Session 4aTHR: Thursday, April 15, 5:05-5:25, Ferguson Theater

A Cognitive Model of Southern Speech

Susan Tamasi
University of Georgia

This research explores the attitudes and perceptions that nonlinguists have about Southern American English (SAE) and analyzes how this knowledge is cognitively organized. Previous studies (cf. Preston 1993; 1997) have shown that the South commonly appears as the most salient dialect group in folk linguistic study and that it is considered to be an area of “incorrect,” yet “pleasant” speech. The aim of this paper is to present a cognitive model that accounts for these perceptions. Using qualitative and quantitative data from a study in which sixty respondents from Georgia and New Jersey were interviewed, I not only review what types of information are associated with Southern speech, but I also show how this information is cognitively categorized. Specifically, I discuss nonlinguist perceptions as they are associated with regional, social, and linguistic information and show how these different areas are inherently connected in the folk mind. For this, the data are analyzed using a variety of cognitively-based techniques, including cluster analysis and consensus analysis. This information is then compared with nonlinguist attitudes toward other perceived American dialect areas, a comparison that quickly reveals that SAE stands out as the one variety of American English that has the most consistent and most developed set of perceptions associated with it.

References

Preston, Dennis R. 1997. “The South: The Touchstone.” In Language Variety in the
South Revisited, edited by C. Bernstein, T. Nunnally and R. Sabino. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Preston, Dennis R. 1993. “Folk Dialectology.” In American Dialect Research, edited by
D. R. Preston. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Over the past 52 years, at least thirty studies have investigated experimentally the identification of voices as African American or European American. A general finding of these studies is that, in most cases, listeners can identify the ethnicity of speakers, though accuracy rates vary from near-chance to over 90%, depending on the type of stimuli used and what sorts of listeners serve as subjects. It can thus be said that most listeners can identify the ethnicity of most speakers most of the time. The next step is to determine how listeners make their identifications. Many of the past investigations on ethnic identification have attempted to address this issue. Doing so involves more experimental difficulties than simply determining whether ethnic identification is possible, however. For the most part, past research on what cues listeners utilize to make identifications has focused on single cues, such as the quality of certain vowels, the fundamental frequency (F0), or intonational patterns, and has been limited to determining whether listeners could access the particular cue instead of comparing the relative importance of various cues.

We designed an experiment to compare the relative usefulness of different cues. The stimuli that we used were samples of running speech, including both read and spontaneous utterances, spoken by African American and European American college students. The read utterances were designed to highlight either particular vowels or intonation patterns. In this way, the results can be compared with the findings of speech production studies. We avoided identifying lexical, morphosyntactic, and, as far as possible, consonantal variants in the stimuli; middle-class African Americans often avoid these variants, yet such speakers are still usually identifiable. In production, African Americans show less fronting, on average, of /o/ (as in coat), /u/ (as in who), and the nucleus of /au/ (as in how), than European Americans, as well as higher /æ/ (as in hat) and /e/ (as in set), and also produce more intonational pitch accents than European Americans. We wanted to determine whether these trends in production were reflected in perception. In addition, there may be some differences in voice quality that listeners can access. African American males are reported to show lower F0 values, on average, than European American males—though it is unclear whether the same relationship holds for females—and there may be differences in spectral tilt as well. We presented subjects with the same utterances, treated three different ways, to subjects: unmodified (after the initial digitization), monotonized, and lowpass filtered at 500 Hz. Monotonization makes F0 constant, eliminating F0-dependent voice quality variation and reducing the amount of intonational information available to listeners. Lowpass filtering at 500 Hz eliminates F2 and higher formants, as well as a good deal of F1 information, making differences in vowel quality virtually unrecognizable, and also makes variations in spectral tilt essentially indistinguishable. By comparing responses to different utterances and different treatments, we were able to compare the degree to which listeners relied on different cues.

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Jan Tillery
University of Texas at San Antonio

The grammar of Southern American English (SAE) has long been of interest both to linguists and also to lay people. The distinctiveness of Southern features such as you-all, the a-prefix, plural verbal –s, and perfective done and their persistence through the 20th century have made them prime topics for research in both dialectology and sociolinguistics. SAE grammatical features are important in identifying subregional variation, in exploring the roots of SAE, and in examining the relationships between white and African American vernaculars in the South. Most work on SAE grammar, though, has focused on individual features, so general conclusions about these issues are provisional and partial rather than definitive and global.

This paper attempts to reach some more definitive conclusions about the evolution of SAE grammar by drawing on significant new research that has been conducted over the last decade (e.g., the work of Wolfram, Montgomery, and Schneider) and by examining the distribution of a number of SAE grammatical features in several linguistic resources that were completed or have become accessible over the last ten years. These resources include the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), a Grammatical Investigation of Texas English (GRITS), a Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD), a Survey of Texas Dialects (STED), and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). The features examined include relative pronouns, perfective done, a-prefixing, plural verbal –s, 0 3rd singular, invariant be/bes, singular were, plural was, plural is, zero copula, liketa, gonna, useta, multiple modals, fixin to, you-all/yall, positive anymore, the past and past participle of irregular verbs.

The data suggests the following conclusions: (1) many of the traditional features of SAE grammar have been disappearing since World War II, and some have been on the decline at least since the last quarter of the 19th century; (2) the disappearance of these features does not mean that SAE grammar is losing all of its distinctiveness since features like fixin to, multiple modals, and yall seem to be holding their own, and the last of these is spreading outside the South; (3) the history of SAE grammar seems to be one of delocalization and regional consolidation. As the work of Wolfram and his associates shows, the earliest settlements in the American South were characterized by an amazing range of linguistic variation. As westward migration and then urbanization brought together various local dialects, much of the local variation was lost in a process of regional consolidation. It is out of this process of regional consolidation that SAE emerged.

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Session 2THR: April 15, 11:45-12:05 a.m.,Ferguson Theater

Salience Measurements of Southern vowels

Benjamin Torbert
Duke University and NC State University

Not many studies have attempted to empirically measure the salience of various linguistic variables. Though Sociolinguists can often intuit what features tip listeners off about the region or ethnicity of a given speaker, there is not a great deal of quantitative support in the literature for judging which features are considered salient by the common listener. To find out whether fronted /o/ is a perceptual marker indicating to listeners that a speaker is from the South, and whether it is a marker of ethnicity, I conducted two perception experiments in which speakers from various parts of the Eastern US, some who back /o/ and some who front /o/, were played for a group of undergraduates at North Carolina State University. The frames were very short, so as to isolate /o/ as much as possible while still preserving recognizable speech. The participants were asked to rate the speakers on a scale of one to five from “most Southern” to “least Southern,” and to guess the ethnicity of the speakers. Combining methodologies of Graff, Labov and Harris (1986), Gooskens (1997) and Thomas and Reaser (2002), I included unmodified, monotonized and low pass filtered tokens (to eliminate F0 variation and segmental information, respectively) in order to better isolate the /o/ variable, in both prevoiced and prevoiceless environments. Among participants surveyed, fronted /o/ was not salient for determining region, but was salient for determining ethnicity.
I then repeated the experiment with /ai/ in pre-voiceless contexts. Unsurprisingly, unglided /ai/ proved salient for determining Southern-ness to the listeners, but was not salient for ethnicity.
By the time of LAVIS in 2004, I will have completed similar perceptions test on most of the Southern vowel system; lowered /e/ and lowered /i/ will be treated next. This paper may serve as a springboard towards a detailed study of the salience of various vowel variations characteristic of both White and African American varieties in the South.

References

Gooskens, Charlotte. 1997. On the Role of Prosodic and Verbal Information in the Perception of Dutch and English Language Varieties. Doctoral Dissertation. Catholic University of Nijmegen.
Graff, David, William Labov and Wendell A. Harris. 1986. Testing Listeners’ Reactions to Phonological Markers of Ethnic Identity: a New Method for Sociolinguistic Research. Diversity and Diachrony, David Sankoff, ed. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
Thomas, Erik. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English. PADS 85. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
Thomas, Erik, and Jeff Reaser. 2002. Perceptual cues used for ethnic labeling of Hyde County, NC, voices. Paper presented at ADS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, January 2002.

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Session 8bFRI : Friday, April 16, 4:15-4:25, Ferguson Forum

Toward the reconstruction of Saint-Domingue Creole

Albert Valdman
Indiana University

Opinions diverge with regard to the origins of Louisiana Creole. Did it emerge autonomously; is it a modified form of a creole first spawned in the Lesser Antilles, or was it influenced directly by its congener imported from colonial Saint-Domingue by the massive influx of refugees from the slave revolt? Answering the latter question requires a better knowledge of Saint-Domingue than is currently available. Our knowledge of that creole derives mainly from a single source: dialogues appended to Ducœurjoly’s 1802 Manuel des habitants de Saint-Domingue. A more authoritative reconstruction of this pivotal creole will be attempted by broadening the scope of early texts. In particular evidence will be provided from relatively unknown short post-colonial plays authored by Juste Chanlatte, King Christophe’s secretary and court poet. In addition, extrapolations will be made from materials collected recently in the Cape Haitian region from monolingual speakers. Still poorly described and documented this dialect shows conservative salient particularities with respect to the standard dialect of Haitian Creole that may be direct reflexes from the colonial period.

 

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Session 4bTHR: Thursday, April 15, 4:15-4:35, Ferguson Forum

Regional variation in 19th-century African American English

Gerard Van Herk
University of Ottawa

New sources of information on the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) enrich research, but rarely permit analysis of regional variation. Recorded interviews (Bailey et al. 1991) and early written materials (Montgomery 1999) are too sparse; the speech of the African American diaspora (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001, Singler 1989) cannot always be attributed a precise place of origin (and may involve post-dispersal change or dialect leveling); and transcribed ex-slave interviews (Schneider 1989), while permitting regional analysis, cannot by the nature of their transcription process capture details of phonological
conditioning.
We address that lacuna through recourse to a large corpus of letters written between 1834 and 1866 by African Americans settling in Liberia, most of whose state of origin is known. The Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC) (Van Herk & Poplack, in press) consists of 427 letters by 206 semiliterate authors, featuring a range of speech-like non-standard forms. Analysis of present and past tense marking of over 6,000 verbal tokens reveals:
Unmarked past-referring strong verbs (e.g. go/went) are sharply restricted to a small group of verbs (come, run, give) that also surface bare in British dialects (Milroy & Milroy 1993) and contemporary AAVE (Rickford 1999). This effect is strongest in the middle South, weakest in the inland deep South.
Unmarked past-referring weak verbs are strongly conditioned by a phonological tendency to avoid word-final consonant clusters. This effect is stronger in the deep South.
Non-standard present tense s-marking is concentrated in third-person plural contexts with no adjacent pronominal subject, matching the Northern Subject Rule of British dialects (Murray 1873). This widespread effect is strongest in the middle South.
In non-third-person contexts, s-marking is conditioned by phonological and (perhaps) aspectual factors. This effect appears to be stronger in the deep South.
Overall rates of suffix deletion are higher in the deep South, across contexts.
Other constraints proposed in the literature or apparently operative in other corpora are not significant in the OREAAC.
Overall, these findings support two major inputs to 19th-century AAE. In the domain of morphosyntax, dialectal English features predominate. They are especially evident in areas where sociohistoric factors such as early settlement (coastal areas) and small landholdings (middle South) would favor uninterrupted transmission. Phonological factors, favoring word-final consonant cluster simplification, may derive from dialectal, universal, second language acquisition, or African substrate influences. Their predominance in areas with dialect mixing, late settlement, and late slave importation (the inland deep South) and high African-origin population ratios (the entire deep South) argues for a non-English origin for these features. The persistence of all these features across all regions (albeit to varying degrees), and of most into the contemporary variety, partially reconciles traditionally opposing views of the origin of AAVE. Both dialect morphosyntax and non-English phonology were required to produce 19th-century AAE; subsequent legal and social segregation and the passage of time have privileged phonological factors, thus obscuring earlier dialect features and regional distinctions.

