This is the schedule of papers, meetings, and presentations for the 2019 American Dialect Society annual conference to be held from Thursday, January 3, through Sunday, January 6, 2019, in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel in New York City. For more information on the hotel and location, and other events associated with the conference, see the Linguistic Society of America website. Abstracts are included in full below the schedule. You may download everything as a PDF: American Dialect Society 2019 Meeting Schedule and Abstracts. Last updated Jan. 1, 2019, 9:59 a.m. PST.
Schedule of Sessions
Thursday, January 3
Executive Council
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: ADS President Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
Time: 1:00–3:00 PM
Open meeting; all members welcome.
Annual Business Meeting
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: ADS President Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
Time: 3:00–3:30 PM
ADS Session 1: University of Toronto Linguists Have Some Things to Tell You About Canadian English
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria)
4:00 Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto): Tracking change in Canadian English utterance-initial discourse markers
4:30 Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto), Tim Gadanidis (University of Toronto), Jean-François Juneau (University of Toronto), Kinza Mahoon (University of Toronto), Andrei Munteanu (University of Toronto), Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto), Fiona Wilson (University of Toronto): Sounding like a “Sounder”: dialect accommodation in Ontario, Canada
5:00 Bridget L. Jankowski (University of Toronto), Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto): “He come out and give me a beer, but he never seen the bear”: old preterites in Ontario dialects
5:30 Derek Denis (University of Toronto Mississauga), Vidhya Elango (University of Toronto Mississauga), Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal (University of Toronto Mississauga), Srishti Prashar (University of Toronto Mississauga), Maria Velasco (University of Toronto Mississauga): Exploring the sounds of Multicultural Toronto English
Words of the Year Nominations
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Ben Zimmer (Chair of ADS New Words Committee)
Time: 6:15–7:15 PM
Open meeting of the New Words Committee; ADS members and friends welcome. This meeting reviews nominations for Words of the Year 2018. Final candidates will be identified in preparation for the vote at 5:00 p.m. Friday.
Sister Society Meet and Greet Reception
Room: Lobby Bar
Time: 8:30–10:00 PM
Friday, January 4
ADS Session 2: American Sounds
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Thomas Purnell (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
8:30 Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia): Are BEG- and BAG-raising distinct? Regional patterns in prevelar raising in North American English
9:00 Isabelle Strong (Dartmouth College), Julie Roberts (University of Vermont): Is there anything left of the traditional Vermont dialect? A study of Vermont’s last frontier
9:30 Stuart Davis (Indiana University Bloomington), Kelly Berkson (Indiana University Bloomington), Alyssa Strickler (University of Colorado Boulder): Diary of a sound change: patterns of incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana
10:00 Luke Lindemann (Yale University): Sibilant variation and koinézation in Texas German
ADS Session 3: Trapped Back on the West Coast
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Charlie Farrington (University of Oregon)
11:00 Kara Becker (Reed College), Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University): The social meaning of TRAP-backing in West Coast English: evidence from perception
11:30 Chloe Brotherton (University of California, Davis), Michelle Cohn (University of California, Davis), Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis), Santiago Barreda (University of California, Davis): Regional variation in vowel positioning and diphthongization in TRAP allophones in California
12:00 Cory Holland (Worcester State University): The relationship between front/low lax vowel movements in western U. S. English
ADS Session 4: Topically Heterogeneous Session to Accommodate Schedule Conflicts
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Betsy E. Evans (University of Washington)
1:00 Benjamin Hebblethwaite (University of Florida): Gullah structures, Atlantic structures: a cross-linguistic analysis of individuated plural determiner phrases
1:30 Christopher Strelluf (University of Warwick): anymore, It’s on Twitter: positive-anymore, American regional dialects, and polarity-licensing in tweets
2:00 Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech University) Nathalie Dajko (Tulane University): Lexical and syntactic features in New Orleans English
ADS Session 5: The Northern Cities Shift
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Jon Bakos (Indiana State University)
3:00 Aaron J. Dinkin (San Diego State University): Low back merger encroaching at a stable dialect boundary in northern New York
3:30 Wil Rankinen (Grand Valley State University), Aaron Albin (Kobe University), and TJ Neuhaus (Bowling Green State University): Decline of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in western Lower Michigan: apparent-time evidence of a change in progress
4:00 David Durian (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania), Richard Cameron (University of Illinois at Chicago): The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago: reexamining its development and progression
Words of the Year Vote
Room: Empire Ballroom
Time: 5:00–6:15 PM
Bring-Your-Own-Book Exhibit and Reception
Room: Pre-Function Area 2 (Lower Level, near elevators, outside of Murray Hill Room)
Time: 6:30–7:30 PM
Saturday, January 5
ADS Session 6: Insular Linguistics and More
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Charles Carson (Duke University Press)
8:30 Lauren Squires (The Ohio State University), Nicole Holliday (Pomona College), Lemuel Lan (Pomona College): “I’ve code-switched on behalf of the Black student population”: linguistic insecurity among Black students at HWIs
9:00 Arianna Janoff (Georgetown University): Expanding a dialect corpus: a diachronic analysis of a Smith Island native
9:30 Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (Queen’s University), Anastasia Riehl (Queen’s University): We seen “eh” and so on: a preliminary study of three variables in the Wolfe Island English corpus
ADS Poster Session
Room: Metropolitan Ballroom East
Time: 10:30 AM–12:00 PM
Assigned poster board numbers are found in parentheses before each poster’s author(s). Each poster board will have an identifying number.
(82) Craig Alexander (University of Glasgow), Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow), Tereza Neocleous (University of Glasgow), Ludger Evers (University of Glasgow): A new tool for sociolinguistic data analysis: using graphical models to visualize mixed effects modeling for vowel formant data
(83) Nicoleta Bateman (California State University, San Marcos): Using formal English to teach the value of language variation and linguistic diversity
(84) Samantha Beaver (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Glenn Starr (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jonathan Jibson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Patching together a picture of the low-back merger mid-century
(85) Jeremiah Bill (University of Rochester), He Gong (University of Rochester), Brooke Hamilton (University of Rochester), Henry Hawthorn (University of Rochester), Xiaonan Hu (University of Rochester), Alexander Johnson (University of Rochester), Alan Kuo (University of Rochester), Nicholas Kasper (University of Rochester), Tyler Knight (University of Rochester), Elizabeth Lee (University of Rochester), Rachel Myers (Georgetown University), Caleb New (University of Rochester), Madeline Rose (University of Rochester), Anthony Russell (University of Rochester), Sophie Sackstein (University of Rochester), Lee Stovall (University of Rochester), Justin Tian (University of Rochester), Siddharth Vashishtha (University of Rochester), Xiaoxuan Wang (University of Rochester), Liqi Zhu (University of Rochester), Maya Abtahian (University of Rochester), Scott Grimm (University of Rochester): The extension of (positive) anymore
(86) Mary Blockley (University of Texas at Austin): Unetymological -o in the USA
(87) Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (University of Richmond): Ideologically motivated semantic shift as evidence of linguistic relativism in contemporary American English
(88) Andrew Bray (University of Georgia): Canadian features in the speech of American-born NHL players
(89) Hannah Brouse (University of New Mexico): North American Sign Languages and the colonial power matrix
(90) Katherine Conner (The Ohio State University): When violation goes viral: a continuing critical discourse analysis of social media comments on sexual assault
(91) Angelo Costanzo (Bloomsburg University): Language, ethnicity, and pierogi/pyrohy in the PA Anthracite Coal Region
(92) Ivy Hauser (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Individual differences in stop prevoicing among English speakers in the American Northeast
(93) Ho’omana Nathan Horton (Oklahoma State University): “To describe it to a non-skater”: Skater identity and participation in the sociolinguistic interview
(94) Jeffrey Kallen (Trinity College Dublin): Enregisterment in linguistic landscapes: global insights from Irish English
(95) Tyler Kibbey (University of Kentucky): The Kingdom and the Republic: sovereignty metaphors in the opening prayers of the 115th United States Congress
(96) Ayden Loughlin (University of Victoria): Who is they? Pronoun use across time and social structure
(97) Isabel McKay (University of Arizona): Laughing with letters: a corpus comparison of English written laughter expressions on Twitter
(98) Elizabeth Peterson (University of Helsinki): Call to action: filling the sociolinguistic gap for English speakers worldwide
(99) Alexandra Pfiffner (Georgetown University): Word-final obstruent devoicing in Minnesota: patterns in gradient neutralization
(100) Lisa Sprowls (Tulane University): “A little Southern” in Little Italy: phonology and linguistic perception in a Louisiana Italian-American community
(101) Felicia Jean Steele (College of New Jersey): “Which English do we learn?”: Community Engaged Learning in the American English classroom
(102) Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University): Pre-velar raising among Nordic Americans in Seattle
ADS Session 7: Style, Stance, and Ideology
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Jennifer Bloomquist (Gettysburg College)
10:30 M. Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex): Language ideology in lexical listicles: Americanisms for British audiences
11:00 Margarita Nemchuk (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology),Jon Bakos (Indiana State University): Small town Southern man: comparing Southern features in the songs and interviews of Alan Jackson
11:30 Bryce McCleary (Oklahoma State University): “I bet it’s an ugly thing”: constructing stance with creaky voice
ADS Annual Luncheon
Room: Liberty 3
Cost: $50 ($10 for students). See Julie Roberts, Executive Secretary, for reservations. The main course is salmon or a vegetarian option.
