Naomi Nagy | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

Papers by Naomi Nagy

Elsevier eBooks, 2006

Sociolinguistic research methodology revolves around the Observer's Paradox: the goal is to o... more Sociolinguistic research methodology revolves around the Observer's Paradox: the goal is to observe the way people speak and understand language when they are not aware of being observed. Experimental methods may attempt to achieve highly accurate observations of less than natural speech or may attempt to achieve less accurate observations of very naturalistic language use. The inherent tradeoffs are discussed primarily as they relate to the areas of recording techniques, perception studies, and real vs. apparent time studies. Grammaticality judgment and survey technique are also briefly addressed.

Language in Society, 2014

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2016

Reviewed by NAOMI NAGY This is a collection of sociolinguistic perspectives on communities that a... more Reviewed by NAOMI NAGY This is a collection of sociolinguistic perspectives on communities that are rarely examined in the variationist framework or, in most cases, in terms of their microsociolinguistic variation.

Language and Speech, Oct 17, 2022

In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto,... more In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language’s phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles.

Springer international handbooks of education, 2016

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, Jul 15, 2022

Language and Speech

The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, 2021

This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research an... more This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research and in education. It begins with an overview of HLs in Canada and the current ethnolinguistic vitality (demographics, institutional support and status) of these language varieties. This includes an overview of programs to teach HLs (or to use HLs as the medium of instruction) in primary, secondary and post-secondary contexts. Census information is provided to profile the distribution of HL speakers across major cities and all the provinces and territories of Canada, and the status of the HLs. The next section surveys publications about HLs in Canada including overviews, studies from the domain of sociolinguistics (language variation and change) that rely on spontaneous speech corpora, acquisition studies employing experimental methodology, and research on pedagogical approaches, noting primary findings from each. Specific information is provided about heritage varieties of Cantonese, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Inuktitut, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.

The future of Catalan dialects' syntax: A case study for a methodological contribution Ares Llop ... more The future of Catalan dialects' syntax: A case study for a methodological contribution Ares Llop Naya II Methods 5 Fuzzy dialect areas and prototype theory: Discovering latent patterns in geolinguistic variation Simon Pickl 6 On the problem of field worker isoglosses Andrea Mathussek 7 Tracking linguistic features underlying lexical variation patterns: A case study on Tuscan dialects Simonetta Montemagni & Martijn Wieling 8 A new dialectometric approach applied to the Breton language Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Tanguy Solliec & Jean Le Dû Contents 9 Automatically identifying characteristic features of non-native English accents Jelke Bloem, Martijn Wieling & John Nerbonne 10 Mapping the perception of linguistic form: Dialectometry with perceptual data

Linguistics Vanguard

Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at hom... more Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at home versus out of the home for work, school, and recreation. As a result, many individuals have experienced a disruption in the frequency and type of their interactions. Given the importance of intergenerational transmission and intergenerational interaction for promoting language maintenance, and the importance of peer-to-peer interaction for promoting language shift, we ask how these abrupt changes necessitated by social distancing will affect language use and attitudes, specifically short- and long-term language maintenance or shift involving heritage languages. We examine principles of language maintenance and shift in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown for university students, people still involved in critical acts of identity creation. Here we describe a survey designed to learn how the lockdown is affecting young people’s language ecologies and attitudes. Using both quantitative a...

This special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language brings together arti... more This special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language brings together articles from an international set of authors that situate the family of Francoprovençal (FP) dialects in terms of formal structures, contexts of contact, practice and policy. FP has been the subject of little scholarly attention. This dearth of research is largely the result of its ambiguous status. Ever since it was introduced by Ascoli (1878 [1874]), the notion of FP has been questioned. There has long been disagreement over its linguistic borders and the linguistic criteria used for demarcation. As late as 2007, scholars have asked: le francoprovençal existe-t-il ? [does FP exist?] (Tuaillon 2007: 9). This is the first collection describing FP across its entire geographical distribution and assembling varied sociolinguistic approaches. Previous collections include a dialectology volume focusing on the status and structure of FP (Marzys (1971); a posthumous volume focusing on Lyonnais (Ga...

