Sociolectal and Dialectal Variation in Prosody (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Although much work has investigated various aspects of African American English (AAE), prosodic features of AAE have remained relatively underexamined (e.g. McLarty 2018; Thomas 2015). Studies have, however, identified prosodic differences between AAE and European American English (EAE) varieties, with AAE speakers found to have generally more dynamic prosody than EAE speakers. Despite these findings, the extent to which listeners perceive these differences remains unclear, as well as which specific phonetic features, alone or in concert, contribute to the differences. To address this gap in knowledge, this dissertation project utilized the Rapid Prosodic Transcription (RPT) task developed by Cole et al. (2010, 2017) to determine how much sensitivity listeners have to prominence variation in conversational speech excerpts from male and female African Americans and European Americans from North Carolina. Crucially, participants are drawn from three different listener groups, who represent a range of experience with AAE and EAE speech: African American listeners from North Carolina, European American listeners from North Carolina, and European American listeners from Oregon. In addition to examining listeners in terms of their v regional background and ethnicity, listeners' own self-reports about their experience with AAE are used to further explore the role of experience in prominence perception. Results indicate that African American voices are heard as having significantly more prominences in their speech than the European American speakers, a finding in line with prior literature on production-based differences. Further, findings identify some differences between the listener groups, but also show that the listeners generally attend to linguistic factors in similar ways for these voices despite different regional backgrounds, ethnicities and self-reported experiences with AAE. The methodological approach and findings in this dissertation provide a a new avenue for sociolinguistic research on prosody, while also providing insights on the relationship between production and perception.
Phonologization and Social Meaning, NowPhon 2017, May 22nd at the University of British Columbia
Moore and Carter (2015) contend that while third wave variationist studies provide rich accounts of social meaning potentials, their tendency to focus on highly localized stances and interactional moments isolates them from longer-term process of language variation and change. Yet, with respect to phonetic and phonological variables, studies have regularly turned up robust associations between localized social meaning and sound changes in progress (Labov 1963, Eckert 1989, Podesva et al. 2015). The current paper argues that the degree of phonologization of features within a given community is an important factor in identifying potential socially-meaningful variants. The study proposes a link between the conventionalization of co-articulatory processes and the availability of a linguistic feature to become a salient bearer of localized social meaning (also see Wassink & Riebold 2013, Wassink 2015). Strictly mechanical, co-articulatory phonetic processes are unlikely candidates to carry social meaning, while progressive conventionalization of a phonetic feature throughout the speech community may allow it to acquire socioindexical meaning. On the other end of the continuum, phonologized features generally, serve as a marker or provide evidence for a supra-local dialect differentiation, but may occasionally index a locally salient social meaning (Eckert 2008). Crucially, during the intermediary steps of sound change, features may be phonologized for some individuals with a speech community, but not for others. While sociophoneticians have relied on the term “phonologized” to describe the variable degree of participation in phonological or allophonic processes, they have not always done so using the analytic methods a phonologist would (compare Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006 and Solé 2007). This study compares Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC with respect to their use of two critical diagnostic dialectal variants: /æn/ raising and Canadian Raising of /aʊT/. Data were collected via word- list reading task and a sociocultural attitudinal survey from a sex-balanced sample of 39 young adults in Seattle and Vancouver. The study considers first the degree of phonologization of these two allophonic processes by comparing the formant trajectories /æn/ and /æd/ and /aʊT/ and /aʊD/ along with their socio-distributional patterns in mixed-effects linear regression models. The study also considers which, if any, of the attitudinal factors emerge as significant predictors of linguistic behavior in terms of F1 and F2 values, which offer clues regarding the socioindexical value of the variants. The results show distinct degrees of phonologization for /æn/ raising and /aʊT/ raising in Seattle and Vancouver on the basis of differences in the time-proportional formant values and their relative stability within the speaker sample. For Seattle speakers /æn/ raising is strongly phonologized; for Vancouver speakers, there is variation within the sample and evidence to suggest that /æn/ raising shows a greater degree of phonologization for some speakers than other, though at the population level, the allophonic process remains more co-articulatory than in Seattle. /aʊT/ in Vancouver is a phonologized; for Seattle, significant differences do emerge between /aʊT/ and /aʊD/ tokens, but these can be characterized as co-articulatory. Crucially, whether and which speakers’ attitudes and ideologies emerge as significant predictors of their linguistic behavior for these variables also varies between cities, suggesting the social meaning associated with these processes co-varies with their degree of phonologization. For co-articulatory /aʊT/ raising in Seattle, no attitudinal or ideological factors emerge as significant predictors of F1 values. For Vancouver, National Pride emerges as a significant predictor of /aʊT/ raising, suggesting the availability of this phonologized feature to index supra-local contrasts. For phonologized /æn/ raising in Seattle, no attitudinal or ideological factors emerge as significant predictors of F1 values. For Vancouver, where /æn/ raising shows more variation between a co-articulatory and a phonologized process, F1 values were significantly impacted by talkers’ ratings of Seattle and Portland’s similarity. Significant effects of speaker attitudes suggest a degree of control over these processes and hints at their socioindexical value, which may be tested more directly (in progress). These findings may help to situate the social meaning of local variants within a framework that takes into account longer-term variation and change on the basis of their degree of phonologization and control.
