U.S. Latino/a Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

From Labov’s (1963) finding that the centralization of the /ay/ and /aw/ diphthongs in Martha’s Vineyard was emblematic of resistance to local economic and social change, to Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) finding that variation in the realization of the /I/ vowel corresponds to gang affiliation among Latina girls in a Northern California high school, identity has been at the center of sociolinguistic analysis and theory for nearly a half century. Despite the centrality of this construct, sociolinguists have rarely stopped to ask about the epistemological, theoretical, and even political implications of identity. This dissertation offers a sustained, interdisciplinary critique of identity, as articulated both in linguistics and in contemporary poststructuralist theory more generally. Through engagements with anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and linguistics, this critique calls attention to identity’s epistemological baggage and theoretical tendencies and suggests, instead, a turn to poststructuralist theory of subject formation. Within the this framework, identity has its analytic place among equally important theoretical constructs, including subject type, subject position, discourse, and subjectivity, as described in the work of social theorists such as Foucault (1965, 1975, 1978) and Butler (1990, 1991, 2004).
Two empirical studies of adolescent language use – one, a case study of a single speaker, the other an ethnography conducted in a middle school – are presented and findings are considered in light of poststructuralist theory of subject formation. The first study focuses on the speech of one adolescent Mexican American female, “María,” whose patterns of language use underwent reorganization over a three-year period coinciding with a change in community, school, and peer group. Segmental and suprasegmental variables were analyzed from data collected from two time periods. In order to account for modifications in “María’s” vocalic production, two vowel variables were selected for acoustic analysis: pre-nasal and non-pre-nasal allophones of /æ/. Midpoint measurements were taken for F1, F2, and F3 for a minimum of 25 tokens of each variable from T1 and T2 using PRAAT phonetics software (Boersma & Weenink 2009). Maria’s production of prosodic rhythm was also analyzed using the Pairwise Variability Index (Lowe & Grabe 1995). Over 400 measurements of syllable duration were made for the analysis of prosodic rhythm.
Changes in F1 and F2 for both vocalic variables were statistically significant—both allophones of /æ/ were lowered and backed. Conversely, no statistically significant difference was found in rhythm. These findings are analyzed in the context of two social processes: interpellation and racialization, and the role of agency is considered in light of these processes.
The second study is an ethnographic investigation of a ‘majority minority’ middle school in North Carolina that took place over a five-month period. Detailed ethnographic fieldnotes and unscripted interviews with 50 African American, white, and Latino speakers in social groups identified during observation constitute the data for this study. The analysis focuses on the subjectivizing effects of the institution, particularly the discourses of ‘choice’ and ‘value,’ on the cultural and linguistic practices of its students. The analysis shows that talk by students across all major social divisions is inflected by institutional discourses. A complementary analysis considers the subjectivizing function of language ideology as it pertains to three distinct discursive formations about language: ‘proper talk,’ ‘ghetto talk,’ and Spanish. Finally, a quantitative, variationist analysis is presented of four core features of African American English: verbal –s absence, preterit copula leveling, copula deletion, and invariant be. The sociolinguistic patterning is complex, with African Americans and Latinos demonstrating different levels of usage for all four variables, with significantly different interactional effects between social variables (gender, popularity, gang affiliation) and linguistic variables (structure type, grammatical environment).