Three Students Honored

ADS President Walt Wolfram announces his award of Presidential Honorary Memberships 1998-2001 to Charles Boberg, McGill Univ., nominated by Bill Labov; Gordon Easson, Univ. ofToronto, nominated by Jack Chambers; and Julie Kerekes, Stanford Univ., nominated by John Baugh.

The four-year complimentary memberships are intended to encourage interest and participation in our field by outstanding students, graduate or undergraduate.

Nominations are now invited for next year's three Presidential Honorary Memberships. All that is needed is a letter of recommendation, although supporting material is also welcome. Send nominations to President Wolfram at Dept. of English, North Carolina State Univ., Box 8105, Raleigh NC 27695-8105.

January 1998: Highlights of New York Annual Meeting

Lisa Ann Lane was elected to membership on the Executive Council. . . . Much consideration was given to proposals from potential publishers for our journals, with the hope of making a decision shortly (for the latest information, contact President Walt Wolfram). . . . William Labov gave a well-received luncheon talk to a record audience of 90 on "Merging Sociolinguistics and Dialectology." His models for the two complementary approaches are at websites http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html and http://hyde.park.uga.edu.

NWAV(E) XXVII

This year's annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (in English) will be held in Athens, Georgia, at the University of Georgia Oct. 1-4.

Plenary speakers will include William Labov and Salikoko Mufwene.

Information about submission of abstracts will be forthcoming in March. For further information, please send to nwave27@linguistics.uga.edu, fax to (706) 542-2897, or write Bill Kretzschmar, NWAV(E) 27, Linguistics Program, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-6205. A Web site devoted to the conference should be set up by the time this notice is published, at http://linguistics.uga.edu/nwave27.

In the two days preceding NWAV(E) 27, September 29 and 30, there will be a state-of-the-art conference on AAVE, hosted by Professor Sonja Lanehart, called "Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American Vernacular English." This meeting will feature invited presentations by 14 leading scholars in the field, with ample opportunity for discussion.

Both events will be held at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education on the Georgia campus. When registration materials are available (not yet), it will be possible to register for both events (or either one separately) on the same form.

Wolfram for Tamony XIII

Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University will present the Peter Tamony Memorial Lecture on American Language at 3:45 p.m. Friday, April 24, in Ellis Library Auditorium at the University of Missouri, Columbia. A public reception will be held immediately following at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection offices across the hall.

Wolfram's talk will address the questions: "What are social and ethnic dialects? Why do they exist? Why are they important?"

It is the 13th annual lecture commemorating the gift to the WHMC of the clippings of slang and colloquialisms collected by San Francisco lawyer Peter Tamony (1902-1985).

For further information, contact Nancy Lankford or Sue McCubbin at Western Historical Manuscript Collection, 23 Ellis Library, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia MO 65201-5149; phone (573) 882-6028; lankforn@ext.missouri.edu or mccubbis@ext.missouri.edu.

ADS at NCTE, November

As usual, ADS will sponsor a concurrent session at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, to be held in Nashville Nov. 19-22. "Southern Mountain English" is the theme of the session being organized by Bethany K. Dumas, English Dept., Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996-0430; phone (423) 974-6965; dumasb@utk.edu.

For membership and convention information write NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana IL 61801-1096; phone (800) 369-6283 or (217) 328-3870; http://www.ncte.org.

ADS at ILA in April:
Spanish se, Franco-American thNew Order Amish Women, Early Anabaptists

ADS-sponsored session at the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association, New York University, April 17-19.

Chair and ADS Northeast Regional Secretary: Silke Van Ness, Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures, University at Albany, HU 216, SUNY, Albany NY 12222; (518) 442-5191; sv478@cnsvax.albany.edu.

Conference chair: John R. Costello, Dept. of Linguistics, New York Univ., 719 Broadway Room 504, New York NY 10003-6860; phone (212) 998-7948; costellj@is2.nyu.edu.