New horizons in sociophonetic variation and change
New horizons in sociophonetic variation and change Arguably the main concern of modern linguistics has been to put forward evidence of an unchangeable and stable grammar in humans. At the same time variability remains a very fundamental property of human language. Language varies across communities, individuals and speech acts, and with language variability comes language change. The question at heart of the scientific endeavour concerned with linguistic variability is what causes language to change? This question is present at the core of disciplines such as historical linguistics, contact linguistics and, especially, (variationist) sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics as a discipline has made great contributions to our understanding of variability in language and the complex workings of the human communicative faculty by showing that variation in speech follows quite robust patterns that bear relationships with social variables. The papers in this issue of Lingua are concerned with some of the key topics of modern sociolinguistics, namely to which extent individuals' and communities' social histories are reflected in the production of language and to which extent our social experiences influence our perception of language. The current issue even touches upon the question of how linguistic variation commences at an individual level. Phonetic issues have played a central part in studies of linguistic variation and change since the birth of sociolinguistics. William Labov's seminal studies in the 1960s were concerned especially with phonological or phonetic variation and change, and throughout the last half century sound change has remained a core focus of studies concerned with synchronic language variation. This issue of Lingua brings together six studies of phonetic variation and change in the English language. The articles have in common that they use sophisticated methodologies or innovative experimental designs to further our knowledge of exactly how and why language varies and changes and how variation and change relate to social factors. They also fall into the category that one might label sociophonetic research. The merger of the two fields of phonetics and sociolinguistics in sociophonetics has been described by Foulkes et al. (2010:704) as having 'the aim of identifying, and ultimately explaining, the sources, loci, parameters and communicative functions of socially structured variation in speech'. This aim thus applies to a large proportion of work done in the field of sociolinguistics, but also to work done in the discipline of phonetics. The specifically sociophonetic field of research can therefore be viewed as an overarching area of enquiry that contributes fundamental knowledge and theory to both sociolinguists and phoneticians. These two groups of linguists, although both benefitting from work done within the field of sociophonetics, do not necessarily share much more common ground, however. A focus on sociophonetics as a field of linguistics in its own right is therefore part of the motivation for publishing this special issue. Motivation for this issue is also found in the fact that sociophonetic work can help refine general linguistic theories, such as that of exemplar theory. As argued in Pierrehumbert (2001:1) typical phonological theories struggle to account for some of the detailed phonetic knowledge that speakers have, and the variability that exist in one individual's realisation of the same phonological categories in different lexical items. A usage-based component must therefore be included to such theories to account for why perception and production targets vary across lexical items, people, and communities. Exemplar theory does this by allowing for the possibility that informants store and categorise individual instances of sounds and lexical items in memory (cf. e.g. Pierrehumbert, 2001). When accounting for language production and perception the theory also necessarily comprises social exemplars, meaning that speakers can store social information alongside linguistic input. What is more, exemplar theory partly accounts for communal generational differences in language, i.e. observable language change, by suggesting that older speakers' amounts and types of exemplars differ from those of younger speakers simply through an increased amount of experience (cf. Pierrehumbert, 2001:11). Sociophonetic work can inform us of the role of exemplars in our linguistic system by showing variability in how social categories and linguistic detail are connected by listeners. Furthermore, work in sociophonetics can show how linguistic exemplars connected with particular social categories can lose out (or win) in processes of language change. A further motivation for the current special issue is to promote innovativeness in methodology as a general concern for current sociolinguistic research. A heightened awareness of methodological concerns is perhaps something that sets sociophonetic work apart from a lot of other work concerned with language variation and change. As mentioned above, investigations of the relationship between production of fine phonetic detail and social belonging have been prominent in the field of variationist linguistics since the 1960s (from the studies collected in Labov (1972), to more recent work such as Lingua 122 (2012) 749-752
2014
This volume collects seven papers in contemporary sociophonetic research. It addresses hot themes in sociophonetics and proposes a fresh look at old problems still open to debate. A variety of approaches is proposed without neglecting the need for a coherent discussion of the nature of variation in speech and how speakers develop a cognitive representation of it. These characteristics distinguish the present volume from the panorama of comparable sociophonetic literature, which mainly consists of textbooks, readers, and journal special issues (as well as individual journal articles, conference proceedings, and informal reports). , contemporary sociophonetics and sociophonology differ from early variationist sociolinguistics for their focus on the cognitive representation of phonetic variation in the mind of the individual. Stated differently, the fundamental purpose of sociophonetic studies should be that of analyzing how the concrete communicative experiences are categorized by the speakers and, most importantly, of establishing the function of such complex nucleus of information in the structuring of linguistic systems. The fusion of sociolinguistics and phonetics occurs therefore within a cognitivist perspective in which the probabilistic nature of the language and the interest for the processes of language use and comprehension play a special role.