A primary goal of the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project (HLVC) is to construct a uni... more A primary goal of the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project (HLVC) is to construct a unique corpus of conversational speech in ten Heritage Languages spoken in the Greater Toronto Area. This corpus, the Heritage Language Documentation Corpus, or HerLD, contains recordings in the Heritage Languages of speakers representing three generations. Our goal is to record 40 speakers, balanced for age and sex, for each of the three generations (and 20 speakers for languages where only two generations exist in Toronto, i.e., Korean and Faetar).

The frequent appearance of double consonants in word-initial position in all existing

SLA [Second language acquisition] is in some ways dramatically positioned, I believe, to contribu... more SLA [Second language acquisition] is in some ways dramatically positioned, I believe, to contribute to variationist understandings of language. Its respondents are on a fast-track of language change, allowing real-rather than apparent-time studies. This study focuses on a sample of second language (L2) speakers in order to identify which aspects of a grammar may be transmitted in a language contact situation and what social characteristics of the speakers promote or impede this transmission. 1 A second goal of this investigation is to describe the competence in French of the first generation of Montreal Anglophones (native English speakers) that had access to French immersion schooling and to understand which social factors determine their level of competence. We address the following three research questions, and determine that the answer to each is "yes." (1) Does double marking, a pattern not taught in school, exist in L2 Montreal French? (2) Does the rate of double marking correlate to the type and amount of acquisition and contact? (3) Does the variation provide evidence of acquisition of L1 grammar (as opposed to mimicking of a salient surface structure)? As members of a minority population in a city with a majority of French native speakers, young Anglophone adults have many types of contact with French speakers. Some grew up having regular interactions with Frenchspeaking relatives and close friends; others had no French speakers in their 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of a Summer Research Fellowship from the University of New Hampshire to the first author in 1997. We also thank P. Thibault and G. Sankoff for allowing us to use this corpus of Montreal L2 speech.

We consider the possibility of Cantonese and English reciprocally influencing vowel space in Toro... more We consider the possibility of Cantonese and English reciprocally influencing vowel space in Toronto’s Heritage Cantonese community by comparing Generation1 and Generation2 speakers in both languages. We predict more English-like patterns in Gen2 Cantonese (vs. Gen1) and more Cantonese-like patterns in Gen1 English (vs. Gen2). Methodological innovations include automated forced alignment and formant extraction for Cantonese -- methods increasingly used for English data but not frequently applied to other languages in sociolinguistics. Extension to additional languages provides testing grounds for sociolinguistic generalizations which have been based primarily on English, French and Spanish. FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011) was used to force-align English transcripts to the corresponding .wav. Cantonese transcripts were force-aligned in ProsodyLab (Gorman et al. 2011), using unsupervised machine learning to train acoustic models, customizable for non-English data (unlike FAVE). FAVE wa...

It is well known to social scientists, that in building any theory, theoreticians must account fo... more It is well known to social scientists, that in building any theory, theoreticians must account for the general pattern first, and only then can they turn to the problematic cases commonly referred to as “exceptions.” Thus, the claim by Chomsky (1965:3-4) that linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech community, was a necessary first step towards building a coherent syntactic theory. However, GB theory, together with other branches of linguistics, has progressed quite far in the past 28 years, and the time is ripe to begin to concentrate more on the “exceptions” or unclarities that theoreticians have not been addressing by developing experimental methods to examine them. The development of syntactic theory appears to proceed in the following manner: data consisting of isolated sentences are gathered, their grammaticality is determined, and a theory is developed which accounts for both the grammatical and ungrammatical s...

Heritage Language Journal, 2021

We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach ... more We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared. In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent ...