uklvc 9 - university of sheffield/file/uklvc... · we are delighted to be hosting the 9th uklvc...

UKLVC 9

2nd - 4th September 2013

Conference programme and abstract book

Sponsors

1

Contents Welcome to Sheffield! ............................................................................................................................ 2

Programme Outline ................................................................................................................................ 3

Programme – Day 1 ................................................................................................................................ 4

Programme – Day 2 ................................................................................................................................ 5

Programme – Day 3 ................................................................................................................................ 6

Poster presentation abstract titles ......................................................................................................... 7

Places to eat and drink ............................................................................................................................ 8

Keynote abstracts ................................................................................................................................. 14

Paper abstracts ..................................................................................................................................... 17

Poster abstracts .................................................................................................................................... 81

Delegate list ........................................................................................................................................ 109

Paper and poster author index ........................................................................................................... 112

Notes ................................................................................................................................................... 113

2

Welcome to Sheffield!

We are delighted to be hosting the 9th UKLVC conference and welcome you to Sheffield. We

hope you like the city as much as we do! In this booklet, you will find information about the

programme, abstracts and participants. We have also included a list of places to eat and

drink around Sheffield. These are just our personal recommendations, but we hope you find

them useful.

If you have any questions, or need any help during the conference, please feel free to get in

touch with one of us or one of our team of fantastic helpers. You can identify Sheffield folks

by their yellow badges. If you can’t find any of us around and about, the registration desk will

be open for the duration of the conference.

All papers will take place in the Halifax Hall Dining room, and the poster session will be held in

the Sharman room.

The conference dinner will take place at Kelham Island Industrial Museum. You should have

been given a ticket for this event (if you booked onto it when registering for the conference),

do let us know if you think you should have a ticket but don’t have one.

We hope you have a great conference!

Best wishes,

The UKLVC9 organising team

Chris Montgomery

Emma Moore

Joan Beal

3

Programme Outline

Day 1 – Monday 2nd September 2013

9:00-9:30 Registration and coffee 9:30-9:40 Welcome 9:40-10:40 Keynote 1 – Jen Hay

11:00-12:15 Session 1

12:15-13:15 Lunch 13:15-14:05 Session 2 14:05-14:20 Break 14:20-15:10 Session 3 15:10-15:40 Coffee 15:40-16:55 Session 4 16:55-17:05 Break 17:05-17:55 Session 5 17:55-18:05 Break

18:05-19:30 Poster Session and wine reception

Day 2 – Tuesday 3rd September 2013

8:45-9:00 Coffee 9:00-10:00 Keynote 2 – Julia Snell

10:00-10:10 Break 10:10-11:00 Session 6 11:00-11:30 Coffee 11:30-12:20 Session 7 12:20-13:20 Lunch 13:20-14:35 Session 8 14:35-14:45 Break 14:45-16:00 Session 9 16:00-16:15 Coffee 16:15-17:30 Session 10

18:30- Conference Dinner, Kelham Island Industrial Museum

Day 3 – Wednesday 4th September 2013

9:00-9:15 Coffee 9:15-10:05 Session 11

10:05-10:35 Coffee 10:35-11:25 Session 12 11:25-11:30 Break 11:30-12:20 Session 13 12:20-13:30 Lunch (and business meeting) 13:30-14:20 Session 14 14:20-14:35 Coffee

14:35-15:50 Session 15 15:50-15:55 Break 15:55-16:55 Keynote 2 – Peter Trudgill

16:55-17:05 Conference close

4

Programme – Day 1

9:00 - 9:30 Registration and coffee

9:30 - 9:40 Welcome

9:40 - 10:40 Keynote 1 - Producing and Perceiving 'Living Words' Chair

Joan Beal Jen Hay

10:40 - 11:00 COFFEE

11:00 - 11:25

Lawson, Eleanor A Socio-Articulatory Study of Postvocalic /r/ in the Scottish Central Belt.

Session 1 Chair

Robert Lawson

Stuart-Smith, Jane

Scobbie, James

11:25 - 11:50 Nance, Claire Variation and Change in Scottish Gaelic Tone and Intonation

11:50 - 12:15 Smith, Jennifer One Speaker, Two Dialects: Bidialectalism

across the generations in a Scottish community

Holmes-Elliott, Sophie

12:15 - 13:15 LUNCH

13:15 - 13:40 McCafferty, Kevin

‘I dont care one cent what Ø goying on in great Britten’: Be-deletion in Irish English

Session 2 Chair

Raymond

Hickey

Amandor-Moreno, Carolina

13:40 -14:05 Palfreyman, Nick Persistence and Intra-Individual Variation: Completive aspect markers in Indonesian sign language varieties

14:05 - 14:20 Break

14:20 -14:45

Podesva, Robert

The California Vowel Shift in a Rural Inland Community

Session 3 Chair

Lauren Hall-

Lew

Calder, Jeremy

Chen, Hsin-Chang

D'Onofrio, Annette

Flores Bayer, Isla

Kim, Seung Kyung

Van Hofwegen, Janneke

14:45 - 15:10 Moore, Emma Dialect Contact and Distinction in an Island

Community Carter, Paul

15:10 - 15:40 COFFEE

15:40 - 16:05

Devlin, Thomas The Effect of Conversational Topic on Variation in County Durham English Session 4

Chair

Warren Maguire

French, Peter

Llamas, Carmen

16:05 - 16:30 Burland, Kate ‘We call a goat a ‘goːt’ around here not a ‘g ut’’: Phonetic variation and identity in the Barnsley dialect

16:30 - 16:55 Cooper, Paul “Turtlely Amazing”: goat fronting & the enregisterment of “Yorkshire” dialect

16:55 - 17:05 Break

17:05 - 17:30

Deuchar, Margaret Social Factors Favouring Code-Switching in a Large Spoken Corpus of Welsh-English Bilinguals.

Session 5 Chair

Rob

Drummond

Piercy, Caroline

Donnelly, Kevin

17:30 - 17:55

Hall-Lew, Lauren "If you will allow me, Mr Speaker…": Audience Design and Phonetic Variation in the House of Commons

Friskney, Ruth

Scobbie, James

17:55 - 18:05 Break

18:05 - 19:30 Poster session & Drinks reception

5

Programme – Day 2

8:45 - 9:00 COFFEE

9:00 - 10:00

Keynote 2 - Language and class revisited: the issue of vernacular

maintenance

Julia Snell

Chair Susan

Fitzmaurice

10:00 - 10:10 Break

10:10 - 10:35 Kerswill, Paul The Reification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of ‘Multicultural London English’ in the British media

Session 6 Chair

Isa

Buchstaller 10:35 - 11:00 Torgersen, Eivind A Reanalysis of Old Data: The Sivertsen Cockney Phonology recordings

11:00 - 11:30 COFFEE

11:30 - 11:55 Drummond, Rob Adolescent Identity Construction Through Multicultural (Manchester) English

Session 7 Chair

Paul Kerswill 11:55 - 12:20 Kirkham, Sam

Ethnicity, Style and Social Meaning in a Sheffield High School

12:20 - 13:20 LUNCH

13:20 - 13:45

Hughes, Vincent Lexical Competition, Frequency and the Fronting of Back Vowels in Northern British Englishes Session 8

Chair

Eivind Torgersen

Foulkes, Paul

Haddican, Bill

LaShell, Pat

13:45 - 14:10 Turton, Danielle An Ultrasound Study of Contextual Patterns of /l/-Darkening in Varieties of British English

14:10 - 14:35 Holmes-Elliott, Sophie

Blame the Parents! The transmission of endogenous versus exogenous change within a levelling variety

14:35 - 14:45 Break

14:45 - 15:10

McLaughlin, Brittany Animacy Effects in English Contraction

Session 9 Chair

Patricia

Cukor-Avila

MacKenzie, Laurel

15:10 - 15:35 Wagner, Suzanne Hesson. Ashley Little, Heidi

Referential General Extender use Across Registers in American English speech

15:35 - 16:00

Tamminga, Meredith The Sensitivity of persistence to subject

Animacy in AAVE Third Singular /s/ McLaughlin, Brittany

16:00 - 16:15 COFFEE

16:15 - 16:40 Wright, David A Variationist Approach to Identifying Idiolect for Forensic Linguistic Purposes Session 10

Chair

Joan Beal

16:40 - 17:05 Kasstan, Jonathan A Social Network Approach to Variation in Obsolescent Francoprovençal

17:05 - 17:30 Roberts, Nicholas The Variable Nature of the Negative Particle ne in Martinique French

18:30 onwards

Conference Dinner, Kelham Island Industrial Museum

6

Programme – Day 3

9:00 - 9:15 COFFEE

9:15 - 9:40 Clark, Lynn The Transmission and Diffusion of /t/-

Debuccalisation Session 11 Chair

Paul Foulkes

Watson, Kevin

9:40 - 10:05

King, Jeanette

Monophthongs vs Diphthongs in Māori: Why is the influence different?

Watson, Catherine

Maclagan, Margaret

Harlow, Ray

Keegan, Peter

10:05 - 10:35 COFFEE

10:35 - 11:00 Foulkes, Paul The Evolution of Medial /t/ Over Real and

Imagined Time

Session 12 Chair

Jennifer

Smith

Hay, Jen

11:00 - 11:25 Szakay, Anita Indexical Specificity Effects in Cross-Dialect Auditory Priming

11:25 - 11:30 Break

11:30 - 11:55 Kretzschmar, Bill

Computer Simulation of Speech with GIS

Juuso, Illlka Session 13 Chair

Chris

Montgomery

11:55 - 12:20

Cukor-Avila, Patricia Jeon, Lisa Rector, Patricia C.

A Variationist Approach to Perceptual Dialectology

12:20 - 13:30 LUNCH (and business meeting)

13:30 - 13:55 Buchstaller, Isa Diagnostics of Language Change - Attitudes, Stereotypes and Real Time Data Session 14

Chair

Sam Kirkham 13:55 - 14:20 Wagner, Suzanne Individual Differences in Social Competence and Attention to Detail Affect the Sociolinguistic Monitor

14:20 - 14:35 COFFEE

14:35 - 15:00 Maguire, Warren The Dialect of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne Session 15

Chair

Claire Nance

15:00 - 15:25 Lawson, Robert Social Identity, Indexical Fields and (θ) Variation in Glasgow

15:25 - 15:50 Stuart-Smith, Jane What is Happening to the Scottish Vowel

Length Rule in Glasgow? Rathcke, Tamara

15:50 - 15:55 Break

15:55 - 16:55 Keynote 3 - The Sociolinguistics of Non-Equicomplexity Chair

Chris Montgomery Peter Trudgill

16:55 - 17:05 Closing remarks

17:05 Close

7

Poster presentation abstract titles

Author(s) Abstract title

Badia Barrera, Berta A Sociolinguistic Study of Young RP

Cardoso, Amanda PRICE and MOUTH Phonologically Conditioned Variation in Scouse

Diskin, Chloe Language Variation and Second Language Acquisition: Polish and Chinese Speakers of English in Dublin

Durham, Mercedes Changing Domains of Dialect Use: A real-time study of Shetland schoolchildren

Evans, Mel Idiolectal Variation/Macro-Level change: (historical) sociolinguistics & the individual speaker

Flynn, Nicholas MOUTH and PRICE in Nottingham: Are they now aligning?

Jannedy, Stefanie Weirich, Melanie

Diphthong Realization as a Marker of Hood German

Jose, Brian Stuart-Smith, Jane Timmins, Claire Torsney, Ben

In the Aftermath of /u/ Leaving: Glaswegian Vowels through Real and Apparent Time

Leach, Hannah Variation in Accent and Attitudes in Stoke-on-Trent

Mayr, Robert Mennen, Ineke Morris, Jonathan

Socio-Phonetic Variation in a Language Contact Situation: The case of Welsh and Welsh English

McDougall, Fernanda Variation in the Realisations of GOAT and FACE in Barrow-in-Furness

Meluzzi, Chiara Ciccolone, Simone Fiorentini, Ilaria

Contact-Induced Innovation in a Multilingual Setting: Evidence from Italian, German, and Ladin in South Tyrol

Mooney, Damien Supralocalisation in French: a Sociophonetic Analysis of the Mid-Vowels in the Regional French of Béarn.

Prichard, Hilary The role of Higher Education in Socially-Motivated Change

Schützler, Ole Stable Norms and Variable use in Edinburgh Middle-Class speech

Sneller, Betsy Hometown Affiliation and Language Change

Zipp, Lena Stylistic Variation in British Asian English prosody

8

Places to eat and drink Halifax Hall is situated in the Endcliffe Village, to the South West of the map below. It is around 2 miles from the city centre, which lies to the East. In between Endcliffe Village and the City Centre is the main University of Sheffield campus. The closest places to Endcliffe village to eat and drink are Broomhill (to the North East of Endcliffe Village) and the Sharrow Vale/Eccleshall Road areas (to the South East of Endcliffe Village). The conference dinner will take place at Kelham Island Industrial Museum, which lies in the Neepsend area to the North East of the map.

You will find a larger version of this map in your conference pack.

9

Eating and drinking in the Ecclesall Road/Sharrow Vale Road area

Ecclesall Road and Sharrow Vale Road are around a ten minute walk from Halifax Hall and are popular areas with students and Sheffield residents alike. There are a large number of good quality places to eat and drink. This list is not exhaustive, but you should be fine eating in most of the bars/restaurants here.

Sharrow Vale Road

Greedy Greek Deli

Good value Greek food from this family-run

business. Premises aren’t glamorous but food

is good.

418-420 Sharrow Vale Road,

Sheffield

S11 8ZP

0114 266 7719

http://www.thegreedygreekdeli.co.uk/

The Lescar

Good pub selling reasonably-priced food from

a varied menu

303 Sharrow Vale Road

Sheffield

S11 8ZF

0114 266 8974

http://www.thelescarhuntersbar.co.uk/

Otto’s Restaurant

Moroccan restaurant.

Hunters Bar Junior School


Sheffield

S11 8ZP

0114 2669147

http://www.ottosrestaurant.co.uk/

The Mediterranean

Tapas, fish and seafood restaurant.


Sheffield

S11 8ZF

0114 2661069

http://www.mediterraneansheffield.co.uk/

The Mogul Room

Good modern Indian restaurant.


Sheffield

S11 8ZH

0114 267 9846

http://www.mogulroom.com/

The Pasta Bar

Nice Italian restaurant, with authentic food at

a reasonable price


Sheffield

S11 8ZH

0114 268 0505

http://www.thegreedygreekdeli.co.uk/

http://www.thelescarhuntersbar.co.uk/

http://www.ottosrestaurant.co.uk/

http://www.mediterraneansheffield.co.uk/

http://www.mogulroom.com/

10

Ecclesall Road

All Siam Well-regarded Thai restaurant. 639 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PT 0114 267 0580

Ashoka A Sheffield institution since 1967. Good South Asian cuisine for a reasonable price. 307 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8NX 0114 268 3029 http://www.ashoka1967.com/ashoka1967/Home.html

Graze Inn Newish bar/restaurant with modern British cooking and local beer. 315-319 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8NX 0114 267 6666 http://www.grazeinn.co.uk/welcome.html

Mud Crab Diner Good burgers and ribs, with big portions. 521 – 523 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PR 0114 263 1617 http://www.mudcrabindustries.co.uk/

Nonnas Good Italian food, a little on the pricey side, but worth it. 537-541 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PR 0114 268 6166 http://www.nonnas.co.uk/c/sheffield

Porter Brook Pub serving a range of beers and cheap food. Nothing to write home about. 565 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PR 0114 266 5765 http://gkpubs.co.uk/pubs-in-sheffield/porter-brook-pub/

Relish Bar and restaurant serving modern and traditional British food. 371-373 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PF 0114 266 5541 http://www.relishrelish.co.uk/welcome.html

The Italian Kitchen Family-run restaurant serving Italian food (believe it or not) 349 Ecclesall Road Sheffield S11 8PF 0114 266 4168 http://www.italiankitchensheffield.co.uk/

http://www.ashoka1967.com/ashoka1967/Home.html

http://www.ashoka1967.com/ashoka1967/Home.html

http://www.grazeinn.co.uk/welcome.html

http://www.mudcrabindustries.co.uk/

http://www.nonnas.co.uk/c/sheffield

http://gkpubs.co.uk/pubs-in-sheffield/porter-brook-pub/

http://gkpubs.co.uk/pubs-in-sheffield/porter-brook-pub/

http://www.relishrelish.co.uk/welcome.html

http://www.italiankitchensheffield.co.uk/

11

Eating in Broomhill

Broomhill is around a fifteen minute walk from Halifax Hall. It is a popular student area situated around Fulwood Road and Glossop Road. There are a small number of good quality places to eat, and this is a more or less complete list. There are three other pubs (The Place, The Nottingham House, and The South Sea), and some coffee bars if you’re just after a drink.

El Torro Good quality tapas bar. 129 Newbould Lane, Sheffield S10 2PL 0114 266 6956 http://www.el-toro-sheffield.co.uk/

La Vaca Really nice South American steak house. A little pricey, but worth it. 477-479 Glossop Road Sheffield S10 2QE 0114 267 6215 http://www.lavaca-restaurant.co.uk/contact-la-vaca.html

Lokanta Meze bar and Turkish restaurant. Well regarded with some reasonable offers. 480 Glossop Rd Sheffield S10 2QA 0114 266 6444 http://www.lokanta.co.uk/

The York Upmarket pub with a good quality food menu. 243-247 Fulwood Road

Sheffield

S10 3BA

0114 266 4624

http://www.theyorksheffield.co.uk/

Thyme Café Restaurant and café serving reasonably priced, good quality food. 490-492 Glossop Rd Sheffield S10 2QA 0114 267 0735

http://www.thymecafe.co.uk/home.html

http://www.el-toro-sheffield.co.uk/

http://www.lavaca-restaurant.co.uk/contact-la-vaca.html

http://www.lavaca-restaurant.co.uk/contact-la-vaca.html

http://www.lokanta.co.uk/

http://www.theyorksheffield.co.uk/

http://www.thymecafe.co.uk/home.html

12

Eating and drinking in Sheffield city centre

The city centre is around 2 miles from Halifax Hall. These are some suggestions of places to eat and/or drink, although the list is of course not exhaustive.

BB's Local Italian restaurant, good value and very popular with students. 119 Devonshire Street Sheffield, S3 7SB 0114 279 9394 www.bbsrestaurant.co.uk/sheffield/index.html

Bath Hotel Good city centre pub with a range of cask ales. 66-68 Victoria Street Sheffield S3 7QL 0114 249 5151 www.beerinthebath.co.uk/home.html

Blue Moon Cafe Excellent vegetarian/vegan cafe, offering a good selection of food. All served with a selection of salads. Serves food until 8pm. 2 St. James Street Sheffield, S1 2EW 0114 276 3443 www.bluemooncafesheffield.co.uk/

Bungalows & Bears Very friendly city centre bar, with a range of drinks. Serves food until 10pm, although it does become quite busy . Old Fire Station, 50 Division Street City Centre, Sheffield, S1 4GF 0114 279 2901

hwww.bungalowsandbears.com/

Cubana Good tapas bar. 34 Trippet Lane Sheffield, Sheffield, S1 4EL 0114 276 0475 www.cubanatapasbar.co.uk

Devonshire Cat Excellent pub, with the largest range of cask ale in Sheffield city centre. Extensive bottled beer menu, with food served until 8pm on a Saturday. Devonshire Courtyard, 49 Wellington Street Sheffield, S1 4HG 0114 279 6700 www.devonshirecat.co.uk

East 1 Noodle Bar Good value noodle bar, quick friendly service.

Piccolos Restaurant Local Italian restaurant. Good value and very popular with students.

http://www.bbsrestaurant.co.uk/sheffield/index.html

http://www.bbsrestaurant.co.uk/sheffield/index.html

http://www.beerinthebath.co.uk/home.html

http://www.bluemooncafesheffield.co.uk/

http://www.bungalowsandbears.com/

http://www.cubanatapasbar.co.uk/

http://www.devonshirecat.co.uk/

13

8 Fitzwilliam Street Sheffield, S1 4JB 0114 272 5533 www.east1noodlebar.co.uk/location.htm

3 Convent Walk Sheffield, S3 7RX 0114 249 5040 www.piccolositalian.co.uk/

Pizza Express Branch of the popular chain. 124 Devonshire Street Sheffield, S3 7SF 0114 275 2755 http://bit.ly/XXL9TB

The Old House Popular city centre bar with a wide range of drinks. Serves good food until 9pm, although it does become quite busy, and can be noisy. 113-117 Devonshire Street Sheffield, S3 7SB 0114 276 6002 www.theoldhousesheffield.com

The Red Deer Excellent pub serving a good range of cask ales. Also serves decent food. 18 Pitt Street Sheffield, S1 4DD 0114 272 2890 www.red-deer-sheffield.co.uk

Sheffield Piccolino Good quality Italian food. Slightly more expensive than other offerings. 4 Millennium Square Sheffield, S1 2JL 0114 275 2698 www.individualrestaurants.com/piccolino/sheffield/

University Arms

Excellent University-owned pub

197 Brook Hill

Sheffield

S3 7HG 0114 222 8969 www.withus.com/drinkwithus/venues/university-arms/

Zizzi's Outlet of the popular Italian restaurant chain. 8 Leopold Square Sheffield, S1 2JG 0114 278 7718 www.zizzi.co.uk/venue/index/sheffield

http://www.east1noodlebar.co.uk/location.htm

http://www.piccolositalian.co.uk/

http://bit.ly/XXL9TB

http://www.theoldhousesheffield.com/

http://www.red-deer-sheffield.co.uk/

http://www.individualrestaurants.com/piccolino/sheffield/

http://www.individualrestaurants.com/piccolino/sheffield/

http://www.withus.com/drinkwithus/venues/university-arms/

http://www.withus.com/drinkwithus/venues/university-arms/

http://www.zizzi.co.uk/venue/index/sheffield

14

Keynote abstracts Keynote 1 Jennifer Hay, University of Canterbury, NZ Producing and Perceiving 'Living Words' Many current usage-based models of speech production and perception incorporate the notion of experience-based representations for words. In such models, the representation of a word is not abstract and it is not static. Rather, word representations are phonetically detailed, and are constantly updated. The consequences of these assumptions are wide reaching, and are relatively unexplored. Words lead unique and complex social lives - occupying a range of habitats. This habitat variation can be linguistic - for example, some words occur more before consonants, and some before vowels. It can also be social - for example, some words are encountered more in younger voices and some in older voices. Some words are used more by female speakers, and some by male speakers. Living word representations should capture and exploit the complexity of these varying linguistic and social distributions. In this talk I argue that a word representation is indeed affected by the distribution of previous experiences with that word. Representations are thus intricately shaped by a word's linguistic and social habitat. I present experiments and corpus analysis demonstrating how the cumulative experience of a word’s overall distribution comes to shape its representation, and thus can influence how the word is both pronounced and perceived. These results are of theoretical importance, as they strongly point towards usage-based models of speech production and perception which incorporate word-specific memories. They also point to new directions for understanding the trajectories of language variation and change. Sound change progresses through the iterative exchange of words. The linguistic and social environments across which 'living' words are distributed therefore comes to play a central role.

15

Keynote 2 Julia Snell, King’s College London, UK Language and class revisited: the issue of vernacular maintenance

The pressure for speakers to moderate, or even erase, their local accents and dialects and conform instead to prestige standards is relentless. Rarely a month goes by without the appearance of a news story that reveals linguistic prejudice and class bias. Within the last eight months alone, the dialect area that will be the focus of this talk, Teesside, has been in the national news twice. In February it was reported that a primary school head teacher had banned the use of spoken dialect in the classroom and written to her pupils’ parents to ask that they do the same at home. In July, the BBC business news reporter, Steph McGovern, revealed in an interview with the Radio Times that she had been subject to discrimination at the BBC because of her Teesside accent. She had also received letters from viewers suggesting, for example, that she seek corrective therapy for her ‘ailment’. Yet despite this pressure, regional and non-standard ways of speaking remain strong. In this paper I consider why attempts to quash the use of local dialect appear to have had so little impact. This question is as old as sociolinguistics itself and goes right to the heart of the relationship between language and social class. Sociolinguistic research on language and class (both survey style and ethnographic) has emphasised the importance of local solidarity in the maintenance of local dialects; indeed the contrastive concepts of solidarity/status have been dominant within sociolinguistics more generally. In this paper I offer alternative hypotheses for the issue of vernacular maintenance, and in doing so, challenge the dominance of the solidarity versus status dichotomy within sociolinguistic accounts of class.