References

Bailey, G., N. Maynor, & P. Cukor-Avila. 1991. The Emergence of Black English: Texts and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Milroy, J. & Milroy, L. (eds). 1993. Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman.
Montgomery, M. 1999. Eighteenth-century Sierra Leone English: Another exported variety of African American English. English World Wide, 10(3), 227-278.
Poplack, S. & Tagliamonte, S. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rickford, J. R. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schneider, E. 1989. American Earlier Black English:Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Singler, J. 1989. Plural marking in Liberian Settler English. American Speech, 64(1), 40-64.
Van Herk, G. & Poplack, S. In press. Rewriting the past: Bare verbs in the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

 

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Session 11b: Saturday, 2:00-2:20, Ferguson Forum

Puerto Rican Spanish in South Texas: variation in subject personal pronouns

Carlos Martin Vélez-Salas, Belinda Schouten-Treviño, Norma Cárdenas,
and Robert Bayley
University of Texas at San Antonio

In Spanish, a subject may be expressed overtly or as null, e.g. Yo/Ø jugaba fútbol ‘I used to play soccer’. In recent years, this alternation has received considerable attention in Spanish sociolinguistics. Studies of Spanish dialects in many areas, including northern and southern California, Madrid, New York, San Juan, and Valladolid, Yucatán, have shown that subject personal pronoun (SPP) alternation is a classic sociolinguistic variable, subject to multiple linguistic and stylistic constraints (see, e.g. Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1997; Cameron 1992, 1996; Flores 2002; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Solomon 1999). Of particular interest for studies of dialect contact, speakers of highland dialects, including most of Mexico and the Andean countries, use significantly fewer overt SPPs than speakers of the lowland dialects of the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico (Zamora Munné & Guitart, 1982). SPPs thus represent an appropriate locus for investigating contact among different Spanish varieties in the United States, including both long-established communities in Texas and newly emerging communities in many Southern states.
This study, based on more than 4,000 tokens drawn from sociolinguistic interviews, examines SPP variation in the Spanish of Puerto Rican residents of San Antonio, Texas, a city in which residents of Mexican background constitute the majority of the population. Overall results of quantitative analysis indicate that San Antonians from Puerto Rico use approximately twice as many overt SPPs as their fellow Texans of Mexican background. This result, as well as the use other well-known markers of Caribbean Spanish by the speakers examined here, e.g. /s/ aspiration and deletion, suggests that Puerto Ricans in San Antonio are maintaining their linguistic distinctiveness despite the fact that they constitute only one percent of the city’s Latino population. We explore the implications of these results for studies of Spanish dialect contact in the U.S. and the sociocultural context of the San Antonio Puerto Rican speech community.

References

Bayley, Robert, & Pease-Alvarez, Lucinda. (1997). Null pronoun variation in Mexican-descent children’s narrative discourse. Language Variation and Change 9:349-371.
Cameron, Richard. (1993). Ambiguous agreement, functional compensation, and nonspecific tú in the Spanish of San Juan, Puerto Rico and Madrid Spain. Language Variation and Change 5:304-334.
Cameron, Richard. (1996). A community-based test of a linguistic hypothesis. Language in Society 25:61-111.
Flores, Nydia. (2002). Subject personal pronouns in Spanish narratives of Puerto Ricans in New York City: A variationist study. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, Julie. (1999). Phonological and syntactic variation in the Spanish of Valladolid, Yucatán. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
Zamora Munné, Juan C., & Guitart, Jorge M. (1982). Dialectología hispanoamericana. Salamanca: Editiones Almar.

