A Phonemic and Phonetic Analysis of the Folk Speech of Bedford County, Tennessee

Until recently, no systematic study of Tennessee folk speech had been performed. This study, descriptive in scope, will help fill a void and provide valuable data for determining Tennessee\u27s relationship to other American dialects. Five informants, each one fitting Hans Kurath\u27s Type I, Group A classification, were interviewed using The Questionnaire for the Investigation of American Regional English: Based on the Work Sheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (Orton and Wright, 1972). The phonological material obtained from the five tape recorded interviews is presented in a unitary phonemic system along with characteristic allophonic and free variation (incidence of the phonemes)

Free-classification of American dialects in three conditions: natural, monotonized, and low-pass filtered speech

The dialects of American English have distinct features: these features include vowel shifts – the Northern Cities Chain Shift and the Southern Chain Shift (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006; Clopper, Pisoni, & deJong 2005) -- and prosodic variation, including intonation and rhythm (Clopper & Smiljanic 2011, 2015). In the current study, I ran three conditions to test which prosodic cues listeners were using when classifying talkers by regional dialect. American English has six distinct dialects: Northern, Southern, Midland, Mid-Atlantic, Western, and New-England (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006). Participants listened to 60 talkers, 10 from each of the six regional American English dialects, and were asked to sort the talkers into groups by dialect using free-classification. All of the talkers read the same sentence, which was manipulated in two of the three conditions. The first condition left the talkers’ voices natural and un-manipulated. The second condition monotonized all of the talkers’ voices. The third condition ran all of the talkers’ voices through a low-pass filter, which removed everything above 400 Hz. Results indicated that all participants, regardless of condition, made about 9 groups of talkers on average. Results also revealed effects of condition and talker dialect on accuracy. For the condition accuracy, the monotonized condition had the most accurate groupings, while the low-pass filtered condition had the least accurate groupings. For the talker dialect accuracy, the Western dialect had the most accurate groupings while the Southern dialect had the least accurate groupings. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) plots visualized the groupings made for each condition. In both the natural and monotonized condition, participants were using dialect and gender to sort talkers. In the low-pass filtered condition, participants were using gender and not dialect to sort talkers, and the MDS plot looked different from the other MDS plots indicating that intonation alone was not effective for dialect classification.This thesis was funded by the Undergraduate Research Scholarship.No embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic

Employing geographical principles for sampling in state of the art dialectological projects

The aims of this paper are twofold: First, we locate the most effective human geographical methods for sampling across space in large-scale dialectological projects. We propose two geographical concepts as a basis for sampling decisions: Geo-demographic classification, which is a multidimensional method used for the socio-economic grouping of areas. We also develop an updated version of functional regions that can be used in sociolinguistic research. We then report on the results of a pilot project that applies these models to collect data regarding the acceptability of vernacular morpho-syntactic forms in the North-East of England. Following the method of natural breaks advocated for dialectology by Horvath and Horvath (2002), we interpret breaks in the probabilistic patterns as areas of dialect transitions. This study contributes to the debate about the role and limitations of spatiality in linguistic analysis. It intends to broaden our knowledge about the interfaces between human geography and dialectology

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Welche Sprache ist sie anyway?: Borrowed anyway/anyhow in Texas German

A common phenomenon when languages are in contact is for one language to borrow words or phrases from another and incorporate them into the native vocabulary. Texas German, which has been in contact with English for over 100 years, shows extensive borrowing of English words. In addition to content word borrowing, lexical items such as nouns and verbs, Texas German shows examples of borrowings of discourse markers (DMs), which serve functional rather than lexical purposes. One of the most common English DM borrowings is anyway and it variant form anyhow. In this thesis I analyze the extent to which borrowed anyway/anyhow exhibit the same semantic and pragmatic functions as in English.Germanic Studie

African American English And Urban Literature: Creating Culturally Caring Classrooms

Language and literacy are a means of delivering care through consideration of students’ home culture; however, a cultural mismatch between the predominantly white, female educator population and the diverse urban student population is reflected in language and literacy instruction. Urban curricula often fail to incorporate culturally relevant literature, in part due to a dearth of texts that reflect student experiences. Dialectal differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) and a history of racism have attached a reformatory stigma to AAE and its speakers. The authors assert that language and literacy instruction that validates children’s lived experience mediates this hegemony, leads to empathetic relationships between teachers and students of different cultural backgrounds, and promotes academic success. This paper seeks to 1) dissect the relationship between academic achievement and affirmation of student culture through language and literacy instruction, 2) enumerate classroom strategies that empower students and foster the development of self-efficacy 3) identify ways teachers might weave value for diversity in language and literacy into a pedagogy of care for urban classrooms

Dialect Classification and Speech Intelligibility in Noise

Undergraduate Research Scholarship, $4000, College of Arts and Sciences Honors, for thesis workListeners have good intuitions about regional differences between speakers. Less studied is the relationship between dialect classification and speech intelligibility. Regional dialect is known to affect speech intelligibility: in some cases, familiar dialects can facilitate speech processing, but in other cases, familiar dialects inhibit speech processing. Many other lexical, discourse, and social factors also affect speech intelligibility. The present study explores predictors of dialect classification accuracy and intelligibility accuracy for the Northern and Midland dialects of American English. In previous studies, Midland speech in noise was found to be more intelligible than Northern speech in noise for both Midland and Northern listeners. Given that listeners are sensitive to differences between Northern and Midland speech in terms of intelligibility, we might expect that listeners use differences in intelligibility to identify where talkers are from. To explore this possibility, participants completed a speech intelligibility in noise task followed by a dialect classification task with Northern and Midland speech. Stimulus materials were balanced for lexical, discourse, and social factors that affect speech intelligibility. A linear regression model revealed that mean token intelligibility did not predict token classification accuracy. The results reveal that easily classifiable tokens are not always the least intelligible. These results suggest that processing mechanisms adapt for regional variation, but dialect-specific cues are not always available to the listener in classification. Predictive models of intelligibility and classification revealed that social, lexical, and discourse factors interact to affect accuracy on both tasks. Ongoing analysis will more precisely determine the role of each predictor in each task, leading towards a better understanding of the relationship between dialect perception and processing mechanisms.No embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic

The Names of Us English: Valley Girl, Cowboy, Yankee, Normal, Nasal, and Ignorant

A commonplace in United States (hereafter US) linguistics is that every region supports its own standard; none is the locus (or source) of the standard. Historically that is a fair assessment, for no long-term centre of culture, economy and government has dominated in the US