16

Keynote 3 Peter Trudgill, University of Agder, Norway The Sociolinguistics of Non-Equicomplexity The idea that all languages are equally complex was at one time very much the conventional wisdom amongst academic linguists. Their view was particularly strongly argued for in the context of uninformed public opinion, which held to the view that some languages really were more “primitive” than others. However, this "equicomplexity hypothesis" was always implicitly rejected by sociolinguists, creolists and dialectologists who had learnt that language contact led to simplification. It was obvious to them that, if the same language could be more or less simple at different points in time, then different languages could be more or less simple at the same point in time. This talk will discuss what exactly the social determinants of linguistic simplicity and complexity might be.

17

Paper abstracts Abstracts are ordered by lead author surname. Please see the index to locate papers by second, third, etc. author’s surnames.

18

Buchstaller, Isabelle University of Leipzig

Diagnostics of language change - Attitudes, Stereotypes and real time data

This paper investigates the development of the ideologies and stereotypes attached to quotative be like and go in the face of on-going change in progress in the quotative system. To this aim, this paper triangulates perception and production data from the US, where be like has achieved a much higher frequency of use and notoriety, as well as from the UK:

• an attitudinal survey collected in 2010 from 205 younger and 138 older speakers in New York City and in Newcastle,

• and attitudinal survey collected in 2004 from 191 speakers in the UK, • usage data from10 speakers in the US and 32 from the UK.

The findings suggest that whereas social stereotypes towards be like are relatively stable across time and space, the perceptual load of go is unstable and dependent on what D’Arcy has termed “the cultural landscape of the time” (2007). Indeed, it seems that the associations with quotative go are easily influenced by the perceptual baggage of its competitor form be like. Furthermore, British informants are more reluctant to admit to using be like and voice much more negative attitudes when asked whether they personally like the new quotative. This suggests that the longer diachronic time-depth of the form in the USA has led to increased entrenchment and thus to a greater acceptance of the form. Overall, my informants seem to either consider these two quotatives as one of a kind (in the UK) or as very different phenomena (in the US). Indeed, the two innovative quotative forms “are differentially noticed, rationalised, and evaluated (…). In different communities, (…) the kind of people who [use these forms] (…) are differently ideologised”. (Milroy 2004:167). Crucially,in the UK as in the US, both quotatives are associated with inarticulateness. These results go some way towards answering the question why incoming features spread in spite of the negative stereotypes reported so ubiquitously in the press. The findings reported here suggest that be like (and less so quotative go) has started to carry a very different perceptual load amongst the younger age bands who are embracing the form than amongst the older respondents. References D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2007. “‘Like’ and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction.”

American Speech, 82.4: 386–419. Milroy, Lesley. 2004. “Language Ideologies and Linguistic Change.” In Sociolinguistic

Variation: Critical Reflections, edited by Carmen Fought, 161-177. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

19

Burland, Kate University of Sheffield ‘We call a goat a ‘goːt’ around here not a ‘g ut’’: phonetic variation and identity in the

Barnsley dialect. This paper considers the variables GOAT and FACE within the Barnsley dialect in light of metalinguistic claims (Burland 2010) which indicate that the dialect of Royston, an ex-mining township on the northern border of Barnsley, features diphthongal variants of GOAT and FACE which differ markedly from the more widely recognized long monophthongal Barnsley variants (Wells 1982:365). Local metalinguistic commentary claims that the distinctive Royston variants are the product of a significant influx of migrant labour from the Black Country at the end of the nineteenth century (Cave 2001: 15). Census data suggests that a significant proportion of the long distance migration to Royston did indeed come from the Black Country in order to provide the vast workforces required for burgeoning collieries and their dependent industries. In the forty year period between 1871 and 1911 the population of Royston increased by over nine times; a rise of over double that found by Kerswill in his study of the ‘New Town’ Milton Keynes (Kerswill 1996). Many other areas of Barnsley also attracted long distance migrant labour forces during this period but they do not inspire the same metalinguistic commentary. The discovery that Barnsley speakers link Royston phonological variants to Black Country heritage is resonant of Dyer’s findings in the Scottish – English community of Corby (Dyer 2002). However, Royston is also a ‘border town’ (cf. Llamas 2000: 124), located on the boundary between South and West Yorkshire. It is equally possible that any distinctiveness in the Royston dialect is a consequence of contact with other Yorkshire varieties. This paper will explore whether linguistic practice correlates with metalinguistic claims and consequently why distinct Royston variants would persist in the face of competition from more widely used Barnsley variants. Data has been gathered via structured elicitation techniques (word list and semi-structured interview) from Royston speakers within two Communities of Practice representing older and younger speakers within the township. The data support metalinguistic claims of distinct Royston diphthongal variants of GOAT and FACE which differ from the more general Barnsley long monophthongal forms. Furthermore, the Royston variants are present within the repertoires of both the older and younger speakers in the data sets. However, the attitudes and beliefs of these speakers with regard to their own dialect identity and local affiliations differ markedly across the two Communities of Practice. An analysis of the Royston/Barnsley GOAT and FACE variants will be presented alongside an ideological approach which considers the metalinguistic commentary of speakers themselves in order to evaluate the ways in which beliefs about identity and local affiliations can link to phonetic variation.

References

Burland, K . (2010) ‘From Pride to Prejudice: Speakers’ Own Perceptions of the Barnsley Vernacular,’ unpublished MA thesis, University of Sheffield.

Cave, A. (2001) ‘Language Variety and Communicative Styles as Local and Subcultural Identity in a South Yorkshire Coalmining Community’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.

20

Dyer, J. (2002) ‘’We All Speak the Same Round Here’: Dialect Levelling in a Scottish –English Community’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (1): 99 – 116.

Kerswill, P.E. (1996) ‘Children, Adolescents, and Language Change’. Language Variation and Change 8: 177-202.

Llamas, C. (2000) ‘Middlesbrough English: Convergent and Divergent Trends in a ‘Part of Britain With No Identity’’. Leeds Working Papers in: Linguistics and Phonetics 8: 123-148.

Wells, J.C. (1982) Accents of English 2. The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21

Clark, Lynn Watson, Kevin University of Canterbury

The transmission and diffusion of /t/-debuccalisation Sound change is often governed by a complex system of lexical and phonological constraints. What happens to these constraints as a sound change progresses, from generation to generation (transmission) and from community to community (diffusion)? Labov (2007) suggests that in transmission, the frequency of a variant may increase over time but the underlying structure should remain relatively stable. In diffusion, complex constraints are less likely to be acquired because contact takes place between adults and so there should be structural simplification as the change diffuses. In this paper, we explore the extent to which Labov’s (2007) claims regarding these two types of change can be generalised to speech communities outside of the US. We examine the process of /t/ debuccalisation in north-west England. Specifically, we analyse 7654 instances of word-final, pre-pausal /t/ in two localities where /t/ can be realised as [h]. In Liverpool, where /t/→[h] is attested from at least 1898, the phenomenon is governed by both segmental and prosodic constraints. /t/→[h] is more likely in monosyllabic words than in polysyllabic words, but in polysyllabic words it is more likely when following an unstressed vowel, and it is entirely inhibited when following a long vowel. Using a binomial mixed effects model, we show that although we see an increase in the frequency of [h] over time, the constraints on [h] have remained relatively stable, as predicted for change by transmission. In Skelmersdale, just 20km east of Liverpool, /t/→[h] is a recent phenomenon; its arrival coincides with Skelmersdale’s designation as a New Town in the 1960s, which resulted in an influx of people from Liverpool. We examine the constraints operating on /t/→[h] in Skelmersdale, in individuals and groups, using binomial mixed effects models and also random forests (Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012). The group data from Skelmersdale show that the constraints are indeed much simpler overall than those found in Liverpool, again confirming Labov’s predictions regarding change by diffusion. However, underlying Labov’s suggestions about transmission and diffusion is the assumption that this process should happen in the same way for all members of the same speech community: “The view I present … is dependent upon the concept of a speech community with well-defined limits, a common structural base and a unified set of sociolinguistic norms” (Labov 2007: 374). We show that when we explore individual speaker behaviour using random forests, there is much variation: some Skelmersdale speakers obey the complex Liverpool constraints on /t/→[h] but others do not, suggesting underlying structural differences for these speakers. In other words, speakers from the same social background and the same community do not necessarily share the same constraints on a variable form. This raises issues for the statement that diffusion leads to the simplification of constraints because there are different degrees of complexity in the constraints surrounding /t/→[h] for different speakers. In conclusion, we question the extent to which the speech community can be said to exist for Skelmersdale, while considering the wider implications for sociolinguistic theory.

22

Cooper, Paul University of Sheffield

“Turtlely Amazing”: GOAT fronting & the enregisterment of “Yorkshire” dialect This paper discusses the enregisterment (Agha 2003) of “Yorkshire” dialect and the possibility of a new linguistic feature becoming part of its enregistered repertoire. There are many features that speakers associate with “Yorkshire” dialect; in this paper I discuss how an online survey highlighted that among the most common were: nowt ‘nothing’, owt ‘anything’ and definite article reduction. Many of the features listed as “Yorkshire” by respondents to this survey, and in particular the three listed above, also appear on commodities purporting to represent “Yorkshire” dialect. However, further investigation of such commodities suggests that, in addition to these features, a fronted vowel in GOAT words is becoming associated with Yorkshire. This pronunciation is stereotypical of Hull English (Watt and Smith 2005:109), but now seems also to be spreading throughout Yorkshire dialects (Watt and Tillotson 2001, Khattab 2007) and is a relatively recent innovation indicating a change in progress (Khattab 2007:398). I therefore suggest that fronted GOAT pronunciations are becoming more strongly associated with Yorkshire dialects as a result of this spread and similarly becoming newly enregistered as “Yorkshire”. A representation of this feature appears on a t-shirt declaring Yorkshire to be Turtlely Amazing. Although stereotypical in Hull English, this t-shirt links the turtlely pronunciation with the wider area of Yorkshire and, following Johnstone, I suggest that t-shirts bearing dialect representations in this manner can ‘contribute to dialect enregisterment’ (2009:159). The representation of this relatively new and apparently spreading feature on a t-shirt therefore indicates that it is in the process of being enregistered. References Agha, A. (2003). ‘The Social Life of Cultural Value’. Language & Communication 23: 231-273. Johnstone, B. (2009). ‘Pittsburghese Shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an

Urban Dialect’. American Speech 84 (2) : 157-175. Khattab, G. (2007). 'Variation in vowel production by English–Arabic bilinguals.' Laboratory

phonology 9: 383-410. Watt, D. and Smith, J. (2005). 'Language Change' in Martin J. Ball (ed) Clinical Sociolinguistics.

Pp. 101-119. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Watt, D. and Tillotson, J. (2001). 'A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English'. English World-Wide 22(2) : 269-302.

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Cukor-Avila, Patricia Jeon, Lisa Rector, Patricia C. University of North Texas

A variationist approach to Perceptual Dialectology The present study contributes to the growing body of perceptual dialectology and language

attitude research through an analysis of how respondents’ perceptions are stratified by sex,

age, socio-economic class, social networks, and urbanicity. It does so with data from two

recent perceptual dialectology studies, one at the local level (Cukor-Avila et al. 2012 in Texas)

and the other at the national level (Jeon 2012 in South Korea). The data for both the Texas

and South Korea studies were collected using the same methodology: respondents were

randomly approached and given a map outlining the area under study, next they were asked

to identify places where they thought people sounded different, indicating what they would

call that way of talking. Once they completed the draw-a-map task respondents then

answered demographic information questions listed on the reverse side of the map. Data for

the Texas study were collected across the state in spring 2012 and include 367 hand-drawn

maps from respondents aged 18-87. Data for the study in South Korea were collected in

summer 2012 from 436 respondents living in all six provinces who range in age from 18-82.

Following the analytical methods outlined in Evans (2011) and Montgomery and Stoeckle

(forthcoming) respondents’ comments were coded for semantic categories and perceived

dialect regions were identified from an “all-polygons drawn” heat map created using GIS

software.

Few perceptual dialectology studies have reported on the interaction between demographic

factors and dialect perceptions (notable exceptions are Kuiper 1999 and Demirci and Kleiner

1999), and none to date have done so using GIS software. Using a GIS is beneficial for this

type of multi-layered data analysis because it allows areas identified on respondent maps to

be quantitatively aggregated and queried, permitting a detailed analysis of the spatial

information captured by the hand-drawn map data (Montgomery and Stoekle forthcoming).

Results from a GIS analysis of the Texas and South Korea data suggest that age, sex, and

urbancity play an important role in perceived dialect areas. For example, middle-aged and

younger respondents identified fewer and smaller dialect areas, males perceived fewer and

more merged dialect areas than females, and urban respondents perceived more large cities

as dialect areas than the respondents who identified as rural.

References

Cukor-Avila, P., Jeon, L., Rector, P. R., Tiwari, C. and Shelton, Z. (2012). “Texas – It’s like a

whole nuther country”: Mapping Texans’ perceptions of dialect variation in the Lone

Star state. Texas Linguistics Forum 55, Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual

Symposium About Language and Society – Austin, 10-19.

Demirci, M and Kleiner, B. (1999). The perception of Turkish dialects. In Dennis R. Preston

ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 1, 263-81. Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.

24

Evans, B. (2011). ‘Seattletonian’ to ‘Faux Hicks’: Perceptions of English in Washington state.

American Speech 86, 383-414.

Jeon, L. (2012). Drawing boundaries and revealing attitudes: Mapping perceptions of dialects

in Korea. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of North Texas.

Kuiper, L. (1999). Variation and the Norm: Parisian perceptions of regional French. In Dennis

R. Preston ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 1, 243-62. Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.

Montgomery, C. & P. Stoeckle. (forthcoming). Perceptual dialectology and GIS. Journal of

Linguistic Geography.

25

Deuchar, Margaret Piercy, Caroline Donnelly, Kevin Bangor University ‘Speaking of which ti wedi clywed gynni’: Social factors favouring code-switching in a

large spoken corpus of Welsh-English bilinguals. In the thirty years since Poplack’s (1980) groundbreaking results on the factors favouring intrasentential code-switching there has been little exploitation of developments in corpus linguistics to perform automatic analysis on large datasets in the public domain. In this paper we report on the results of an automatic analysis of the Welsh-English corpus Siarad (http://talkbank.org/data/BilingBank/Bangor) collected from 151 speakers and consisting of about half a million words. We aimed to determine whether proficiency in the two languages was as much a factor in our data as in Poplack’s, but also to identify the role of age, gender, the language of education, social network and attitudes to code-switching. We used an automatic glossing mechanism to extract all the finite bilingual and monolingual clauses in the data and then performed a mixed-effects logistic regression relating social factors to the production of bilingual vs. monolingual clauses. Our results showed that those speakers who had acquired Welsh and English simultaneously from an early age produced more bilingual clauses (i.e. more intrasentential code-switching) than those who had acquired one language later than the other. Age was also a factor in that younger speakers (who additionally reported a higher self-assessed proficiency in English) were more likely to code-switch. Gender was not an influential factor but language of education did make a difference. In particular, those who had received their education in Welsh were more likely to code-switch than those who had received bilingual education or education in English. Speakers who reported speaking both Welsh and English to their primary contacts were more likely to code-switch than those who reported using only one language in their social network. Finally, those who reported avoiding code-switching were generally found to use fewer bilingual clauses than those who did not think it important to keep Welsh and English separate. References Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18: 581-618.

26

Devlin, Thomas French, Peter Llamas, Carmen University of York

The effect of conversational topic on variation in County Durham English Research into the effect of conversational topic on speech style (Yaeger-Dror and Kemp 1992; Yaeger-Dror 1996; Walker and Hay 2011) has not yet demonstrated a link between a locally-focussed conversation topic and a shift towards more localised forms of pronunciation. In a study of language change in New Zealand, Gordon et al (2004: 279-281) attempt to account for the retention of traditional pronunciations through a conversational topic rooted in a past era – in this case, a discussion of the major industries of mining and farming. However, their results instead suggest that usage is linked to topic-specific vocabulary. In order to provide evidence for the correlation between conversational topic and use of a localised pronunciation, the present study explores variation in the MOUTH vowel (Wells 1982) across four County Durham villages. As the former dominant industry of the area (Wilkinson & McCay 1998), notions of coalmining have a strong local resonance and a correlation has been drawn between local coalmining communities and dialect perception (Pearce 2009: 176). The Sense-Relation Network (Llamas 1999) – employed as a data elicitation method during fieldwork collection – is used to clearly demarcate the local topic of coalmining from non-localisable conversational topics. This allows the data to be coded in terms of conversational topic during analysis. The four Durham villages are situated on a roughly contiguous north-south line between two larger urban conurbations: Wearside and Teesside. Different patterns of variation are attested in the MOUTH vowel in these locations: in Sunderland, situated to the north, a local ‘shibboleth’ (Beal 2000: 353) [εʊ] form is used as well as the less localisable [aʊ] variant, whereas in Teesside, which lies to the south, only the [aʊ] form is noted (Beal, Burbano-Elizondo and Llamas 2012). Following both auditory and acoustic analysis, the results show an absence of [εʊ] usage among the younger speakers, regardless of distance from Sunderland – where [εʊ] is reported – pointing to a process of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill 2003). On the other hand, the older speakers from all four villages demonstrate an increased use of [εʊ] - particularly when the topic of conversation is related to the former local mining industry, as compared with a general, non-local discussion. Furthermore, usage rates of topic-specific vocabulary are low, and those which do appear, do not occur with a localised [εʊ] form, thereby avoiding a lexical result, as found in Gordon et al’s (2004). The data therefore support a link between increased usage of a highly localised variant and a local conversational topic. References Beal, J. C. 2000. ‘From Geordie Ridley to Viz: Popular Literature in Tyneside English’ in

Language and Literature 9. 4: 343-359. Beal, J. C., Burbano-Elizondo, L., & Llamas, C. 2012. Urban North-Eastern English: Tyneside to

Teesside. ‘Edinburgh Dialects of English’ series, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gordon, E., Campbell, L., Hay, J., Maclagan, M., Sudbury, A., & Trudgill, P. 2004. New Zealand

English: Its Origins and Evolution. ‘Studies in English Language’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

27

Kerswill, P. 2003. ‘Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English’, in Britain, D. & Cheshire, J. (eds.) Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill, Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 223-243.

Llamas, C. 1999. 'A new methodology: data elicitation for social and regional language variation studies', Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 7: 95-118.

Pearce, M. 2009. ‘A Perceptual Dialect Map of North East England’, Journal of English Linguistics 37: 162-192.

Walker, A. & Hay, J. 2011. ‘Congruence between ‘word age’ and ‘voice age’ facilitates lexical access’, Journal of Laboratory Phonology 2: 219-237.

Wells, J. C. 1982. The Accents of English. Three volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilkinson, D. L. & McCay, N. A. J. 1998. ‘Reclamation of the Durham coast’, in Fox, H. R., Moore, H. M., & McIntosh, A. D. (eds.), Land Reclamation: achieving sustainable benefits. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 209-218.

Yaeger-Dror, M. & Kemp, W. 1992. ‘Lexical classes in Montreal French’, Language and Speech 35 (3): 251-293.

Yaeger-Dror, M. 1996. ‘Phonetic evidence for the evolution of lexical classes: The case of a Montreal French vowel shift’, in Guy, G., Feagin, C., Baugh, J., and Schiffrin, D. (eds.), Towards a Social Science of Language, Benjamins: Philadelphia, 263-287.

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Drummond, Rob Manchester Metropolitan University

Adolescent identity construction through Multicultural (Manchester) English This paper reports on the findings of an ongoing project looking at the variety(ies) of English used by adolescents in inner-city Manchester. Anecdotally, young people in Manchester are sounding more and more alike, with those from white backgrounds described as ‘sounding black’. This of course brings to mind the work carried out on Multicultural London English (e.g. Cheshire et al 2011) and in many ways the two contexts are very much related, both cities being important urban centres with a history of immigration. Indeed, the linguistic situation observed in Manchester can be viewed in much the same way as Cheshire et al’s interpretation of the processes behind MLE, especially the idea that young people might acquire specific combinations of language features from a kind of ‘feature pool’ of linguistic forms. Overlapping influences from a wide variety of languages ensure the richness of this pool which not only serves as a resource, but also as model for non-native speakers acquiring English in the absence of a consistent native model. The specific focus here is on a particular social group – adolescent males from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are on the fringes of gang affiliation/activity. Participants are from either a youth community project in the city, or a school which caters for adolescents who have been excluded from mainstream education for behaviour issues. Preliminary findings suggest that there is a great deal of cross-fertilisation between the speech varieties of the various ethnic groups (mostly white Manchester, Jamaican Manchester and Somali Manchester), resulting in a hybrid repertoire not unlike that reported for MLE. It is also apparent that this new ‘variety’ is being used as a means of constructing a very specific identity, one which incorporates gang aspirations. This process is particularly strong in the school context, where adolescents who previously enjoyed a certain reputation in a mainstream school suddenly find themselves jostling for position in a school where they are no longer top dog. Features under investigation include extreme GOOSE fronting, as well as changes to the FACE and PRICE vowels. Some lexical features will also be reported, providing evidence for what seems to be a process of change along similar lines to what is happening in London. But despite these changes, certain salient local features (such as the lack of a FOOT/STRUT split) remain. References Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the feature pool

and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2): 151-196

29

Foulkes, Pauli Hay, Jenii iUniversity of York iiUniversity of Canterbury

The evolution of medial /t/ over real and imagined time Usage-based models such as exemplar theory hold that knowledge of linguistic structures is updated throughout life, in response to experience. One specific prediction is that linguistic knowledge reflects ongoing linguistic change. In childhood we learn forms from the substance to which we are exposed, including knowledge about variable forms and their sociolinguistic patterning. Where these forms undergo change, new variants increase in currency over time, and our experience of them increases as we get older. If linguistic knowledge is constantly updated, older variants will be represented more in early life while newer variants will be added incrementally in later life. We can access these layers of learning by examining speakers’ discussions of different times in their lives. If individuals store phonetically-detailed memories over a long time period, they should access older variants when talking about older events. In other words, if there is a linguistic change in progress, the nature of that change should be replicated by speakers, visible across their speech about distant versus recent events. We tested this prediction using data for (-t-) in New Zealand English. From the ONZE corpus (Gordon et al 2007) over 3,000 tokens were extracted from 91 speakers, born 1863-1970. In current NZE (-t-) is generally realised as [d/ɾ] (Holmes 1994). Our ONZE data showed that the earliest speakers used [t] and [d] in similar proportions, and the change towards [d] was apparent for those born from ca. 1950. We therefore predicted that discussion of older topics would yield a greater use of [t], while more recent topics would produce more [d], but this effect would be apparent only for contemporary speakers. We fit a logistic mixed effects regression analysis to the entire dataset, using word and speaker as random effects. A number of factors were significant, including sex, speech rate, lexical stress, and the presence of a /d/ earlier in the word. Interestingly, the model also showed a robust change has taken place with respect to the role of lexical frequency in determining the preferred variant. For speakers born before 1900, more frequent lexical items are more likely to attract [t]. For the contemporary speakers, more frequent items are more likely to attract [d]. This interaction presents a complex pattern in terms of the likely stored distributions of variants across individual words within the memory of the contemporary speakers. Frequent words may be more likely to be [t] when accessing older memories, whereas infrequent words would be more likely to be [t] when accessing newer memories. We therefore fit a second model, just to the contemporary speakers. As predicted, we found a significant interaction between lexical frequency and the time of the event being discussed. Discussion of recent events showed a strong effect of lexical frequency, with more frequent items attracting [d]. Discussion of distant effects did not. The data therefore offer support to usage-based theories of linguistic knowledge. The results also support the hypothesis that individuals participate in language change by modifying their own representations, and presumably usage, over time. This occurs in a lexically specific way. References

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Gordon, E., Maclagan, M. & Hay, J. (2007) The ONZE corpus. In Beal J.C., Corrigan K.P. & Moisl H.L. (eds.) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 2: Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Holmes, J. (1994) New Zealand flappers: an analysis of “t” voicing in a sample of New Zealand English. English World-Wide, 15(2): 195-224.

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Hall-Lew, Laureni Friskney, Ruthi Scobbie, Jamesii iThe University of Edinburgh iiQueen Margaret University

“If you will allow me, Mr Speaker…”: Audience Design and Phonetic Variation in the House of Commons Chamber

Among politicians, one’s political party may be a stronger predictor of certain patterns of phonetic variation than other social factors (Hall-Lew et al., 2010; 2012a). This fact is particularly compelling in the contemporary Scottish context, where Scottish and British identities are essential factors in the political debates around Scottish independence and union with the rest of the UK. Recent work (Hall-Lew et al., 2012b) considered the realisation of the Scottish CAT vowel (Johnston 1997), a variable that encompasses members of both of the TRAP and BATH lexical sets found in Southern English English varieties (Wells, 1982). This study found significant phonetic differences in the realisation of the CAT vowel between MPs from Scottish Labour, a unionist UK-oriented party, and MPs from the independence-advocating Scottish National Party (SNP). The Scottish Labour MPs showed greater variability in F2 realisation across tokens, and a higher CAT vowel, overall, than the SNP MPs. While neither group displayed a robust TRAP/BATH split, the Scottish Labour MPs showed an effect of conditioning by phonological environment (for F2, but not for duration) where the SNP MPs did not. These differences were taken to reflect different demands on the two groups’ professional personae. The present paper considers patterns of intraspeaker variation for these same speakers and this same linguistic variable. Our results show that, for some of these speakers, F1 and/or F2 patterns of CAT vowel production differ significantly between the start of a given speech and the end of that same speech, and that the pattern of shift obtains consistently across separate speeches. We suggest that this correlation may reflect a kind of Audience Design (Bell, 1984), such that some Scottish MPs exhibit subtle style-shifting as a consequence of interventions from other Members. According to Westminster procedure, an MP called to speak in the House of Commons Chamber should not read a prepared speech and is expected to respond spontaneously to short interventions from other MPs (Sandford, 2012). However, in parliamentary practice MPs must address their remarks to the Speaker or his deputies, and not to the House (McKay, 2004: 424), in order “to maintain the dignity of the House and its Members, to make criticism and comment less direct as well as showing respect to the Chair”(Sandford, 2012: 4). As a result, MPs refer to other MPs in the third person and by title, and reserve use of the second person for speech directed “to the Speaker alone”(Sandford, 2012: 4). In terms of Bell’s (1984) Audience Design theory, while the Speaker or his deputies represent the role of Addressee, our data suggest that styleshifts in the House of Commons Chamber appear to be often motivated by Auditor Design. Furthermore, topic effects (in terms of ‘Scottishness’ of topic) highlight the utility and complexity of analysing topic in terms of Bell’s Referee Design. Our results thus not only continue to shed light on the role of a speaker’s political party in their phonetic production, but they shed new light on models of interactional alignment. References Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppock & Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Indexing Political Persuasion:

Variation in the Iraq Vowels. American Speech. 85(1): 91-102

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Hall-Lew, L., Rebecca L. Starr & Elizabeth Coppock. 2012(a). Style-Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The vowels of ‘Iraq(i)’. In Juan Manuel Hernandez Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hall-Lew, Lauren, Ruth Friskney, and James M. Scobbie. 2012(b). Political party affiliation and phonetic variation in the vowels of Scottish politicians. Sociolinguistics Symposium 19, 21-24 August, Berlin.

Johnston, Paul. 1997. Regional variation. In Charles Jones (ed.), The English Language in Scotland: An Introduction to Scots. East Linton: Tuckwell. 433-513.

McKay, William (ed.) 2004. Erskine May’s treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament. 23rd edn. London: LexisNexis.

Sandford, Mark. 2012. House of Commons Background Paper: Traditions and customs of the House. Standard Note SN/PC/06432. London: House of Commons Library. http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN06432.pdf, accessed 31 January 2013.

Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Holmes-Elliott, Sophie University of Glasgow Blame the Parents! The transmission of endogenous versus exogenous change within

a levelling variety Previous research comparing exogenous and endogenous changes has shown that they differ markedly in their progression within a community, particularly in terms of their incrementation, the “increase in frequency, extent, scope or specificity of a variable” (Labov, 1994). Exogenous changes, spread through adult-to-adult contact, often show imperfect replication of the constraints on use. Endogenous changes, acquired by children early on, preserve constraints between generations (Labov, 2007). However, recent research from London has shown that in some circumstances the distinction between these two processes is less clear cut. In their study of Multicultural London English Cheshire et al (2011) showed that the linguistic conditioning of GOOSE-fronting was not replicated by the youngest age cohort in their study, despite it being an endogenous change. This leads to a crucial question: to what extent do generalisations concerning the incrementation of different types of language change hold within a levelling variety? The present paper contributes to this question through the investigation of language change in Hastings in the southeast of England, a region where levelling is well underway (Altendorf & Watt, 2008). I target two features for analysis. TH-fronting (1), where the labiodental fricative /f/ is variably used in place of the dental one /θ/; often described as a diffused, exogenous change. The second is GOOSE-fronting (2) where the back, high vowel in words such as news, two, super etc is moving forwards in the vowel space so that it overlaps with the FLEECE vowel. In contrast to TH-fronting, this change is often described as an endogenous change, brought about through internal phonetic pressures (Fridland, 2008). 1. I think [fiŋk/θiŋk]it was called Hastings Health [hɛɫf/hɛɫθ] Authority [ forɪti/ θorɪti](Jimmy, 49) 2. Oh it was a super [sʉpə] school [skuɫ] (Roger, 82) Analysis of over 5,500 tokens in the speech of 42 speakers stratified by age (old, 60-91yrs; middle, 35-51yrs; adolescents, 15-18yrs; and children, 8-10yrs) and gender was carried out. Results show that the constraints on GOOSE-fronting are faithfully maintained in the youngest cohort. For example, the frequently reported hierarchy of palatals > coronals > non-coronals within preceding phonetic environment was replicated at every stage. This suggests that even within a levelling variety ‘endogenous’ changes retain their linguistic conditioning. In contrast, with TH-fronting the constraints reorganised, with the results from the children showing that previously inhibitory contexts are beginning to participate in the change. This reorganisation is one aspect of development predicted for exogenous change. These results support the traditional distinction between exogenous and endogenous change, providing further evidence for the progression of change in the speech community.

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Hughes, Vincenti Foulkes, Pauli Haddican, Billii LaShell, Patiii iUniversity of York iiCUNY-Queens College iiiNZILBB, University of Canterbury

Lexical competition, frequency and the fronting of back vowels in Northern British Englishes

A guiding principle of vowel change is the maintenance of contrast between lexical sets. Mergers are hypothesised to be more likely where functional load is low (Martinet 1955), and the preservation of contrasts underlies coordinated chain shifts (Labov 1994). It has also been argued that lexical frequency plays a role in pronunciation variation, and thus potentially in change (e.g. Pierrehumbert 2002).Rare items are more likely to be realised with canonical forms, while more frequent lexical items have greater phonetic freedom and are therefore more likely to be lenited or to attract less predictable innovative variants. Despite these claims, the lexical-functional role of vowel contrasts as a predictor of change has received little detailed attention (Hay et al 2010 and Flynn 2012 are exceptions). To what extent are particular contrasts genuinely threatened by a change in progress? Is there quantitative evidence for an effect of functional load? Do words with many lexical competitors change at different rates from those with few or none? Are contrasts between frequent items maintained more or less robustly than contrasts between rarely used words? In Hughes et al (2012) we presented preliminary results showing significant effects of lexical competition on GOOSE and GOAT fronting in Manchester and York. The Manchester data consist of 16 speakers (8 male) aged 18-21 and 62-82. The York data contain 18 young speakers (8 male) recorded in 2008 and 16 older speakers (8 male) recorded in 1998 (Tagliamonte 1996-98). Dynamic time-normalised values of each vowel (mean 41 per speaker) were extracted at +10% steps from the F1 and F2 trajectories. Values were normalised following Fabricius et al (2009). The maximum F2 value of GOOSE in York was significantly lower for lexical items with a FLEECE and/or KIT competitor (e.g. goose~geese), compared with competitor-absent conditions (e.g. spoon~speen). In both cities, GOAT fronting was promoted for target words with no lexical competitor. In this paper we explore more systematically the role of lexical-functional factors in GOOSE and GOAT fronting, considering all potential competitors across the vowel phoneme inventory. Fronting is analysed at different points in the F2 trajectory according to (i) the frequency of each competitor item, (ii) summed frequencies of all competitors for each word, and (iii) the total number of lexical competitors. We also considered the frequency of the target word itself. The interaction between predictors is analysed with reference to the phonetic distance between the target and competitor, and the syntactic categories of the target and competitor. Word frequencies were generated from the Celex English Lexical Database. We manually corrected phonemic transcriptions, added competitors not identified by Celex, and removed cases of implausible lexical confusion. As a metric of phonetic distance we computed Euclidean distances between all lexical sets from scalar phonemic classification (front-back, open-close etc).

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Preliminary results show that competitor frequency is significant for GOOSE in both cities. GOOSE words with many or frequent competitors have lower F2 – i.e. they remain backer – than those with few or rare competitors. This effect is strongest where the target item is rare, but weakened where the target item itself is frequent (Figure 1). The results support predictions that maintenance of contrast is a factor in promoting or inhibiting change, tied to the relative frequency of both target and competitor word. Figure 1: fronting effects for GOOSE in Manchester (left) and York (right). Y-axis: normalised F2 at 10% measurement point. X-axis: standardised frequency of all competitor items. Low/Mean/High = 1st/2nd/3rd quartile frequencies of target items.

References Flynn, N. (2012) Levelling and diffusion at the north/south border: a sociophonetic study of

Nottingham speakers. PhD Thesis, University of York. Hay, J., Pierrehumbert, J. and Walker, A. (2010) Lexical frequency in (push)-vowel change.

Paper presented at the Inaugural NZILBB Workshop. Christchurch, December 2010. Fabricius, A., Watt, D. & Johnson, D. (2009) A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel

formant frequency normalisation algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 21(3): 413-435.

Labov, W. (1994) Principles of linguistic change: internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Martinet, A. (1955). Economie des changements phonétiques. Francke: Bern. Pierrehumbert, J. (2002) Word-specific phonetic detail. In Gussenhoven, C. and Warner, N.

(eds) Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 101-139. Tagliamonte, S. (1996-98) Roots of identity: variation and grammaticalisation in

contemporary British English. Final report to the UK Economic and Social Research Council R000221842.`

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Kasstan, Jonathan University of Kent

A social network approach to variation in obsolescent Francoprovençal

Variationist studies that employ a social network methodology have demonstrated that close-knit ties support highly localised norms and intercommunity distinctiveness in a unilingual context, whereas ‘weak ties’ lead speakers to be more readily susceptible to processes of levelling and linguistic change (Milroy and Milroy, 1985). Moreover, it has been shown that, in a bilingual community, similar methodological principles can be applied which might account for language obsolescence and where loose-knit ties would likely bring about language shift (Li Wei, 1994). However, Milroy maintains that, while of considerable theoretical interest, in this under-studied context it is much less clear how the parameters of social networks can be adequately operationalised to account for socially and geographically mobile speakers, whose ties are considered ‘weak’ (2004:562). Further, few studies have attempted to apply this model to account for variation in minority variety speech communities, where conflict and linguistic divergence arises between L1 and L2 speakers. Through an analysis of data collected in 2012, this paper will examine the current sociolinguistic situation in the Francoprovençal speaking regions of les monts du Lyonnais (France) and Valais (Switzerland). Francoprovençal is a fragmented dialect-grouping spoken by less than 1% of the total regional population (cf. Tuaillon, 1993; Bert et al., 2009). While Francoprovençal might clearly represent a language experiencing ‘gradual death’ (Campbell and Muntzel, 1989:184), given the dwindling number of traditional native speakers, it is also nevertheless experiencing revitalisation, due, in part, to a newly emerging type of L2 speaker – termed ‘néo-locuteurs’ (Bert et al., 2009:43) – who have been documented as springing up out of renewed efforts to reverse language shift (cf. Kasstan, 2010; Meune, 2012a; 2012b). Hitherto studied in the context of other typologically dissimilar minority varieties, neo-speakers have been shown to employ variants that are significantly removed from traditional norms; because of underlying sociolinguistic differences between L1 and L2 speakers in these contexts, both groups are noted to perceive themselves as being socially and linguistically incompatible (cf. Jones, 1995; 1998 on Breton; Holton, 2009 on Athabascan). In the context of Francoprovençal, these L2 speakers maintain weak network ties, for they are few in number, geographically dispersed over a large area, and maintain contact – through the use of a neo-variety which they term ‘Arpitan’ – via the Internet, and come together only occasionally for the purpose of language activism. Further, they insist on the need for publication of materials in a unified, pan-regional orthography that differs radically from conventional, highly localised phonetic spelling systems. Crucially, these L2 neo-speakers form and maintain bridges between a number of close-knit, multiplex traditional speaker groups, where, the data will report, new vernacular forms may be emerging. Therefore, these L2 neo-speakers fit the parameters of ‘linguistic innovators’, that, it has been suggested, might ‘figure prominently in a socially accountable theory of linguistic diffusion and change’ (Milroy, 2004:563). As such, this paper will demonstrate how weak ties between groups of L1 and L2 speakers, within obsolescent dialect communities, can both prevent language shift and bring about linguistic change. References Bert, M., Costa, J. and Martin J. B. (2009). Étude FORA : Francoprovençal et occitan en Rhône-

Alpes. Étude Pilotée par l’Institut Pierre Gardette. Université catholique de Lyon.

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Campbell, L. and Muntzel, M. C. (1989). The structural consequences of language death. In: N. C. Dorian (ed.), Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181-196.

Holton, G. (2009). Relearning Athabascan Languages in Alaska: Creating Sustainable Language Communities through Creolization. In: A. M. Goodfellows (ed.), Speaking of Endangered Languages: Issues in Revitalization. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 238-265.

Li Wei. (1994). Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family. Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Jones, M. C. (1995). ‘At What Price Language Maintenance? Standardization in Modern Breton’, French Studies, XLIX, 3, pp. 428-436.

-- -- (1998). Language Obsolescence and Revitalization: Linguistic Change in two Sociolinguistically Contrasting Welsh Communities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kasstan, J. R. (2010). Language obsolescence in the Lyonnais area. Unpublished M.Phil. thesis. University of Cambridge.

Meune, M. (2012a). Pratiques et représentations des langues chez les locuteurs du francoprovençal fribourgeois. Enquête sur la Société des patoisants de la Gruyère. Département de littérature et de langues modernes, Université de Montréal.

-- -- (2012b). Pratiques et représentations du francoprovençal chez les néo-locuteurs vaudois. Enquête sur l’Association vaudois des amis du patois. Département de littérature et de langues modernes, Université de Montréal.

Milroy, L. and Milroy, J. (1985). ‘Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation’, Journal of Linguistics, 21 (2), pp. 339-384.

Milroy, L. (2004). Social Networks. In: J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 549-572.

Tuaillon, G. (1993). Faut-il, dans l’ensemble Gallo-Roman, distinguer une famille linguistique pour le francoprovençal ? In: H. Guillorel and J. Sibille, Langues, dialectes et écriture (Les langues romanes de France), Actes du Colloque de Nanterre des 16, 17 et 18 avril 1992. Paris: I.E.O. : I.P.I.E, pp. 142-149.

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Kerswill, Paul University of York

The reification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of ‘Multicultural London English’ in the British media

This paper is concerned with media labelling of a rapidly emerging language variety, and the media’s ability to shape public conceptions of the variety by appealing to implicit, often negative, ideologies through discourse. The past 30 years have seen scholarly interest in a new youth variety in London’s multiethnic inner city. Writing about the early 1980s, Hewitt (1986) and Sebba (1993) refer to a ‘multiracial vernacular English’ which allowed common linguistic ground to be forged across ethnicities, with a largely London phonology combined with slang. Today, this has evolved into what academics have labelled ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE), a highly variable variety which additionally contains innovative phonological features, new patterns of past tense BE agreement, and distinctive discourse features including a this is + SPEAKER quotative. MLE contains characteristics of both (transient and contingent) youth language and (quasi-permanent) Labovian vernacular; it is referred to by its speakers as ‘slang’ (Author’s Name 2013). Non-speakers may refer to it as ‘talking black’. The British print media have, however, only recently shown an interest in this variety – it is clear that MLE has not yet reached the level of coverage that similar phenomena have achieved in Germany and Sweden, where MLE equivalents have been part of public discourse since the early 1990s. Using the print media database Nexis UK, I have traced the usage of the term which has been adopted by the UK media: Jafaican (with its spelling variant Jafaikan), from its first mention in the Evening Standard in April 2006 to February 2013, during which time 70 articles discussed the term. The one prior use of the word, from 2002, refers to ‘fake Jamaican style’, a meaning which is still attested in the wiki Urban Dictionary, alongside ‘London multiethnic youth language’. If the current referent of ‘Jafaican’ has remained fixed, the discourses surrounding it have not, and have rapidly moved from the straightforward reporting of a newsworthy phenomenon, through to complex representations of it as ‘foreign’ and as morally degenerate. The transition is not unilinear, but can be schematised as follows:

new, interesting language variety threat to ‘Cockney’ an educational problem fully ‘enregistered’ variety (Agha, Johnstone), subject to derision a foreign variety that must be expunged

I argue, with Androutsopoulos (2010), that media representations are part of the history of varieties, often leading to their stereotyping and, especially in the case of mixed, youth varieties, leading to their derogation and political exploitation. References Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2010. Ideologizing ethnolectal German. In Sally Johnson and

Tommaso Milani (eds.), Language ideologies and media discourse, 162-181. London: Continuum.

Kerswill, Paul (2013). Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer et al. (eds.) Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hewitt, R. 1986. White talk black talk. Inter-racial friendship and communication amongst adolescents. Cambridge UP.

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Sebba, Mark. 1993. London Jamaican. London: Longman.

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King, Jeanettei Watson, Catherineii Maclagan, Margareti Harlow, Rayiii Keegan, Peteri i University of Canterbury ii University of Auckland iii University of Waikato

Monophthongs vs diphthongs in Māori: why is the influence different? The NAME project investigates sound change in Māori. The database contains 60 male and female speakers with birthdates spanning 100 years. Recordings and analyses are in both Māori and English. Changes in the speakers’ English parallel known changes in New Zealand English (NZE) (Hay et al. 2008). Acoustic analysis shows there has been considerable change in the quality and quantity of Māori vowels (Author et al. 2010). In particular, /u/ and /u:/ have fronted, the mid vowels have risen, so that for some speakers, /i~i:~e~e:/ are scarcely distinguished, and, apart from the pair /a~a:/, the qualitative and quantitative distinction between the long and short monophthongs has been reduced and in some younger speakers virtually lost. Most of the sound changes have been influenced by English, though some, like the fronting of /u:/ and /u/, could also be language internal change (Author et al. 2009). Here we focus on the speakers’ Māori and English diphthongs which have also changed over time. English has five closing diphthongs, Māori many more. For the older two groups of speakers, their English diphthongs pattern on their Māori diphthongs, but the young speakers’ English diphthongs are indistinguishable from those of other young New Zealanders (Hay et al. 2008) and very different from their Māori diphthongs. We examine the five most common Māori diphthongs MAI /ai/, WAE /ae/, RAU /au/, HOU /ou/, and PAO /ao/ where there are two diphthong mergers MAI/WAE and RAU/HOU for both males and females. Originally, Māori diphthongs were the same length as the long vowels. However, whereas the long monophthongs have shortened so that the length distinction between long and short monophthongs has greatly diminished, the diphthongs continue to be almost the same length as two short vowels. These aspects of the Māori diphthong system do not pattern with the NZE diphthongs, so that the younger speakers appear to have totally different diphthong systems in their two languages. Our findings show that, unlike the monophthongs, Māori diphthongs have been affected not by New Zealand English diphthongs, but by the analysed Māori monophthong shifts (Author et al. 2010). We suggest that because Māori is a 5 vowel system, and English an 11 vowel system, for bilingual speakers the Māori diphthongs could change differently to the New Zealand English ones because the system constraints on the two are quite different. We suggest that a further factor may be that, unlike the monophthongs of either language, the diphthongs are highly salient in contrasting NZE and Māori pronunciations, especially MOUTH vs. RAU and PAO. Use of NZE MOUTH in Māori, or even in words of Māori origin within NZE discourse, is highly stigmatised, leading to almost deliberate avoidance of NZE influence, and to continued pegging of the diphthongs to their corresponding monophthong positions. This finding supports earlier work which shows the continued relationship between diphthongs and their associated monophthongs in the speech of English speakers with

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acquired hearing loss who similarly patterned according to changes in their monophthongs (Palethorpe et al. 2003). References Hay, J., Maclagan, M., and Gordon, E. (2008) New Zealand English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press. Palethorpe, S., Watson, C.I., and Barker, R. (2003). Acoustic analysis of monophthong and

diphthong production in acquired severe to profound hearing loss. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114 (2): 1055-1068.

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Kirkham, Sam Lancaster University

Ethnicity, style and social meaning in a Sheffield high school Studies of linguistic variation in contemporary urban cities find that the increasingly multiethnic composition of those communities plays a significant role in the development of patterns of variation and change (e.g. Labov 1963; Wiese 2009; Quist & Svendsen 2010; Cheshire et al. 2011; Sharma & Sankaran 2011). Findings from recent studies also suggest that concepts such as ‘ethnicity’ and other social categories may be more complex than previously imagined (Eckert 2008; Mendoza-Denton 2008), which has in turn expanded our view of the indexical possibilities of linguistic variation. This talk examines phonetic variation in a multiethnic high school in Sheffield, focusing on the role of style in accounting for the social meaning of variation in this community. Social and linguistic data were collected during a 15-month ethnographic study of a multiethnic high school in Sheffield. A number of social groups in the school were identified via ethnographic observation and participant selfreports, which are here referred to as ‘friendship groups’. These friendship groups were generally oriented around mutual engagement in shared social practices and shared sociocultural orientations (cf. Eckert 2012). Speakers were also categorised in terms of self-reported ethnicity, and information on a number of other social and bilingualism variables was also collected. The linguistic analysis focuses on the acoustic realisation of word-initial [t] and word-final unstressed [ɪ] (often referred to as the HAPPY vowel; cf. Wells 1982; Harrington 2006). In particular, I focus on the noisiness properties of [t] using the peak zero-crossing rate, and the realisation of [ɪ] using a measurement of F2 minus F1. The results for word-initial [t] suggest that variation clusters tightly with social practice groupings in both female and male groups, broadly supporting the findings of previous studies on multiethnic communities (e.g. Eckert 2008; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Alam & Stuart-Smith 2011). These patterns are also evident in comparisons between individual speakers. However, the results for [ɪ] show more complex patterns. The primary axis of variation is in [lɪ] clusters, as in words such as ‘really’ or ‘silly’. In [lɪ] clusters, social groups often vary in (i) the realisation of [l]; (ii) the realisation of [ɪ]; and (iii) the F2-F1 trajectories across the [lɪ] cluster. Social practice differences are evident amongst the female speakers, but these tend to be oriented towards broader pro-/anti-school orientations rather than the more local groupings evident in the [t] analysis. In the male friendship groups, on the other hand, ethnicity appears to play a stronger role in explaining the variation than does social practice. The results suggest that, whilst social practice explains the variation in some cases, ethnicity appears to be a stronger predictor in others. I unpack these results by examining case studies of individual speakers and chart how variation is incorporated into broader stylistic repertoires. In doing so, I suggest that our ability to evaluate the social meaning of variation in this community depends on our ability to situate that variation in terms of different styles and the individuals that embody them (Moore & Podesva 2009; Eckert 2012). References Alam, F., Stuart-Smith, J. 2011.Identity and ethnicity in /t/ in GlasgowPakistani high-school

girls. Proceedings of the XVII International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 216-219.

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Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., Torgersen, E. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: the emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2): 151-196.

Eckert, P. 2008. Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1-2): 25-42.

Eckert, P. 2012. Three waves of variation study. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87-100. Harrington, J. 2006. An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas

broadcasts. Journal of Phonetics 34(4): 439-457. Labov, W. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273-309. Mendoza-Denton, N. 2008. Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth

Gangs. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Moore, E., Podesva, R.J. 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions.

Language in Society 38(4): 447-485. Sharma, D., Sankaran, L. 2011. Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: gradual change in

London Asian speech. Language Variation and Change 23(3): 399-428. Quist, P., Svendsen, B.A. (eds) 2010. Multilingual Urban Scandinavia: New Linguistic Practices.

Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English: Volumes 1-3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiese, H. 2009. Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe: New linguistic

practices among adolescents. Lingua 119(5). 782-806.

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Kretzschmar, Billi Juuso, Ilkkaii iUniversity of Georgia, University of Glasgow, University of Oulu iiUniversity of Oulu

Computer Simulation of Speech with GIS Nobody can observe the language variation in speech directly, for lack of data and lack of time, so computer simulation is the only practical way to model variation. This paper describes a cellular automaton (CA) with advanced GIS (Geographical Information System) features that model language variation as the adaptive aspect of the complex system of speech. The CA uses update rules to determine the status (whether a linguistic feature variant is used or not) at a given location with respect to the status of its neighboring locations; all locations in a matrix are evaluated, and then the new status for each one is displayed all at once (one iteration). We demonstrate how simple rules, run over hundreds of iterations in the CA, can create complex patterns that mirror the distributions of single variants in actual survey data from the Linguistic Atlas project (as below; CA at 1000 iterations at left, probability estimate from Atlas data at right). We then show how such simple rules based only on immediate proximity can be enhanced with multidimensional information available for each location in a large matrix, e.g. social factors such as urban/rural residence and education. We assume that neighbors with the same social status are more likely to adopt or maintain use of the same variant, and vice versa, which allows for variable weighting of use decisions. It is computationally tractable to model the situation by saying that socially similar neighbors get full credit for their spatial proximity, and dissimilar neighbors get partial credit. The simple proximity of immediate neighbors (the eight locations surrounding any non-edge location in a square matrix) is applied in CA update rules such that a certain number of neighbors need to use a variant before the target location begins to use the variant, say 2, 3, or 4 neighbors for our best rule set. A different number of neighbors need to use a variant in order for the target location to keep using the variant, say 5, 6, 7, or 8 neighbors in the best rule set. When multidimensional social factors are added as weights, they can modify the decision at the boundaries of the decision range based on location alone, say to drop the neighborhood score to below 2 for adoption of the variant, or below 5 for maintenance of the variant, if the neighbors were dissimilar socially. In this way the enhancement of a CA with GIS functions models the reality of language variation in speech in social as well as geographic space.

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Lawson, Eleanori Stuart-Smith, Janei Scobbie, Jamesii iUniversity of Glasgow iiQueen Margaret University

A socio-articulatory study of postvocalic /r/ in the Scottish Central Belt. Increasingly, attention is being paid in Sociolinguistics to how fine phonetic variation is exploited by speakers to construct and index social identity (Hay and Drager 2007). To date, most sociophonetic work on consonants has made use of acoustic analysis to reveal unexpectedly subtle variation that is nonetheless socially indexical, e.g. Docherty and Foulkes (1999). However, some aspects of speech production are not readily recoverable even with a fine-grained acoustic analysis. New articulatory analysis techniques, such as ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), allow researchers to push the boundaries further, identifying seemingly covert aspects of speech articulation, which pattern with indexical factors with remarkable consistency. One such case is postvocalic /r/ variation in Central Scotland. We report on an analysis of socially-stratified audio-ultrasound datasets in the east and west of the Scottish Central Belt. Several decades of sociolinguistic investigation have established that there is an auditory dichotomy for postvocalic /r/ in the Scottish Central Belt, (Romaine, 1978; Macafee, 1983; Stuart-Smith 2003, 2007; Lawson, Stuart-Smith and Scobbie, 2008) and beyond, e.g. in Ayrshire (Jauriberry, Sock, Hamm and Pukli, 2012). Weak rhoticity is a feature of working-class (WC) speech, strong rhoticity is associated with middle-class (MC) speech. Initially, a socially-stratified eastern Central Belt audio-ultrasound dataset of teenage speech, collected in 2008, was obtained in order to shed light on weakly rhotic WC /r/ variants, which had proved difficult to code, see Stuart-Smith (2007). However, the ultrasound data revealed unexpected variation in tongue configuration that correlated with social class, and that had not been identified in previous auditory-acoustic analyses. MC speakers were found to produce bunched /r/s in word-list speech style, while WC speakers produced /r/ by raising their tongue tip or front to the postalveolar region. In 2012, we collected a similar dataset of teenage speech in the western Central Belt. Identical patterns of socially-stratified tongue-shape variation were identified in this second dataset, reinforcing that the pattern of variation is not random and has social significance. In addition, we were able to carry out an analysis of lingual gesture timing using the second dataset, that confirmed that speakers belonging to different socioeconomic groups time their /r/ gestures differently and that differences in lingual gesture timing between the WC and MC groups is statistically significant. We will show that variation in tongue shape and timing parameters of articulation can explain the strong and weak rhoticity of MC and WC /r/ respectively, but that, crucially, this variation performed by speakers, had been overlooked by researchers. In particular, the weakening of /r/ due to gesture mistiming may have been misinterpreted as vocalisation. We found almost no instances where the /r/ gesture was completely absent, suggesting that speakers maintain rhoticity at the articulatory level, even where /r/ is only weakly audible or inaudible. References

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Docherty, G. J. and Foulkes, P. (1999). “Newcastle upon Tyne and Derby: instrumental phonetics and variationist studies.” In P. Foulkes and G. J. Docherty (Eds.), Urban Voices: accent studies in the British Isles, London: Arnold, pp47-71.

Hay, J. and Drager, K. (2007). “Sociophonetics”, Annual Review of Anthropology, (36), 89-103 Jauriberry, T. Sock, R. Hamm, A. and Pukli, M. (2012). “Rhoticité et dérhoticisation en anglais

écossaise d’Ayrshire”. Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALNRECITAL, Grenoble 4-8 June 2012 (vol. 1) pp 89-96

Lawson, E. Stuart-Smith, J. & Scobbie, J. M. (2008). “Articulatory insights into language variation and change: Preliminary findings from an ultrasound study of derhoticisation.” In Selected Papers from NWAV 36, Special Issue of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (36). Pennsylvania: The Penn Linguistics Club, pp102-110.

Macafee, C. (1983). Glasgow. Varieties of English Around the World. Text Series, Vol.3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Romaine, S. (1979). “Postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English: Sound change in progress?” In P. Trudgill, (Ed). Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London: Edward Arnold, pp144-157.

Stuart-Smith, J. (2007). “A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ in Glaswegian adolescents.” Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrücken, 1307

Stuart-Smith, J. (2003). “The phonology of modern urban Scots.” In J. Corbett, J. D. McClure, and J. Stuart-Smith (Eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 110-137.

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Lawson, Robert Birmingham City University “Anti-establishment”, “tough” or something else?: Social identity, indexical fields and

(θ) variation in Glasgow As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in Scotland, particularly in the urban centres of Aberdeen, Fife and Glasgow. However, while current research on this phenomenon has focused on frequency effects (Clark and Trousdale 2009), lexical effects (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2006) and media effects (Stuart-Smith 2006), two issues are less-well researched; the social meaning(s) of TH-fronting in discourse and the role social identity plays in how and why speakers might use the feature. Indeed, although the leaders of TH-fronting appear to be working-class adolescents, limited research has focused on which working-class adolescents use TH-fronting and which do not. Moreover, the range of social meanings attached to TH-fronting, including ‘rough’, ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-middle-class’, has meant there have been few attempts to reconcile these disparate meanings into one model. And lastly, there has been limited discussion of how the social meanings of [f] interact with the more established variants [θ] and [h], and in particular, how speakers might use different rates of these variants in the construction of their social identities. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in Glasgow, this paper addresses these issues by considering how variants of (θ) are patterned across four distinct adolescent Communities of Practice and considers how the three main variants of (θ) in Scotland are used by speakers in the construction of their social identity. The results show that although many speakers use TH-fronting, the use of [f] is highest among speakers who dis-identify with the school and engage in a range of sub-cultural social practices. There is also evidence, however, of low rates of [f] among speakers who can be described as ‘pro-school’, suggesting that while particular groups of adolescent speakers may lead in its use, [f] appears to be gaining ground in Glasgow. As such, although [f] has typically been attributed as having a social meaning of ‘rough’ (Clark 2009: 155) or ‘anti-establishment’ (Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie 2007: 251), it seems necessary to re-evaluate the potential ‘indexical field’ of TH-fronting in Scotland. The picture is, however, complicated somewhat by the fact that both [θ] and [h] remains productive variants for speakers, thus I also outline how the social meanings of these two variants interact with [f], and how speakers exploit these varying rates of all three variants during interaction. This paper not only contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding the social productivity of TH-fronting in Scotland, but also focuses on furthering our understanding of its relationship with more established variants of (θ), and highlights how understanding the construction of social identity relies less on a speaker’s use of one particular variant, but on how variants pattern with one another across discourse. References Clark, Lynn. 2009. Variation, change and the usage-based approach. PhD thesis. Edinburgh,

U.K.: University of Edinburgh.

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Clark, Lynn and Trousdale, Graeme. 2009. Exploring the role of token frequency in phonological change: evidence from TH-Fronting in east-central Scotland. English Language and Linguistics, 13 (1): 33-55.

Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2006. The influence of media on language. In Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics (140 – 148). London: Routledge.

Stuart-Smith, Jane and Timmins, Claire. 2006. ‘Tell her to shut her moof’: The role of the lexicon in TH-fronting in Glaswegian. In Christian Kay, Graham Caie, Carole Hough and Irene Wotherspoon (eds.), The Power of Words: Essays in Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics (171 – 183). Rodopi: Amsterdam.

Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins and Fiona Tweedie. 2007. Talkin’ Jockney?: Accent change in Glaswegian. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (2): 221-260.

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Maguire, Warren University of Edinburgh

The dialect of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne This paper describes on-going development and analysis of a corpus of audio recordings of the divergent dialect of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in northeast England. This corpus, collected by a Swiss PhD student, Jörg Berger (see further Berger 1980), in the early 1970s, and supplemented by recordings made of one of Berger’s informants in 2006, consists of about 30 hours of interviews, conversations, and answers to questionnaires such as the Survey of English Dialects (SED). The informants were all natives engaged in traditional occupations, especially fishing, and were mostly born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The recordings cover topics such as local history, fishing practices, place-names and superstitions, and they provide a unique insight into a traditional island society at a time of dramatic social change. As part of a British Academy funded project, time-aligned orthographic transcriptions (using ELAN) are being made of these recordings; these will be hosted on the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) website. The transcriptions will open up the content of the recordings to other researchers and will make detailed analysis of them possible at all linguistic levels. This paper highlights two aspects of the corpus which are currently under linguistic investigation:

1) The extent to which such a corpus of recorded speech reflects the kind of traditional dialect data recorded in surveys like the SED. What were traditional dialect speaking communities actually like in the mid 20th century, and what kinds of variation were present in them? Just to give one example, Berger (1980) records only uvular R ([ʁ]) in the variety. Does an analysis of the recordings confirm Berger’s findings, or is the situation more complicated than this? If so, what variation is there, and how is it conditioned?

2) The evidence that this corpus provides for the linguistic history of the Border region. The Holy Island dialect contains a wide range of features typical of Border Scots varieties not usually found in Northumberland (e.g. SVLR-type conditioning of high monophthongs, / / in KIT and /ʌ/ in STRUT, ‘HAND-Darkening’, some merger of LOT and GOAT, you and me diphthongisation). As such, it provides an excellent source of evidence for the history of dialect in north Northumberland and for the interaction of phonological variation and the Scottish-English Border (which lies 15 miles north of Holy Island), complementing and contextualising, geographically and diachronically, more recent research by the Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border (AISEB) project.

The Holy Island corpus provides a wealth of data for addressing these and many other questions. It will be seen that legacy corpora of this kind are crucial for understanding variation and change in divergent varieties of English, and their development and analysis is a key task for 21st century dialectologists. References Berger, Jörg. 1980. The Phonology of the Holy Island Dialect. Bern: Peter Lang. Orton, Harold and Eugen Dieth (eds.). 1962–71. Survey of English Dialects (B): The basic

materials. Leeds: Arnold & Son.

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Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE): http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/ Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border (AISEB):

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/ ELAN: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/

http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/

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McCafferty, Kevini Amandor-Moreno, Carolinaii iUniversity of Bergen iiUniversity of Extremadura

‘I dont care one cent what Ø goying on in great Britten’1: Be-deletion in Irish English Copula deletion in equative sentences is a salient, well-known and heavily-researched feature of African American English (e.g., Rickford 1998; Kautszch 2002; Green 2002; Weldon 2003). Since this is taken to be a creole or African substrate feature in AAVE, it is assumed that superstrate input varieties of English from Britain and Ireland did not include this feature. Certainly, there have been few reports of be-deletion from Britain and Ireland, though it has recently been reported from present-day northeastern England (Martin 1999; Martin & Tagliamonte 1999, cited in Tagliamonte 2012:39) as well as Scotland (Macaulay 1991) and nineteenth-century Yorkshire (Giner & Montgomery 1997). Recently, too, Hickey (2007:176-177) has reported be-deletion in a wider set of contexts (not just copula deletion) in the Irish English of the Waterford region of southeastern Ireland. Besides copula functions, be-deletion: (a) occurred predominantly in third-person contexts, (b) past-tense forms of be were also subject to deletion, and (c), contrary to claims made regarding African American English, deletion also occurred in clause- and sentence-final positions. It is further suggested that the frequency of –s absence on common verbs in the third person in southeastern Ireland might have facilitated be-deletion (Hickey 2007:177). This paper uses the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) for a diachronic study of be-deletion in Irish English. The findings indicate that this was a robust phenomenon in Irish English historically, and offer support for the predominance of third-person contexts for be-deletion. Furthermore, the geographical spread of this feature in Ireland stretches from Derry and Donegal in the northwest to Waterford in the southeast. However, occurrences in final positions were rare in the CORIECOR data, as was –s absence on third-person verbs. This study thus broadly supports Hickey’s proposal that attestations of be-deletion in Irish English must lead to some revision of accounts that assume copula deletion does not and did not occur in British and Irish Englishes (e.g., Rickford 1998:187). Dialect input from relevant varieties spoken in Ireland, a country that supplied large numbers of English-speaking settlers to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can no longer be dismissed when considering copula deletion in African American English (Hickey 2007:177). References Cukor-Avila, Patricia 1999. Stativity and copula absence in AAVE: grammatical constraints at

the subcategorical level. Journal of English linguistics 27:341-355 Giner, María F. García-Bermejo & Michael Montgomery 1997. Regional British English from

the nineteenth century: evidence from emigrant letters. In A.S. Thomas (ed.), Current methods in dialectology. Bangor: University of Wales. 167-183.

Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English. A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hickey, Raymond 2007. Irish English. History and present-day forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1 Source: letter from John Stevenson Sinclair to Margaret Graham (JSS, 05.03.1889).

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Kautszch, Alexander 2002. The historical evolution of Earlier African American English. An empirical comparison of early sources. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Macaulay, Ronald K.S. 1991. Locating dialect in discourse. The language of honest men and bonnie lassies in Ayr. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rickford, John R. 1998. The creole origins of African-American vernacular English: evidence from copula absence. In Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey & John Baugh (eds.), African-American English. Structure, history and use. London: Routledge. 154-200.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. The roots of English. Exploring the history of dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weldon, Tracy L. 2003. Revisiting the creolist hypothesis: copula variability in Gullah and southern rural AAVE. American speech 78:171-191.

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McLaughlin, Brittanyi MacKenzie, Laurelii iUniversity of Pennsylvania iiUniversity of Manchester

Animacy effects in English contraction An effect of animacy has been demonstrated for certain linguistic variables in English, namely, the dative and genitive alternations (Bresnan and Hay, 2008; Rosenbach, 2005). Recent work has also brought to light animacy effects in several variables in African American English (McLaughlin 2013). The present study investigates animacy effects in contraction of the auxiliaries is and has, and finds that animacy is a large and significant predictor of contraction. As such, we document a hitherto unattested factor conditioning this variable, and open up a discussion of animacy as a predictor of variable morphosyntactic phenomena more generally. Our findings are based on a database of 1481 tokens from the Switchboard (Godfrey and Holliman, 1997), Fisher (Cieri, 2004), and Philadelphia Neighborhood (Labov and Rosenfelder, 2011) corpora. The two auxiliaries under study, is and has, were coded as contracted when they surfaced as a single consonant with no audible vowel; otherwise they were coded as full. Auxiliaries after pronoun subjects were excluded, as they nearly categorically display contraction (MacKenzie 2013). Animacy was operationalized as human vs. inanimate, following findings that human is at the most animate end of the spectrum, and that inanimates are the least animate in English (Rosenbach 2005). Additional predictors coded were those found significant in prior work on contraction: subject length in words, and, in the case of is, preceding segment (consonant vs. vowel) and following constituent type (Labov, 1969; MacKenzie, 2012). We ran separate mixed-effects models on is (N=1102) and has (N=379) with the factors listed above as fixed effects, plus random effects of speaker, preceding word, and following word. As expected, subject length and (for is) preceding segment and following constituent were all significant effects. The novel finding is that animacy also has a significant and large effect, such that contraction is more likely with animate subjects (Tables 1-2). In fact, animacy is the predictor with the largest effect size. Figure 1 graphs the raw animacy and contraction data for is. These effects are reminiscent of English genitive variation, which is also conditioned by NP weight and animacy. However, NP weight and animacy are highly correlated (Rosenbach 2005), such that animates are more likely to have low weight. Rosenbach teased apart these factors and determined that both are significant effects independently from one another. We test this on our larger dataset, that of is, by controlling for number of words and running the same model on only two-word subjects (N=617). The animacy effect remains the largest effect and is highly significant (Table 3), indicating that animacy conditioning is not simply an epiphenomenon of weight. Our results contribute to a growing body of research demonstrating the pervasiveness of animacy effects in sociolinguistic variables in varieties of English. They also corroborate and provide a potential source for animacy conditioning on AAE copula deletion found in McLaughlin 2013. Accordingly, we conclude with a discussion of the potential source of

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animacy effects on morphosyntactic phenomena, including the nature of their representation in the grammar. Table 1: Mixed-effects model results for contraction of “has.” Estimate Standard Error p value

(Intercept) -1.05 0.53 0.045 Animacy = human 1 0.31 0.0014 Subject length in words -0.42 0.12 <0.001 Prec. segment = consonant 0.43 0.38 0.26 Table 2: Mixed-effects model results for contraction of “is.” Estimate Standard Error p value

(Intercept) 1.48 0.38 <0.001 Animacy = human 1.36 0.22 <0.001 Subject length in words -0.51 0.09 <0.001 Prec. segment = consonant -0.78 0.22 <0.001 Following = noun phrase -1.30 0.33 <0.001 Following = adjective -0.63 0.30 0.03 Table 3: Mixed-effects model results for contraction of “is” with two-word subjects. Estimate Standard Error p value

(Intercept) 0.55 0.43 0.21 Animacy = human 1.61 0.29 <0.001 Prec. segment = consonant -0.93 0.33 0.004 Following = noun phrase -1.18 0.39 0.003 Following = adjective -0.65 0.35 0.065

Figure 1: Raw proportions of contracted “is” by animacy type. References Bresnan, Joan, and Jennifer Hay. 2008. Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the

syntax of give in New Zealand and American English. Lingua 118:245–259. Cieri, Christopher et al. 2004. Fisher English Training Speech Parts 1 and 2. Philadelphia:

Linguistic Data Consortium. Godfrey, John J., and Edward Holliman. 1997. Switchboard-1 Release 2. Philadelphia:

Linguistic Data Consortium.

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Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45:715–762.

Labov, William, and Ingrid Rosenfelder. 2011. The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus. MacKenzie, Laurel. 2013. Variation in English auxiliary realization: A new take on contraction. Language Variation and Change 25:1–25.

MacKenzie, Laurel. 2012. Variation Above the Phonology. PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

McLaughlin, Brittany. 2013. Animacy effects on verbal -s and copula deletion in African American Vernacular English. Paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, January 6, 2013.

Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81:613–644

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Moore, Emma Carter, Paul University of Sheffield

Dialect Contact and Distinction in an Island Community The Isles of Scilly are situated twenty-eight miles west of the Cornish mainland. Very little is written about the variety of English spoken on the islands, but metalinguistic commentary suggest that islanders are “remarkable for speaking good English” (Borlase 1756, 116). Relying on this metalinguistic commentary when writing his work on English dialects, Ellis (1890, 41) insisted that “all dialect had been educated out” and that “no attention therefore need be paid to [the islands]”. However, data from the Isles of Scilly Museum’s oral history archive suggests that the dialect situation is less straightforward than these informal accounts would have us believe. Whilst it is clear that the variety exhibits differences from its nearest neighbouring varieties on the Cornish mainland, it is not the case that the dialect is “scarcely removed from Standard (southern) English” (Thomas 1979, 109). Links to elite social groups (following a series of island governors; the first of which is believed to have effectively repopulated the island in the 16th century) and on-going (mostly Cornish) immigration into the islands, suggests a complex history of dialect contact. This paper will attempt to untangle this history by comparing data from Scillonian speakers born at the turn of the twentieth century with contemporaneous data from the varieties claimed to have influenced the dialect on the islands: Cornish English and RP. The Scillonian data is drawn from the Isles of Scilly Museum’s oral history archive (www.hrionline.ac.uk/scillyvoices). The Cornish data is taken from interviews made during the Survey of English dialects (Orton and Wakelin 1968), and the RP data is drawn from Linguaphone recordings made by linguists at the University College London (supplied courtesy of the British Library’s Early Spoken Word collection: http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Early-spoken-word-recordings). Auditory and acoustic analysis of the vowels found in the TRAP and BATH lexical sets (which are split by vowel quality in RP, but not in traditional varieties of Cornish English) is undertaken in order to explore the relationship between these varieties. Not only do our results provide support for dialect contact, but heterogeneity amongst the Scillonian speakers suggests a process of reallocation (Trudgill 1986), whereby the input variants have been refunctionalised on the islands for socio-stylistic purposes (Britain and Trudgill 1999, 247–248). These results demonstrate that linguistic variation on Scilly is not as straightforward as historical metalinguistic commentary would have us believe. Furthermore, they provide additional support for recent work on other rural areas which demonstrates that “individual speakers distinguish themselves linguistically no matter what type of community they live in” (Schreier 2006, 27; see also Schilling-Estes 2002; Britain 2009). References Borlase, William. 1756. Observations on the Ancient and Present State of the Isles of Scilly and Their

Importance to the Trade of Great-Britain. In a Letter to the Reverend Charles Lyttelton, LL.D. Dean of Exeter, and F.R.S. Oxford: W. Jackson.

Britain, David. 2009. “‘Big Bright Lights’ Versus ‘Green and Pleasant Land?’: The Unhelpful Dichtomy of ‘Urban’ Versus ‘Rural’ in Dialectology.” In Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Enam Al-Wer and Rudolf de Jong, 223–247. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/scillyvoices

http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Early-spoken-word-recordings

http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Early-spoken-word-recordings

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Britain, David, and Peter Trudgill. 1999. “Migration, New Dialect Formation, and Sociolinguistic Refunctionalisation: Reallocation as an Outcome of Dialect Contact.” Transactions of the Philological Society 97: 245–256.

Ellis, Alexander J. 1890. English Dialects - Their Sounds and Homes. London: The English Dialect Society.

Orton, Harold, and Martyn F. Wakelin, ed. 1968. Survey of English Dialects (B) The Basic Materials. Volume IV The Southern Counties. Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Sons Ltd.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. “On the Nature of Isolated and Post-isolated Dialects: Innovation, Variation and Differentiation.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (1): 64–85.

Schreier, Daniel. 2006. “The Backyard as Dialect Boundary: Individuation, Linguistic Heterogeneity and Sociolinguistic Eccentricity in a Small Speech Community.” Journal of English Linguistics 34 (1): 25–57.

Thomas, Charles. 1979. “A Glossary of Spoken English in the Isles of Scilly.” Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall: 109–147.

Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Wiley.

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Nance, Claire Lancaster University

Variation and change in Scottish Gaelic tone and intonation Scottish Gaelic is a minority endangered language of Scotland currently undergoing revitalisation (MacLeod 2006). One revitalisation measure is the introduction of Gaelic immersion schooling in both areas where Gaelic is traditionally spoken, and also urban areas where Gaelic is not a widespread community language. This paper examines variation and change in the Gaelic language. In particular I focus on young people learning Gaelic in immersion schooling as a result of revitalisation measures. Here I examine variation and change in tone and intonation. Gaelic is described as a ‘word accent’ language making some use of lexical tone alongside intonation (e.g. Ternes 2006). Each stressed word is assigned one of two contrastive word accents realised as different pitch contours. This system is very different to English, a language in intense contact with Gaelic. English is considered an intonation language making no use of lexical tone (e.g. Wells 2006). Data were collected from three groups of Gaelic speakers: older speakers living on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, adolescents in Gaelic immersion education in Lewis, and adolescents in Gaelic immersion education in Glasgow. Ethnographic fieldwork and sociolinguistic interviews were carried out among the three groups of speakers. The linguistic data presented here are from interviews with 39 participants and are discussed with reference to the ethnography. Approximately 30 intonation phrases per speaker were analysed from two discourse contexts defined using the Discourse Context Analysis framework (Gregersen, Nielsen & Thøgersen 2009). Within each phrase the pre-nuclear and nuclear pitch accents were analysed using firstly descriptive labelling and then Autosegmental Metrical analysis (Pierrehumbert 1980). An initial analysis of the data compared the pitch accents which speakers produced, to the pitch accents predicted by previous descriptions of Gaelic. Results indicate that while the older Lewis speakers produced accents very similar to those predicted from work such as Ternes (2006), the two groups of young speakers did not, and instead produced pitch accents consistent with an intonation language such as English. A separate analysis was conducted on the young people’s data using a labelling system designed for dialects of English (Grabe, Nolan & Farrar 1998). This analysis revealed that young Glaswegian speakers typically produced rises similar to those found in Glaswegian English e.g. (Cruttenden 1997:133), and in Lewis speakers produced a variety of rises and falls. Both groups of speakers occasionally produced examples of High Rising Terminal, a pattern that is not commonly reported in Scottish English and has never previously been reported in Scottish Gaelic. These results are discussed with reference to the ethnographic fieldwork carried out in each community, cross-language prosodic influence, variation and change in minority languages, and previous research into High Rising Terminal. References

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Cruttenden, Alan. 1997. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2nd edn.Grabe, Esther, Francis Nolan & Kimberley Farrar. 1998. IViE: a comparative transcription system for intonational variation in English. Proceedings.of.the.5th. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Sydney, Australia. 1259-1262.

Gregersen, Frans, Søren Beck Nielsen & Jacob Thøgersen. 2009. Stepping into the same river twice on the discourse context analysis in the LANCHART project. Acta.Linguistica.Hafniensia .41. 30-63.

Macleod, Wilson. 2006. Revitalising. Gaelic. in. Scotland.. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1980. The. phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD thesis,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. Ternes, Elmar. 2006. The.phonemic.analysis.of.Scottish.Gaelic:.based.on.the.dialect. of

Applecross, Rossshire. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. 3rd edn. Wells, John. 2006. English. intonation:. an. introduction.. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

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Palfreyman, Nick iSLanDS Institute, University of Central Lancashire Persistence and intra-individual variation: completive aspect markers in Indonesian

sign language varieties. This paper investigates the factors that influence the usage of variants of the completive aspect marker in two urban sign language varieties. The investigation is based on a corpus of spontaneous, conversational data from 40 sign language users in the cities of Solo (Java) and Makassar (Sulawesi). The completive aspect is frequently realised in both sign language varieties, perhaps due to its cultural significance in Indonesia (Kadarisman 2005). Around 300 tokens have been identified and coded. Four forms occur frequently in the corpus that appear to be functionally equivalent in expressing the completive aspect. These are best analysed as lexical variants of a single variable, which is referred to here as SUDAH. (“Sudah”, an Indonesian word, ‘usually indicates

SUDAH-1 is articulated with a quick change in hand orientation created by a twist of the wrist, where the exact orientations are underspecified.

SUDAH-2 is the most frequent variant, and involves a slower twist of the wrist in the opposite direction to SUDAH-1, finishing palm-up.

SUDAH-3 is a phonologically distinct form requiring a forward movement. SUDAH-4 has grammaticalised from a polysemous sign with meanings including

‘good’, ‘safe’ and ‘ready’.

Tokens were coded for three social variables (location, age, sex of the signer) and three linguistic variables: syntactic position, previous realisation of the variable, narrative advancement function. Mixed effect logistic regression analysis (using Rbrul, Johnson 2008) indicates that all of these variables significantly predict variation in SUDAH, with the exception of location. One of the variants (SUDAH-1) shows a preference for a pre-predicate slot, while another (SUDAH-2) is used less by older signers and more by men than women. Interestingly, the previous realisation of the variable is a significant predictor of all but one variant (p<0.01) – but is this evidence of intra-individual variation, or persistence (Szmrecsanyi 2005)? There is qualitative evidence of both phenomena in the data. In some dialogues, signers use the same variant regardless of the one(s) used by their interlocutor (persistence) – as in (1), a conversation between Jayeng and Muhammad from Solo. In other cases, signers switch from one variant to another (see (2) from Makassar).

(1) Jayeng: PT:PRO1=SUDAH-1 PT:PRO1 MEET PT:PRO1 CHATTING YAHOO- MESSENGER ‘I met [him], we chatted on Yahoo Messenger’.

Muhammad: SUDAH-2 MEET SUDAH-2

‘Have you already met him [in person]?’

Jayeng: PT:PRO1 CHATTING=SUDAH-1 reciprocal KNOW PT:PRO- 1=SUDAH-1

‘I have already chatted with him, we already know each other’.

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(2) SUDAH-1 WEDDING-RING MARRY SUDAH-3 ‘[We will] already have married…’

I present the findings of further quantitative analysis that seeks to differentiate between persistence and intra-individual variation by examining previous realisations of the variable by the same signer and by the interlocutor(s) in a previous turn. The aim is to obtain a more detailed picture of how signers might select variants of the completive aspect marker. Possible reasons for intra-individual variation are also discussed, including phonological conditioning and accommodation. References Johnson, Daniel Ezra (2008). Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-

effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3.359-383. Kadarisman, A. Effendi (2005) ‘Linguistic Relativity, Cultural Relativity, and Foreign Language

Teaching’. TEFLIN, 16:1. Sneddon, James (2010). Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt (2005). ‘Language users as creatures of habit’, Corpus Linguistics &

Linguistic Theory 1-1, 113-50.

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Podesva, Robert Calder, Jeremy Chen, Hsin-Chang D'Onofrio, Annette Flores Bayer, Isla Kim, Seung Kyung Van Hofwegen, Janneke Stanford University

The California Vowel Shift in a Rural Inland Community

While several studies have examined vocalic variation in California (Moonwomon 1987,

Hagiwara 1997, Fought 1999, Hall-Lew 2009, Podesva 2011), nearly all previous work focuses

on urban, coastal varieties. This study investigates the extent to which speakers in Shasta

County — a Northern, inland community — participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS).

We consider the speech of 32 lifelong residents of the community, half oriented to the town

of Redding (Townies), the other half to the country (Country- folk), along three dimensions

of the CVS: the fronting of back vowels GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT; the nasal pattern (raising of

TRAP before nasals, backing elsewhere); and the LOT-THOUGHT merger.

Mixed-effect regression models show Shasta County speakers participating to some extent

in all components of the shift Younger speakers exhibit more merged LOT-THOUGHT

(p<0.05), strongly fronted back vowels [p<O.05 GOOSE, p<0.01 GOAT), and a stronger nasal

pattern (p<0.05 pre-nasal TRAP raising, p<O.OO1 TRAP backing) than older speakers.

Additionally, an interaction between gender and town-orientation conditions the backing of

non-p re-nasal TRAP. Townies show greater backing, whereas Country-folk men resist it

(p<0.05).

Our data suggest the CVS spreads from urban centers and that speakers’ orientation to the

town structures variation patterns. People in Shasta County position themselves in

opposition to city-dwellers and accordingly use newer CVS features (nasal pattern) less than

urban Californians (Eckert 2008). Further, the greater ideological divide between cities and

smaller towns plays out recursively in Shasta County: Country-folk exhibit a less distinct

nasal pattern than the more cosmopolitan Townies. Yet Townies and Country-folk, both

oriented to Californian identity, use older CVS features (LOT-THOUGHT).

This study demonstrates that while certain features of the CVS retain associations with the

metropolis, others have become more widespread indices of California authenticity.

Speakers appeal to these different meanings to negotiate an identity that is non-urban, but

nevertheless Californian.

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Roberts, Nicolas Newcastle University

The Variable Nature of the Negative Particle ne in Martinique French This study is the first quantitative variationist investigation of the negative particle ne in the French département d’outre-mer of Martinique. In Standard varieties of French, verbal negation is expressed through a bipartite ‘bracketing’ structure, which is comprised of the preverbal morpheme ne and one of several post-verbal second negatives (as in 1a and 1b). By contrast, in spoken language, the ne particle can be omitted, leaving the post-verbal negative polarity items as the sole overt markers of negative meaning (as in 2).

(1) a. Je ne suis pas sûr. [ALB] 1SG NEG be.PRES.IND not sure ‘I am not sure.’

b. Vous ne pouvez rien faire. [MAE] 2PL NE can.PRES.IND nothing make.INF ‘You cannot do anything.’

(2) Moi j’ ai jamais vu la neige. [KAG] Me 1SG have.PRES.IND never see.PP DEF snow ‘I have never seen snow.’

The presence or absence of ne has been described as ‘possibly the best known sociolinguistic variable in contemporary French’ (Coveney 2002: 55). Indeed, previous variationist research has produced remarkably consistent results concerning both the internal and external factors governing negative particle variation (cf. Ashby 1981, Coveney 2002, Armstrong 2002, Armstrong & Smith 2002, Poplack & St-Amand 2007, Auger & Villeneuve 2008 inter alia). However, as morphosyntactic variables in Antillean French are known to pattern relatively differently from other varieties (Roberts 2012a, 2012b), it remains to be seen whether the expression of verbal negation in Martinique French is similarly distinctive. The present study aims to investigate whether the constraint systems reported for other varieties of French also hold in a Caribbean context. The analysis is based on a sample of 30 speakers from a 2011 corpus of spoken Martinique French. Informants were interviewed in self-selected dyads using a traditional sociolinguistic interview protocol and were stratified by age, educational level and gender. Additionally, due to high levels of French/créole martiniquais bilingualism, speakers’ use of French was controlled for and measured using a modified version of Mougeon and Beniak’s (1991) language-restriction index. Crucially, analyses of the data reveal that verbal negation strategies in Martinique French do indeed differ from other varieties. Isolated chi-square and fixed-effects logistic regression models highlight the complex set of syntactic, social and stylistic constraints governing variable negation in this particular locality. Mixed models furthermore tease apart the complex set of interacting factor groups influencing variant selection and demonstrate the importance of considering individual speaker and word-level variation when analysing sociolinguistic data.

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By contrasting variable usage in Martinique French with European and Canadian speech communities, this paper provides a local as well as a global perspective on French morphosyntactic variability. The present study contributes to our understanding of the linguistic factors that unite and divide la francophonie, whilst adding a French perspective to the existing literature on global linguistic trends (cf. Meyerhoff & Niedzielski 2003, Buchstaller & D’Arcy 2009). References Armstrong, N. 2002. ‘Variable deletion of French ne: a cross-stylistic perspective’. Language

Sciences 24: 153–173. Armstrong, N. and A. Smith 2002. ‘The influence of linguistic and social factors on the recent

decline of French ne’. French Language Studies 12: 23–41. Ashby, W. J. 1981. ‘The loss of the negative particle ne in French: a syntactic change in

progress’. Language 57: 674–687. Auger, J. and A.-J. Villeneuve 2008. ‘Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French: evidence for

distinct grammars’. In M. Meyerhoff and N. Nagy (eds.) Social Lives in Language: Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Buchstaller, I. and A. D’Arcy 2009. ‘Localized globalization: a multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13: 291-331.

Coveney, A. 2002. Variability in Spoken French: A Sociolinguistic Study of Interrogation and Negation. Bristol and Portland: Elm Bank.

Meyerhoff, M. and N. Niedzielski 2003. ‘The globalisation of vernacular variation’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 535-555. Mougeon, R. and E. Beniak 1991. Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poplack, S. and A. St-Amand 2007. ‘A real-time window on 19th -century vernacular French: the Récits du français québécois d’autrefois’. Language in Society 36: 707–734.

Roberts, N. S. 2012a. ‘Future temporal reference in Hexagonal French’. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18.2: 97–106.

Roberts, N. S. 2012b. ‘A Caribbean perspective on global linguistic trends: The future of Martinique French’. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 41, Indiana University, 25–28 October 2012.

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Smith, Jennifer Holmes-Elliott, Sophie University of Glasgow

One speaker, two dialects: bidialectalism across the generations in a Scottish community

Sociolinguistic research in the British Isles has demonstrated ongoing dialect attrition in traditional varieties of English spoken in peripheral, rural areas (e.g. Britain 2009, Smith & Durham 2011). It is often assumed that dialect attrition inevitably leads to dialect death. However, an alternative to dialect death is bidialectalism. In this scenario, instead of the local dialect being completely replaced by a supra-local variety, speakers in previously monolectal communities now have access to both varieties in their linguistic repertoire, as in (1):

(1) Shona: I na ken far the quines is. Jennifer: Sorry? Shona: I said I don’t know where the girls are.

Bidialectalism is said to have ‘increased so much that monolingual speakers of non-standard dialects have become the exception’ in modern day life (Cornips & Hulk 2006:355). But what exactly does it mean to be bidialectal? Can speakers really have control over two dialects, just as, for example, a bilingual speaker has over two languages? Some studies have investigated this issue in immigrant communities in the British Isles (e.g. Sharma 2011), but little is known about ‘the qualitative and quantitative linguistic and sociolinguistic constraints for potentially bidialectal speakers’ (Hazen 2001:85) in hitherto traditional dialect areas where the indigenous variety may be far removed from more mainstream linguistic norms. This results in a significant gap in the investigation of the changing dialect landscape in the British Isles in the 21st century. In this paper we introduce a new ESRC funded project on bidialectalism which may go some way to addressing this gap. We investigate a community of speakers from a small fishing town in northeast Scotland. Speakers in this community are observed to employ both local dialect and more standardised English in their linguistic repertoire: the local dialect is used the majority of the time, with an alternate variety approximating Standard Scottish English (SSE) mostly circumscribed to school and talking to outsiders. However, the use of the two varieties may be age- and form-dependent. Initial observation suggests that 1) the older generations have limited ability in SSE, with switching restricted to a handful of highly salient lexical items. 2) the middle-aged speakers can switch across a wider range of forms, and 3) the younger speakers are much more flexible in utilizing both local and standard varieties in particular contexts of use. Even in this younger generation, however, speakers appear to systematically switch with lexical and phonological forms, but not with morphosyntactic variables. In other words, bidialectal ability may be increasing, but still partial, across the generations. This research will investigate these observations further through a quantitative, sociolinguistic analysis of the use of two codes across the generations. We will collect a corpus of data from 64 speakers, stratified by age and gender, in conversation with 1) a community ‘insider’ and 2) an ‘outsider’ and compare a number of key linguistic features through quantitative analyses of their use across both recordings. This empirical investigation of how speakers manipulate their linguistic repertoire in contexts beyond vernacular use will contribute to our understanding of the transition from monolectalism to bidialectalism in this community, the British Isles and elsewhere.

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Stuart-Smith, Jane Rathcke, Tamara University of Glasgow

What is happening to the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow? The number of real-time studies of phonological variation and change is still relatively small (Sankoff 2006), and there has been little investigation into change in features other than segments, such as vowel quantity, which we might also expect to interact with speech prosody (Nakai et al 2012). Glasgow vernacular, like other varieties of Scottish English, is known for showing a quasi-phonemic pattern of vowel duration, the ‘Scottish Vowel Length Rule’ (SVLR). Unlike other English accents, Scottish English shows rather little low-level-lengthening of vowels before voiced consonants. Vowels are generally short, and only lengthened before voiced fricatives, /r/ and morpheme boundaries. Aitken’s (1981) original formulation applied the SVLR to all vowels, but McKenna (1988) and then Scobbie et al (1999) only found evidence for /i ʉ/ and /ai/. At the same time, the SVLR appears to be weakening, and being replaced by low-level-lengthening, in situations of high contact with English English (for children of English-speaking parents in Edinburgh, Hewlett et al 1999; in younger speakers in the border town of Berwick, Watt/Ingram 2000; in speakers from Aberdeen, Watt/Yurkova 2007). What is the fate of the SVLR in Glasgow, where there is less contact with other varieties of English, and where it is expected to be more robust (Scobbie et al 1999)? This paper begins to tackle these questions drawing on a real-time corpus of Glaswegian, and here, spontaneous speech from the 1970s and 2000s. We compare four speaker groups, two of middle aged men, 70M and 00M, born in the 1930s and 1060s respectively, and two of adolescent boys, 70Y and 00Y, born in the 1950s and 1970s. All tokens containing /i ʉ a/ (except preceding /r/), were extracted and labelled according to segmental and morphological environment. Each target syllable was also coded for prosodic factors: prominence (stressed, accented and nuclear), and phrasal position (initial, medial, final). The data were analysed using linear mixed effects models with crossed, maximal random effect structure to account for possible idiosyncrasies in the dataset (Barr et al 2013). Our results show that - across all four speaker groups - /a/ was lengthened at morphological boundaries, but slightly shortened before voiced fricatives. /a/ does not seem to belong to the vowel set participating in the SVLR, and there has been no change since the 1970s. /i/ and /ʉ/, on the other hand, undergo substantial lengthening in SVLR lengthening environments. However, there was a significant interaction between prominence and the realization of the SVLR across the four groups. Both adolescent groups showed very little lengthening in stressed syllables, but SVLR ‘long’ vowels were shorter in nuclear accents produced by the 00Y group, than all other groups. These results are intriguing for three reasons. First, SVLR seems to be eroding in Glasgow vernacular. Second, they point to the importance of prosodic factors in sound change (Nakai et al 2012). And third, the absence of low-level-lengthening of vowels before voiced consonants in Glasgow suggests that weakening of the SVLR in this low-contact situation is proceeding differently from contact-induced erosion elsewhere. References

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Aitken, A.J. (1981): The Scottish Vowel Length Rule. In Benskin, M. & Samuels, M.L.(eds.) So meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: The Middle English Dialect Project. 131-157.

Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, Ch., Tilyc, H. J. (2013): Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68(3), 255-278.

Hewlett, N., Matthews, B., and Scobbie, J.M. (1999): Vowel duration in Scottish English speaking children. Proceedings of the XVth ICPhS. 2157-60.

Nakai, S., Turk, A., Suomi, K., Granlund, S., Ylitalo, R., and Kunnari, S.(2012): Quantity constraints on the temporal implementation of phrasal prosody in Northern Finnish. Journal of Phonetics 40, 796– 807

Sankoff, G. (2006): Age: Apparent time and real time. Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, Article no: LALI:01479

Scobbie, J. M., Hewlett, N., & Turk, A. (1999): Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish vowel length rule revealed. In P. Foulkes and G.J. Docherty (eds.) Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold, 230-245.

Watt, D. and Ingham, C. (2000): Durational evidence of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Berwick English. In: Nelson, D. & P. Foulkes (eds) Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics 8, pp. 205-228.

Watt, D. and Yurkova, G. (2007): Voice Onset Time and the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Aberdeen English. Proceedings of the XVIth ICPhS, 1521-4.

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Szakay, Anita Stanford University

Indexical Specificity Effects in Cross-Dialect Auditory Priming Indexical variation – such as talker variability – has been shown by numerous studies to affect speech processing (e.g. Peters 1955, Mullennix et al 1989, Church & Schacter 1994). For example, words are processed faster when spoken by the same talker, as opposed to different talkers. Luce et al (2003) suggest that this decrease in the magnitude of priming caused by a different talker (= indexical specificity effect) may take time to develop during the course of speech processing. When processing is fast an effortless, specificity effects do not occur. When processing is delayed, however, the reliance on indexical details increases, and greater specificity effects are obtained. The present study investigates another source of indexical variability, namely the effect of ethnic dialect on speech processing. 72 ethnically Maori New Zealanders participated in a short-term auditory lexical decision task, where prime and target pairs were made up of the two main ethnic dialects of New Zealand English: the standard variety (Pakeha English (PE)), and the non-standard variety (Maori English (ME)). This created four test conditions: two matched conditions (PE-PE and ME-ME), and two mismatched conditions (ME-PE and PE-ME). Critical trials consisted of repeated items (e.g. snow – snow), and control trials consisted of unrelated items (e.g. thing – food). The results reveal that overall reaction times are significantly slower on ME targets. This suggests a processing benefit for the standard PE dialect, even for speakers of the nonstandard ME variety. This difference in reaction times creates an ideal situation to test the time-course hypothesis proposed by Luce et al (2003). We expect more pronounced indexical specificity effects on the ME targets, where processing is slower, than on PE targets, where processing is faster. To gauge the magnitude of specificity effects, priming values were calculated as the difference in mean reaction times between related critical pairs and unrelated control pairs. As expected, the priming results revealed no specificity effects on PE targets, showing that both ME and PE words are equally good primes in the ME-PE and PE-PE conditions. However, specificity effects were obtained on ME targets, where priming was significantly attenuated in the mismatch condition. In other words, a standard PE word is not as good at priming a non-standard ME target, as a ME prime is. The results demonstrate that indexical information, in particular ethnic dialect, is retained in memory and has consequences for subsequent processing. The results are consistent with Luce et al’s (2003) time-course hypothesis, which posits that reliance on indexical details increases when responses are delayed by suboptimal processing conditions, in this case the slower processing of a non-standard ethnic dialect. Taken together, these findings suggest that socio-indexical information associated with different dialects is processed relatively late during speech perception.

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Tamminga, Meredith McLaughlin, Brittany University of Pennsylvania

The sensitivity of persistence to subject animacy in AAVE third singular /s/ Many linguistic variables are conditioned by persistence – the tendency to reuse a recently-used variant. An inverse frequency effect, whereby the less-frequent variant more strongly promotes its own reuse, has been identified experimentally and in corpus data (Ferreira 2003, Szmrecsanyi 2006, Jaeger & Snider 2007). It is not known whether the inverse frequency effect reflects which variant is less frequent overall or which variant is less frequent within a linguistic context. We investigate persistence effects in third singular /s/ variation (“He sing(s)”) in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). We demonstrate that this variable is persistent in a way that shows contextual sensitivity to the effect of animacy on /s/ realization (McLaughlin 2013). Furthermore, we show that the inverse frequency effect depends on the context of the prime rather than the target. We use data from 583 interviews with African American children in the Frank Porter Graham Corpus. To measure persistence, each token (target) is coded for the presence or absence /s/ in the previous token (prime), and the distance between target and prime in orthographic words. Subject animacy is operationalized as human vs. non-human (following Rosenbach 2005). Figure 1 shows that third singular /s/ (N=1773) is subject to a robust persistence effect. The red line shows that previous absence of /s/ depresses the probability of using /s/ subsequently, while the blue line shows that the previous presence of /s/ increases the probability of subsequent /s/. These effects are of roughly equal magnitude as expected with the mean /s/ presence near 50%. We know from McLaughlin (2013), though, that /s/ absence is the minority variant with inanimate subjects while /s/ presence is the minority variant with animate subjects (Figure 2). The general symmetry of the persistence effect, then, might not be expected to hold across these different contexts. Further, if it matters to persistence which variant is rare in a given context, it then becomes relevant to ask whether persistence is sensitive to the context of the target or the prime. Figure 3 reveals that the relative persistence effects caused by /s/ presence and absence can differ across linguistic contexts, and specifically are sensitive to variant frequencies within the prime. This figure plots the size of the persistence effect with inanimate-subject targets only (N=419), measured as the absolute value of the log-odds divergence from the subset mean. The left facet shows that when the prime has an animate subject, the persistence effect is stronger for presence than absence because presence is the less frequent variant. The right facet shows that when the prime has an inanimate subject, the persistence effect is stronger for absence than presence because absence is the less frequent variant. Our findings are novel in several ways: persistence has not previously been documented for third singular /s/, AAVE, or children's naturalistic production. Furthermore, we show that the inverse frequency effect applies at the level of conditioned variables. These results boost our confidence in the psycholinguistic reality of persistence as well as the validity of the recently-documented animacy effect. Figure 1: Persistence of third singular /s/.

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Figure 2: Percent /s/ presence across subject types (reproduced from McLaughlin 2013).

Figure 3: Contextual persistence effects from animate and inanimate primes on inanimate targets.

References

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Ferreira, V. S. (2003). The persistence of optional complementizer production: Why saying “that” is notsaying “that” at all. Journal of Memory and Language, 48:379-398.

Jaeger, T. F. and Snider, N. (2007). Implicit learning and syntactic persistence: surprisal and cumulativity. University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences, 3(1):26–44.

McLaughlin, Brittany. (2013). Animacy effects on verbal -s and copula deletion in African American Vernacular English. Paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, January 6, 2013.

Rosenbach, Anette. (2005). Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81(3):613-644.

Szmrecsanyi, B. (2006). Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English: A corpus study at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. Mouton de Gruyter.

Tamminga, Meredith. (2013). Persistence in the production of linguistic variation. Dissertation proposal, University of Pennsylvania.

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Torgersen, Eivind Sør-Trøndelag University College

A reanalysis of old data: the Sivertsen Cockney Phonology recordings We present an acoustic analysis of the material on which Cockney Phonology (Sivertsen 1960) was based. Cockney Phonology was one of the first investigations of urban dialects in England. Typical of the time, the study was small in terms of number of speakers and did not systematically examine language variation. Nevertheless, it has been one of the main sources for reference works on English accents, such as Wells (1982). Later work looking at change in contemporary London speech from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective has used Cockney Phonology as baseline, although the lack of acoustic data has made the investigation of processes such as vowel change more difficult as these studies, e.g. Kerswill et al. (2008), have exclusively used formant tracking. Recently, however, Sivertsen’s original recordings have been recovered and digitised, and been made available to other researchers. Her informants, already elderly when the recordings were carried out in the mid-1950s, were born between 1874 and 1892 and had lived in the Bethnal Green area of London’s East End ever since. These recordings constitute some the oldest documentation of traditional London speech. Our acoustic analysis of phonological features provides an improved baseline for some of the processes that can be observed in London English today. We focus on the interview with Ethel Edwards, who was born around 1890. Not surprisingly, the acoustic analysis of all vowels shows more variation than the system presented in Cockney Phonology. We also present an analysis of morpho-syntactic features such as the use of non-standard was and relative what. For discourse features, there is an extensive use of see, which was not found in the London data collected in 2005 and 2008 (Kerswill et al. 2007, 2011). References Kerswill, Paul, Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen (2007) Linguistic Innovators:

The English of Adolescents in London: Full Research Report ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-23-0680. Swindon: ESRC.

Kerswill, Paul, Eivind Torgersen and Sue Fox (2008) Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20: 451-491.

Kerswill, Paul, Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen (2011) Multicultural London English: The Emergence, Acquisition and Diffusion of a New Variety ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-0814. Swindon: ESRC.

Sivertsen, Eva (1960) Cockney phonology. Oslo: Oslo University Press. Wells, John (1982) Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Turton, Danielle University of Manchester

An ultrasound study of contextual patterns of /l/-darkening in varieties of British English

The phenomenon of /l/-darkening, whereby /l/ is produced with a delayed tongue-tip gesture, exhibits a remarkable amount of variation depending on its position in the word or phrase. Traditionally, it is said that light [l] occurs in onsets (e.g. light) and dark [ë] in codas (e.g. dull; Giegerich 1992; Halle & Mohanan 1985), but many studies report varying distributions of light and dark /l/ in different morphosyntactic environments. Table 1 summarises the outcome of previous studies on /l/-darkening in American varieties, alongside the pattern reported in RP.

Table 1: /l/-darkening in different environments. Adapted from Bermúdez-Otero (2007) Beyond this variation in morphosyntactic conditioning, some dialects have been reported to show no allophonic distinction between light and dark /l/. The variety spoken in Manchester is said to exhibit dark [ë] in all contexts (Cruttenden 2008; Kelly & Local 1986), whilst North-East /l/s are reported as being clear in all positions (Cruttenden 2008; Wells 1982). Although such reports are widespread in the existing literature, they are yet to be vindicated by instrumental articulatory evidence, or even acoustic data. This paper presents ultrasound data collected to test whether the aforementioned dialects of British English indeed display the reported patterns of /l/-darkening, and whether British English dialects show any evidence of morphosyntactic conditioning of /l/-darkening, as previously reported for American English. Speakers of RP, and speakers from Manchester and Middlesbrough were recorded producing /l/ in five contexts: word-initial, word-medial before a vowel in the same stem, word-medial before a suffixal vowel, word-final prevocalic, and phrase-final, corresponding to the headings in Table 1. The RP speaker illustrated in Figure 1 shows the pattern of /l/-darkening reported by Cruttenden (2008), with [ë] only in non-prevocalic position: the backed tongue body, reduced tongue-tip gesture, and retracted tongue root typical of [ë] are found in prepausal heal only, and not in heal it. This demonstrates that there exist varieties of RP that do display very limited /l/-darkening, with a phrase-level alternation between light [l] prevocalically, and dark [ë] phrase-finally. The Middlesbrough speaker in Figure 2 shows the same distribution as RP, with phrase- final /l/ significantly backed in comparison with the four other phonological contexts (all statistical tests performed in the Articulate Assistant Advanced spline workspace with two way t-test function; Wrench 2007). The Mancunian data (Figure 3) may appear to corroborate the claims of no allophonic distinction between initial and final /l/, however, the ultrasound imaging shows that phrase-final /l/ in the Mancunian data has marginal but significant tongue root backing (p < 0.05) compared with the other contexts.

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The data from the three dialects provide hitherto absent instrumental evidence for a morphosyntactically conservative distribution of /l/-darkening, documenting an earlier stage of a well-reported sound change. Moreover, the fact that the three varieties show similarities in terms of distribution, but wide-ranging differences in terms of realisation raises important questions about the abstract nature of allophonic categories.

Figure 1: The standard RP pattern

Figure 2: The Middlesbrough pattern Figure 3: The Mancunian pattern

References Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2007. Word-final prevocalic consonants in English: representation

vs derivation. Paper presented at the Old World Conference in Phonology 4, Rhodes. Handout available at http://www.bermudez-otero.com/OCP4.pdf.

Cruttenden, Alan (ed.). 2008. Gimson’s pronunciation of English. London: Hodder 7th edn. Giegerich, H. 1992. English phonology: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Halle, Morris & K. P. Mohanan. 1985. Segmental phonology of modern English. Linguistic

Inquiry 16, 57–116. Hayes, Bruce. 2000. Gradient well-formedness in Optimality Theory. In Joost Dekkers, Frank

van der Leeuw & Jeroen van de Weijer (eds.), Optimality Theory: phonology, syntax, and acquisition, 88–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelly, J. & J.L. Local. 1986. Long-domain resonance patterns in English. In Institute of electronic engineers: Proceedings of the international conference on speech input/output, 304–308.

Olive, Joseph P., Alice Greenwood & John Coleman. 1993. Acoustics of American English speech: a dynamic approach. New York: Springer Verlag.

Sproat, Richard & Osamu Fujimura. 1993. Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. Journal of Phonetics 21, 291–311.

Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wrench, A.A. 2007. Articulate Assistant Advanced user guide: Version 2.07. Edinburgh:

Articulate Instruments Ltd.

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Wagner, Suzanne Michigan State University

Individual differences in social competence and attention to detail affect the sociolinguistic monitor

The study of individual differences is becoming popular in research on language variation (e.g. Yu 2010), that is: differences in IQ, cognitive processing ability, personality and other sociopsychological measures. This paper uses the Autism Quotient (AQ) questionnaire (Baron-Cohen et al 2001) to investigate individual differences in the properties of the “sociolinguistic monitor” (Labov et al 2011, Levon & Fox 2012). Specifically, I look at whether differences in pattern recognition ability and in social competence intersect with listeners’ sensitivity to the frequency of sociolinguistic variants. Autism Spectrum Disorder prototypically manifests as high attention to patterns and low social competence. The AQ comprises 50 questions designed to assess the respondent's potentially autistic traits in 5 areas: social skill, imagination, attention to detail, communication, and attention switching. This study replicates Labov et al's (2011) study of listeners' perceptions of (ing) and uses their original audio stimuli. 108 neurotypical, native American-Englishspeaking subjects aged 18-26 (median 20) were recruited from a large general requirement college class. 47 different majors across the sciences and humanities are represented in the sample, which was 57% female and 73% white. Told that a woman was auditioning for a job as a newsreader, subjects were asked to rate each of her auditions on a 7-point scale of professional suitability. The audition passage contained 10 tokens of (ing), with a different proportion of the non-standard alveolar variant (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, 70% and 100%) produced in each audition. Subjects also completed a demographic questionnaire, the AQ and a post-task interview. Labov et al found that adult listeners exhibited a logarithmic response to increasing [In] frequency: highly differentiated ratings at the low end of the progression, and largely undifferentiated ratings at the high end. That is, listeners incrementally penalize the speaker for producing 10 or 20% alveolar [In], but above this threshold they judge all frequencies of [In] to be equally inappropriate in newscaster speech. We hypothesized that individuals with few “autistic” characteristics would exhibit this logarithmic response, while individuals with many “autistic” characteristics would exhibit a linear response. They would be sensitive to the increasing frequency of [In], but would not have the social competence to judge the higher frequencies as equally occupationally unsuitable. The results support this hypothesis. A generalized estimating equation (GEE) analysis revealed a main effect (p <0.001) of “ing-noticing”. Subjects (n=78) who mentioned (ing) in the post-task interview were on average more likely to penalize the auditionee for [In] use. Ing-noticers and non-noticers were demographically non-distinguishable, but differed significantly in their Attention to Detail scores on the AQ, with ing-noticers significantly more attentive (p < 0.05). However, within the ingnoticing group, only those who were scored as having good social compentence on the Social Skill subscale exhibited the expected logarithmic progression. Those with low social competence exhibited a linear progression. We conclude that sensitivity to sociolinguistic variation is subject to individual differences along two dimensions: attention to detail and social skill. Future research will consider whether individuals with different permutations of these characteristics exhibit variation in sociolinguistic production as well as perception.

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References Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Richard Skinner, Joanne Martin and Emma Clubley.

2001. The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 31: 5-17.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash, Maya Ravindranath, Tracey Weldon and Naomi Nagy. 2011. Properties of the sociolinguistic monitor. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15: 431-463.

Levon, Erez and Sue Fox. 2012. Salience and the sociolinguistic monitor: An investigation of (ing) and (th)-fronting. Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 19, Berlin, August 2012.

Yu, Alan. 2010. Perceptual compensation is correlated with individuals’ “autistic” traits: Implications for models of sound change. PLoS ONE 5, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011950.

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Wagner, Suzanne Hesson, Ashley Little, Heidi Michigan State University

Referential general extender use across registers in American English speech This paper addresses an apparent controversy regarding the distribution of general extenders (GEs) across registers. General extenders (GEs) are typically clause- or utterance-final phrases that extend a set of previously mentioned referents, e.g. nuts or beans or something like that. Familiar interlocutors have been posited to use high frequencies of GEs to signal shared knowledge and to support positive politeness strategies (Dines 1980, Meyerhoff 1992). Similarly, unfamiliar interlocutors have also been posited to use high frequencies of GEs to feign shared knowledge, close social distance (Youssef 1993), and support negative politeness strategies (Aijmer 1985, Terraschke 2007). The quantitative reports underlying these positions conflict: (i) higher rates of GE use among familiars (Overstreet & Yule 1997); (ii) higher rates among unfamiliars (Terraschke 2007), and (iii) no significant difference (Stubbe & Holmes 1995, Cheshire 2007). We argue that contradictory reports should not be surprising when only the overall rate of GE use is calculated. Since GEs are multifunctional in discourse, we suggest that the proportion of GEs serving e.g. interpersonal or referential functions may be more predictably different across registers. An obstacle to this line of research however has been the inherently subjective nature of the task of identifying GE functions. No prior published work has attended to objective coding of GE pragmatic function. Our study employs a conservative yet replicable new method of identifying those GEs that have an unequivocal referential function (Wagner, Hesson & Bybel 2012). The method relies on syntactic cues and a tightly constrained definition of GE referent. We compare the proportional use of referential GEs versus all other GEs in two datasets that represent different registers: face-to-face conversation among familiar peers (Wagner 2008), and conversation between strangers on the telephone (Cieri et al 2004). Speakers in both samples were females from Pennsylvania aged 16-24, recorded 2003-2006. We hypothesized that there would be a higher proportion of primarily referential, unambiguously set-extending GE tokens in dialogue between unfamiliar interlocutors, since listing behavior might be likelier in this context. Likewise, we expected that there would be a higher proportion of GEs serving primarily interpersonal functions (ie. with ambiguous or unidentifiable referents [Pichler & Levey 2011, Tagliamonte & Denis 2010.]) in talk between familiars. Our results contradict this hypothesis. No significant difference in rate of extending GE use was observed between the talk among familiars (95/605, 15.7%) and talk among strangers (59/337, 17.5%, p=0.53, 2-proportion t-test). Overall rate of use of GEs was higher in the speech between unfamiliar interlocutors (41.2 per 10,000 words) than between familiar interlocutors (36.3 per 10,000 words). Given that speakers seem to be using GEs in proportionately similar ways across our samples, we suggest that the register variation observed in previous studies may have been an artifact of comparing raw frequencies. Though more research is needed to explore potential relationships between GE form, frequency, and function, we propose that there may be more consistency than difference in

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GE use across registers and that this regularity may be alluding shared pragmatic constraints. References Aijmer, K. (1985). What happens at the end of our utterances? - The use of utterance-final

tags introduced by and and or. In O. Togeby (Ed.), Papers from the eighth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (pp. 366–389). Copenhagen: Institut for Philologie.

Cheshire, J. (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2), 155–193. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00317.x

Cieri, C., Graff, D., Kimball, O., Miller, D., & Walker, K. (2004). Fisher English Training Part 1, Transcripts. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.

Dines, E. R. (1980). Variation in discourse: “and stuff like that.” Language in Society, 9(1), 13–31. Meyerhoff, M. (1992). “A sort of something” - hedging strategies on nouns. In J. Winter (Ed.),

Working Papers of Language, Gender and Sexism: Women At Talk: Gender Differences (Vol. 2, pp. 59–73). Monash University, Australia.

Overstreet, M., & Yule, G. (1997). On Being Inexplicit and Stuff in Contemporary American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 25(3), 250–258. doi:10.1177/007542429702500307

Pichler, H., & Levey, S. (2011). In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: general extenders in northeast England. English Language and Linguistics, 15(03), 441–471. doi:10.1017/S1360674311000128

Stubbe, M., & Holmes, J. (1995). You know, eh and other “exasperating expressions”: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication, 15(1), 63–88.

Tagliamonte, S. A., & Denis, D. (2010). The Stuff of Change: General Extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics, 38(4), 335–368. doi:10.1177/0075424210367484

Terraschke, A. (2007). Use of general extenders by German non-native speakers of English. IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 45(2), 141–160. doi:10.1515/IRAL.2007.006

Wagner, S. E. (2008). Linguistic change and stabilization in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Linguistics. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Wagner, S. E., A. Hesson & K. Bybel. (2012). Reliability, accountability and stuff like that: Quantifying pragmatic function in general extenders. Paper presented at Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC), Salford University, UK, April 18-20.

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Wright, David University of Leeds

A variationist approach to identifying idiolect for forensic linguistic purposes: An Enron email case study

This paper aims to start an interdisciplinary conversation between forensic linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics in the identification of idiolectal variation for the purposes of authorship attribution of disputed documents. Linguistic variation is inherent in the theory and practice of forensic authorship identification. In particular, the forensic linguist approaches the problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker/writer has their own distinct variety of their language, their own idiolect (Coulthard 2004:431). Idiolect is an unhelpfully abstract concept (De Beaugrande 1999), but over recent years sociolinguists have produced insightful empirical research into linguistic individuality (e.g. Kuhl 2003; Johnstone 2009). Meanwhile, authorship attribution research largely relies on computers to pursue algorithms which discriminate between authors, but lack linguistic explanation and validity (Grant 2008: 228), overlooking the argument that sociolinguistic findings about how particular linguistic forms are associated with certain social variables can reveal the sources of variation (Coulthard et al. 2011:536). To this end, grounded in variationist theory and methodology, this paper argues that identifying an author’s distinctive linguistic behaviour within the conventions of particular genres is an effective and accessible step towards empirically measuring their idiolect. The data for this study are emails written by employees from the former American energy company Enron. The primary corpus for analysis comprises 2,622 emails and 86,902 words extracted from the ‘sent’ folders of four traders. These authors were chosen specifically for investigation as they share many social characteristics, are members of the same community of practice (Eckert 2006), and are largely writing within the same register (Halliday and Hasan 1985). Drawing on the relationship between linguistic variation and genre (Hymes 1974), using computational and qualitative methods, the emails were coded for a range of variables pertaining to the email genre, including greetings, farewells, closing statements, date formats, and emoticons (Crystal 2006). Several variants across all the variables were identified as being distinctive of one of the four traders, distinguishing their email styles from those of other socially-similar authors in this dataset. The rarity, expectancy and distinctiveness of these variants were then tested against the much larger ‘Enron Sent Email Author Reference Corpus’ (ESEARC) containing a further 40,236 emails and over 3 million words sent by an additional 126 Enron employees. Results show that some variants were up to 500 times more likely to appear in an email written by the trader in question than another writer in this relevant population. Further systematic investigation suggests that authors’ linguistic choices within the variables are pre-determined and pre-conditioned by the communicative content of the email, including topic, purpose and recipient. Evidence indicates that observing the ways in which these linguistic and situational features interact can reveal author-distinctive co-selections of variants and idiolectal linguistic choices within the email genre, which combined constitute an individuating email style. Overall, this paper contributes to the empirical research into individual linguistic variation and has significant implications for forensic linguistics, not least in demonstrating the importance for approaches to forensic authorship attribution to be underpinned by linguistic theory and methods.

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References Coulthard, Malcolm. 2004. Author identification, idiolect, and linguistic uniqueness. Applied

Linguistics 24(4): 431–447. Coulthard, Malcolm, Tim Grant, and Krzysztof Kredens. 2011. Forensic Linguistics. In Ruth

Wodak, Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Sage, 531–544.

Crystal, David. 2006. Language and the Internet (2nd edn.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

De Beaugrande, Robert. 1999. Linguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics: Ideal language versus real language. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(1): 128–139.

Eckert, Penelope. 2006. Communities of Practice. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. London: Elsevier, 683–685

Grant, Tim. 2008. Approaching questions in forensic authorship analysis. In John Gibbons and M. Teresa Turell (eds.) Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 215–229.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1985. Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Tavistock.

Johnstone. Barbara. 2009. Stance, style, and the linguistic individual. In Alexandra Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 29–52.

Kuhl, Joseph W. 2003 The Idiolect, Chaos, and Language Custom Far From Equilibrium: Conversations in Morocco. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Athens, Georgia.

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Poster abstracts

Abstracts are ordered by lead author surname. Please see the index to locate papers by

second, third, etc. author’s surnames.

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Badia Barrera, Berta University of Essex

A Sociolinguistic Study of Young RP Received Pronunciation (RP) has been widely described linguistically (Wells 1982, 1991, 1997), although little sociolinguistic research has been carried out on it (Fabricius 2000; Altendorf 2003). Over the last few years, a new trend has been observed in young RP speakers to incorporate non-standard features in their accent, such as T-glottalling (Fabricius 2000). Another new trend in young RP speakers involves the usage of FOOT fronting, a linguistic innovation which seems to have spread throughout Southern England very rapidly (Torgersen 2002; Fabricius 2007; Harrington et al. 2011). This sociophonetic study analyses to what extent T-glottalling and FOOT fronting are present in the speech of young RP speakers. The data is based on sociolinguistic interviews of 20 teenagers, aged between 13 and 17, from three different types of schools in the South of England: a major boarding public school, a non-boarding private school and an outstanding rated comprehensive school. This data is compared to 15 older speakers, aged 27, who are exalumni of the schools under study. The quantitative data is analysed using Rbrul, as well as Praat for an acoustic analysis. In addition, there is also qualitative data, drawn from interviews on the speakers’ background, daily lives and attitudes towards accents in the UK. This research project examines how different RP is in middle and middle-upper class youth today, as well as analysing the state of RP in the current generation and if there are any changes in progress. This analysis uses school type as a proxy for social class and it is the first controlled study of public school students and graduates, compared with a relevant intermediate private non-boarding school and an outstanding rated comprehensive school, for two different age groups. Preliminary results show so far that school type has the strongest effect on the variation of T in both the teenagers and the young adults, but not so much for FOOT fronting, which appears to have an age-graded variation. Moreover, two new linguistic variables have been found in the speech of only male RP teenagers (and not in the young adults): TH-fronting to a bigger extent and L-vocalisation to a lesser extent, suggesting that new non-standard features might be making its way into young RP speakers. References Altendorf, U. (2003). “Is English becoming more natural and more democratic? The role of

language-internal and language-external factors in accounting for current trends in RP, souteastern British English and beyond”. 2nd International Conference on Language Variation in Europe, Uppsala University, 85-97.

Fabricius, A. (2000). T-glottalling, between stigma and prestige: a sociolinguistic study of modern RP. Unpublished Phd thesis. Copenhagen Business School.

Fabricius, A. (2007). “Vowel formants and angle measurements in diachronic sociophonetic studies: foot-fronting in RP”. ICPhS XVI, Saarbrücken, 1477-1480.

Torgersen, E. (2002). “Phonological distribution of the FOOT vowel, /ʊ/, in young people’s speech in south-eastern British English”. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics, 6, 25-38.

Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English (Vols. 1 and 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, J. C. (1991). “The cockneyfication of RP?” Nonstandard varieties of language.

Stockholm Symposium, 1-6.

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Wells, J. C. (1997). “Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation?” II Jornadas de Estudios Ingleses, University of Jaen, 19-28.

Harrington et al. (2011). “The contributions of the lips and the tongue to the diachronic fronting of high back vowels in Standard Southern British English”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 41/2.

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Cardoso, Amanda University of Edinburgh

PRICE and MOUTH Phonologically Conditioned Variation in Scouse PRICE and MOUTH phonologically conditioned variation has been observed in Liverpool English(LE) (Knowles, 1973; Cardoso, 2011). Similar PRICE/MOUTH phenomena, such as Canadian Raising(CR) and the Scottish Vowel Length Rule(SVLR), are widely reported in English-speaking areas of the world, including North America (Joos, 1942; Kurath and McDavid, 1961; Labov, 1972), South America (Sudbury, 2001; Ayres, 1933), South Africa (Finn, 2004), and the United Kingdom (Aitken, 1981; Britain, 1997). The current investigation presents the first quantitative analysis of these phenomena in LE, discusses the possible connections with CR and SVLR, and their interaction with dialect contact situations. This poster presents empirical evidence of PRICE and MOUTH phonologically conditioned variation in Scouse, with a focus on the conditioning environments and their associated realisations. The two small pilot studies and a larger experiment use monosyllabic, disyllabic and morphologically complex tokens with differing following consonants in order to provide a detailed description of this variation. Previous studies on PRICE and MOUTH in LE have primarily used impressionistic judgments on monosyllabic tokens. However, certain stress/foot structure in disyllabic tokens can block raising in some CR patterns (Vance, 1987; Chambers, 1989; Bermudez-Otero, 2004), and morphological condition- ´ ing is a factor in SVLR. Therefore, these experiments add to our current knowledge of these patterns through the first quantitative analysis, which considers syllable structure and morphological conditioning, and seeks to gain a better understanding of the connection between PRICE and MOUTH phonologically conditioned variation in LE and the similar patterns found in other varieties of English. Preliminary results suggest that the main conditioning environments for PRICE and MOUTH variation in Scouse are before voiceless obstruents, nasals, /l/, and elsewhere. While these conditioning environments generally hold for both vowels, the findings support an analysis which treats the PRICE and MOUTH variations as separate potentially related patterns. In non-monosyllabic tokens PRICE shows evidence of morphological conditioning, whereas MOUTH varies based on whether the following consonant is in the coda or the onset of the following syllable. Before voiceless obstruents PRICE shifts the entire diphthong, so that both the nucleus and offglide are raised and fronted compared to the variants before other environments. On the other hand, MOUTH only shows a raising of the nucleus in this same environment. This type of analysis is supported by previous research on CR/SVLR patterns. Gregg (1973) advocates for the two vowels to be analysed separately in the historical development of diphthongisation. Gregg (1973) and Moreton and Thomas (2007) only consider PRICE vowel variation when discussing the possible origins of CR. Finally, CR/SVLR in some varieties of English occur with PRICE (Lass, 1981; Scobbie et al., 2006) but not MOUTH. The current project provides a firm database with which to understand the precise details of the PRICE and MOUTH vowels in Liverpool English, presents empirical evidence of this variation in Scouse, and contributes to the understanding of PRICE and MOUTH phonologically conditioned variation in dialects of English. Furthermore, it suggests possible connections between dialect contact situations and the developments of similar PRICE/MOUTH variation in a wide-range of dialects of English.

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Diskin, Chloe University College, Dublin

Language variation and second language acquisition:

A study of Polish and Chinese speakers of Irish-English in Dublin, Ireland This paper presents aspects of a PhD project examining language variation and change among adult speakers of English as an L2 in Dublin, Ireland. It looks at recently-arrived Polish and Chinese migrants who came to Dublin during the Celtic Tiger economic boom years, particularly 2006-2008. It poses the question whether these migrants, having not been exposed to Irish-English previously, can acquire this variety, and if so, which features do they use and why? It has previously been shown that the fluency with which a non-native speaker uses discourse-pragmatic markers in the L2 is an indication of their level of integration into the speech community (Sankoff et al 1997). A relationship between language and ethnicity has also long been established in works such as Hoffmann & Walker (2010) or D’Arcy (2010). Discourse-pragmatic markers in Irish-English have to date received only limited attention within the literature (e.g. Kallen 2005/2006) and they have been understudied in general among non-native speakers (Müller 2005). Moreover, although studies of quotatives in many varieties of English have shed light on rapid changes (Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999), they have been virtually ignored in studies of Irish-English. This paper presents results from a quantitative analysis of discourse-pragmatic markers (like, you know and I mean) as well as quotatives among non-native speakers, as compared to a control group of native speakers of Dublin English. The results are taken from a total of 20 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2012. This paper will shed light on current features of Irish-English as it is used both by its native and non-native speakers. It will discuss the idea of ownership, not neglecting the fact that non-native speakers also renegotiate the norms within the languages and varieties that they use. Results from a qualitative analysis will discuss identity and heritage language maintenance among the migrants interviewed, with the aim to finding a link between attitudes, ideology and language use. The speakers’ stance towards the social stratification of Dublin English (the ‘Northside/Southside’ distinction), as well as how they situate themselves more generally within an urban, multilingual setting, will be compared with frequency of use of Irish-English variables. Overall, this paper will aim to find a link between integration and language use. References D'Arcy A. (2010) Quoting Ethnicity: Constructing Dialogue in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Journal

of Sociolinguistics 14: 60-88. Hoffmann M and Walker J. (2010) Ethnolects and the City: Ethnic Orientation and Linguistic

Variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22: 37-67. Kallen J. (2005) Silence and Mitigation in Irish English Discourse. In: Barron A and Schneider

KP (eds) The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 47-71. Kallen J. (2006) Arrah, Like, You Know: The Dynamics of Discourse-Marking in ICE-Ireland.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 16. University of Limerick, Ireland. Müller S. (2005) Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native English Discourse, Amsterdam:

John Benjamins.