Chair: ADS President Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
Time: 12:15–1:45 PM
Announcement: Roger Shuy (Georgetown University): Recipient of the Roger Shuy Best Paper of the year in American Speech Award
Speaker: Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto): Doing dialectology in the 21st century
ADS Session 8: Methods, Research and Pedagogical
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Kathryn Remlinger (Grand Valley State University)
2:00 Jessica Grieser (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): “Has there ever been a time …?”: Investigating sociolinguistics’ most famous question
2:30 Patricia Cukor-Avila (University of North Texas), Guy Bailey (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley): Linguistic insights from a longitudinal case study
3:00 Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria): Exploring the dynamics of language change through the lens of community, caregiver, and child
3:30 Stefan Dollinger (University of British Columbia): The written questionnaire 2.0: research-oriented approaches to dialectology in the classroom
4:00 Jennifer Renn (Purdue University), Annie Duguay (Center for Applied Linguistics): Embedding linguistics in content teacher training to support linguistically and culturally diverse students
Sunday, January 6
ADS Session 9: African American Speech in Context
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Sonja Lanehart (University of Texas, San Antonio)
8:30 Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley College): Another case of perfect-to-past reanalysis in African American English
9:30 Michael D. Picone (University of Alabama): Linguistic ramifications of slave and ex-slave migrations within the American South
10:00 John Baugh (Washington University in St. Louis): Linguistics, life, and death
ADS Session 10: Perception
Room: Sugar Hill
Chair: Ayesha Malik (St. Mary’s University School of Law)
11:00 Rachel Olsen (University of Georgia), Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia), Michael Olsen (University of Georgia), Lisa Lipani (University of Georgia), Margaret Renwick (University of Georgia): Reconciling perception with production in Southern speech
11:30 Emily Hughes (Oklahoma State University), Phillip Weirich (Indiana University Bloomington): Oklahoma perceptual dialectology
12:00 Marie Bissell (North Carolina State University): The role of linguistic self-perception in perceptual dialectology tasks
ADS abstracts
John Baugh (Washington University in St. Louis)
Linguistics, life, and death
Four African American male defendants were accused of murder in separate trials that hinged on linguistic results. The first case claims that a white witness “overheard the voice of a black man,” at the scene of the crime. The second case is from a wire-tapped recording of a defendant awaiting trial. The prosecutor asserted that he had admitted guilt during a phone call. Another case pertains to a drive-by shooting, where a child was killed. The final case represents a crime of passion after a lover’s quarrel. The defendant alleged racial bias based on prosecutor’s inflammatory characterizations of him during closing remarks.
Kara Becker (Reed College)
Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University)
The social meaning of TRAP-backing in West Coast English: Evidence from perception
This study uses perceptual data to explore the social meaning of TRAP-backing, a feature increasingly documented in West Coast English. 89 listeners from Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco heard backed or non-backed tokens of TRAP in short utterances. The findings show that Condition (backed vs. non-backed) is a significant predictor of perceived talker age and of the Serious~Frivolous affective scale, with TRAP-backing indexing youth and frivolousness for all three cities. However, listeners’ classifications of talker origin demonstrate that TRAP-backing is not perceived exclusively as a feature of California speech, supporting the view of the feature as a widespread phenomenon.
Jeremiah Bill (University of Rochester)
He Gong (University of Rochester)
Brooke Hamilton (University of Rochester)
Henry Hawthorn (University of Rochester)
Xiaonan Hu (University of Rochester)
Alexander Johnson (University of Rochester)
Alan Kuo (University of Rochester)
Nicholas Kasper (University of Rochester)
Tyler Knight (University of Rochester)
Elizabeth Lee (University of Rochester)
Rachel Myers (Georgetown University)
Caleb New (University of Rochester)
Madeline Rose (University of Rochester)
Anthony Russell (University of Rochester)
Sophie Sackstein (University of Rochester)
Lee Stovall (University of Rochester)
Justin Tian (University of Rochester)
Siddharth Vashishtha (University of Rochester)
Xiaoxuan Wang (University of Rochester)
Liqi Zhu (University of Rochester)
Maya Abtahian (University of Rochester)
Scott Grimm (University of Rochester)
The extension of (positive) anymore
“Positive anymore” describes the extension of NPI anymore to non-NPI contexts. We analyzed 13,267 unique occurrences of positive anymore collected online with respect to i) geographic distribution and ii) semantic extension from negative to positive contexts. We find a high frequency of occurrences outside the ANAE isogloss, demonstrating that the construction is not limited to that region and may be spreading. In addition, we consider positive anymore’s meaning as a “social negative” for those speakers that use it. Our results provide data for re-analysis of old questions on the linguistic and social mechanisms of the spread of the construction.
Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (Queen’s University)
Anastasia Riehl (Queen’s University)
We seen “eh” and so on: a preliminary study of three variables in the Wolfe Island English Corpus
This paper introduces a new sociolinguistic corpus, the Wolfe Island English Corpus (WIEC), comprised of interviews with 109 residents of a small island community in Southern Ontario. We present preliminary results concerning three variables that have been studied in detail in other varieties of Canadian English: the pragmatic marker eh; general extenders (and stuff, and whatever); and regularization of preterite and participial verb forms (I seen it). The WIEC generally conforms to expected Canadian patterns, while nonetheless differing in interesting ways from proximate urban centers.
Marie Bissell (North Carolina State University)
The role of linguistic self-perception in perceptual dialectology tasks
This paper examines how linguistic self-perception influences perceptions of others’ speech. Judgments about qualities of speech, especially when the speech is classified as sounding southern, are significantly influenced by self-perception of accent. This study both supports and challenges socio-psychological scholarship on how individuals with certain social characteristics rate others with those same social characteristics less favorably. Perceptual dialectology experiments canonically focus on the speech being judged rather than the person doing the judging and shifting attention towards the participant allows for greater potential to understand how linguistic self-perception affects the lens through which they view the language of others.
Chloe Brotherton (University of California, Davis)
Michelle Cohn (University of California, Davis)
Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis)
Santiago Barreda (University of California, Davis)
Regional variation in vowel positioning and diphthongization in TRAP allophones in California
Allophonic splitting of TRAP appears to be an ongoing and dynamic aspect of California vowels, involving co-variation of multiple acoustic properties: TRAP-n is raised, fronted, and diphthongal; elsewhere, it is retracting. We examine regional variation within California in phonetic co-variation of TRAP allophones, comparing speakers from the Bay Area, Central Valley, and Southern California. Bay Area and Central Valley speakers displayed the highest and most diphthongal TRAP-n; Bay Area also had the frontest realizations of TRAP-n in the vowel space. Distinct patterns of vowel positioning and dynamism indicate there is systematic co-variation in the realization of features across California regions.
Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech)
Nathalie Dajko (Tulane University)
Lexical and syntactic features in New Orleans English
Forty-five New Orleanians completed a grammatical acceptability survey focused on local syntactic and lexical features. Results patterned by age and ethnicity, with some features appearing robust across groups and others favored by certain ethnic groups or used only by older speakers. For speakers under 30, Black and Creole speakers provided the highest acceptability ratings overall while White speakers generally rejected the structures. This patterning mirrors research in other locales suggesting increased divergence between Black and White dialects over time; in New Orleans it is due to White speakers shifting away from marked local linguistic features.
Patricia Cukor-Avila (University of North Texas)
Guy Bailey (University of Texas, Rio Grande)
Linguistic insights from a longitudinal case study
This paper examines the evolution of a vernacular through a 30-year longitudinal case study of an African American resident of Springville, Texas. It demonstrates how case studies provide unique insights into the acquisition and later development of a vernacular and also unique perspectives on transmission vs. diffusion, style shifting, and vernacular maintenance vs. lifespan changes. It also reveals many of the perils of the case study approach, such as apparent changes in the vernacular caused by the effects of gaps in communication, small numbers of tokens, and the relationship between the subject of the case study and the larger population.
Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria)
Exploring the dynamics of language change through the lens of community, caregiver, and child
This presentation targets the preschool and early elementary years, when children begin participating in linguistic change. Evidence from the community, caregivers, and children is triangulated to understand the dynamics of language change as they are activated on the ground and as they intersect with social aspects of community structure. Variationist analysis of adjectives of positivity and deontic modality reveals remarkable parallelism across features, highlighting regular differences across groups and enabling tentative answers to the following questions: Is the starting point for change the adult model or one with a shifted vector? Is inception of change parallel across girls and boys?
Stuart Davis (Indiana University)
Kelly Berkson (Indiana University)
Alyssa Strickler (University of Colorado)
Diary of a sound change: Patterns of incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana
This paper addresses incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of wordlist data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., nike, bison, cyber, tiger). We provide details of six /ay/ production patterns found in the Fort Wayne data which range on a continuum from no raising to phonological raising (i.e., raising before t-flaps, Dialect A). We document the elusive Dialect B (Joos, 1942) where raising occurs in write but not before t-flaps and find that Dialect B speakers tend not to raise in any trochaic words.
Derek Denis (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Vidhya Elango (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Srishti Prashar (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Maria Velasco (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Exploring the sounds of Multicultural Toronto English
Multiethnolects are dialects of majority languages that emerge among immigrant children in multilingual/multicultural neighbourhoods. Little research has been done on multiethnolects in North America. We document vowel phenomena in Multicultural Toronto English in comparison to normative Canadian English. CanE includes the Canadian Vowel Shift, Canadian Raising, fronted /uw/, split nasal /æ/ system, and diphthongal/fronted /ow/; MTE exhibits a lack of /æ/-tensing, monophthongal/backed /ow/, and non-participation in Canadian Raising; Canadian Shift and /uw/-fronting are common. These patterns are part of the MTE variable repertoire; some suggest alignment with the ambient norm, others are traced to the multiethnolectal nature of the community.
Aaron J. Dinkin (San Diego State University)
Low back merger encroaching at a stable dialect boundary in northern New York
This paper investigates the lot/thought merger in northern New York. Sociolinguistic interviews from eight communities are examined: four along the St. Lawrence River, and four 25 miles south of it. The western half of the data, including the city of Ogdensburg, shows robust lot/thought distinction, though apparent-time trends toward merger exist; east of Ogdensburg, the merger is much more advanced. The geographical sharpness of this boundary suggests it is not due merely to socioeconomic differences between communities. It may be due to historical patterns of transportation: in the 19th century, Ogdensburg was the easternmost navigable point of the river.
Stefan Dollinger (University of British Columbia)
The written questionnaire 2.0: Research-oriented approaches to dialectology in the classroom
This paper presents tested strategies for employing written questionnaires in undergraduate teaching. Originally neglected by sociolinguistics, written questionnaires have seen a revival starting with Chambers (1998). Recently, a first textbook has become available (Dollinger 2015), illustrating questionnaires as both an entry method and an effective gathering tool more generally. Students learn range of skills, from question design, pretesting and question revision, to data collection, analysis and interpretation. If design principles are followed — to be presented and discussed in this talk — questionnaire data is also much better than its reputation and thus useful beyond the teaching context.
