals a gradual shift from East Coast patterns rooted in the speech of New York City to West Coast patterns rooted in the speech of Los Angeles. Changes include a decline in /r/ vocalization, which is restricted almost entirely to the period before the mid-1960s; a decline in the low back distinction between /o/ and /oh/ (lot and thought); a new distinction between /æ/ (trap) and its allophone before nasal consonants (e.g., ham or hand); shifts of /æ/ and /oh/ to a lower, more central position in the vowel space; and fronting of the back upgliding vowel /uw/ (goose). These and other patterns correspond closely to those identified in the speech of ordinary people, revealing an intriguing parallel between public speech in the mass media and private speech in local communities.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"95 1","pages":"441-484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47874827","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 : 2020-10-23DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8791763
Sali A. Tagliamonte
This study investigates a discourse-pragmatic use of the word wait in spoken North American English. This function is an extension from an original lexical meaning of pausing or lingering which has extended to indicate a pause in discourse as a speaker reflects on or corrects an earlier topic. Over 340 examples from 211 individuals permit comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling in order to offer an early assessment of the variation among alternates of this innovative use and to test for broad social and linguistic factors in order to understand the underlying processes. The results expose notable recent developments: older people use longer, more temporally specified variants, wait a minute/wait a second, while wait alone is increasing in apparent time with women leading its advance. The robust increase in use of wait alone, e.g. “I haven’t seen her yet. No wait. Yes, I have”, co-occurrence with other markers, e.g. no, and the function of self-correction/commentary arises after 1970. The unique contribution of socially stratified corpora also demonstrates that this development follows well-known principles of linguistic change as wait develops from a verb with temporal specification to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery.“…markers allow speakers to construct and integrate multiple planes and dimensions of an emergent reality” (Schiffrin 1987:330)
{"title":"Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker","authors":"Sali A. Tagliamonte","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791763","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates a discourse-pragmatic use of the word wait in spoken North American English. This function is an extension from an original lexical meaning of pausing or lingering which has extended to indicate a pause in discourse as a speaker reflects on or corrects an earlier topic. Over 340 examples from 211 individuals permit comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling in order to offer an early assessment of the variation among alternates of this innovative use and to test for broad social and linguistic factors in order to understand the underlying processes. The results expose notable recent developments: older people use longer, more temporally specified variants, wait a minute/wait a second, while wait alone is increasing in apparent time with women leading its advance. The robust increase in use of wait alone, e.g. “I haven’t seen her yet. No wait. Yes, I have”, co-occurrence with other markers, e.g. no, and the function of self-correction/commentary arises after 1970. The unique contribution of socially stratified corpora also demonstrates that this development follows well-known principles of linguistic change as wait develops from a verb with temporal specification to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery.“…markers allow speakers to construct and integrate multiple planes and dimensions of an emergent reality” (Schiffrin 1987:330)","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42073404","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 : 2020-10-23DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8791754
Monica Nesbitt
Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the North American Great Lakes region show that the area’s characteristic vowel chain shift, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities, such that it is no longer regarded as “standard American English.” Sociocultural and temporal accounts of capital loss and dialect decline remain unexplored, however. This article examines F1, F2, and diphthongal quality of trap produced by 36 White speakers (18 women and 18 men) in one NCS city—Lansing, Michigan—over the course of the twentieth century. Results show that trap realization is conditioned by gender and birth year, such that women led the change toward NCS realizations into the middle of the twentieth century and then away from them thereafter. These findings reflect the backdrop of deindustrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing and show that as the regional industry—(auto) manufacturing—loses prestige, so does the regional variant, raised trap. This article expands our understanding of North American dialectology by adding the importance of deindustrialization and the Baby Boomer to Generation X generational transition to our discussion of regional dialect maintenance.
{"title":"The Rise and Fall of the Northern Cities Shift","authors":"Monica Nesbitt","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791754","url":null,"abstract":"Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the North American Great Lakes region show that the area’s characteristic vowel chain shift, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities, such that it is no longer regarded as “standard American English.” Sociocultural and temporal accounts of capital loss and dialect decline remain unexplored, however. This article examines F1, F2, and diphthongal quality of trap produced by 36 White speakers (18 women and 18 men) in one NCS city—Lansing, Michigan—over the course of the twentieth century. Results show that trap realization is conditioned by gender and birth year, such that women led the change toward NCS realizations into the middle of the twentieth century and then away from them thereafter. These findings reflect the backdrop of deindustrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing and show that as the regional industry—(auto) manufacturing—loses prestige, so does the regional variant, raised trap. This article expands our understanding of North American dialectology by adding the importance of deindustrialization and the Baby Boomer to Generation X generational transition to our discussion of regional dialect maintenance.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45793213","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 : 2020-10-23DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8791745
Michael J. Fox
The social mechanisms that influence the direction of language change operate along the demarcations of networks of communication (Bloomfield 1933; Milroy and Milroy 1985). Within geographic regions, the focused organizations that individuals participate in structure the lines of communication (Feld 1981) and the socio-demographic composition (social ecology) therein limits the options of peers to associate with (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Schools have their own social ecology (McFarland et al. 2014) and attendance at schools can explain language change at a level above social interaction but below the level of community (Dodsworth and Benton 2017, 2019). This study uses acoustic vowel measurements from 132 speakers in three geographically contiguous cities located in northwestern Wisconsin. Modeling results indicate (1) similar socio-geographic contexts lead to linguistic similarity; (2) dissimilarity in social ecology leads to greater linguistic dissimilarity as the difference between a dyads’ years of birth increases; (3) net of local socio-geographic context and social ecology, similarity in sex and age leads to linguistic similarity and vice versa. These patterns indicate that local social ecologies further demarcate the lines of communication thereby structuring the form of language at a level between the micro interactional and the macro level of the speech community.
