American Dialect Society
Session Chair: Susan M. Burt
Illinois State Univ.
Session 1:
Dude, this is hella
cool: the syntax and semantics of ‘hella.’
Scalar modifiers evaluate a predicate according to its position on a scale or range of values. Intensifiers are scalar modifiers that convey an increase in the degree to which the property of its predicate holds. For instance, very in the sentence Peter is very tall (Klein, 1980) conveys a proposition like ‘Peter’s size is significantly above the relevant average degree of tallness.’ Over the past few decades, a newer intensifier, hella, has become established in the lexicon of some English speakers. Using a newly-compiled corpus of nearly 1000 naturally-occurring examples of hella from personal weblogs and websites such as Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, and MySpace.com, the syntax and semantics of hella were compared with the syntax and semantics of traditional intensifiers very, too, and much. I demonstrate that hella’s syntactic distribution is highly similar – but not identical – to that of very and too. I then show that frameworks such as Kennedy and McNally [“K&M”] (2005), which thoroughly describe the semantics of traditional intensifiers, cannot describe the complete semantic identity of hella. Finally, I suggest that Potts’s (2004) analysis of non-traditional intensifiers totally and “speech-act” SO can account for some of the uses of hella that are not captured via K&M (2005).
Author: Jennifer Alexander
Affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University
Email: jenalex@northwestern.edu
Definitions of AAVE in Lay Discourse
I analyze lay discussions on AAVE on the Internet, concentrating on serious and humorous
definitions of these terms. My main basis for my
analysis are
70 definitions from urbandictionary.com, supplemented with definitions from
other on-line sources.
First, I outline the strategies that are used to define AAVE in the lay community:
Definition by:
(a) delineating the speech community
(b) giving examples
(c) listing rules
(d) comparing linguistic features (usually with SAE)
(e) outlining its development/history
(f) outlining its function
(g) delineating its linguistic status (in comparison with SAE)
(h) evaluation
These strategies can be – and are – filled with a multitude of different contents. Strategy (g), for example, occurs with the belief that AAVE is a languages as it does with beliefs that it is a dialect, a speech impediment, or ‘nothing at all’. Therefore it is necessary to also look at the content transmitted, which I do in a second step.
Beside listing and illustrating the frequently and less frequently stated beliefs, I will attempt to answer the following questions:
Which beliefs are most salient for the lay community?
In how far do beliefs reflect the traditional folk linguistic belief in The Language as a Platonic abstraction (cf. Niedzielski/Preston 2003, 18) and in how far are beliefs derivatives of contemporary or past linguistic knowledge?
My
research will illustrate how AAVE is perceived by the lay population.
Additionally, the degree to which traditional linguistic beliefs are reflected
(or not reflected) by these definitions will highlight in how far linguistic
knowledge permeates folk linguistic knowledge.
References:
Niedzielski,
Nancy A.;
Author: Judith Bündgens-Kosten
Affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Anglistik III, Aachen University
Email: Judith.buendgens-kosten@gmx.net
Investigating
Gender-Specific Pragmatics in Televised Interviews
According to previous research, several gender-related differences in communication are exhibited in patterns/styles of speech, specifically the speech used in public contexts, such as interviews. Researchers claim that the levels of formality and power in interview contexts often lead to displays of gender differences in speech patterns/styles. For example, talk-time, intensifiers, value-loaded words, hedges, turn-taking, questions, and interruptions are all examples of patterns that vary across gender in interview contexts. Furthermore, styles of speech also vary across gender. While females’ public speech is often cooperative, supportive, collaborative, and rapport-oriented, male speech is conversely seen as combative, competitive, adversarial, and report-oriented. This study sought to investigate whether current television interviewers (and their interviewees) exhibited the same speech patterns/styles (according to gender) as shown in previous research. The speech patterns/styles in two interviews were investigated. The interviewers were two high profile news reporters—Ann Curry (Today) and Chris Matthews (Hardball), and their interviewees (held constant across interviewers) were John Meacham (Newsweek) and Sally Quinn (Washington Post). The aforementioned speech patterns and styles were analyzed using quantitative (tabulation) and qualitative methodology, respectively. Results of the analyses showed typical gender-related differences in talk-time, intensifiers, value-loaded words, and hedges in both interviewers and interviewees. Contrary to previous research, some quantitative and most qualitative results revealed more masculine behavior on the part of the female interviewer; where the male interviewer treated the interviewees as predicted, the female interviewer treated them more aggressively than did her male counterpart.