David Durian (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania)
Richard Cameron (University of Illinois, Chicago)
The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago: Reexamining its development and progression
We trace the real-and-apparent time inception and development of the NCS in the vowel systems of 50 Chicagoans born between 1875-1990, drawing on data from earlier studies and data collected more recently. Results reveal significant unreported patterns of variation and possible reinterpretations of the onset and development of the NCS. Among speakers born after 1975, we find indications of reversal of the NCS among some speakers, but also signs the NCS has become more focused as a blue-collar speech marker. We explore implications for the refinement of models of vowel shifts, sound change transmission, and the stages of the NCS.
Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley College)
Another case of perfect-to-past reanalysis in African American English
This paper argues that use of ain’t for didn’t in African American English resulted from perfect-to-past reanalysis, parallel to the diachronic development of preterit had. Data from 42 speakers from Philadelphia (birth years 1901–1969) show an apparent time increase in use of ain’t in past contexts. This increase corresponds to a decrease in reliance on ain’t + preterit verb constructions, used in present perfect contexts, to convey past tense meaning as well. I hypothesize that semantic overlap between perfect and past meaning, supported by other aspects of AAE grammar, facilitated a rise in use of ain’t in past contexts.
Jessica Grieser (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Hypothesized to mitigate the effects of observer’s paradox, the Danger of Death (DoD) question has been a staple of sociolinguistic interviewing since the field’s inception. But how well does it really work? This study uses a measure of feature rates of African American Language morphosyntax and finds that while topic overall is a significant predictor of change in the rate of AAL morphosyntax use, DoD does not significantly increase the likelihood of seeing AAL features (p = 0.07), and in addition, aspects of the interviews themselves indicate that the question causes interviewee discomfort.
Benjamin Hebblethwaite (University of Florida)
Gullah structures, Atlantic structures: A cross-linguistic analysis of individuated plural determiner phrases
The individuated plural Determiner Phrase (DP) in Gullah shares structural affinities with Jamaican Patwa, Belize Kriol, Sierra Leone Krio, English, the Gbe languages Aja, Fon and Ewe, and French-lexified Haitian Creole, to name a few languages. The structural traits of Gullah’s individuated plural DP (de goat dem ‘the goats’) point to a combination of Germanic pre-nominal definiteness and Gbe post-nominal number marking. Cross-linguistic syntactic analysis illustrates the transmission of superstrate and substrate linguistic traits in Gullah and reveals the role of parameter settings in accounting for dialectal syntactic diversity.
Cory Holland (Worcester State University)
The relationship between front/low lax vowel movements in western US English
Using an implicational hierarchy (IH) and factor analysis (FA) I investigate connections between the lowering and/or retraction of BIT, BET, BAT, and BOT attested across vowel systems in the American West. Data is recorded reading passages from 106 speakers aged 18-72 from Colorado and California. The IH suggests BET leads retraction followed by BAT and BOT. A four factor FA, including both F1 and F2 dimensions for all vowels, supports and complicates the IH results, suggesting primary variability in the lowering of BET, BAT, and BOT, as well as backing of BAT and BOT, with variable involvement of BIT lowering.
Nicole Holliday (Pomona College)
Lemuel Lan (Pomona College)
Lauren Squires (Ohio State University)
“I’ve code-switched on behalf of the black student population”: Linguistic insecurity among Black students at HWIs
At Historically/Predominantly White Institutions (H/PWIs), students of color are confronted with discrimination stemming from racist ideologies. This study builds on research addressing linguistic diversity in higher education, exploring how language relates to other elements of black students’ experiences in HWIs. In our interviews with black/African American students about language in the classroom and on campus, we found that while their responses were diverse, they consistently told stories around three themes: stereotype threat, perceived incompetence, and bifurcated sociolinguistic identities. Their accounts reveal the daily linguistic labor these students perform as they navigate a campus environment that continues to foster sociolinguistic prejudice.
Emily Hughes (Oklahoma State University)
Phillip Weirich (Indiana University)
Oklahoma Perceptual Dialectology
This study presents an analysis of perceptual dialect maps drawn by 88 long-time Oklahoma residents. Participants described where/how people speak English differently within the state. By compiling data using a GIS, we created aggregate maps of labels and their associated regions. Categories of labels include Negative Attitude, Southern, Rural, Neutral/Standard Language, Twang, and Drawl. Negative Attitude aligns with Southern and Rural, while Neutral/Standard Language centers on urban areas. Twang and Drawl are associated with the south/southeast. Interestingly, Twang is also present in the cities. These findings suggest an urban/rural split among Oklahomans with regard to language variation in their state.
Bridget L. Jankowski (University of Toronto)
Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
“He come out and give me a beer but he never seen the bear”: Old preterites in Ontario dialects
A ubiquitous feature of vernacular English dialects is variation in strong verb preterite/participle morphology. We present a broad perspective on variable came/come, saw/seen, gave/give, and did/done, using data from more than a dozen Ontario communities, socially stratified by age, sex, occupation, education, and spanning more than 100 years in apparent-time. Comparative sociolinguistic methods and mixed effects models permit testing of social, geographic and linguistic factors on the variation. Despite strong social constraints due to standardization and increasing literacy, linguistic constraints endure. Given current trajectories, however, none of the vernacular preterite forms are likely to persist through the 21st century.
Arianna Janoff (Georgetown University)
“You know, we talk backwards”: A diachronic analysis of a Smith Island native
Smith Island is a small, maritime-based community in the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland. While ne may expect that population decrease and contact with the mainland would lead to the decline of the island dialect, this has not been the case. According to Schilling-Estes (1997, 2006), sociophonetic and lexical features have become even more distinct over time due to ‘dialect concentration’. Using FAVE and R, the present study examines the diachronic change of one white female speaker across the three waves of sociolinguistic interviews: 1985, 1999, and 2016. Real-time studies like this one demonstrate how time, environmental, and situational changes impact acoustic behavior.
Bryce E McCleary (Oklahoma State University)
“I bet it’s an ugly thing”: Constructing stance with creaky voice
Voice quality research is becoming increasingly popular in variation studies, but none has been conducted in Oklahoma, where research on gay identities and language is also limited. This project used discourse analysis and acoustic measures of voice quality to characterize expert-stance-taking by gay Oklahomans during interviews about their attitudes toward life and language in their home state. Interviews were coded for stance-taking and perceived voice quality. Acoustic analysis confirms respondents used creaky phonation to varying degrees, and patterns emerged to show that creaky voice can contribute to the construction of expert stance, particularly when being critical of Oklahoma life/culture.
- Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex)
Language ideology in lexical listicles: Americanisms for British audiences
Differences in British and American vocabulary are a popular topic for media “listicles”. Recent work has shown that listicles of “Britishisms” offer a rich resource for considering how English and Britishness is presented for American and British audiences. This paper looks at lists of “Americanisms” presented in contrast to British English with reference to the words’ formal features, list authorship and the asymmetrical relationships between the national standards. That asymmetry is enacted in how the listicles are framed and which words are presented in them.
Margarita Nemchuk (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology)
Jon Bakos (Indiana State University)
Small town Southern man: Comparing Southern features in the songs and interviews of Alan Jackson
A Southern accent is often seen as key to the performance of country music and to one’s larger Southern identity. This work examines the Southern dialect features of country music singer, Alan Jackson, in two contexts – songs and interviews. The investigation focuses on two Southern accent features, the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) and /ai/ monophthongization. Our data show that Jackson displays fewer Southern features in songs, such as a lack of FACE/DRESS inversion. When interviewed, however, Jackson displays more markers of Southern identity in his speech, such as more intense back vowel fronting and inversion of FACE and DRESS.
Rachel M. Olsen (University of Georgia)
Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia)
Michael Olsen (University of Georgia)
Lisa Lipani (University of Georgia)
Margaret E. L. Renwick (University of Georgia)
Reconciling perception with production in Southern speech
This project investigates the relationship between perception and acoustic measurements of monophthongization of canonical diphthongs (/aɪ aʊ ɔɪ/) in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech. We test whether impressionistic monophthongal transcription rates (e.g., [a], not [aɪ]) reflect the acoustic measure of Trajectory Length (TL), a quantification of F1 and F2 length capturing vowel movement across time. Because monophthongs are less dynamic than diphthongs, monophthongized vowels should have shorter TL; however, we found only a slight correlation (r = 0.22). Mixed modeling of perceptual vs. acoustic data also tells different stories, underlining the need to investigate the two in concert with one another.
Michael D. Picone (University of Alabama)
The linguistic ramifications of slave and ex-slave migrations within the American South
Early migrations saw Virginian and Carolinian slaves enter the Mississippi Territory, which increased with the Indian Removals. Hence creole-like features in some locations, such as the Black Belt of Mississippi and Alabama, may be partly due to westward migrations of Gullah speakers themselves. Gullah runaways into nearby Native American communities and subsequent points west present another vector. Massive slave migrations within the South, testimonies of interviewees collected by folklorists, and online respondents on Gullah websites all point to a “Gullah diaspora.” The possibility of subsequent dialect leveling must be considered as one potential explanatory vector regarding the sources of AAE.
Wil Rankinen (Grand Valley State University)
Aaron Albin (Kobe University)
TJ Neuhaus (Bowling Green State University)
Decline of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in western Lower Michigan: Apparent-time evidence of a change in progress
In central Lower Michigan, like other areas of the Inland North, younger speakers have been reported to exhibit a (1) reversal of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, (2) near-merger of low-back /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, and (3) allophonic split of /æ/ before nasals vs. stops. To confirm whether the same is true for western Lower Michigan (including Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city), a reading passage task was administered to a stratified sample of 45 speakers from the area. In younger speakers, all three of these characteristics were indeed observed, reinforcing their status as newly-developing features shared across the Inland North.
Jennifer Renn (Purdue University)
Annie Laurie Duguay (Center for Applied Linguistics
Embedding linguistics in content teacher training to support linguistically and culturally diverse students
This presentation describes the development and implementation of content modules created for pre- and in-service middle grades STEM teaching fellows enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching program at a public urban U.S. university. The modules sought to increase the fellows’ preparedness to work with linguistically and culturally diverse students by focusing on linguistic understanding, critical language awareness, and pedagogical modeling. Results highlight the need for including content on educational linguistics in educator training, as participants reported an improved understanding of academic language and the increased ability to create and modify activities for students from diverse language backgrounds.
Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto)
Tracking change in Canadian English utterance-initial discourse markers
Utterance-initial discourse markers have recently been the subject of metalinguistic commentary due to the perceived novelty of some variants (e.g., so), despite previous apparent-time research demonstrating their presence in speech across the age spectrum (Tagliamonte 2016). This study uses real-time television data to examine these markers in Canadian English throughout the past forty years. Results demonstrate that while some markers remain stable in their pragmatic functions over time, others undergo extension to new discourse-organizational roles. Overall, this study demonstrates both the systematic structuring of these markers in speech and their development and change within Canadian English from a historical perspective.
Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia)
Are beg- and bag-raising distinct? Regional patterns in prevelar raising in North American English
Prevelar raising is the conditioned raising of TRAP (BAG) and DRESS (BEG) before voiced velar consonants (as in flag, sag, aggravate and egg, leg, integrity). Using a categorization task distributed via Reddit as a survey, I collected 432,700 observations from 5,289 people. While the regional distribution of bag-raising generally coincided with previous research, beg-raising was much more widespread and was found in all areas except the South, with varying degrees of homogeneity. Because some areas had one without the other, I suggest that beg- and bag-raising may be more distinct than initially believed. This warrants further investigation using acoustic data.
Christopher Strelluf (University of Warwick)
anymore, It’s on Twitter: Positive-anymore, American regional dialects, and polarity-licensing in tweets
Positive-anymore has been widely researched in American Englishes, but studies have generally reported from problematic grammaticality judgments. This presentation examines productions of positive-anymore through a corpus of 80,000 tweets. Results confirm positive-anymore as a distinctive feature of US Midland grammar. However, results also show differences in productions within the Midland. Additionally, Midland cities show increased incidence of anymore with NPI triggers that should license NPIs in all dialects, suggesting that ostensibly ordinary NPI triggers interact with the use of anymore in positive polarity contexts. This presentation also considers ethical and legal issues relevant to building sociolinguistic corpora from Twitter data.
Isabelle Strong (Dartmouth College)
Julie Roberts (University of Vermont)
Is there anything left of the traditional Vermont dialect? A study of Vermont’s last frontier
The present study focuses on an understudied area of Vermont: The Northeast Kingdom (NEK). The NEK is an acknowledged and self-identifying region inhabited by so called “old Vermonters”: a group of traditionally working-class people whose families have lived in the area for generations. Though this area has maintained the traditional dialect longer, features like /aʊ/-raising are now receding. Results showed significant /aʊ/-raising in comparison to /ɑ/. Greater /aʊ/ raising was correlated with older age, male gender and lower SES. We conclude that /aʊ/-raising remains prevalent in the NEK but is still declining in this area despite its more rural setting.
Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
Tim Gadanidis (University of Toronto)
Jean-François Juneau (University of Toronto)
Kinza Mahoon (University of Toronto)
Andrei Munteanu (University of Toronto)
Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto)
Fiona Wilson (University of Toronto)
Sounding like a ‘Sounder’: Dialect accommodation in Ontario, Canada
Canadian English is thought to be homogenous countrywide (Chambers 2010); however, new research is uncovering dialect diversity in rural areas (e.g., Jankowski & Tagliamonte 2017). We report findings from 150 individuals in one such community: Parry Sound, Ontario. We find that the old-line dialect (e.g., zero plurals, ‘yet’ for ‘still’) remains robust among people born before 1960, and the area’s long-term residents align with them. The youngest generation, however, is near-indistinguishable from summer visitors from the south. Overall, the results constitute further evidence that rich regional dialects exist in Ontario; however, the obsolescent old-line dialect is unlikely to endure.
Posters
Craig Alexander (University of Glasgow)
Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow)
Tereza Neocleous (University of Glasgow)
Ludger Evers (University of Glasgow)
A new tool for sociolinguistic data analysis: Using graphical models to visualize mixed effects modeling for vowel formant data
We describe the development of a new statistical toolkit which has at its center functionality for modeling multiple response variables through linear mixed models. The toolkit develops upon the widely used R package lme4 (Bates, 2015) by allowing the modeling of multiple response variables. In terms of vowel formant modeling, they may now all be modeled simultaneously. This is advantageous as vowel formant measurements are often correlated, and we now take account for this correlation and obtain a more accurate model.
The toolkit also provides a visualization of the model output in the form of a graphical model.
Nicoleta Bateman (California State University, San Marcos)
Using formal English to teach the value of language variation and linguistic diversity
This poster describes a pedagogical tool — an experience and reflection assignment — designed to challenge students’ assumptions about their own “standard” use of English and the implications thereof toward understanding those who speak a non-dominant language (a nonstandard dialect or a non-mainstream language). Students in linguistics college courses and 8th grade students were challenged to use only formal English for one day, creating an uncomfortable experience, and subsequently to reflect on it. Reflections demonstrate that, by crudely approximating the linguistic experiences of non-mainstream speakers, this assignment helps students realize the value of nonstandard dialects and promotes an appreciation of linguistic diversity.
Samantha Beaver (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Glenn Starr (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Jonathan Jibson (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Patching together a picture of the low-back merger mid-century
We compare a small sample of phonetic data (daughter and got in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) from the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP), including unpublished fieldnotes from Frederic Cassidy, with later data from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE). Despite difficulties coding the transcribed LAP data by ANAE’s acoustic categorization, our analysis clearly suggests that the merger predates 1900. We find that regions with both merged and unmerged speakers in LAP are monolithically merged or unmerged in ANAE. We conclude that the spread of the merger consisted of leveling existing variation rather than the purported introduction of a novel phonology.
Mary Blockley (University of Texas, Austin)
Unetymological -o in the USA
Merriam-Webster reported a “meteoric rise” in the use of century-plus disyllabic doggo. OED3 (s.v. –o, suffix) does not address unetymological –o as in combo, which it curtly labels “slang.” Analogy with words that have an etymological <o> explains items like braino (cf. typo). Others — pinko/pink — are informal and deprecatory variants of monosyllables and truncations. Boyo and ammo, go back as far as the 16th century; others items are more recent: e.g., mus(ic)o, convo, compo, inspo, journo. –O’s current ubiquity may provide insight into earlier words of obscure etymology like hobo, jingo, bingo, and proprietary names like Jello and Brillo.
Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (University of Richmond)
Ideologically motivated semantic shift as evidence of linguistic relativism in contemporary
American English
Semantic shifts in the lexica of political economy reveal ideological motivating factors that act to limit semantic fields and the parameters of political reasoning. Some terms slipped along their syntagmas and acquired idiosyncratic meanings that ally with ideological changes: e.g., liberal, conservative, exceptionalism, left, right, red, ethnic, social, tipping. Conceptual metaphor theory demonstrates the subconscious, culturally determined generation of metaphors. Research on the persistence of pre-operational cognition illuminates psychological factors motivating semantic drift: e.g., metaphorical extension, reduction, elevation, degradation. These correlate with defense mechanisms: e.g., condensation, displacement, inversion, denial. A subliminal and protective fusion of concept and word image arises.
Andrew Bray (University of Georgia)
Canadian features in the speech of American-born NHL players
The speech of 10 American-born National Hockey League players was analyzed for two Canadian English features; Canadian Raising and monophthongal /ow/. While these features are found in different regional American Englishes, the Upper Midwest is the only where both are attested. The results demonstrate players from regions where raising occurs exhibit the feature. However, /aw/ remains backed in all but one players’ speech showing influence on non-raising players. A more monopthongal /ow/ was documented for all 10 players suggesting that it has become a second-order index for membership within a hockey-based population, as regional dialect cannot explain its uniform presence.
Hannah Brouse (University of New Mexico)
North American Sign Languages and the colonial power matrix
The only sign language option for North American deaf folks (regardless of culture of origin) is American Sign Language (ASL). Evaluating five centuries of North American sign languages using the colonial matrix of knowledge, I shift the loci of sign language knowledge to an indigenous lingua franca: Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). I build on the work of Melanie McKay-Cody and Ramón Grosfoguel to unveil ASL as a colonial language and PISL as a decolonial language practice for deaf and hearing North American indigenous folks alike and call for further study.
Katherine Conner (Ohio State University)
When violation goes viral: A continuing critical discourse analysis of social media comments on sexual assault
Do social media comments reflect “real life” sexual assault paradigms (i.e., hegemonic heterosexuality, victim blaming, “life ruining” consequences and “false” accusations)? How do people characterize victims/survivors, how “should” justice be pursued? This CDA found reflections of “real life” rape myths, discursive constructions of “violent” rape, “traditional” roles for men and women in rape (with little exception), and that the judicial system is seemingly the only “real” way to pursue justice. These results seem to support the ubiquity of current sexual assault paradigms. Some unique cases of individualized narrative occur in comments where a “survivor” role/identity was claimed by the commenter.
Angelo Costanzo (Bloomsburg University)
Language, ethnicity, and pierogi/pyrohy in the PA Anthracite Coal Region
This paper examines the relationship between language and ethnic identity in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region. I focus on three main questions: (1) How have immigrant languages brought to the region 100 years affected local English dialects? (2) Do any of these influences signal a particular ethnic identity? (3) How important is the maintenance of ethnic identity in younger generations
Ivy Hauser (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Individual differences in stop prevoicing among English speakers of the American northeast
This study provides evidence of stop prevoicing in American English speakers who are not speakers of the Southern or African-American varieties in which prevoicing has previously been described. The results suggest that English prevoicing might be more widespread than previously documented. The overall amount of prevoicing exhibited by a given speaker was found to be highly talker-specific but does not appear to be structured according social demographics. We conclude that these prevoicing differences reflect individual/idiolectal preferences and are not necessarily tied to a specific regional dialect.
Ho’omana Nathan Horton (Oklahoma State University)
“To describe it to a non-skater”: Skater identity and participation in the sociolinguistic interview
Skateboarding, like many other “lifestyle sports,” is viewed by most skaters and outsiders as countercultural, and a central value of skater identity is nonconformity. This study examines sociolinguistic interviews with four skaters, two conducted by a skater and two by an outsider and investigates the relationship between skater identity and participation in the goals of the sociolinguistic interview. The results demonstrate that skaters’ willingness to provide information which is meaningful to an out-group audience falls along a continuum which depends less upon the group identity of the interviewer and more upon the degree to which the interviewee’s identity as skater is central.
Jeffrey Kallen (Trinity College Dublin)
Enregisterment in linguistic landscapes: global insights from Irish English
Linking linguistic landscape (LL) research with the study of enregisterment and the commodification of language variation (cf. Agha 2003; Johnstone 2009), this presentation examines the indexical use of Irish English in the LL of Ireland and in overseas “Irish pubs.” Using fieldwork photographs, I argue that the physical placement features of the LL afford it a distinctive role in the enregisterment of lexicon, phonology, and discourse features: discourse elements are often indexical of oral traditions and of opportunities for further discourse. I conclude that features of discourse and space are crucial to the role of the LL in language enregisterment.
Tyler Kibbey (University of Kentucky)
The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereignty metaphors in the opening prayers of the 115th United States Congress
In this study, I undertake an analysis of roughly 800 prayers given before sessions of the U. S. Senate and House of Representative during the 115th Congress, and within that corpus, I specifically outline a system of theo-political religious metaphor related to divine sovereignty. This system, which takes GOD IS KING as its primary metaphor, creates an understanding of an anthropopathic end-point concept, GOD, in terms of an embodied conceptual domain of kingship and sovereignty. This system is both fundamental to and in conflict with the context in which it occurs, and this is exemplified by the utilized divine epithets.
Ayden Loughlin (University of Victoria)
Who is they? Pronoun use across time and social structure
This poster investigates who uses singular they and the effect of antecedent perceived gender on pronominal choice. A survey of 379 individuals (b.1939-2004) resulted in 588 tokens of they, 135 of he, and 91 of she, across three occupations: mechanic, secretary, student. Overall, they prevails. Mechanic (he) and secretary (she) remain gendered but are less so over apparent time as they increases. For student, they is consistently the most frequent choice. Participant gender is an important predictor: non-binary lead the change to they, followed by women. This study thus provides empirical evidence regarding pronominal reference across age and gender categories.
Isabel McKay (University of Arizona)
Laughing with letters: A corpus comparison of English written laughter expressions on Twitter
In this presentation I will discuss some similarities and differences between the use of nine English Written Laughter Expressions (WLEs) on Twitter. These forms are members of three different categories of WLEs: onomatopoeia (haha, hehe, tehe), acronyms (lol, lmao, lmfao), and emoji (😂, 🤣, 😆). I use quantitative techniques to compare and contrast the conversational use of WLEs from each of these groups and evaluate the unique meanings associated with each in order to establish a tentative typology of written laughter. Some criteria examined include positioning within the tweet, use in replies as opposed to non-replies, and gendered use patterns.
Elizabeth Peterson (University of Helsinki)
Call to action: Filling the sociolinguistic gap for English speakers worldwide
Most linguists are aware that currently the estimated number of worldwide English speakers is around 2 billion, with English serving as an additional language for the majority of these speakers. This fact brings to light specific responsibilities and opportunities for North American linguists, whose work continues to create a valuable cornerstone for how (English) linguistics is taught worldwide. This presentation highlights the often-overlooked importance of North American linguistic research in training both students and teachers. With this influence comes a responsibility for shaping the social consciousness of students of English, with language attitudes and sociolinguistic properties often remaining underdeveloped areas.
Alexandra Pfiffner (Georgetown University)
Word-final obstruent devoicing in Minnesota: Patterns in gradient neutralization
This study examines word-final obstruent devoicing in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota. Production data of underlying [b, d, g, v, ð, z] in various phonological environments show that Minnesotan word-final devoicing is not a case of complete neutralization; obstruents can maintain voicing, partially devoice, or devoice entirely. A multinomial logistic regression model demonstrates that voicing status can be predicted by both social and linguistic factors, including gender, age, obstruent identity, morphosyntactic status, and following environment. While gradient productions are expected phonetically, there are patterns that suggest a phonological component is also influencing devoicing.
Lisa Sprowls (Tulane University)
“A little Southern” in Little Italy: Phonology and linguistic perception in a Louisiana Italian- American community
This poster examines linguistic production and perception in Independence, Louisiana. Though within the Southern English isogloss, Independence is tied to New Orleans (an exception to the isogloss) through shared patterns of Italian immigration. A sociophonetic analysis of Italian-Americans in Independence shows that, while speakers produce aspects of both Southern and New Orleans phonologies, they avoid self-identification with either of these communities. Rather, speakers identify their overall accent (and even some specific features) as reflective of their Italian-American heritage. These results contribute to a better understanding of both Southern phonological variation and the role of ethnicity in linguistic identity and perception.
Felicia Jean Steele (College of New Jersey)
“Which English do we learn?”: Community Engaged Learning in the American English classroom
Students at The College of New Jersey participate in a Community Engaged Learning (CEL) project while enrolled in an upper-division linguistics class, LNG 372, American English. This poster demonstrates the application of community-engaged pedagogies and the introduction of applied linguistic methods into an undergraduate course in American Dialects. Students in the course tutor non-native speakers of English in an urban area where multiple dialects of English are spoken. CEL pedagogy invites students to interrogate discourse about standardness in newly arrived communities.
Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University)
Pre-Velar Raising Among Nordic Americans in Seattle
Pre-velar raising of /æg/ and /ɛg/, sometimes merging with /eyg/, has been treated as a dialect feature of the Pacific Northwest (Wassink 2015). Riebold (2015) highlights that Mexican, Japanese and Yakama Nation individuals in Washington participate with variation in this pattern. This study uses oral histories to explore the speech patterns of Nordic Americans (another founder group of the Puget Sound area) born from the 1920s through 1940s. The findings suggest that merger of /ɛg/ and /eyg/ preceded the merger of /æg/ and /eyg/ in the Pacific Northwest, and that the latter change may have occurred after the mid-20th century.
ADS abstracts
John Baugh (Washington University in St. Louis)
Linguistics, life, and death
Four African American male defendants were accused of murder in separate trials that hinged on linguistic results. The first case claims that a white witness “overheard the voice of a black man,” at the scene of the crime. The second case is from a wire-tapped recording of a defendant awaiting trial. The prosecutor asserted that he had admitted guilt during a phone call. Another case pertains to a drive-by shooting, where a child was killed. The final case represents a crime of passion after a lover’s quarrel. The defendant alleged racial bias based on prosecutor’s inflammatory characterizations of him during closing remarks.
Kara Becker (Reed College)
Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University)
The social meaning of TRAP-backing in West Coast English: Evidence from perception
This study uses perceptual data to explore the social meaning of TRAP-backing, a feature increasingly documented in West Coast English. 89 listeners from Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco heard backed or non-backed tokens of TRAP in short utterances. The findings show that Condition (backed vs. non-backed) is a significant predictor of perceived talker age and of the Serious~Frivolous affective scale, with TRAP-backing indexing youth and frivolousness for all three cities. However, listeners’ classifications of talker origin demonstrate that TRAP-backing is not perceived exclusively as a feature of California speech, supporting the view of the feature as a widespread phenomenon.
Jeremiah Bill (University of Rochester)
He Gong (University of Rochester)
Brooke Hamilton (University of Rochester)
Henry Hawthorn (University of Rochester)
Xiaonan Hu (University of Rochester)
Alexander Johnson (University of Rochester)
Alan Kuo (University of Rochester)
Nicholas Kasper (University of Rochester)
Tyler Knight (University of Rochester)
Elizabeth Lee (University of Rochester)
Rachel Myers (Georgetown University)
Caleb New (University of Rochester)
Madeline Rose (University of Rochester)
Anthony Russell (University of Rochester)
Sophie Sackstein (University of Rochester)
Lee Stovall (University of Rochester)
Justin Tian (University of Rochester)
Siddharth Vashishtha (University of Rochester)
Xiaoxuan Wang (University of Rochester)
Liqi Zhu (University of Rochester)
Maya Abtahian (University of Rochester)
Scott Grimm (University of Rochester)
The extension of (positive) anymore
“Positive anymore” describes the extension of NPI anymore to non-NPI contexts. We analyzed 13,267 unique occurrences of positive anymore collected online with respect to i) geographic distribution and ii) semantic extension from negative to positive contexts. We find a high frequency of occurrences outside the ANAE isogloss, demonstrating that the construction is not limited to that region and may be spreading. In addition, we consider positive anymore’s meaning as a “social negative” for those speakers that use it. Our results provide data for re-analysis of old questions on the linguistic and social mechanisms of the spread of the construction.
Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (Queen’s University)
Anastasia Riehl (Queen’s University)
We seen “eh” and so on: a preliminary study of three variables in the Wolfe Island English Corpus
This paper introduces a new sociolinguistic corpus, the Wolfe Island English Corpus (WIEC), comprised of interviews with 109 residents of a small island community in Southern Ontario. We present preliminary results concerning three variables that have been studied in detail in other varieties of Canadian English: the pragmatic marker eh; general extenders (and stuff, and whatever); and regularization of preterite and participial verb forms (I seen it). The WIEC generally conforms to expected Canadian patterns, while nonetheless differing in interesting ways from proximate urban centers.
Marie Bissell (North Carolina State University)
The role of linguistic self-perception in perceptual dialectology tasks
This paper examines how linguistic self-perception influences perceptions of others’ speech. Judgments about qualities of speech, especially when the speech is classified as sounding southern, are significantly influenced by self-perception of accent. This study both supports and challenges socio-psychological scholarship on how individuals with certain social characteristics rate others with those same social characteristics less favorably. Perceptual dialectology experiments canonically focus on the speech being judged rather than the person doing the judging and shifting attention towards the participant allows for greater potential to understand how linguistic self-perception affects the lens through which they view the language of others.
Chloe Brotherton (University of California, Davis)
Michelle Cohn (University of California, Davis)
Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis)
Santiago Barreda (University of California, Davis)
Regional variation in vowel positioning and diphthongization in TRAP allophones in California
Allophonic splitting of TRAP appears to be an ongoing and dynamic aspect of California vowels, involving co-variation of multiple acoustic properties: TRAP-n is raised, fronted, and diphthongal; elsewhere, it is retracting. We examine regional variation within California in phonetic co-variation of TRAP allophones, comparing speakers from the Bay Area, Central Valley, and Southern California. Bay Area and Central Valley speakers displayed the highest and most diphthongal TRAP-n; Bay Area also had the frontest realizations of TRAP-n in the vowel space. Distinct patterns of vowel positioning and dynamism indicate there is systematic co-variation in the realization of features across California regions.
Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech)
Nathalie Dajko (Tulane University)
Lexical and syntactic features in New Orleans English
Forty-five New Orleanians completed a grammatical acceptability survey focused on local syntactic and lexical features. Results patterned by age and ethnicity, with some features appearing robust across groups and others favored by certain ethnic groups or used only by older speakers. For speakers under 30, Black and Creole speakers provided the highest acceptability ratings overall while White speakers generally rejected the structures. This patterning mirrors research in other locales suggesting increased divergence between Black and White dialects over time; in New Orleans it is due to White speakers shifting away from marked local linguistic features.
Patricia Cukor-Avila (University of North Texas)
Guy Bailey (University of Texas, Rio Grande)
Linguistic insights from a longitudinal case study
This paper examines the evolution of a vernacular through a 30-year longitudinal case study of an African American resident of Springville, Texas. It demonstrates how case studies provide unique insights into the acquisition and later development of a vernacular and also unique perspectives on transmission vs. diffusion, style shifting, and vernacular maintenance vs. lifespan changes. It also reveals many of the perils of the case study approach, such as apparent changes in the vernacular caused by the effects of gaps in communication, small numbers of tokens, and the relationship between the subject of the case study and the larger population.
Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria)
Exploring the dynamics of language change through the lens of community, caregiver, and child
This presentation targets the preschool and early elementary years, when children begin participating in linguistic change. Evidence from the community, caregivers, and children is triangulated to understand the dynamics of language change as they are activated on the ground and as they intersect with social aspects of community structure. Variationist analysis of adjectives of positivity and deontic modality reveals remarkable parallelism across features, highlighting regular differences across groups and enabling tentative answers to the following questions: Is the starting point for change the adult model or one with a shifted vector? Is inception of change parallel across girls and boys?
Stuart Davis (Indiana University)
Kelly Berkson (Indiana University)
Alyssa Strickler (University of Colorado)
Diary of a sound change: Patterns of incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana
This paper addresses incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of wordlist data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., nike, bison, cyber, tiger). We provide details of six /ay/ production patterns found in the Fort Wayne data which range on a continuum from no raising to phonological raising (i.e., raising before t-flaps, Dialect A). We document the elusive Dialect B (Joos, 1942) where raising occurs in write but not before t-flaps and find that Dialect B speakers tend not to raise in any trochaic words.
Derek Denis (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Vidhya Elango (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Srishti Prashar (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Maria Velasco (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Exploring the sounds of Multicultural Toronto English
Multiethnolects are dialects of majority languages that emerge among immigrant children in multilingual/multicultural neighbourhoods. Little research has been done on multiethnolects in North America. We document vowel phenomena in Multicultural Toronto English in comparison to normative Canadian English. CanE includes the Canadian Vowel Shift, Canadian Raising, fronted /uw/, split nasal /æ/ system, and diphthongal/fronted /ow/; MTE exhibits a lack of /æ/-tensing, monophthongal/backed /ow/, and non-participation in Canadian Raising; Canadian Shift and /uw/-fronting are common. These patterns are part of the MTE variable repertoire; some suggest alignment with the ambient norm, others are traced to the multiethnolectal nature of the community.
Aaron J. Dinkin (San Diego State University)
Low back merger encroaching at a stable dialect boundary in northern New York
This paper investigates the lot/thought merger in northern New York. Sociolinguistic interviews from eight communities are examined: four along the St. Lawrence River, and four 25 miles south of it. The western half of the data, including the city of Ogdensburg, shows robust lot/thought distinction, though apparent-time trends toward merger exist; east of Ogdensburg, the merger is much more advanced. The geographical sharpness of this boundary suggests it is not due merely to socioeconomic differences between communities. It may be due to historical patterns of transportation: in the 19th century, Ogdensburg was the easternmost navigable point of the river.
Stefan Dollinger (University of British Columbia)
The written questionnaire 2.0: Research-oriented approaches to dialectology in the classroom
This paper presents tested strategies for employing written questionnaires in undergraduate teaching. Originally neglected by sociolinguistics, written questionnaires have seen a revival starting with Chambers (1998). Recently, a first textbook has become available (Dollinger 2015), illustrating questionnaires as both an entry method and an effective gathering tool more generally. Students learn range of skills, from question design, pretesting and question revision, to data collection, analysis and interpretation. If design principles are followed — to be presented and discussed in this talk — questionnaire data is also much better than its reputation and thus useful beyond the teaching context.
David Durian (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania)
Richard Cameron (University of Illinois, Chicago)
The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago: Reexamining its development and progression
We trace the real-and-apparent time inception and development of the NCS in the vowel systems of 50 Chicagoans born between 1875-1990, drawing on data from earlier studies and data collected more recently. Results reveal significant unreported patterns of variation and possible reinterpretations of the onset and development of the NCS. Among speakers born after 1975, we find indications of reversal of the NCS among some speakers, but also signs the NCS has become more focused as a blue-collar speech marker. We explore implications for the refinement of models of vowel shifts, sound change transmission, and the stages of the NCS.
Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley College)
Another case of perfect-to-past reanalysis in African American English
This paper argues that use of ain’t for didn’t in African American English resulted from perfect-to-past reanalysis, parallel to the diachronic development of preterit had. Data from 42 speakers from Philadelphia (birth years 1901–1969) show an apparent time increase in use of ain’t in past contexts. This increase corresponds to a decrease in reliance on ain’t + preterit verb constructions, used in present perfect contexts, to convey past tense meaning as well. I hypothesize that semantic overlap between perfect and past meaning, supported by other aspects of AAE grammar, facilitated a rise in use of ain’t in past contexts.
Jessica Grieser (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Hypothesized to mitigate the effects of observer’s paradox, the Danger of Death (DoD) question has been a staple of sociolinguistic interviewing since the field’s inception. But how well does it really work? This study uses a measure of feature rates of African American Language morphosyntax and finds that while topic overall is a significant predictor of change in the rate of AAL morphosyntax use, DoD does not significantly increase the likelihood of seeing AAL features (p = 0.07), and in addition, aspects of the interviews themselves indicate that the question causes interviewee discomfort.
Benjamin Hebblethwaite (University of Florida)
Gullah structures, Atlantic structures: A cross-linguistic analysis of individuated plural determiner phrases
The individuated plural Determiner Phrase (DP) in Gullah shares structural affinities with Jamaican Patwa, Belize Kriol, Sierra Leone Krio, English, the Gbe languages Aja, Fon and Ewe, and French-lexified Haitian Creole, to name a few languages. The structural traits of Gullah’s individuated plural DP (de goat dem ‘the goats’) point to a combination of Germanic pre-nominal definiteness and Gbe post-nominal number marking. Cross-linguistic syntactic analysis illustrates the transmission of superstrate and substrate linguistic traits in Gullah and reveals the role of parameter settings in accounting for dialectal syntactic diversity.
Cory Holland (Worcester State University)
The relationship between front/low lax vowel movements in western US English
Using an implicational hierarchy (IH) and factor analysis (FA) I investigate connections between the lowering and/or retraction of BIT, BET, BAT, and BOT attested across vowel systems in the American West. Data is recorded reading passages from 106 speakers aged 18-72 from Colorado and California. The IH suggests BET leads retraction followed by BAT and BOT. A four factor FA, including both F1 and F2 dimensions for all vowels, supports and complicates the IH results, suggesting primary variability in the lowering of BET, BAT, and BOT, as well as backing of BAT and BOT, with variable involvement of BIT lowering.
Nicole Holliday (Pomona College)
Lemuel Lan (Pomona College)
Lauren Squires (Ohio State University)
“I’ve code-switched on behalf of the black student population”: Linguistic insecurity among Black students at HWIs
At Historically/Predominantly White Institutions (H/PWIs), students of color are confronted with discrimination stemming from racist ideologies. This study builds on research addressing linguistic diversity in higher education, exploring how language relates to other elements of black students’ experiences in HWIs. In our interviews with black/African American students about language in the classroom and on campus, we found that while their responses were diverse, they consistently told stories around three themes: stereotype threat, perceived incompetence, and bifurcated sociolinguistic identities. Their accounts reveal the daily linguistic labor these students perform as they navigate a campus environment that continues to foster sociolinguistic prejudice.
Emily Hughes (Oklahoma State University)
Phillip Weirich (Indiana University)
Oklahoma Perceptual Dialectology
This study presents an analysis of perceptual dialect maps drawn by 88 long-time Oklahoma residents. Participants described where/how people speak English differently within the state. By compiling data using a GIS, we created aggregate maps of labels and their associated regions. Categories of labels include Negative Attitude, Southern, Rural, Neutral/Standard Language, Twang, and Drawl. Negative Attitude aligns with Southern and Rural, while Neutral/Standard Language centers on urban areas. Twang and Drawl are associated with the south/southeast. Interestingly, Twang is also present in the cities. These findings suggest an urban/rural split among Oklahomans with regard to language variation in their state.
Bridget L. Jankowski (University of Toronto)
Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
“He come out and give me a beer but he never seen the bear”: Old preterites in Ontario dialects
A ubiquitous feature of vernacular English dialects is variation in strong verb preterite/participle morphology. We present a broad perspective on variable came/come, saw/seen, gave/give, and did/done, using data from more than a dozen Ontario communities, socially stratified by age, sex, occupation, education, and spanning more than 100 years in apparent-time. Comparative sociolinguistic methods and mixed effects models permit testing of social, geographic and linguistic factors on the variation. Despite strong social constraints due to standardization and increasing literacy, linguistic constraints endure. Given current trajectories, however, none of the vernacular preterite forms are likely to persist through the 21st century.
Arianna Janoff (Georgetown University)
“You know, we talk backwards”: A diachronic analysis of a Smith Island native
Smith Island is a small, maritime-based community in the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland. While ne may expect that population decrease and contact with the mainland would lead to the decline of the island dialect, this has not been the case. According to Schilling-Estes (1997, 2006), sociophonetic and lexical features have become even more distinct over time due to ‘dialect concentration’. Using FAVE and R, the present study examines the diachronic change of one white female speaker across the three waves of sociolinguistic interviews: 1985, 1999, and 2016. Real-time studies like this one demonstrate how time, environmental, and situational changes impact acoustic behavior.