Registration before March 17 is $30 ILA members, $40 others, $20 student ILA members, $30 student non-members. After March 17, all categories go up $10.

ADS session: Panel B

9:00-11:00 a.m. Saturday, April 18

·9:00-9:25: "Spanish se Structures." Maurice Westmoreland, University at Albany, SUNY.

The following study will undertake an analysis of the issues of voice, transitivity, and pronominality as motivation for the patterns of meaning and agreement found in Spanish se structures. The following provide a few examples of the variety of meanings associated with se:

"Juan se lava cada dia" (John washes himself every day)

"Ellos se lavan cada dia" (They wash each other every day)

"Juan se comió toda la pizza" (John ate up all the pizza)

"Juan se durmió a las seis" (John fell asleep at 6)

"Se lo mandé, el paquete" (I mailed him the package)

"Se me cortó el pelo" (I got my hair cut)

"Se me olvidaron los vasos" (I went and forgot the glasses)

"Ya se construyeron las casas" (The houses were already built)

The study will focus in particular on those structures categorized as pseudo-reflexive, ergative, detransitivizing, and (ethical) dative, and will argue that current patterns of usage are informed by specific instances of analogy, iconicity, and regrammaticization.

·9:25-9:50: "The French-Influenced Dialect of Manchester, NH." Wendy Ryback-Soucy, Univ. of New Hampshire.

Numerous factors can influence variation in a spoken language, for example, the languages one is continously exposed to, how mobile one is, and the geographical area one is raised in. This paper presents a study on the French language's influence on Franco-American English in Manchester, New Hampshire.

I show that the Franco-American community of Manchester speaks a distinct variety of American English. The dialectal features can be traced to influence from French, as Manchester has had a strong presence of Franco-Americans dating back to the late 1800s. Speakers who have stronger cultural connections to French and/or are linguistically more French dominant exhibit this resemblance by producing a more French-sounding English. This prediction parallels the findings cited in Nagy et al.'s paper, "On the acquisition of variable phonology in L2."

The two linguistic variables examined:

1. Th fricative pronounced either as in English, or as a t or d stop, because th is not a sound that is native to the French language. Them may be pronounced as tem or dem, suggesting French influence.

2. Word-initial h, either articulated or deleted, for example in such words as 'air, 'ands, and 'eadache. The French language lacks /h/ in any environment (Janda & Auger 1992), so it is expected that these speakers may not have mastered the rules for its production, and deletion of this sound would indicate French influence.

Both social and linguistic information was obtained. Rather than including a non-French control group, speakers are divided into categories: those that are more-French-oriented and those that are less-French-oriented. The difference between these two groups supports the hypothesis that speakers with more French orientation will have a more French-sounding English. For example, speakers who were involved with Franco-American social groups had 21 percent stops as compared with speakers with no involvement at 7 percent. Also, speakers who grew up in the heavily Franco-American populated west side of Manchester, known as "Little Canada," produced twice as many stops (16 percent) as those living on the east side (8 percent), which is more ethnically diverse.

·10:15-10:40: "The Variable Expression of Possessive Function in an Early Anabaptist Church Register from Eastern France." Werner Enninger, Univ. of Essen, Germany.

The paper deals with a church register from the area of Belfort in eastern France. The "Register der Gemeind von Lamä" (AFHAM 1986) records 289 births from 1729 to 1842, 139 baptisms from 1741 to 1835, 49 marriages from 1747 to 1825, and 124 deaths from 1756 to 1834. Of all aspects worthy of attention, the paper focuses on possessive constructions in this Germanophone text corpus.

The formulaic character of records of births, marriages, deaths etc. is bound to hide quite a number of those types of variation which one might hope to find or even elicit in ad-hoc produced speech or writing. However, the invariable propositional matrix of the entries in each list provides an unexpected wealth of unelicited variants of a limited set of variables, such as the possessive function -- a phenomenon that has repeatedly attracted attention in studies on the development of German varieties in the US.

The extant variation extends beyond morphological vs. analytical coding of possession into the case system in general (e.g. accusative subjects) and the gender system (dative singular non-feminine article dem as well as third person masculine possessive adjective sein with female possessors).

The data will be compared to phenomena found in German varieties in the United States. Possible explanations (structural attrition of L1 in language shift situation, foregrounding of dialectal German variants, grammaticalization etc.) will be discussed.
The two linguistic variables were analyzed for 16 speakers, 150 tokens per speaker. Social factors investigated included the amount of involvement in French activities, one's neighborhood, education achieved, occupation, and the use of French. Quantitative data supports my hypothesis that those with more involvement in French culture have a more French-sounding English, even if non-French-speaking.

References

Janda, Richard D. and Julie Auger. 1992. "Quantitative Evidence, Qualitative Hypercorrection, Sociolinguistic Variables--and French Speakers." Language and Communication 12.3/4: 195-236.

Nagy, Naomi, Christine Moisset, and Gillian Sankoff. 1995. "On the acquisition of variable phonology in L2." University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: (N) WAVES and MEANS 3.1:111-126.

·9:50-10:15: "A New Look at the Role of New Order Amish Women in Language Change." Silke Van Ness, University at Albany, SUNY.

This study deals with an incipient change in pronominal anaphora in the Pennsylvania German of the New Order Amish community in Holmes County, Ohio. The paper does not present recent data, but rather takes a new look at data described in an earlier article. Only the pronoun es in subject/object position and neuter feminine or zero determiners with feminine names are selected here for discussion.

While the earlier article focused on the description of the observable variation and its distribution over speakers and speaker groups, the present article will suggest some tentative explanations of the observables. In particular, it seeks to assess the role which young Amish women play in language innovation--in comparison with the often described role of females in language innovations in less traditional societies.

Pertinent questions are: 1) Why should young Amish women -- of all groups -- be in the forefront of language change in the given (tradition-directed) socio-regional unit? 2) Why should this female-initiated language innovation make itself felt in the grammatical core of Pennsylvania German, but not in the other languages of the Amish, i.e. English and Amish High German? 3) Why should, generally, female-initiated semiotic innovations not start in any of the other (nonverbal) signaling systems of this Amish group, such as dress, hair style etc.?

Answers will be sought in both language-inherent and language-external factors. Ultimately, it will be speculated that the female-initiated innovation in the pronominal anaphora system of Pennsylvania German makes perfect sense in the Amish social network and the Amish role system.

Books
Idioms, E-Discourse, Girls, Scots, Shakespeare: Our New Books

If you have recently published a book, send pertinent information to Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf (address above), and we'll mention it here.

Modern English (1100-1700) synonyms of girl/young woman. An attempt is made to find ME and EModE primary designating expressions. The book also discusses borrowing, the scope of metaphorization, the role of personal names, and animal metaphors.

Ronald K. S. Macaulay. Standards and Variation in Urban Speech: Examples from Lowland Scots. John Benjamins, 1997. x + 201 pages. Hardcover Hfl 120. ISBN 90-272-4878-8. Critically examines the notions vernacular, standard language, Received Pronunciation, social class, and linguistic insecurity. Uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods with examples from comedians' jokes, dialect poetry, formal and informal interviews, and personal narratives.

Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Malless. Coined by Shakespeare: Words & Meanings First Penned by the Bard. Merriam-Webster, January 1998. xli + 274 pages. Hardcover $14.95. ISBN 0-87779-353-0. In the "Lighter Side of Language" series. Alphabetically organized essays on several hundred of the 1500 words Shakespeare added to English, from abstemious to zany. Interspersed with quizzes about Shakespeare's language and plays.

Lewis J. Poteet and Martin Stone. Plane Talk: Push You, Pull Me--An Aviation Lexicon. Montreal: Robert Davies. $9.95 U.S., $14.95 Canadian. ISBN 1-55207-002-6.

Lewis J. Poteet and Jim Poteet. Car Talk. Montreal: Robert Davies. $9.95 U.S., $14.95 Canadian. ISBN 1-55207-000-X. A revision of the 1992 Car & Motorcycle Slang.

Christine Ammer. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Houghton Mifflin, October 1997. 729 pages. Hardcover $30. ISBN 0-395-72774-X. The most comprehensive collection of idiomatic expressions, some 10,000 verbal phrases (act up, get down), figures of speech (dark horse, blind as a bat), interjections and formulas (says who, take care) and slang (buy the farm, push the envelope). Each is defined, illustrated in usage, and dated, with many including additional history. Valuable for learning or teaching English as a second language.

Boyd H. Davis and Jeutonne P. Brewer. Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space. State Univ. of New York Press. 217 pages. Paperback $16.95 ISBN 0-7914-3476-1. Hardcover $50.50 ISBN 0-7914-3475-3. The authors created an asynchronous mainframe conference for language and linguistics classes in which students analyzed the language of original newspaper reports of the 1960s civil rights sit-ins. The authors observed how students wrote to each other across a wide range of social and virtual settings, how they built a community within and across campus boundaries, and how they handled conflict while avoiding confrontation on sensitive issues of race and power.

Grzegorz A. Kleparski. Theory and Practice of Historical Semantics: The Case of Middle English and Early Modern English Synonyms of GIRL/YOUNG WOMAN. Catholic Univ. of Lublin Press, 1997. 277 pages. $25. (Copies may be ordered directly from the author at English Dept., Catholic Univ., Al. Raclawickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland.) ISBN 83228-0598-5. The author develops an analysis of the semantic development of a large corpus of Middle English and Early

Issues and Methods in Dialectology. Edited by Alan R. Thomas, 25 papers from the Ninth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology held in Bangor, Wales in 1996. x + 312 pages. Paper cover. £22 in UK, £23 in mainland Europe, £25 elsewhere from Methods IX, Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, U.K.; fax +01248 382928, els030@bangor.ac.uk.

DARE Queries
Search the Ruddle for Rat Dogs, Pounce Your Pompey for DARE

If you can help with any of the following words, please send your information (including date and place of use) to DARE's Associate Editor, Joan Hall. She can be reached at 6125 Helen White Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison WI 53706, or by at jdhall@facstaff.wisc.edu.

polecat--An informant in seGA said that this is what he calls "the foamy stuff that has to be dipped off when [cane sugar] syrup is being made." Does anyone know the word in this sense? Does anyone have any any insight into why it should be so called? (It's hard to see any connection with polecat "skunk," but we have not been able to think of any other word this might be a variant or folk-etymology of.)

poley--Reported to mean "rump, backside," but the writer does not say where or by whom. Has anyone heard this?

polly, polly wad--Two DARE informants (PA, KY) gave this in the sense "a woman's hair done up in a bun." Does anyone know this?

pompey--This is in the supplement to the Century Dictionary, defined "Bulging or sagging in a dangerous degree; said of a floor in a burning building; also, applied to ice when it is in a similar dangerous condition. . . ." They quote a 1904 example of the sagging-floor sense from a New York City newspaper; the only other evidence we have for the soft-ice sense comes from an elderly DARE informant from Brooklyn. Any further evidence, current or historical, would be appreciated.

poor-do--We have a scattering of quotations in which poor-do is applied to various cheap or makeshift foods. Is anyone familiar with the word? Is it used generically, or is it applied to a specific dish?

poor man's apple--We have two quotations, one each from KS and OK, which say only that this is "a kind of melon." Has anyone heard this, and if so, can they tell us what kind?

potato bun--Our only evidence for this compound comes from three PA informants. Can it really be a regional term (or concept)? Is it made with potato water, mashed potatoes, or what?

pounce--Asked for ways of saying "hit somebody hard with the fist," an elderly GA woman replied, "He pounced him one." Has anybody heard pounce used in this way?