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Sankoff G, Thibault P, Nagy N, Blondeau H, Fonollosa M-O, Gagnon, L. (1997) Variation in the Use of Discourse Markers in a Language Contact Situation. Language Variation and Change 9: 191-218.

Tagliamonte S and Hudson R. (1999) Be like et al beyond America: The Quotative System in British and Canadian Youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147-172.

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Durham, Mercedes Cardiff University

Changing domains of dialect use: A real-time study of Shetland schoolchildren

Even as regional dialect distinctions in the United Kingdom are reported to be levelling, it is clear that, as a whole, dialect use is perceived as more acceptable now than it was in the past. In what ways can these seemingly opposite tendencies be related? This paper considers the degree to which shifts in dialect use are correlated with shifts in perceived domains of use by examining over 850 attitudinal questionnaires completed by Shetland schoolchildren in 1983 and in 2010. The longitudinal perspective is particularly useful here as there has been a widespread shift away from the dialect by the youngest generations in recent times, particularly in the main town of Lerwick (Smith and Durham 2011, Tait 2001, van Leyden 2004). In the nearly thirty years between 1983 and 2010, the situation on the islands has changed considerably, linguistically, but also socially: there has been an influx of newcomers to the islands following the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the late 70s. This has implications for dialect use obviously, but also for how it is perceived. By comparing the data from 1983 to that in 2010 it will be possible to examine both whether the dialect is seen as being used less, but conversely whether it said to be used in a wider range of situations than previously and what the implications of this may be. Among the questions students were asked, several focus on situations when it would and would not be appropriate to use the dialect. While the rate of children reporting that there are circumstances where it is not proper for a Shetlander to use Standard English has gone down from 1983 to 2010 (40% to 18% for the children born in Shetland to Shetland parents), the rate of children reporting that there are no circumstances where the use of the Shetland dialect is unacceptable has gone up (from 14% to 35% for the Shetland origin children). Although less dramatic in terms of rates, direction of these shifts is the same in the children who are not originally from the Islands. It then underlines that even as the dialect is used less, it is seen as acceptable in a wider range of places. This may of course merely mean that the dialect itself is less marked and already ‘levelled’ to some extent, but not necessarily. Within these questions, students also give examples of when it would be particularly appropriate or inappropriate to use the dialect: although not all of them responded to this part of the question, the answers are very enlightening in terms both of the shift over time and of the perceived acceptability of the dialect in a range of domains. By examining these responses more closely this paper will be able to establish whether the domains where dialect use is acceptable have extended or whether they are merely perceived to have done so.

References Smith, Jennifer and Durham, Mercedes. (2011). A tipping point in dialect obsolescence?

Change across the generations in Lerwick, Shetland. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 197-225.

Tait, John. (2001). "Whit is Shetlandic?" Lallans 58, 7-16. van Leyden, Klaske. (2004). Prosodic Characteristics of Orkney and Shetland Dialects. An

Experimental Approach. PhD Dissertation, Leiden University (LOT Dissertation Series 92, Utrecht: LOT.

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Evans, Mel University of Birmingham Idiolectal Variation/Macro-Level change: a case for the (historical) sociolinguistics of

the individual speaker Stylistic variation plays a critical role in the patterns and developments of linguistic variation and change. The examination of speakers' preferences within real (as opposed to manufactured) language contexts has increasingly demonstrated the social significance of linguistic variants for the construction of that speaker's position within their social group, and the trends of maintenance or change that result (e.g. Moore 2012; Sharma 2011). Case studies of individual speaker variation (e.g. Schreier 2006; Podesva 2007) have made a persuasive case for micro-level analyses of style within the (third-wave) variationist framework. However, although contemporary linguistic analysis can collate stylistic data from various (spoken) contexts, the analysis of style at the level of the speaker in historical periods of English encounters the ever-present "bad data" problem. Nevertheless, in this paper, I suggest that historical sociolinguistics can negotiate the methodological challenges, and argue that data drawn from historical idiolects can provide valuable evidence for our understanding of the processes of historical variation and change. Using cross-genre diachronic evidence representing the idiolects of Queen Elizabeth I and her younger sibling, King Edward VI, I demonstrate how the royal subjects' participation in processes of morphosyntactic change in Early Modern English - particularly the oftdiscussed periphrastic declarative do (e.g. Nurmi 1999) - can shed new light on the stylistic function of these linguistic variants in their social lives, and consequently augment our descriptive account of the macro-level trends. I suggest that idiolectal data can inform and advance our theoretical understanding of variation and language change, both in historical periods and the present day. References Moore, E. 2012. The Social Life of Style. Language and Literature 21 (1), 66-83. Nurmi, A. 1999. A Social History of Periphrastic Do Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique

de Helsinki 56, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Podesva, R. 2007. Phonation Type as a Linguistic Variable: the use of falsetto in constructing a

persona Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (4), 478-504. Schreier, D. 2006. The backyard as a dialect boundary: individuation, linguistic heterogeneity,

and sociolinguistic eccentricity in a small speech community, Journal of English Linguistics 34 (26), 26-57.

Sharma, D. 2011. Style Repertoire and social change in British Asian English, Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 4: 464—492.

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Flynn, Nicholas University of Manchester

MOUTH and PRICE in Nottingham: Are they now aligning? In this paper I present sociophonetic results of a study of the linguistic variables MOUTH and PRICE in the UK East Midlands location of Nottingham. Dialectological evidence from Ellis (1889) and the Survey of English Dialects (Orton & Tilling 1969-71) shows that in this location, a monophthongal realisation of MOUTH is the traditional variant alongside a more standard-like diphthong. For PRICE, there traditionally exist monophthongal, standard diphthongal, near-monophthongal and rounded diphthongal variants. The latter two of these variants show gender-based preferentiality among older speakers, but significantly lower usage by younger speakers. In addition, young speakers demonstrate MOUTH-backing and lowering and PRICE-lowering and fronting. The net effect is that the nuclei for both vowels are being realised in a more similar location in vowel space. However, there remains a phonetic distinction between the two, with formant measurements taken for the two variables remaining statistically significantly separate when analysed using a Pillai score method. The onsets of MOUTH and PRICE have not, then, merged in the variety. However, both variables display what Kerswill et al. (2008) have termed ‘Diphthong Shift Reversal’, movements in the reverse direction to that predicted by the process of ‘Diphthong Shift’ (Wells 1982). I shall discuss my results in light of these observations.

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Jannedy, Stefaniei Weirich, Melanieii iZAS Berlin iiFriedrich-Schiller Universität Jena

Diphthong realization as a marker of Hood German Labov’s 1962 Martha’s Vineyard study (1972a; 1972b) illustrated that the centralization of the diphthongs /aɪ/ as in ‘right’ and ‘light’ and /aʊ/ as in ‘cow’ and ‘loud’ serves as a linguistic marker of social and geographical identity. He describes this alternation as regional in character and as a feature of the speech of the people of Martha’s Vineyard. He found that this linguistic marker spread from the community of fishermen to the general population of the island and was used by the islanders as a social marker to set themselves off from the economically more powerful tourists and visitors coming to the island for summer vacations. Covarying with other morpho-syntactic alternations, a fairly recent observation of multi-ethnic urban German speech as spoken in different neighborhoods in Berlin (Hood-German) is that the diphthongs / ɪ/ as in heute ‘today’ (339 tokens) and /aɪ/ as in Kaiser (name of a supermarket chain; 461 tokens) are realized more closed and fronted than in more standard Berlin German. For this study, spontaneous speech data was collected through standardized interviews and data from thirteen young German female speakers from different neighborhoods in Berlin was analyzed: Wedding and Neukölln are more Arab-dominant while Kreuzberg is more Turkish-dominant. The girls were either monolingual German or spoke a second language. The neighborhoods, Marzahn and Prenzlauer Berg are rather mono-ethnic German. The interviews were orthographically transcribed and added to a database that allows for searching for all occurrences of the two diphthongs under investigation in their naturally occurring context in unscripted speech. So far, 800 occurrences of these diphthongs have been analyzed. Formant measurements were taken at five equi-distanced points throughout the diphthong (start – 25% – 50% – 75% and at the end of the diphthongs). Several linear mixed effects models were run with the F2-formant measurements with the different time points as the dependent variable. The second formant is an indicator of the front-back dimension, with higher values indicating more fronting. The diphthong type (/aɪ/ vs. / ɪ/), the "vernacular" (Berlin- vs. Hood German) and the respective language background (Turkish, Arabic, German) of the speaker were added as factors. The factors neighborhood (where the speakers were from) and speaker were added as random factors. As expected there was a significant effect of diphthong type for all formant measurements. More interestingly, the factor vernacular turned out to show significance for the start, early and mid point of the F2-formant value but only for the diphthong / ɪ/ speakers of Hood German revealed higher values pointing to a more fronted and closer realization of the nucleus. However, there was no effect of second language (including the monolingual German speakers). This implies that the increased fronting and tenseness of the nucleus in / ɪ/ is independent of language background but a marker of this vernacular. We argue that speakers of the multi-ethnolect as spoken in Berlin use the production of the diphthong / ɪ/ as a marker of their local urban identity, regardless of their national identity. More importantly, speakers of the Berlin-dialect do not show this alternation. References

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Jannedy, S. & Weirich, M. (2011) The Effect of Inferences on the Perceptual Categorization of Berlin German Fricatives. In Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2011), pp. 962-965. Hong Kong.

Jannedy, Stefanie (2010) The Usages and Meanings of 'so' in Spontaneous Berlin Kiezdeutsch. In Melanie Weirich & Stefanie Jannedy (eds.) ZAS Papers in Linguistics (ZASPiL) 52, pp. 43-61.

Labov, W. (1972a). The social motivation of a sound change. In Labov, W. Sociolinguistic Patterns, 1– 42. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Labov, W. (1972b). The social setting of linguistic change. In Labov, W. Sociolinguistic patterns, 260 – 325. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Jose, Brian Stuart-Smith, Jane Timmins, Claire Torsney, Ben University of Glasgow

In the Aftermath of /u/ Leaving Glaswegian Vowels through Real and Apparent Time

Research on language variation has typically relied on apparent-time data to chart and analyse changes believed to be in progress. More recently, due to the increasing availability of real-time data, coupled with the inherent and well-known pitfalls to interpreting apparent-time data, a growing number of studies are now benefitting from real-time data either in conjunction with or as a replacement for apparent-time data (Sankoff 2005). Here, we describe one aspect of a large-scale and ongoing real-time study of linguistic variation in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow, where we are building a cross-sectional corpus of naturalistic spontaneous speech that already spans approximately 30 years in real time and approximately 100 years in cumulative apparent time. The goal of the present analysis is to provide a general portrait of a subset of the Glaswegian Vernacular English (GVE) vowel system, with a particular focus on the five monophthongal vowels /¥ e a o u/. The historically high back vowel /u/ has been considerably advanced in Scottish English for quite some time (cf. Macaulay 1977, McAllister 1963 [1938], Speitel and Johnston 1983). It is reasonable to expect that the repositioning of this vowel will have consequences for one or more of the other vowels within the system and, potentially, for the system itself as a whole. For example, Scottish English, and GVE in particular, could simply lose the high back rounded vowel from its inventory and gain a front rounded vowel. Another possibility is that, since front rounded vowels are typologically marked, a fronted /u/ (or /y/) could undergo unrounding and merge with another vowel, most plausibly /¥/. Alternatively, a fronted /u/ could trigger a chain shift, either pushing /¥/ out of its path or pulling /o/ into the vacated space that it previously occupied. Indeed, there seems to be some evidence in support of this latter hypothesis: recent research has described Scottish /o/ as being raised into a high articulatory-acoustic position (Ferragne and Pelligrino 2010, Scobbie et al 2012). Any of these developments could result in further subsequent developments of the GVE vowels. Yet another possibility, still, is that /u/ will settle into a previously unoccupied high or high-mid central position, without exerting any notable influence on any of the other vowels. Some retraction and lowering of /u/ has already been observed in GVE, which is consistent with this scenario. As a first step in the long process of investigating these various hypotheses, we present an acoustic analysis of formant measurements taken from the central portion of the targeted vowels as produced by both elderly and adolescent speakers, typically in their 70s-80s and in their teens, respectively, from the 1970s and the 2000s. This sample exploits the maximum temporal separation that our corpus offers and, thus, provides us with the widest window through which to view language change in Glasgow. In addition to comparisons across the decades (real time) and through the generations (apparent time), we consider differences between the sexes to help us chart the course(s) of change in Glaswegian vowels. References

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Ferragne, Emmanuel; Pelligrino, François (2010). Formant frequencies of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40: 1-34.

Macaulay, Ronald (1977). Language, Social Class and Education: A Glasgow Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

McAllister, Anne H. (1963). A Year’s Course in Speech Training, 9th Ed. London: University of London Press. [First Edition, 1938]

Sankoff, Gillian (2005). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in sociolinguistics. In Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J.; Trudgill, Peter (eds.). Sociolinguistics:

An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 2nd Ed, Vol. II. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1003-1013.

Scobbie, James M.; Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane (2012). Back to front: A socially stratified ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish English /u/. Italian Journal of

Linguistics 24: 103-148. Speitel, Hans; Johnston, Paul (1983). A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Edinburgh Speech. Final

report to the ESRC (Grant No. 000230023).

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Leach, Hannah University of Sheffield

Variation in accent and attitudes in Stoke-on-Trent

Situated in the North-West Midlands, Stoke-on-Trent is a region with a rich industrial history which has suffered culturally and economically following the recent decline of the local manufacturing industries. Stoke-on-Trent’s accent is strongly linked to the local identity, and is captured in local popular culture including books (i.e. Leigh 1996), films (Stubbs et al., 2007) and Facebook groups such as ‘every1 shud speak stokie!!!!!!!!!!!!! ' (Facebook, 2012). In March 2013, a part-quantitative, part-qualitative survey was carried out, with residents from across the region responding online. The survey sought quantitative information regarding the spread of local accent features, asking respondents to answer questions such as “Do look and luck rhyme for you?”, giving preliminary data about salient local accent features and their variable use, correlating this with age and in-region postcode data. The survey also sought to investigate the perceptions of and attitudes towards the local accent, its speakers, and the region itself. This poster will present the data in full, but preliminary analysis suggests there is an interesting dichotomy of opinion among residents when it comes to the local variety – a dichotomy which has been previously observed elsewhere. Montgomery (2003) noted that younger local speakers had an unfavourable attitude to the accent, describing it as "common" and Stoke-on-Trent itself as "a really horrible place" and "dull and held back from the past" (2003: 29). While younger middle class speakers rejected the label of having the local accent, younger working class speakers said they did speak with a local accent, but too stated their disdain for it. Older speakers, in contrast, did not share the distaste for the local variety, and more cheerfully owned to speaking with a local accent. Additionally, various Facebook groups and forums have been set up to celebrate and defend the accent, with many people garnering a sense of pride from their use of the variety. The results of this survey, presented in this poster, show a wide variety of opinion between residents of different social groups, and a particular internalised stigma related to Stoke-on-Trent's lack of affluence and economic decline. The poster adds a perceptual facet to studies of variation in urban varieties in the North of England, particularly in such a neglected area as the North West Midlands. The findings will inform further work on Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area, linking cultural history with identity and accent. References Facebook (2012) every1 shud speak stokie!!!!!!!!!!!!! [online] Available at:

http://www.facebook.com/groups/86898844121/ [Accessed 17th August 2012]. Leigh (1996) Leigh, F. (1996) Ow Ter Toke Raight. Staffordshire: Rose Bank Publishing.

Montgomery, C. (2003) The variety of English used in the North Staffordshire Potteries. Undergraduate dissertation, University of Sheffield.

Montgomery, C. & Beal, J. C. (2011). Perceptual Dialectology, in: Maguire, W. and McMahon, A. (Eds.), Analysing Variation in English, (pp. 121–148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stubbs, D., Lloyd, R., McDonald, M. & Gibbs, C. (2007) May Un Mar Language. [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06nbSiv1ZN0 [Accessed July 2012].

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Mayr, Roberti Mennen, Inekeii Morris, Jonathani iCardiff Metropolitan University iiBangor University

Socio-phonetic variation in a language contact situation: The case of Welsh and Welsh English

Research has shown that bilinguals have differentiated, but non-autonomous sound systems, exhibiting cross-linguistic interactions (Mennen 2004; Paradis 2001). In bilingual communities, such interactions may lead to the emergence of contact varieties (Bullock & Gerfen 2005; Heselwood & McChrystal 1999). A particularly interesting sociolinguistic context exists in Wales where monolingual speakers of Welsh English (WE), a contact variety that shares many accentual features with Welsh, live alongside bilingual speakers of Welsh and WE. While the English accents of the largely monolingual areas in South-East Wales are well documented (Mees & Collins 1999; Walters 2001), little is known about the varieties of WE spoken in bilingual areas. Are they characterised by a greater degree of Welsh-language influence? If so, what is the extent of cross-linguistic convergence between Welsh and WE in these communities, and does it differ depending on language dominance? With respect to English, do monolinguals and bilinguals from the same community have different accents? If not, this would suggest that the variety functions as a marker of regional identity in the same way for all individuals, and, crucially, that the bilinguals’ experience with Welsh is inconsequential for their WE accents. In this paper we seek to answer these questions on the basis of a systematic acoustic investigation of vowel and word stress patterns produced by Welsh-WE bilinguals differing in language dominance and by WE monolinguals. Data collection, which is currently underway, is taking place on the premises of a Welsh-medium and an English-medium secondary school in the same community in West Wales. The data will be analysed acoustically and interpreted in the light of the participants’ language use patterns and attitudes towards the two languages. The findings will provide new insights into the role of bilingualism and socio-phonetic variation in language contact situations.

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McDougall, Fernanda University of Manchester

Variation in the Realisations of GOAT and FACE in Barrow-in-Furness

This study investigates language variation and change in the vowel system of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The variables under consideration in this paper are the GOAT and FACE vowels, which display stable variation in this dialect. The data show that there are two variants used to represent each phoneme in Barrow-in-Furness; the monophthongs [o:] and [e:] and the closing diphthongs [əʊ] and [eɪ]. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with twenty-two speakers and acoustic analyses carried out in order to understand the extent to which variation and change is taking place in use of these vowels, with particular consideration of style-shifting. While Watt (2002) found GOAT and FACE to have similar social evaluations in Tyneside, it is not entirely clear whether this finding can be applied to all Northern varieties of British English. Considering the particular sociolinguistic landscape of Tyneside, a different sociolinguistic set-up may result in different social evaluations. Results for the variable of style provide evidence for this idea as there are opposing patterns of style-shifting between social classes in Barrow-in-Furness. The social stratification of GOAT is as expected, correlating with results seen in Tyneside, with diphthongal variants favoured by middle class speakers and in more formal speech styles, and monophthongal variants favoured by working class speakers and in more casual speech. However, the FACE vowel appears to be evaluated differently by speakers from different social groups. An initial analysis shows similar social stratification for FACE as for GOAT, with middle class speakers showing preference for the diphthongal variants and working class speakers favouring monophthongal variants. Yet, the direction of style shifting is not the same for working class speakers as it is for middle class speakers. Middle class speakers shift in the direction one would expect, using diphthongal variants in more formal speech and monophthongal variants in more casual speech. By contrast, the pattern of style shifting for working class speakers is inverted, with speakers favouring diphthongal variants in casual speech and monophthongal variants in the word list. While the differences between the two variants appear to be above the level of awareness for middle class speakers, they appear below the level of awareness for working class speakers. These are intriguing findings with possible theoretical implications for a group-differential application of the concept of sociolinguistic awareness in English dialects. Reference Watt, D. 2002. ‘I don’t Speak With A Geordie Accent, I speak, like, the Northern Accent’:

Contact Induced Levelling in the Tyneside Vowel System. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6/1, 44-63.

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Meluzzi, Chiarai Ciccolone, Simoneii Fiorentini, Ilariai iUniversity of Pavia, Free University of Bolzano (Italy) iiFree University of Bolzano (Italy)

Contact-induced innovation in a multilingual setting: evidence from Italian,

German, and Ladin in South Tyrol South Tyrol is a particularly interesting area for the observation of contact-induced innovation, due to the asymmetrical distribution of the three official languages within the territory. Italian is mostly spoken in the main cities (e.g. Bozen-Bolzano) and in the Bassa Atesina area. The German speech community is distributed through out the province, representing over 90% of the population in rural areas, and mostly uses local dialects in everyday communication. Furthermore, three different varieties of Ladin are spoken in the valleys of Badia, Gardena and Fassa (the latter in the province of Trento) along with Italian, German and local Romance and German dialects. This distribution of the three languages in South Tyrol directly affects the degree of multilingualism, creating a sort of continuum from an almost monolingual pole (as for Italian community in Bozen-Bolzano)to amore balanced plurilingual pole (as in Ladin valleys), along with many “in-between” situations(e.g. Bassa Atesina). In this peculiar context, our aim is to observe contact-induced innovation phenomena on a lexical and discourse level in three different multilingual settings: Bozen-Bolzano, Bassa Atesina and Ladin valleys. The Italian speech community of Bozen-Bolzano derives from the internal migration from different areas of Italy in the last century. Thus, the linguistic repertoire shows an internal variation between Standard Italian and the dialects of the in-migrants. This is reflected in the use of words and expressions from Venetian or Trentino in everyday communication (e.g. ven. Ocio! “Look!”), whereas borrowings from German are few and almost limited to the semantic area of food: (1) [IT] brattaro ‘sausage seller’ < [GER] Bratwurst ‘fried sausage’(Cagnan 2011) Contact between Italian and German is deeper in Bassa Atesina. Furthermore, the repertoire of this area includes local varieties of both German and Italian (in particular, Trentino), along with Standard Italian (cf. Mioni 1990). In this setting, code mixing appears to be the «conversational norm» (de Bot et al. 2009), with frequent single- and multi-word insertions of Italian elements in German sentences. (2) haint hån i a lista gmåcht con CENTO province italiane

[GER]today have I a [IT]list [GER]made [IT] with a hundred Italian provinces ‘today I made a list with a hundred Italian provinces’

The repertoire for the Ladin community is much more complex, with different varieties of Ladin, German, Italian, and dialects. Speakersseemto rely on an Italian discourse markers system, mainly in order to “meta language the frame of discourse” (cf. Maschler 1994):

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(3) No no, secondo me chelresta, segur che a l va dadî, anzi [IT]No, no, in my opinion [LAD_BADIA]it will remain, it will go on for sure, [IT]indeed

This could mean that Italian is the pragmatically dominant language (cf. Matras 1998), at least in Fassa and Badia. In conclusion, in this paper we analyse these contact-induced phenomena and their correlation to the different multilingual settings. We argue that this study adds to the discussion and theoretical understanding of the role of language contact in linguistic innovation. References Cagnan, P.(2011). Lo Slang di Bolzano. Bolzano: Curcu & Genovese. de Bot, K.; Broersma, M.; Isurin, L.(2009). Sources of triggering in code switching. In L.

Isurin,D. Winford, K. de Bot(eds.). Multidisciplinary Approaches to Code Switching. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 85-102.

Maschler, Y.(1994). Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. Language in Society 23: 325-366.

Matras, Y. (1998). Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. Linguistics 36: 281-331. Mioni, A.M.(1990). Bilinguismo intra- e intercomunitario in Alto Adige/Südtirol: considerazioni sociolinguistiche. In F. Lanthaler et al.(eds). Mehr als eine Sprache. Più di una lingua. Meran/Merano. pp. 9-29.

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Mooney, Damien University of Oxford

Supralocalisation in French: a Sociophonetic Analysis of the Mid-Vowels in the Regional French of Béarn.