Bryce E McCleary (Oklahoma State University)
“I bet it’s an ugly thing”: Constructing stance with creaky voice
Voice quality research is becoming increasingly popular in variation studies, but none has been conducted in Oklahoma, where research on gay identities and language is also limited. This project used discourse analysis and acoustic measures of voice quality to characterize expert-stance-taking by gay Oklahomans during interviews about their attitudes toward life and language in their home state. Interviews were coded for stance-taking and perceived voice quality. Acoustic analysis confirms respondents used creaky phonation to varying degrees, and patterns emerged to show that creaky voice can contribute to the construction of expert stance, particularly when being critical of Oklahoma life/culture.
- Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex)
Language ideology in lexical listicles: Americanisms for British audiences
Differences in British and American vocabulary are a popular topic for media “listicles”. Recent work has shown that listicles of “Britishisms” offer a rich resource for considering how English and Britishness is presented for American and British audiences. This paper looks at lists of “Americanisms” presented in contrast to British English with reference to the words’ formal features, list authorship and the asymmetrical relationships between the national standards. That asymmetry is enacted in how the listicles are framed and which words are presented in them.
Margarita Nemchuk (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology)
Jon Bakos (Indiana State University)
Small town Southern man: Comparing Southern features in the songs and interviews of Alan Jackson
A Southern accent is often seen as key to the performance of country music and to one’s larger Southern identity. This work examines the Southern dialect features of country music singer, Alan Jackson, in two contexts – songs and interviews. The investigation focuses on two Southern accent features, the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) and /ai/ monophthongization. Our data show that Jackson displays fewer Southern features in songs, such as a lack of FACE/DRESS inversion. When interviewed, however, Jackson displays more markers of Southern identity in his speech, such as more intense back vowel fronting and inversion of FACE and DRESS.
Rachel M. Olsen (University of Georgia)
Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia)
Michael Olsen (University of Georgia)
Lisa Lipani (University of Georgia)
Margaret E. L. Renwick (University of Georgia)
Reconciling perception with production in Southern speech
This project investigates the relationship between perception and acoustic measurements of monophthongization of canonical diphthongs (/aɪ aʊ ɔɪ/) in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech. We test whether impressionistic monophthongal transcription rates (e.g., [a], not [aɪ]) reflect the acoustic measure of Trajectory Length (TL), a quantification of F1 and F2 length capturing vowel movement across time. Because monophthongs are less dynamic than diphthongs, monophthongized vowels should have shorter TL; however, we found only a slight correlation (r = 0.22). Mixed modeling of perceptual vs. acoustic data also tells different stories, underlining the need to investigate the two in concert with one another.
Michael D. Picone (University of Alabama)
The linguistic ramifications of slave and ex-slave migrations within the American South
Early migrations saw Virginian and Carolinian slaves enter the Mississippi Territory, which increased with the Indian Removals. Hence creole-like features in some locations, such as the Black Belt of Mississippi and Alabama, may be partly due to westward migrations of Gullah speakers themselves. Gullah runaways into nearby Native American communities and subsequent points west present another vector. Massive slave migrations within the South, testimonies of interviewees collected by folklorists, and online respondents on Gullah websites all point to a “Gullah diaspora.” The possibility of subsequent dialect leveling must be considered as one potential explanatory vector regarding the sources of AAE.
Wil Rankinen (Grand Valley State University)
Aaron Albin (Kobe University)
TJ Neuhaus (Bowling Green State University)
Decline of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in western Lower Michigan: Apparent-time evidence of a change in progress
In central Lower Michigan, like other areas of the Inland North, younger speakers have been reported to exhibit a (1) reversal of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, (2) near-merger of low-back /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, and (3) allophonic split of /æ/ before nasals vs. stops. To confirm whether the same is true for western Lower Michigan (including Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city), a reading passage task was administered to a stratified sample of 45 speakers from the area. In younger speakers, all three of these characteristics were indeed observed, reinforcing their status as newly-developing features shared across the Inland North.
Jennifer Renn (Purdue University)
Annie Laurie Duguay (Center for Applied Linguistics
Embedding linguistics in content teacher training to support linguistically and culturally diverse students
This presentation describes the development and implementation of content modules created for pre- and in-service middle grades STEM teaching fellows enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching program at a public urban U.S. university. The modules sought to increase the fellows’ preparedness to work with linguistically and culturally diverse students by focusing on linguistic understanding, critical language awareness, and pedagogical modeling. Results highlight the need for including content on educational linguistics in educator training, as participants reported an improved understanding of academic language and the increased ability to create and modify activities for students from diverse language backgrounds.
Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto)
Tracking change in Canadian English utterance-initial discourse markers
Utterance-initial discourse markers have recently been the subject of metalinguistic commentary due to the perceived novelty of some variants (e.g., so), despite previous apparent-time research demonstrating their presence in speech across the age spectrum (Tagliamonte 2016). This study uses real-time television data to examine these markers in Canadian English throughout the past forty years. Results demonstrate that while some markers remain stable in their pragmatic functions over time, others undergo extension to new discourse-organizational roles. Overall, this study demonstrates both the systematic structuring of these markers in speech and their development and change within Canadian English from a historical perspective.
Joseph A. Stanley (University of Georgia)
Are beg- and bag-raising distinct? Regional patterns in prevelar raising in North American English
Prevelar raising is the conditioned raising of TRAP (BAG) and DRESS (BEG) before voiced velar consonants (as in flag, sag, aggravate and egg, leg, integrity). Using a categorization task distributed via Reddit as a survey, I collected 432,700 observations from 5,289 people. While the regional distribution of bag-raising generally coincided with previous research, beg-raising was much more widespread and was found in all areas except the South, with varying degrees of homogeneity. Because some areas had one without the other, I suggest that beg- and bag-raising may be more distinct than initially believed. This warrants further investigation using acoustic data.
Christopher Strelluf (University of Warwick)
anymore, It’s on Twitter: Positive-anymore, American regional dialects, and polarity-licensing in tweets
Positive-anymore has been widely researched in American Englishes, but studies have generally reported from problematic grammaticality judgments. This presentation examines productions of positive-anymore through a corpus of 80,000 tweets. Results confirm positive-anymore as a distinctive feature of US Midland grammar. However, results also show differences in productions within the Midland. Additionally, Midland cities show increased incidence of anymore with NPI triggers that should license NPIs in all dialects, suggesting that ostensibly ordinary NPI triggers interact with the use of anymore in positive polarity contexts. This presentation also considers ethical and legal issues relevant to building sociolinguistic corpora from Twitter data.
Isabelle Strong (Dartmouth College)
Julie Roberts (University of Vermont)
Is there anything left of the traditional Vermont dialect? A study of Vermont’s last frontier
The present study focuses on an understudied area of Vermont: The Northeast Kingdom (NEK). The NEK is an acknowledged and self-identifying region inhabited by so called “old Vermonters”: a group of traditionally working-class people whose families have lived in the area for generations. Though this area has maintained the traditional dialect longer, features like /aʊ/-raising are now receding. Results showed significant /aʊ/-raising in comparison to /ɑ/. Greater /aʊ/ raising was correlated with older age, male gender and lower SES. We conclude that /aʊ/-raising remains prevalent in the NEK but is still declining in this area despite its more rural setting.
Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
Tim Gadanidis (University of Toronto)
Jean-François Juneau (University of Toronto)
Kinza Mahoon (University of Toronto)
Andrei Munteanu (University of Toronto)
Lisa Schlegl (University of Toronto)
Fiona Wilson (University of Toronto)
Sounding like a ‘Sounder’: Dialect accommodation in Ontario, Canada
Canadian English is thought to be homogenous countrywide (Chambers 2010); however, new research is uncovering dialect diversity in rural areas (e.g., Jankowski & Tagliamonte 2017). We report findings from 150 individuals in one such community: Parry Sound, Ontario. We find that the old-line dialect (e.g., zero plurals, ‘yet’ for ‘still’) remains robust among people born before 1960, and the area’s long-term residents align with them. The youngest generation, however, is near-indistinguishable from summer visitors from the south. Overall, the results constitute further evidence that rich regional dialects exist in Ontario; however, the obsolescent old-line dialect is unlikely to endure.
Posters
Craig Alexander (University of Glasgow)
Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow)
Tereza Neocleous (University of Glasgow)
Ludger Evers (University of Glasgow)
A new tool for sociolinguistic data analysis: Using graphical models to visualize mixed effects modeling for vowel formant data
We describe the development of a new statistical toolkit which has at its center functionality for modeling multiple response variables through linear mixed models. The toolkit develops upon the widely used R package lme4 (Bates, 2015) by allowing the modeling of multiple response variables. In terms of vowel formant modeling, they may now all be modeled simultaneously. This is advantageous as vowel formant measurements are often correlated, and we now take account for this correlation and obtain a more accurate model.
The toolkit also provides a visualization of the model output in the form of a graphical model.
Nicoleta Bateman (California State University, San Marcos)
Using formal English to teach the value of language variation and linguistic diversity
This poster describes a pedagogical tool — an experience and reflection assignment — designed to challenge students’ assumptions about their own “standard” use of English and the implications thereof toward understanding those who speak a non-dominant language (a nonstandard dialect or a non-mainstream language). Students in linguistics college courses and 8th grade students were challenged to use only formal English for one day, creating an uncomfortable experience, and subsequently to reflect on it. Reflections demonstrate that, by crudely approximating the linguistic experiences of non-mainstream speakers, this assignment helps students realize the value of nonstandard dialects and promotes an appreciation of linguistic diversity.
Samantha Beaver (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Glenn Starr (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Jonathan Jibson (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Patching together a picture of the low-back merger mid-century
We compare a small sample of phonetic data (daughter and got in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) from the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP), including unpublished fieldnotes from Frederic Cassidy, with later data from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE). Despite difficulties coding the transcribed LAP data by ANAE’s acoustic categorization, our analysis clearly suggests that the merger predates 1900. We find that regions with both merged and unmerged speakers in LAP are monolithically merged or unmerged in ANAE. We conclude that the spread of the merger consisted of leveling existing variation rather than the purported introduction of a novel phonology.