影响语言变化方向的社会机制沿着交际网络的界限运作(Bloomfield 1933;Milroy and Milroy 1985)。在地理区域内，个人参与的重点组织结构了沟通渠道(Feld 1981)，其中的社会人口构成(社会生态学)限制了同伴的交往选择(McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001)。学校有自己的社会生态(McFarland et al. 2014)，上学可以在高于社会互动水平但低于社区水平的层面上解释语言变化(Dodsworth and Benton 2017, 2019)。这项研究使用了来自威斯康辛州西北部三个地理上相邻城市的132名说话者的声学元音测量。建模结果表明:(1)相似的社会地理环境导致语言相似性;(2)随着二人出生年龄差异的增大，社会生态的差异导致语言差异的增大;(3)在当地社会地理环境和社会生态的影响下，性别和年龄的相似性导致语言相似性，反之亦然。这些模式表明，当地的社会生态进一步划分了交流的界限，从而在言语社区的微观互动和宏观层面之间构建了语言的形式。
{"title":"The Influence of Institutional Affiliation and Social Ecology on Sound Change","authors":"Michael J. Fox","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8791745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8791745","url":null,"abstract":"The social mechanisms that influence the direction of language change operate along the demarcations of networks of communication (Bloomfield 1933; Milroy and Milroy 1985). Within geographic regions, the focused organizations that individuals participate in structure the lines of communication (Feld 1981) and the socio-demographic composition (social ecology) therein limits the options of peers to associate with (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Schools have their own social ecology (McFarland et al. 2014) and attendance at schools can explain language change at a level above social interaction but below the level of community (Dodsworth and Benton 2017, 2019).\u0000 This study uses acoustic vowel measurements from 132 speakers in three geographically contiguous cities located in northwestern Wisconsin. Modeling results indicate (1) similar socio-geographic contexts lead to linguistic similarity; (2) dissimilarity in social ecology leads to greater linguistic dissimilarity as the difference between a dyads’ years of birth increases; (3) net of local socio-geographic context and social ecology, similarity in sex and age leads to linguistic similarity and vice versa. These patterns indicate that local social ecologies further demarcate the lines of communication thereby structuring the form of language at a level between the micro interactional and the macro level of the speech community.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45062815","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 : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8661851
P. Grund, Matti Peikola, Johanna Rastas, Wen Xin
In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters and went through a change from a positionally constrained system (i.e., initial , medial ) to a system based on phonetic value, with marking vowels and consonants. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a data set of 3,801 examples from 107 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the and usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between and , from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.
{"title":"The and Alternation in the History of English","authors":"P. Grund, Matti Peikola, Johanna Rastas, Wen Xin","doi":"10.1215/00031283-8661851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8661851","url":null,"abstract":"In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters <u> and <v> went through a change from a positionally constrained system (i.e., initial <v>, medial <u>) to a system based on phonetic value, with <u> marking vowels and <v> consonants. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a data set of 3,801 examples from 107 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the <u> and <v> usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between <u> and <v>, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.","PeriodicalId":46508,"journal":{"name":"American Speech","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44947331","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 : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1215/00031283-8715662
Staci Defibaugh, K. Taylor
Language and identity are intricately woven into the personal and public lives of social groups. Words and phrases may originate in a subculture morphing into mainstream culture on the comingled streams of interactions among the masses. These words and phrases have specific meanings within their original contexts in their home cultures, yet they vary and evolve as they travel on the above-mentioned comingled streams of interactions and conversations. In this paper, we explore the typified Southern expression, ‘bless your heart,’ examining the ways in which this phrase is used, understood and reinterpreted as it circulates within the South and outside of it. We examine data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and substantiate those findings through sociolinguistic interviews focusing on individuals’ experiences with this phrase. We first note that when this phrase is used, it is capable of accomplishing a range of meanings, but positive and negative; however, when it gets spoken about, a singular, negative connotation of the phrase and those who use it emerges, conjuring images of the ‘sassy Southern belle.’ Despite this dichotomy of how the phrase is used and spoken about, a third, and more nuanced, understanding of the phrase was often evoked by the interview participants. Our research highlights the complexity of this phrase for both cultural insiders (i.e. Southerners) and outsiders (i.e. non-Southerners) and the potential negative repercussions of the monolithic representation of white Southern women and the iconic link between this figure of personhood and the seemingly innocuous phrase, ‘bless your heart.’
语言和身份复杂地交织在社会群体的个人和公共生活中。单词和短语可能起源于一种亚文化，在大众互动的混合流中演变成主流文化。这些单词和短语在其本国文化的原始语境中具有特定的含义，但在上述相互作用和对话的混合流中，它们会发生变化和演变。在本文中，我们探讨了典型的南方表达，“保佑你的心”，研究了这个短语在南方内外流通时的使用、理解和重新解释方式。我们研究了当代美国英语语料库(COCA)的数据，并通过关注个人使用这个短语的经历的社会语言学访谈来证实这些发现。我们首先注意到，当使用这个短语时，它可以完成一系列的意义，但肯定的和否定的;然而，当这个词被提起时，它和使用它的人就会产生一种单一的、负面的含义，让人联想到“时髦的南方美女”。“尽管这个短语的用法和谈论方式存在分歧，但受访者通常会对这个短语有第三种更微妙的理解。”我们的研究强调了这个短语对文化圈内人(即南方人)和局外人(即非南方人)的复杂性，以及南方白人女性整体形象的潜在负面影响，以及这种人格形象与看似无害的短语“bless your heart”之间的标志性联系。
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