Authors: Tamara M. Constant and A.
Lou Coyne
Affiliation: Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale
Email: tconstan@siu.edu, acoyne@siu.edu
Session 2
The Low Back Merger in
the Steel City: African American English and Pittsburgh Speech.
The low-back merger, in which the contrast between /a/ and // is lost, is a widespread phenomenon across the northern US, and has received extensive treatment in dialectology. Although there is growing interest in regional varieties of African American English (AAE), relatively little is known about AA participation in this merger. The few studies that have addressed this question report that in areas where the vowels are merged in White speech, these segments remain distinct for AA speakers (Fridland, 2004; Thomas, 2001; Bernstein, 1993). Such results corroborate the claim that AAs do not participate in local sound changes (Labov, 2001).
In Pittsburgh, a complete merging of /a/ and // is reported for White speakers, in both production and perception (Labov et al, 2006). In the current paper, we examine the extent to which the low-back merger has taken place within AAE in the city. We consider word list data for which AA participants read a list of words aloud and judged them to be the same or different. Two phonological environments were included in the list—preceding /n/ (in pond and pawned) and preceding /t/ (in cot and caught). Preliminary analyses indicate that AAs in Pittsburgh have lost the distinction between /a/ and // in both environments. Such findings contribute to the growing body of research on regional phonological variation within AAE, and provide further counter-evidence to the claim that AAs do not partake in phonological sound changes in the regions in which they reside (cf. Anderson, 2003; Jones, 2003).
References
Anderson, Bridget
(2003). An Acoustic Study of
Bernstein, Cynthia (1993). Measuring social causes of phonological variables. American Speech 68, 227-240.
Jones, Jamila
(2003). African Americans in
Fridland, Valerie (2004). The low-back merger in Memphis: An ethnolinguistic marker? Paper presented at Language Variation in the South III, Tuscaloosa, AL.
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thomas,
Erik. (2001). An Acoustic Analysis of Variation in
Authors:
Maeve Eberhardt
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh
Emails: maest38@pitt.edu
Navajo English
Many articles have been written on the transfer of features of Navajo and
other Indian languages into the English spoken by Indian children; much of the
writing has the openly expressed or hidden agenda of correcting these
transferences, to fix it so the students no longer speak and write in these
distinctive ways, and most of the observations have been published in the genre
of English education articles (Bartelt 1981, Cook M.J., Foster et al. 1989,
Young, etc.). Although many of the
phonological, morphological, and syntactic features found in Navajo English can
be easily attributed to substrate influence, in Navajoland these features may
be found among children and young people who don’t speak Navajo, for whom
English is their first language. Some of
these young people command Standard American English as well. For this reason the alternative speaking
styles must be recognized as organized codes, different from Standard American
English in particular, ordered, ways. If
there is no particular motivation to assimilate into the mainstream culture,
there is also no motivation to sound just like the mainstream culture. Although Navajo English has been analyzed in
terms of the ways its speakers have not attained the target language “Standard
American English,” I would like to propose that it is used intentionally as a
way of establishing contrastive self-identification as non-participants in the
SAE system, and that the target is the non-standard code itself. My own data are taken from years living in
Navajoland (1989-1992) and many trips back since then to visit.
Bibliography
Bartelt, H. Guillermo 1981 Some Observations on Navajo English. From: Papers in
Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication 14 (3).
Cook, Mary Jane. (Date unknown) Problems of Southwestern Indian Speakers in
Learning English. From: American
Indians: Language resources and Development. Part II.
Foster, Singer, Benally, Boone, and Beck.
Describing the Language of Navajo Children “Journal of Navajo Education” Fall 1989
Volume vii, Number 1. Rock Point, Arizona.
Young, Robert W. (date
unknown) A Contrastive Overview of
Certain Features of the English and Navajo Languages: Phonology from ESL
for Navajos. Chapter 6.
Author:
Charlotte Schaengold
Affiliation:
Miami University of Ohio
Email: schaencc@muohio.edu