Session A
In 1770, Colonel Robert Munford, a Virginia planter, wrote The Candidates, a theatrical farce dealing with an election in colonial Virginia. His portrayal of gentry and non-gentry provide insight into language variation as perceived by a prominent Virginian. The electoral candidates range from the statesmanlike Mr. Worthy to the foolish Sir John Toddy and the unscrupulous Mr. Strutabout. As the candidates and their followers maneuver through the campaign, they generate various speech acts, including requests, wagers, arguments, and insults. Their speech reveals the kinds of linguistic resources available to 18th century Virginians and how these resources could be manipulated. The characters employ a number of politeness strategies, both positive and negative, including varying use of address terms. Although most syntactic and morphological structures closely resemble those of PDE, conservative forms occur with regard to conditional clauses, lack of do-support, a-prefix, and methinks, among others. The social distribution of these historically transitional forms is associated sometimes with the gentry, sometimes with the lower classes, and it sometimes cuts across both groups. Overall, language use in The Candidates demonstrates the interplay among grammar, lexicon, hierarchical social relations, and the cultural concept of southern honor.
Susan Garzon
Oklahoma State University
sgarzon@okstate.edu
Show Me Variation and Change: A Look at Current Patterns in Missouri Speech
The state of Missouri has long been known as a dialectological crossroads where the South meets the North (or at least the North Midlands). The traditional blend of dialect features heard in Missouri reflects historical trends including settlement patterns. Today, Missouri speech continues to show influences from various regions though apparently not due to any population shifts. Instead, linguistic changes with broad regional currency are moving into the state. This paper seeks to examine the interaction of recent and established dialect features in Missouri using data from a questionnaire survey. Responses to this survey have been collected from around 2,500 native Missourians. The questionnaire investigates a number of lexical, phonological, and grammatical variables. Some of these variables contribute to an east~west linguistic divide within the state as is the case with soda versus pop. Other variables pattern on more of a north~south divide as illustrated by the pronunciation of insurance which may be stressed on either of the first two syllables. In addition to highlighting such apparently stable patterns, this paper will offer a more detailed examination of an on-going sound change: the low-back vowel merger which results in the homophony of pairs such as cot and caught, Don and dawn, etc. The sociolinguistic distribution of the merger suggests it is a change in progress and the regional data indicate that it is spreading across the state in a pattern of contagious (rather than hierarchical) diffusion. However, the spread of the merger is meeting with some resistance in two regions: St. Louis and the rural counties to the west along the Missouri River. I consider how the unusual dialect history of these regions as well as the influence of more recent phonological developments may have served to inoculate these speakers against the low-back merger.
Matthew J. Gordon
University of Missouri-Columbia
gordonmj@missouri.edu
"Get Me A Couple of Stroh's": Dialect Sustainability Among British Immigrants in Detroit
During the economically prosperous decades of the 1950s through the 1970s, many skilled tradesmen were recruited from Great Britain to work as engineers, pattern makers, and model makers in Detroit's booming automotive industry. There they met other British immigrants and prospered within a growing support network of British-affiliated social clubs and businesses. For their wives and children, this support network provided a link to the home they may not necessarily have wanted to leave behind. Such support networks play a key role in the maintenance of dialectical variation. Immersion in support groups, the workplace environment, and gender issues each have a role to play in language sustainability. This presentation explores what happens when a dialect community (e.g. British immigrants) is surrounded by a dominant dialect of the same language (e.g. Midwestern U.S. English). Based on interviews of a sample of white British people in the metropolitan Detroit area, I consider the role of settlement patterns, nationalism, and regional differences within a sociolinguistic framework. In addition, issues of class in the workplace and social settings are analyzed due to the unique perceived prestige of the British accent in the United States.
Jane Nordberg
Michigan Technological University
jlnordbe@mtu.edu
Session B
"He Dream of Coming to a Rich Country": From the Archives, an Exploration of theSyntactic Features of Southeastern Idaho
Oral history tapes can help researchers trace the origins of and establish an historical context for current syntactic features. In this study, 30 tapes from the Idaho Historical Society were examined to discover the characteristic syntactic features present at the time of the original settlement of southeastern Idaho. The speakers consist of 16 women and 18 men (some tapes have more than one narrator) from 19 counties in southeastern Idaho. Born between 1870 and 1930, the speakers ranged in age from 96 to 50 at the time the tapes were recorded. The speech patterns of these speakers, who were among the original settlers of this area of Idaho, provide first-hand information on dialect features brought into Idaho from other areas during its settlement. Some of main syntactic features found on the tapes included the following: Personal dative; A- prefixing; Regional uses of the prepositions to and for; Substitution of the past participle for the simple past; Completive done; Needs plus past participle. We classified these features in three ways: 1) their status as a regionalism in the early part of the 20th century, 2) their status as a regionalism now, and 3) their presence in a source dialect. Based on a study of 1880 and 1900 census data, we identified source dialects as those dialects in the East, South, or Midwest regions from which the settlers to Idaho originated. Since certain language features are associated with regional identity, these findings give us clues as to the parts of the south and eastern United States that early settlers identified with culturally.