rabbit dew--Reported used by an elderly GA farmer to mean "mist." There must be more to it than that; can anyone supply a more detailed definition?

rail, out of one's--Reported heard in the sense "outside one's area of knowledge or expertise." Has anyone else heard this? Is there some coherent metaphor behind it, or is it a blend of "out of one's bailiwick" and "off the rails"?

rail pasture--Reported in 1933 as NE pioneer vocabulary for pasture or corral. Is it still in use? Does it contrast with some other kind of pasture?

railroad daisy--We have three citations for this, all from LA, but the most detailed description says only that it is "a yellow wild flower with a brown center." Can anyone identify this flower more precisely?

rain--We have two reports from opposite ends of the country (NJ and OR) for this as a name for Christmas-tree tinsel. Is this widespread?

raised gravy--Both the DARE and LAGS surveys turned up scattered instances of this in the South (as well as one example, which may or may not be related, of raisin(') gravy), but the comments that were recorded do not make it clear what distinguishes this from other kinds of gravy or explain the sense of raised.

ramada--We have plenty of printed quotations, mostly older or referring to the past, for this in the sense of "brush arbor," and some more recent ones that seem to refer to more substantial shade-providing structures. How current is this in the Southwest, and what sort of structure does it usually refer to?

ranch-fried potatoes--This was volunteered by a single CA informant, who described a dish of potatoes fried with bacon and onions. Is this an established term? Are the bacon and onions essential, or just the informant's personal taste?

ranny/ramie--A 1935 article on "Language of the Livestock Mart" says that rannies are "common-bred southern calves of poor quality." A 1936 list of words from the TN mountains defines ramie as "young calf." Any corroborating evidence for either of these--perhaps related--forms would be appreciated.

ratchet--Someone wrote that she had heard this used to mean "front porch," apparently some time ago in rural GA. Can anyone make any sense of this?

rat dog--This was volunteered by two LAGS informants, one of whom said it was also called a rat tail and that it is "like a fox feist, but bigger." Is anyone familiar with this term, and if so, can they give a more illuminating description?

ruddle--A 1963 Yankee Dictionary, published in Lynn MA, gives this in the sense "attic." We got one example in response to the DARE questionnaire--from an informant in Lynn MA. Is this known anywhere else? Can anyone supply an earlier citation, or a convincing etymology?

tater riffle--This appears in Brown's North Carolina Folklore defined "light bread" and attributed to western NC. Has anyone heard this? The first element is presumably potato (perhaps in reference to the use of potato yeast?), but what is the sense of riffle?

DARE Aid
Help Wanted: DARE Seeks Development Specialist

By Joan Hall

The Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has generously provided the funds to hire a Development Specialist for DARE for three years. We are in the process of advertising the position, and are hopeful that it can be filled sometime this spring. The following ad will appear in The Chronicle of Philanthropy and local newspapers. If any ADS members know of people who should see this, please pass it along to them.

Development: The Dictionary of American Regional English (see website at http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html) seeks a Development Specialist to initiate and execute a major fund-raising campaign to carry this renowned project to its conclusion in 12-15 years. Meeting the goal requires the acquisition of substantial new gifts, and the Development Specialist must exhibit the ability to interact at sophisticated levels with major gift candidates.

The work of this position will be coordinated with that of the University of Wisconsin Foundation. Support for the position is guaranteed for three years; continuation will be contingent on success. Duties include performing prospect research and networking to identify and contact prospective donors; writing proposals; establishing a "Friends" organization; maintaining contact with donors.

Applicants must demonstrate excellent speaking and writing skills; have successful history of funds development; exhibit creativity and enthusiasm for the project; work well independently and as part of a team. (Unless confidentiality is requested in writing, information regarding applicants must be released upon request. Finalists cannot be guaranteed confidentiality.) Send cover letter, résumé, and reference list (by March 13) to Joan Houston Hall, 6125 Helen White Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706.