This poster will examine phonetic and phonological variation and change in the mid-vowel system of the regional variety of French spoken in Béarn, south-west France. It will examine the extent to which non-standard variants of the conservative mid-vowel phonemes have been lost or retained in regional French and will aim to assess and account for convergence towards the supralocal northern norm. The analysis incorporates a sociophonetic apparent-time methodology and challenges some traditional accounts of southern varieties of Regional French which view nonstandard regional variation as being ephemeral (Tuaillon, 1974: 576) and largely absent from the speech of younger generations (Sobotta, 2003; Armstrong and Pooley, 2010: 202). The mid-vowel system in Standard French largely follows the loi de position (open variants [ɛ ] in closed syllables and close variants [e o] in open syllables) but northern supralocal norms have been shown to diverge substantially, with a rise in intermediate variants between /e/ and /ɛ/ and between /o/ and / / as well as a gradual loss of contrastiveness in the contexts where the pairs are phonemic (Hansen and Juillard, 2011). Traditional accounts of regional French in south-western France describe a tendency towards the open variants [ɛ ] in all positions (cf. Walter, 1982; Carton et al., 1983). This presentation will examine the stability of the loi de position in the regional variety of French spoken in Béarn, assuming neutralisation of the conservative Standard French vowels to /E/ and /O/ respectively. The investigation will examine variation and change with reference to a variety of linguistics and extralinguistic factors. The empirical analysis compares the mid-vowels of thirty speakers native to the region in order to examine language change in apparent time. Three generations of speakers were selected to participate in sociolinguistic interviews: ten bilingual (French-Occitan) speakers aged 65+, ten middle-aged speakers aged 30-50 years; ten secondary school students aged 16-18 years. Tokens of each variable are analysed using a combination of auditory and acoustic analysis: variants are assigned to traditional categories associated with southern varieties of Regional French while the acoustic analysis to capture relatively fine-grained phonetic detail in vowel quality, using instrumental techniques from laboratory phonetics. To explain the loss or retention of regional phonetic and phonological variants, this presenation will draw upon two models of language change that have been widely used in Anglo-Saxon variationist studies, particularly in the United Kingdom. These models are Kerswill’s Regional Dialect Levelling model (2003) and Trudgill’s Koinéization model (1986). These models are used to examine the effects of focusing mechanisms (levelling ‘proper’, geographical diffusion, simplification) on language change in the variety. This poster will present empirical evidence of variation and change in the regional French mid-vowel system which suggests that focusing mechanisms have not resulted in complete convergence towards the supralocal northern norm in the speech of younger generations. The acoustic analysis reveals fine-grained regionally distinctive variation which indicates that younger generations may be using a focused, stable regional mid-vowel system which is neither that of their grandparents or of the supralocal norm. References

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Armstrong, N. and Pooley, T. 2010. Social and Linguistic Change in European French.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carton, F., Rossi, M., Autesserre, P. and Léon, P. 1983. Les Accents des Français. Paris:

Hachette. Kerswill, P. 2003. ‘Dialect Levelling and geographical diffusion in British English’. In D.

Britain and J. Cheshire (eds.), Social dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 223-243.

Sobotta, E. 2003. ‘Les Aveyronnais d’Aveyron et les Aveyronnais de Paris’. Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes, 33, 135–142.

Tuaillon, G. 1974. ‘Compte-rendu de l’ALIFO’. In Revue de Linguistique Romane, 38: 576. Trudgill, P. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Walter, H. 1982. Enquête Phonologique et Variétés Régionales du français. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France.

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Prichard, Hillary University of Pennsylvania

The role of higher education in socially motivated change Sociolinguistic research has often considered educational attainment as one of several factors comprising a socio economic index, rather than studying education as a complex variable unto itself. Exceptions include Bigham (2010), who found that in dialect contact between college students, speakers are able to both accommodate and continue participating in local changes, and DeDecker (2006), who found that college students’ orientation towards local values plays a role in how they adapt their speech to changing norms. This study aims to further deepen our understanding of education’s role by developing a more nuanced approach to its categorization. Specifically, we ask what impact higher education has on speakers’ participation in community changes and norms, and whether there is a quantitative difference in the effects of different types of education. This paper builds on the findings of Prichard and Tamminga (2012), who in a close study of synchronic data from eight white, upper working class Philadelphians, found that those at the highest levels of education are correcting away from marked stereotypes of local speech, while at the same time participating in local changes from below. Here we examine whether this finding is replicable in a larger sample, and situate the changes in their diachronic context. The data investigated is drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov and Rosenfelder 2011). 1 9 white, adult Philadelphians, evenly distributed by sex, were selected and divided into four categories based on level and type of education received. This includes 85 speakers with a high school education or less, 28 who attended locally oriented community colleges, 16 who attended larger, more regionally oriented colleges, and 10 who attended prestigious national universities. Vowel tokens were aligned and extracted using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). Two socially salient local vowel variables were investigated: tense /æh/ and /oh/. These were compared to two ongoing changes from below: the raising of /ey/ in checked syllables, and post coronal /uw/ fronting. Figure 1 shows speaker means for /æh/ and /ey/, color coded by education group. The vowels are plotted on a diagonal measurement (calculated as F2 2*F1), where a higher diagonal measure indicates a higher degree of fronting and raising. The contrast between these figures provides dramatic confirmation of the findings discussed above. While college educated speakers have been retreating from the salient Philadelphia tense /æh/ in a gradient fashion according to the type of institution attended, they are moving in lockstep with the community for the change which is still below the level of awareness, /ey/ raising. Linear mixed effects modeling (Table 1) supports this finding. The same pattern is found for the socially salient tense /oh/, as opposed to another change from below, /uw/ fronting (Table 2). This result suggests that speakers who attend college, and particularly regionally and nationally oriented colleges, are motivated to retreat from Philadelphia features, but only insofar as they are aware of which features are marked. Thus this is not a mechanistic retreat due simply to greater exposure to other dialects upon attending college, but rather a socially motivated correction of features which may negatively index a speaker as “local”.

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Figure 1: Speaker means for /æh/ and /ey/ by date of birth.

Table 1: Linear mixed effects models for /æh/ and /ey/ /æh/ (Diag) /ey/ (Diag) Estimate Pr(>|t|) Estimate Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 1504.13 0.29 -7753.21 <0.001 DOB -0.25 0.74 4.44 <0.001 Sex (Male) -103.39 <0.001 -20.08 0.23 Edu. Index -90.33 <0.001 -3.83 0.69 Table 2: Linear mixed effects models for /oh/ and /uw/ /oh/ (Diag) /uw/ (Diag) Estimate Pr(>|t|) Estimate Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) -601.33 0.08 -1178.60 0.19 DOB 0.62 <0.001 1.44 0.01 Sex (Male) 12.34 0.09 -76.67 <0.001 Edu. Index 20.83 <0.001 15.30 0.16 References Bigham, Doug. 2010. Mechanisms of accommodation among emerging adults in a university

setting. Journal of English Linguistics 38:193–210. De Decker, Paul. 2006. A real time investigation of social and phonetic changes in post

adolescence. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 12.2: Selected papers from NWAV 34.

Labov, William, and Ingrid Rosenfelder. 2011. The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus. Prichard, Hilary, and Meredith Tamminga. 2012. The impact of higher education on

Philadelphia vowels. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 40.

Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.

http://fave.ling.upenn.edu/

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Schützler, Ole University of Bamberg

Stable norms and variable use in Edinburgh middle-class speech This paper presents results from a study of 27 middle-class speakers of Scottish Standard English (SSE) in Edinburgh who are exposed to considerable contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE). For these speakers, the SSE norm appears to remain firm, i.e. the influence of SSBE does not result in the processes involved in koinéization, i.e. levelling or simplification (Trudgill 1986). It is argued that in the setting under investigation, accent mixing results in an expansion of speakers’ accent repertoires. In effect, a second (standardto-standard) dimension is added to the Scots-English continuum formulated by McArthur (1979; see also Stuart-Smith 2008). Speakers are thus able to drift between the standard accents of SSE and SSBE when the communicative need arises (see Macafee 2004; Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith 2003). This paper focuses on the variable (r) in coda position (in words like car or bird). Using a three-level hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM; Raudenbush & Bryk 2002; Hox 2010), tokens of (r) are treated as nested within text units (wordlist, reading passage), and text units are treated as nested within speakers. The following results are presented to substantiate the more general claims made above:

1. Female speakers vocalise coda /r/ at a higher rate. 2. The frictionless continuant [ɹ] is the dominant form of (r), but older speakers use a

higher proportion of the more traditional variant [ɾ]. 3. Stylistic variation suggests that the (rhotic) SSE norm remains valid for all speakers. 4. Style interacts with age and gender: wordlist readings generally result in less /r/-

vocalisation, but this is particularly marked among younger male speakers.

It will be argued that in urban middle-class accents of Edinburgh, partial /r/-vocalisation functions as a marker of gender, while the phonetic choice between [ɾ] and [ɹ] is a marker of age. Stylistic variation suggests that the SSE norm, while generally effective, differs significantly in strength along the dimensions of age and gender. Speakers’ sensitivity to stylistically marked contexts is itself variable and follows certain patterns not necessarily observable in general usage. There are two main theoretical and methodological implications of this paper for the notions of variation and change in situations of contact between speakers of standard accents: (1) hierarchical models can be useful tools for modelling subtle patterns of variation that only emerge indirectly in specific ‘marked’ contexts, and (2) in certain situations it can be more useful to think of contact as resulting in expanded accent repertoires with a richer functionality, rather than koinéization, which invariably entails the loss of some forms. References Corbett, John, J. Derrick McClure & Jane Stuart-Smith. 2003b. A brief history of Scots. In:

John Corbett, J. Derrick McClure & Jane Stuart-Smith (eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. Edinburgh: EUP. 1-16.

Hox, Joop. 2010. Multilevel Analysis. Techniques and Applications. London: Routledge. Macafee, Caroline. 2004. Scots and Scottish English. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: CUP. 59-81.

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McArthur, Tom. 1979. The status of English in and furth of Scotland. In: Adam J. Aitken & Tom McArthur (eds.) Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers. 50-67. Raudenbush, Stephen W. & Anthony S. Bryk. 2002. Hierarchical Linear Models. Applications and Data Analysis Methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2008. Scottish English: Phonology. In: Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton, eds. Varieties of English. Vol. 1: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 48-70.

Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Sneller, Betsy University of Pennsylvania

Hometown affiliation and language change There is a wealth of literature in sociolinguistics that explores the connection between group affiliation and linguistic behavior (cf. Labov 1963; Eckert 2000; Moore 2003; Fix 2010) Much of the past research focuses mainly on the agentive adoption of linguistic forms as a way to index positive affiliation toward a particular group. This paper takes affiliation a step further, representing a crucial point of interface between the linguistic effects of group affiliation and the role of group affiliation in community-wide language change. In this poster, I examine the effects of hometown affiliation in a single friendship group of teenage boys in Holland, Michigan. Despite belonging to the same friendship group, these ten teens exhibit very polarized attitudes toward their hometown. These polarized attitudes turn out to have a significant effect on their degree of participation in the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). The NCS is a widely studied chain shift in progress affecting the short vowel systems of speakers in the Inland North of the United States (ANAE). Diachronic data show that the realizations of speakers’ short vowels across this large geographic area have been shifting in the same direction (cf. McCarthy 2011; Labov et al. 1972; ANAE). At the same time, the NCS has been shown time and again to be the most advanced in large cities within the Inland North (cf. Eckert 2000; Fasold 1969; Labov et al. 1972; Ito 1999; Gordon 2001), with the small towns which are situated between large cities lagging behind in their advancement of the NCS. True to these previous findings, my own participants from the small city of Holland have less advanced varieties of NCS than their big-city counterparts. Crucially, however, I find that their degree of participation in NCS shifting is in direct correlation to their hometown affiliation. That is to say, participants with a negative view of their small hometown have more advanced vowels. These advanced vowels have traditionally been associated with large cities. At the same time, participants with a positive affiliation toward their hometown have more conservative NCS vowels. This study supports past research in language affiliation which shows participants altering their linguistic behavior to match their affiliation. Going a step further, it also couches these findings within the framework of language change. I argue that hometown affiliation is not only a predictor of rate of participation, but also that this effect in turn drives linguistic change.

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References Eckert, P. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity

in Belten High. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Fasold, R. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Study of the Pronunciation of Three Vowels in Detroit

Speech. Unpublished MA Thesis. Fix, Sonya. 2010. Representations of blackness by white women: Linguistic practice in the

community versus the media. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 16(2): 55-65.

Gordon, M. 2001. Small-town values and big-city vowels: A study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. American Dialect Society: 84.

Ito, R. 1999. Diffusion of urban sound change in rural Michigan: A case of the Northern Cities Shift. Unpublished PhD thesis, Michigan State University.

Labov, W, M. Yaeger, and R Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.

Labov, W, S. Ash, and C. Bober. 2006. Atlas of North American English. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

McCarthy, C. 2011. The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago. Journal of English Linguistics 39(2): 166-187.

Moore, E. 2003. Learning style and identity: A sociolinguistic analysis of a Bolton High school Unpublished PhD thesis. Manchester: University of Manchester.

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Zipp, Lena University of Zurich

Stylistic variation in British Asian English prosody

Indian-accented English is widely perceived to sound 'staccato', i.e., to be located more towards the syllable-timed end of the rhythm continuum than stress-timed varieties such as Southern British English (e.g. Loukina & Kochanski 2010). Previous research has also shown varying degrees of influence by the respective Indian heritage languages on segmental features in the speech of British Asians (e.g. Alam & Stuart-Smith 2011, Evans et al. 2007, Kirkham 2011, Lambert et al. 2007, McCarthy et al. 2011, Sharma 2005). In this context, Sharma (2011) focuses on the stylistic variability of selected segmental features, and documents that British-born Asians in urban contact settings use both British and Asian features with diverse social indexicality. The style repertoire of young women in particular proved to be flexible, highly differentiated, and tuned to context and interlocutor (Sharma 2011: 481). The stylistic potential of speech rhythm however still needs to be determined, a research gap that is mainly owed to the challenges presented by the durational analysis of syntactically and lexically unrestricted free speech. This poster summarizes our results from a pilot group of young bilingual British Asians. We document the extent to which young bilingual British Asians vary their durational prosodic and intonational patterns in two styles of free speech. The styles are defined with reference to different interactional interlocutors (a friend or relative from the same heritage background versus the researcher). We collected interactional data from customized map tasks in a laboratory setting, and normalized the data using read versions of freely produced utterances to avoid syntactic and lexical skewing (for the 'read speech normalization' method see Zipp & Dellwo 2011). In the evaluation of the data, we use not only the established durational measures based on consonantal and vocalic intervals (e.g. %V, ΔC, VarcoC, nPVI, etc.), but also a more recent method that characterizes rhythm with low-frequency spectral information by analysing the amplitude envelope of vocalic energy between peaks (see Tilsen & Johnson 2008, Das et al. 2008), as it has been argued that this rhythm spectrum analysis is well-suited to the sociolinguistic analysis of conversational speech and rhythmic styles. We show that there is a range of rhythmic variability both across speakers and styles, and that it is justified to suggest the existence of a similarly differentiated, flexible, and interlocutor-sensitive speech rhythm repertoire for individuals who are in continued contact with both syllable-timed and stress-timed varieties of English. References Alam, F., Stuart-Smith, J. 2011. “Identity and ethnicity in /t/ in Glasgow-Pakistani high-school

girls”. Proc. XVII ICPhS Hong Kong, 216-219. Das, T., Singh, L., Singh, N.C. 2008. "Rhythmic structure of Hindi and English: new insights

from a computational analysis". In: Banerjee, R., Chakrabarti, B.K. (eds.). Progress in Brain Research. Vol. 168. Elsevier. 207-214.

Evans, B., Mistry, A., Moreiras, C. 2007. “An acoustic study of first- and second-generation Gujerati immigrants in Wembley: Evidence for accent convergence?” Proc. XVIth ICPhS Saarbrücken, 1741-1744.

Kirkham, S. 2011. “The acoustics of coronal stops in British Asian English”. Proc. XVIIth ICPhS Hong Kong, 1102-1105.

Lambert, K., Alam, K., Stuart-Smith, J. 2007. “Investigating British Asian accents: Studies from Glasgow”. Proc. XVIth ICPhS Saarbrücken, 1509-1511.

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Loukina, A., Kochanski, G. 2010. “Patterns of durational variation in British dialect”. Paper presented at PAC workshop in Montpellier, France on 13 September 2010.

McCarthy, K., Evans, B.G., Mahon, M. 2011. “Detailing the phonetic environment: A sociophonetic study of the London Bengali community”. Proc. XVIIth ICPhS Hong Kong, 1354-1357.

Sharma, D. 2005. "Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English". Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2): 194-224.

Sharma, D. 2011. "Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English". Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(4): 464-492.

Tilsen, S., Johnson, K. 2008. "Low-frequency Fourier analysis of speech rhythm". J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124(2): 34-39.

Zipp, L., Dellwo, V. 2011. “’Read speech normalization’ (RSN): A method to study prosodic variability in spontaneous speech”. Proc. XVIIth ICPhS Hong Kong, 2328-2331.

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Delegate list

Name Affiliation Email

Elaheh Almousavi University of York [email protected]

Amin Alshangiti

[email protected]

Nathan Atkinson University of York [email protected]

Berta Badia Barrera University of Essex [email protected]

Joan Beal University of Sheffield [email protected]

Catherine Best University of Western Sydney [email protected]

Mark Brenchley University of Exeter [email protected]

Isabelle Buchstaller University of Leipzig [email protected]

Emanuela Buizza University of York [email protected]

Allison Burkette University of Mississippi [email protected]

Kate Burland University of Sheffield [email protected]

Amanda Cardoso University of Edinburgh [email protected]

Paul Carter University of Sheffield [email protected]

Catherine Chauvin

[email protected]

Claire Childs Newcastle University [email protected]

Simone Ciccolone Free University of Bozen [email protected]

Lynn Clark University of Canterbury [email protected]

Paul Cooper

[email protected]

Patricia Cukor-Avila University of North Texas [email protected]

Margaret Deuchar Bangor University [email protected]

Thomas Devlin University of York [email protected]

Chloe Diskin University College Dublin [email protected]

Rob Drummond Manchester Metropolitan University

[email protected]

Mercedes Durham Cardiff University [email protected]

Mel Evans University of Birmingham [email protected]

Daniel Ezra Lancaster University [email protected]

Susan Fitzmaurice University of Sheffield [email protected]

Nicholas Flynn University of Manchester [email protected]

Paul Foulkes University of York [email protected]

Lauren Hall-Lew University of Edinburgh [email protected]

Jen Hay University of Canterbury [email protected]

Michaela Hejná University of Manchester [email protected]

Raymond Hickey University of Duisburg and Essen

[email protected]

Sophie Holmes-Elliott University of Glasgow [email protected]

Uri Horesh University of Essex [email protected]

Vincent Hughes University of York [email protected]

Stefanie Jannedy The Ohio State University [email protected]

Sandra Jansen University of Brighton [email protected]

Ella Jeffries University of York [email protected]

Lisa Jeon University of North Texas [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]






































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Miroslav Jezek Masaryk University [email protected]

Brian Jose Indiana University [email protected]

Eleftherios Kailoglou University of Worcester [email protected]

Kerry Karam University of Aberdeen [email protected]

Jonathan Kasstan University of Kent [email protected]

Paul Kerswill University of York [email protected]

Jeanette King University of Canterbury [email protected]

Sam Kirkham Lancaster University [email protected]

Shoko Kojima Nihon University [email protected]

William Kretzschmar University of Georgia [email protected]

Ania Kubisz University of York [email protected]

Robert Lawson Birmingham City University [email protected]

Eleanor Lawson Queen Mary, University of London

[email protected]

Hannah Leach University of Sheffield [email protected]

Jamie Lepiorz University of Sheffield [email protected]

Daniel Lowit

[email protected]

Sarah Lund University of Sheffield [email protected]

Laurel MacKenzie University of Manchester [email protected]

Warren Maguire University of Edinburgh [email protected]

Cheryl Mahmoud Edge Hill University [email protected]

Robert Mayr Cardiff Metropolitan University [email protected]

Kevin McCafferty University of Bergen [email protected]

Fernanda McDougall University of Manchester [email protected]

Brittany McLaughlin University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

Chris Montgomery University of Sheffield [email protected]

Damien Mooney University of Oxford [email protected]

Emma Moore University of Sheffield [email protected]

Jonathan Morris Cardiff University [email protected]

Claire Nance Lancaster University [email protected]

Stefanie Otte University of Leipzig

Nick Palfreyman University of Central Lancashire [email protected]

Robert Podesva Stanford University [email protected]

Hilary Prichard University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

Patricia Rector University of North Texas [email protected]

Nicholas Roberts Newcastle University [email protected]

Saudi Sadiq University of York [email protected]

Ole Schützler University of Bamberg [email protected]

Chikako Shibata Gunma University [email protected]

Jennifer Smith University of Glasgow [email protected]

Julia Snell King's College London [email protected]

Elizabeth Sneller University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

Michelle Straw University of Gloucestershire [email protected]

Jane Stuart-Smith University of Glasgow [email protected]










































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Anita Szakay Stanford University [email protected]

Eivind Torgersen Sør-Trøndelag University College

[email protected]

Peter Trudgill University of Adger [email protected]

Danielle Turton University of Manchester [email protected]

Suzanne Wagner Michigan State University [email protected]

Cathleen Waters University of Leicester [email protected]

Kevin Watson University of Canterbury [email protected]

Helen West University of York [email protected]

Kimberly Witten University of York [email protected]

Jessica Wormald University of York [email protected]

David Wright University of Leeds [email protected]

Lena Zipp University of Zurich [email protected]














112

Paper and poster author index Amandor-Moreno, Carolina, 51 Badia Barrera, Berta, 82 Buchstaller, Isabelle, 18 Burland, Kate, 19 Calder, Jeremy, 62 Cardoso, Amanda, 84 Carter, Paul, 56 Chen, Hsin-Chang, 62 Ciccolone, Simone, 97 Clark, Lynn, 21 Cooper, Paul, 22 Cukor-Avila, Patricia, 23 Deuchar, Margaret, 25 Devlin, Thomas, 26 Diskin, Chloe, 85 Donnelly, Kevin, 25 D'Onofrio, Annette, 62 Drummond, Rob, 28 Durham, Mercedes, 87 Evans, Mel, 88 Fiorentini, Ilaria, 97 Flores Bayer, Isla, 62 Flynn, Nicholas, 89 Foulkes, Paul, 29, 34 French, Peter, 26 Friskney, Ruth, 31 Haddican, Bill, 34 Hall-Lew, Lauren, 31 Harlow, Ray, 40 Hay, Jen, 29 Hesson, Ashley, 77 Holmes-Elliott, Sophie, 33, 65 Hughes, Vincent, 34 Jannedy, Stefanie, 90 Jeon, Lisa, 23 Jose, Brian, 92 Juuso, Ilkka, 44 Kasstan, Jonathan, 36 Keegan, Peter, 40 Kerswill, Paul, 38 Kim, Seung Kyung, 62 King, Jeanette, 40 Kirkham, Sam, 42 Kretzschmar, Bill, 44

LaShell, Pat, 34 Lawson, Eleanor, 45 Lawson, Robert, 47 Leach, Hannah, 94 Little, Heidi, 77 Llamas, Carmen, 26 MacKenzie, Laurel, 53 Maclagan, Margaret, 40 Maguire, Warren, 49 Mayr, Robert, 95 McCafferty, Kevin, 51 McDougall, Fernanda, 96 McLaughlin, Brittany, 53, 69 Meluzzi, Chiara, 97 Mennen, Ineke, 95 Mooney, Damien, 99 Moore, Emma, 56 Morris, Jonathan, 95 Nance, Claire, 58 Palfreyman, Nick, 60 Piercy, Caroline, 25 Podesva, Robert, 62 Prichard, Hillary, 101 Rathcke, Tamara, 66 Rector, Patricia C, 23 Roberts, Nicolas, 63 Schützler, Ole, 103 Scobbie, James, 31, 45 Smith, Jennifer, 65 Sneller, Betsy, 105 Stuart-Smith, Jane, 45, 66, 92 Szakay, Anita, 68 Tamminga, Meredith, 69 Timmins, Claire, 92 Torgersen, Eivind, 72 Torsney, Ben, 92 Turton, Danielle, 73 Van Hofwegen, Janneke, 62 Wagner, Suzanne, 75, 77 Watson, Catherine, 40 Watson, Kevin, 21 Weirich, Melanie, 90 Wright, David, 79 Zipp, Lena, 107

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