ON LANGUAGE USE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The emerging field of sociolinguistics is a response to numerous roadblocks encountered in the more specific area of linguistics. One of the more important of these roadblocks occurred in attempts to provide a linguistic explanation of bilingualism through interpreting languages in contact in terms of an interference perspective. Such a perspective emphasizes structural aspects of languages as explanations of changes in either (or any) language within the contact situation. The language contact situation, however, made extremely evident that explanations of language use must include social factors. In the case of bilingualism, the more general sociolinguistic perspective emphasizes inter-relations between language use and socially constructed situations at the micro level. At the micro level, language forms can be viewed as tools with which social meanings are constructed and communicated, each utterance thereby containing an information aspect (which is obvious) and a more general social aspect. At the macro level, language forms become markers of the relations between and among complex social groups and, in this sense, reflect the more purely sociological concerns of class and stratification. The upshot of this new perspective is that all utterances come to be viewed as tools and containers of social meaning regardless of whether those utterances come from one recognized language or from six recognized languages; people use their sounds to discriminate meaning and will accomplish that discrimination with whatever system they have at hand. Hence, through a sociolinguistic perspective, bilingualism becomes but a special case of this process.http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

The effect of orthography on the recognition of pronunciation variants

published Online First October 24, 2019In conversational speech, it is very common for words’ segments to be reduced or deleted. However, previous research has consistently shown that during spoken word recognition, listeners prefer words’ canonical pronunciation over their reduced pronunciations (e.g., pretty pronounced [priti] vs. [priɾi]), even when the latter are far more frequent. This surprising effect violates most current accounts of spoken word recognition. The current study tests the possibility that words’ orthography may be 1 factor driving the advantage for canonical pronunciations during spoken word recognition. Participants learned new words presented in their reduced pronunciation (e.g., [trɒti]), paired with 1 of 3 spelling possibilities: (a) no accompanying spelling, (b) a spelling consistent with the reduced pronunciation (a reduced spelling, e.g., “troddy”), or (c) a spelling consistent with the canonical pronunciation (a canonical spelling, e.g., “trotty”). When listeners were presented with the new words’ canonical forms for the first time, they erroneously accepted them at a higher rate if the words had been learned with a canonical spelling. These results remained robust after a delay period of 48 hr, and after additional learning trials. Our findings suggest that orthography plays an important role in the recognition of spoken words and that it is a significant factor driving the canonical pronunciation advantage observed previously.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant IBSS-1519908. We also acknowledge support provided by Ministerio de Ciencia E Innovacion Grant PSI2017-82563-P, by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program, by Economic and Social Research Council (UL) Grant ES/R006288/1 and by Ayuda Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490. We thank Marie Huffman and Donna Kat for help with this project

Variation and change in the vowel system of Tyneside English

PhD ThesisThis thesis presents a variationist account of phonological variation and change in the vowel system of Tyneside English. The distributions of the phonetic exponents of five vowel variables are assessed with respect to the social variables sex, age and social class. Using a corpus of conversational and word-list material, for which 32 speakers of Tyneside English were recorded, between 30 and 40 tokens per speaker of the variables (i), (u), (e), (o) and (3) were transcribed impressionistically and subclassified by following phonological context. The results of this analysis are significant on several counts. First, the speakers sampled appear to differentiate themselves within the speech community through the variable use of certain socially marked phonetic variants, which can be correlated with the sex, age and class variables. Secondly, the speakers style shift to a greater or lesser degree according to combinations of the three social factors, such that surface variability is reduced as a function of increased formality. Third, the overall pattern among the sample population seems to be one of increasing uniformity or convergence: it is speculated that social mobility among upper working- and lower-middle class groups may lead to accent levelling, whereby local speech forms are supplanted by supra-local or innovative intermediate ones. That is, the patterns observed here may be indicative of change in progress. Last, a comparison of the results for the (phonologically) paired variables (i u) and (e o) shows a strong tendency for Tyneside speakers to use these 'symmetrically', in that choice of variant in one variable predicts choice of variant in the other. It is suggested that the symmetry in the system is exploited by Tyneside speakers for the purposes of indicating social affiliation and identity, and is in this sense an extra sociolinguistic resource upon which speakers can draw. In addition, the variants of (3) are discussed with reference to the reported merger of this variable with (a); it is suggested that the apparent 'unmerging' of these two classes is unproblematic from a structural point of view, as the putative (3)—(o) merger appears never to have been completed.UK Economic and Social Research Council (award number R00429524350

Indexing political identity in the Catalonian procés: A sociophonetic approach

This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)