Sonja Launspach and Janna Graham
Idaho State University
sllauns@isu.edu
grahjann@isu.edu
Language Variation in Missouri: St. Louis, the Low Vowel Merger, and Urban Sprawl
St. Louis (STL) lies at the crossroads of several dialect areas. To the north and northeast, we find the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). To the west, we find the low vowel merger (LVM) yielding homophonous cot-caught. St. Louisans are reported to participate in the NCS (Labov 1994) but not in the low vowel merger (Gordon 2000). This study seeks to further explore the spread of the LVM by acoustic examination of the speech of 15 adolescents from various parts of Missouri. Sociolinguistic interviews, reading passages, word lists, and minimal pairs tests comprise the data. Vowel duration and F1, F2, and F3 at 3 time points were examined. Results confirm that the LVM has spread into western Missouri, but this spread stops abruptly at the STL outskirts. Variation was found in the speech of two participants from a far-suburb of STL. The speech of one exhibited the merger found in western Missouri, which correlates with negative attitudes she expressed toward the urbanization of her town as well as her ties to rural Missouri. The other participant shifted from a merged to unmerged system as her speech became more reflective. Her interview and reading data was found to be merged, but she was unmerged in minimal pairs tasks. This shift would indicate that she holds the urban speech of STL as prestigious and this is confirmed by positive attitudes toward the urbanization of her town expressed in her interview. Her list data was unique - the two vowels involved in the LVM were distinguishable only by durational differences of one and half times the perceptible threshold. In this partially reflective speech, the two vowels merged in terms of vowel quality but did not in terms of duration, which may be a way for her to signal membership in two speech communities simultaneously.
Tivoli Majors
University
of Missouri-St. Louis
tivoli@umsl.edu
Language Death among the Volga-German Communities in Ellis County, Kansas
The town of Hays, KS, located in Western Kansas along I-70, is surrounded by Volga-German settlements founded in the late 1800's, such as Pfeifer, Liebenthal, Katherinenstadt, Schoenchen, Obermunjou, and Herzog (Keel). For many decades, these settlements retained their unique heritage, isolating them from the surrounding predominately English-speaking area. The persistent maintenance of their culture and language, as well as their being a minority separated from their homeland classifies them as German speech islands (Mattheier). The purpose of this paper will be to research the social and historical development of the language, culture, and impending death of this speech island. Whereas the First World War is often regarded as the single factor attrition German speech islands, it is plausible to assert that in Ellis County, the First World War signaled only the beginning of a gradual process of language loss. The years between the First and Second World Wars represent a transitional period where the increased shift in usage from dialect to English is witnessed. The Second World War represents the most decisive factor responsible for the completion of this process. Aside from the discrimination against the German ethnic communities, the Second World War also brought important socio-economic developments to Ellis County, resulting in a disproportionate exposure to the contact society and increased mobility. Due to these factors the speech islands was compelled to compromise its cultural and linguistic uniformity and self-sustainability. This development led in the decades following the Second World War to a rapid and final language shift from the dialect to the contact language. The evidence suggests that, due to the historical breakdown of the speech islands, the Volga-German dialect and culture will also perish with the deaths of our informants' generation.
References:
Keel, William D. "One the Heimatbestimmung
of the Ellis County ( Kansas) Volga-German Dialects." Yearbook of
German-American Studies 17
(1982): 99-109.
Mattheier, Klaus J. Handout: "Vorschläge für die Definition von 'Sprachinsel'" Modern German Dialects. The University of Kansas, Spring Semester 2000.
G. Scott Seeger
The University of Kansas
gsseeger@ku.edu
"Ideality in Reality": Dialect and Subtle Characterization in Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes
My interest is in connecting the use of dialect to narrative techniques in William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes. What I intend to show by discussing several key portions of the novel is that Howells designed what appears to be superiority of dialect and other social/moral distinctions to reveal the shortcomings of the main character, Basil March. Indeed, I plan to refute one part of Elsa Nettels' 1988 Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells' America. While Nettels maintains that Howells exaggerated differences through dialectical representations because of his own prejudices, I hope to show a more positive possibility for Howells' intentions. Perhaps in his later writing, Howells wished to reveal his own sense of regret at not having done more socially himself. Even if Howells was "all talk" when it came to social reform as some critics argue, he may have intended his later novels to show his realization of his own shortcomings. There are many particular instances in Hazard which seem clearly meant to point out the protagonist's hypocrisy, and my paper will draw these out to support my larger claim that Howells was holding March up as a less-than-noble "hero." For instance, Howells focuses the reader's attention on several "scenes" in which March and his wife look down on others without trying to help them but then never realize their narrow-mindedness. March's wife objects to moving for trivial reasons, March thinks a scene of extreme poverty picturesque, and in the end, he does very little to help Lindau or Conrad, characters who Howells portrays as heroic compared with March. Though March's failure to act may seem excusable to readers because we too often are too busy or too unaware to help, Howells clearly wanted the reader to be disappointed in March. Though Nettels and other critics see Howells' portrayal of March as a mirror of the author's own prejudices, a more careful reading reveals that Howells wanted us to see March as passively allowing injustice all around him.
Rachel G. Wall
Georgia State University
wall5030@comcast.net