Mary Blockley (University of Texas, Austin)
Unetymological -o in the USA
Merriam-Webster reported a “meteoric rise” in the use of century-plus disyllabic doggo. OED3 (s.v. –o, suffix) does not address unetymological –o as in combo, which it curtly labels “slang.” Analogy with words that have an etymological <o> explains items like braino (cf. typo). Others — pinko/pink — are informal and deprecatory variants of monosyllables and truncations. Boyo and ammo, go back as far as the 16th century; others items are more recent: e.g., mus(ic)o, convo, compo, inspo, journo. –O’s current ubiquity may provide insight into earlier words of obscure etymology like hobo, jingo, bingo, and proprietary names like Jello and Brillo.
Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (University of Richmond)
Ideologically motivated semantic shift as evidence of linguistic relativism in contemporary
American English
Semantic shifts in the lexica of political economy reveal ideological motivating factors that act to limit semantic fields and the parameters of political reasoning. Some terms slipped along their syntagmas and acquired idiosyncratic meanings that ally with ideological changes: e.g., liberal, conservative, exceptionalism, left, right, red, ethnic, social, tipping. Conceptual metaphor theory demonstrates the subconscious, culturally determined generation of metaphors. Research on the persistence of pre-operational cognition illuminates psychological factors motivating semantic drift: e.g., metaphorical extension, reduction, elevation, degradation. These correlate with defense mechanisms: e.g., condensation, displacement, inversion, denial. A subliminal and protective fusion of concept and word image arises.
Andrew Bray (University of Georgia)
Canadian features in the speech of American-born NHL players
The speech of 10 American-born National Hockey League players was analyzed for two Canadian English features; Canadian Raising and monophthongal /ow/. While these features are found in different regional American Englishes, the Upper Midwest is the only where both are attested. The results demonstrate players from regions where raising occurs exhibit the feature. However, /aw/ remains backed in all but one players’ speech showing influence on non-raising players. A more monopthongal /ow/ was documented for all 10 players suggesting that it has become a second-order index for membership within a hockey-based population, as regional dialect cannot explain its uniform presence.
Hannah Brouse (University of New Mexico)
North American Sign Languages and the colonial power matrix
The only sign language option for North American deaf folks (regardless of culture of origin) is American Sign Language (ASL). Evaluating five centuries of North American sign languages using the colonial matrix of knowledge, I shift the loci of sign language knowledge to an indigenous lingua franca: Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). I build on the work of Melanie McKay-Cody and Ramón Grosfoguel to unveil ASL as a colonial language and PISL as a decolonial language practice for deaf and hearing North American indigenous folks alike and call for further study.
Katherine Conner (Ohio State University)
When violation goes viral: A continuing critical discourse analysis of social media comments on sexual assault
Do social media comments reflect “real life” sexual assault paradigms (i.e., hegemonic heterosexuality, victim blaming, “life ruining” consequences and “false” accusations)? How do people characterize victims/survivors, how “should” justice be pursued? This CDA found reflections of “real life” rape myths, discursive constructions of “violent” rape, “traditional” roles for men and women in rape (with little exception), and that the judicial system is seemingly the only “real” way to pursue justice. These results seem to support the ubiquity of current sexual assault paradigms. Some unique cases of individualized narrative occur in comments where a “survivor” role/identity was claimed by the commenter.
Angelo Costanzo (Bloomsburg University)
Language, ethnicity, and pierogi/pyrohy in the PA Anthracite Coal Region
This paper examines the relationship between language and ethnic identity in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region. I focus on three main questions: (1) How have immigrant languages brought to the region 100 years affected local English dialects? (2) Do any of these influences signal a particular ethnic identity? (3) How important is the maintenance of ethnic identity in younger generations
Ivy Hauser (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Individual differences in stop prevoicing among English speakers of the American northeast
This study provides evidence of stop prevoicing in American English speakers who are not speakers of the Southern or African-American varieties in which prevoicing has previously been described. The results suggest that English prevoicing might be more widespread than previously documented. The overall amount of prevoicing exhibited by a given speaker was found to be highly talker-specific but does not appear to be structured according social demographics. We conclude that these prevoicing differences reflect individual/idiolectal preferences and are not necessarily tied to a specific regional dialect.
Ho’omana Nathan Horton (Oklahoma State University)
“To describe it to a non-skater”: Skater identity and participation in the sociolinguistic interview
Skateboarding, like many other “lifestyle sports,” is viewed by most skaters and outsiders as countercultural, and a central value of skater identity is nonconformity. This study examines sociolinguistic interviews with four skaters, two conducted by a skater and two by an outsider and investigates the relationship between skater identity and participation in the goals of the sociolinguistic interview. The results demonstrate that skaters’ willingness to provide information which is meaningful to an out-group audience falls along a continuum which depends less upon the group identity of the interviewer and more upon the degree to which the interviewee’s identity as skater is central.
Jeffrey Kallen (Trinity College Dublin)
Enregisterment in linguistic landscapes: global insights from Irish English
Linking linguistic landscape (LL) research with the study of enregisterment and the commodification of language variation (cf. Agha 2003; Johnstone 2009), this presentation examines the indexical use of Irish English in the LL of Ireland and in overseas “Irish pubs.” Using fieldwork photographs, I argue that the physical placement features of the LL afford it a distinctive role in the enregisterment of lexicon, phonology, and discourse features: discourse elements are often indexical of oral traditions and of opportunities for further discourse. I conclude that features of discourse and space are crucial to the role of the LL in language enregisterment.
Tyler Kibbey (University of Kentucky)
The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereignty metaphors in the opening prayers of the 115th United States Congress
In this study, I undertake an analysis of roughly 800 prayers given before sessions of the U. S. Senate and House of Representative during the 115th Congress, and within that corpus, I specifically outline a system of theo-political religious metaphor related to divine sovereignty. This system, which takes GOD IS KING as its primary metaphor, creates an understanding of an anthropopathic end-point concept, GOD, in terms of an embodied conceptual domain of kingship and sovereignty. This system is both fundamental to and in conflict with the context in which it occurs, and this is exemplified by the utilized divine epithets.
Ayden Loughlin (University of Victoria)
Who is they? Pronoun use across time and social structure
This poster investigates who uses singular they and the effect of antecedent perceived gender on pronominal choice. A survey of 379 individuals (b.1939-2004) resulted in 588 tokens of they, 135 of he, and 91 of she, across three occupations: mechanic, secretary, student. Overall, they prevails. Mechanic (he) and secretary (she) remain gendered but are less so over apparent time as they increases. For student, they is consistently the most frequent choice. Participant gender is an important predictor: non-binary lead the change to they, followed by women. This study thus provides empirical evidence regarding pronominal reference across age and gender categories.
Isabel McKay (University of Arizona)
Laughing with letters: A corpus comparison of English written laughter expressions on Twitter
In this presentation I will discuss some similarities and differences between the use of nine English Written Laughter Expressions (WLEs) on Twitter. These forms are members of three different categories of WLEs: onomatopoeia (haha, hehe, tehe), acronyms (lol, lmao, lmfao), and emoji (😂, 🤣, 😆). I use quantitative techniques to compare and contrast the conversational use of WLEs from each of these groups and evaluate the unique meanings associated with each in order to establish a tentative typology of written laughter. Some criteria examined include positioning within the tweet, use in replies as opposed to non-replies, and gendered use patterns.
Elizabeth Peterson (University of Helsinki)
Call to action: Filling the sociolinguistic gap for English speakers worldwide
Most linguists are aware that currently the estimated number of worldwide English speakers is around 2 billion, with English serving as an additional language for the majority of these speakers. This fact brings to light specific responsibilities and opportunities for North American linguists, whose work continues to create a valuable cornerstone for how (English) linguistics is taught worldwide. This presentation highlights the often-overlooked importance of North American linguistic research in training both students and teachers. With this influence comes a responsibility for shaping the social consciousness of students of English, with language attitudes and sociolinguistic properties often remaining underdeveloped areas.
Alexandra Pfiffner (Georgetown University)
Word-final obstruent devoicing in Minnesota: Patterns in gradient neutralization
This study examines word-final obstruent devoicing in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota. Production data of underlying [b, d, g, v, ð, z] in various phonological environments show that Minnesotan word-final devoicing is not a case of complete neutralization; obstruents can maintain voicing, partially devoice, or devoice entirely. A multinomial logistic regression model demonstrates that voicing status can be predicted by both social and linguistic factors, including gender, age, obstruent identity, morphosyntactic status, and following environment. While gradient productions are expected phonetically, there are patterns that suggest a phonological component is also influencing devoicing.
Lisa Sprowls (Tulane University)
“A little Southern” in Little Italy: Phonology and linguistic perception in a Louisiana Italian- American community
This poster examines linguistic production and perception in Independence, Louisiana. Though within the Southern English isogloss, Independence is tied to New Orleans (an exception to the isogloss) through shared patterns of Italian immigration. A sociophonetic analysis of Italian-Americans in Independence shows that, while speakers produce aspects of both Southern and New Orleans phonologies, they avoid self-identification with either of these communities. Rather, speakers identify their overall accent (and even some specific features) as reflective of their Italian-American heritage. These results contribute to a better understanding of both Southern phonological variation and the role of ethnicity in linguistic identity and perception.
Felicia Jean Steele (College of New Jersey)
“Which English do we learn?”: Community Engaged Learning in the American English classroom
Students at The College of New Jersey participate in a Community Engaged Learning (CEL) project while enrolled in an upper-division linguistics class, LNG 372, American English. This poster demonstrates the application of community-engaged pedagogies and the introduction of applied linguistic methods into an undergraduate course in American Dialects. Students in the course tutor non-native speakers of English in an urban area where multiple dialects of English are spoken. CEL pedagogy invites students to interrogate discourse about standardness in newly arrived communities.
Julia Thomas Swan (San Jose State University)
Pre-Velar Raising Among Nordic Americans in Seattle
Pre-velar raising of /æg/ and /ɛg/, sometimes merging with /eyg/, has been treated as a dialect feature of the Pacific Northwest (Wassink 2015). Riebold (2015) highlights that Mexican, Japanese and Yakama Nation individuals in Washington participate with variation in this pattern. This study uses oral histories to explore the speech patterns of Nordic Americans (another founder group of the Puget Sound area) born from the 1920s through 1940s. The findings suggest that merger of /ɛg/ and /eyg/ preceded the merger of /æg/ and /eyg/ in the Pacific Northwest, and that the latter change may have occurred after the mid-20th century.