Phonology and Sociolinguistics
The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 2013
Since the 1960s, there has been a transition in the target of linguistic description, from intuitive representations of the "ideal speaker/listener" to naturalistic data whose gradience is quantified. The transition is captured by Pierrehumbert: [L]anguage exhibits variability at all levels of representation, from phonetics to phonology and syntax, right through to pragmatics. Thus the issue is how variation fits into our scientific understanding of language. . . . [V]ariation penetrates further into the core of the theory than generally supposed, and that variation should be exploited rather than disregarded in investigating language. (1994: 233-234) Related to this are changing views in how human memory, and cognition more generally, work. The present chapter surveys effects of these two developments on the fields of phonology and sociolinguistics, focusing on examples that bring their domains closer. We see resulting developments in more accurate descriptions and robust theoretical models. This chapter reviews instances in which data organized by variationists have served to further develop Lexical Phonology (LP), Optimality Theory (OT), and Exemplar Theory (ET). This transition requires reexamining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional models of generative phonology. We will consider ways in which these developments have influenced sociolinguistic research design and interpretation, particularly regarding which gradient aspects are relevant to social perception and categorization. One goal of this chapter is to provide the groundwork for a unified linguistic model to be developed by collaboration across sociolinguistics, phonology, and other fields. This will allow us to better understand 625 language within the broader context of cognition, to take into account linguistic and nonlinguistic factors in an integrated fashion, and to develop formal models of observed patterns.
Introduction to "Articulatory techniques for sociophonetic research"
Special Issue "Articulatory techniques for sociophonetic research", 2012
From a functionalist point of view, speaker-specific variation is conceived of as a systematic source of indexical information for both the speaker and the hearer, and directly reflects the ‘structured heterogeneity’ (Weinreich et al. 1968) affecting the transmission of sound change. Focusing on the relationships between phonetic/phonological form and social, regional and interactional-communicative factors, sociophonetics deals with the implications of speech variation on theories of language change. Beside the variationist approach to speech production, recent sociophonetic studies are also concerned with the effects of variation on speech perception, phonological categorisation, speaker identification, and perceptual dialectology. Sociolinguistic research in the speech production domain is traditionally based on auditory and acoustic analysis of segmental properties. Groundbreaking work by William Labov and colleagues has popularised the use of spectrographic analysis in the study of accent variation, focusing mostly on formant analysis of vowels in some dialects of English. Acoustic analysis has also been extended to other aspects of vocalic quality such as duration, as well as consonantal variables and suprasegmental features. On the other hand, the contribution of instrumental articulatory research has been relatively scarce until recently. On the contrary, socially structured variation offers considerable opportunities for experimental phoneticians to exploit the instruments’ sensitivity to the fine granularity of those subtle variations that function socially.
Social and Linguistic Speech Prosody
2014
The present study is intended to figure out the extent to which prosody and intonation affect listeners’ ability to estimate the speaker’s age. The performance of a 40-year old anchorman and another by the same speaker at the age of 80 were spectroacoustically analyzed in order to identify the prosodic features of a “young” and an “old” voice. The results of the analysis have shown significant differences between the two voices on a suprasegmental level. To test the effects of these differences on a perceptual level, through the prosodic transplantation technique, the F0 values and the durations of segments and silences were transferred from the “young” to the “old” voice and viceversa. Two age recognition tests, based on original and transplanted voices, were administered to Italian listeners. The results of perceptual tests have confirmed the strict relationship between some rhythmic and prosodic features and the speaker’s age and have demonstrated the effectiveness of the transpl...
Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation
2006
The study of how language varies in social context, and how it can be analyzed and accounted for, are the key goals of sociolinguistics. Until now, however, the actual tools and methods have been largely passed on through 'word of mouth', rather than being formally documented. This is the first comprehensive 'how to' guide to the formal analysis of sociolinguistic variation. It shows step-by-step how the analysis is carried out, leading the reader through every stage of a research project from start to finish. Topics covered include fieldwork, data organization and management, analysis and interpretation, presenting research results, and writing up a paper. Practical and informal, the book contains all the information needed to conduct a fully-fledged sociolinguistic investigation, and includes exercises, checklists, references and insider tips. It is set to become an essential resource for students, researchers and fieldworkers embarking on research projects in soci...