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Session 9 : Saturday, 10:20-11:00, Ferguson Theater

Language Awareness in Middle School:
An Experimental Program

Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser
North Carolina State University and Duke University

Despite the obvious need and the increasing interest in school-based programs on language diversity, there are practically no curricular programs specifically designed to educate students about the nature and significance of language differences. In this presentation, we discuss the rationale for such a program and describe the curricular format for an experimental middle school program in North Carolina, with illustrative examples of materials and activities. We also consider practical issues of implementation, such as the need to design materials that meet current state-mandated competencies and the need to market the curriculum effectively to teachers who already feel overwhelmed by current demands on their time and expertise.

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Plenary: Saturday, April 17, 5:40-6:30, Ferguson Theater

Perspectives on LAVIS III

Walt Wolfram
North Carolina State University

LAVIS III represents an impressive thematic and programmatic expansion in the study of language diversity in the American South. The range of topics and the significance of the issues raised at this conference indicate the enduring linguistic resources—and intrigue—of the region. In part, the impressive array of themes considered at LAVIS III is due to the thoughtful inclusion of topics omitted at previous LAVIS conferences, such as the status of indigenous languages and European languages in the South, and the links of Southern speech to the Caribbean. At the same time, changing social circumstances and sociolinguistic situations have generated new topics for investigation. For example, shifting demographic situations that include proliferating interregional migration within the US and the emergence of new Latino and Asian communities in some regions of the South have raised important questions about the dynamics of evolving language contact situations. At the same time, advancing methodologies that provide ready access to instrumentation and innovative experimentation techniques are helping address once-elusive research questions related to language production and perception. On an applied level, there is an increasing concern for informal and formal language awareness programs and an ongoing commitment to address issues of linguistic inequality.
There are, of course, fundamental questions that remain elusive. Defining the South linguistically, regionally, culturally, and ideologically is still fair game, even as this region becomes increasingly commodified—linguistically and otherwise. There is also continuing debate about the primary linguistic features and levels of language organization that mark varieties of Southern English, and continuing questions about language change. For example, is the now-canonical Southern Vowel Shift accelerating, receding, or perhaps even both under different sociohistorical conditions? Not surprisingly, there are lingering questions about how African American English originated and evolved in time and place throughout the South and beyond? Though the original Anglicist and Creolist hypotheses have been reformulated into the Neo-Anglicist and Substrate hypotheses, respectively, there is persistent controversy—and polemic—about the early development of AAE and its contemporary trajectory(ies) of change. Furthermore, the effects of individual characteristics, various social groupings, sociopyschological attributes, and even broadly based ideologies now figure more prominently in sociolinguistic description and explanation. Meanwhile, there is more critical scrutiny of constructs such as race, ethnicity, gender, and status. There is also more attention to the roles and responsibilities of researchers within communities where they conduct research and serious discussion of power and empowerment in researcher-researched relationships.
With some confidence that the past is a prologue to the future, we can be assured that LAVIS IV, tentatively scheduled to take place at North Carolina State University in 2014, will build upon many of the theoretical, descriptive, and engaged themes examined at this conference. At the same time, we may anticipate some major sociolinguistic shifts that take place to ensure that this region will remain a rich resource for the development of innovative and reconstructed approaches to language variation.

 

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Session 7aFRI : Friday, April 16, 2:00-2:40, Ferguson Theater

Sociolinguistic Involvement in Community Perspective:
Obligation and Opportunity

Walt Wolfram, Drew Grimes, and Ryan Rowe
North Carolina State University

The nature of the relationship between sociolinguistic researchers and the communities that they study has become an increasing matter of concern—for researchers, for professional organizations, and for host communities. In what ways are researchers obligated to the communities that they study? Is it possible to establish genuine researcher-researched partnerships that are mutually responsible and beneficial? How can researchers observe the linguistic gratuity principle as they collect data driven, for the most part, by fundamental research questions? These are questions that face all responsible researchers involved with human subjects, but they are particularly acute in small, Southern communities where the role of outside researchers is inevitably obtrusive. This presentation considers both the obligations and opportunities for sociolinguists in field-initiated community studies by critically examining some of the primary issues that need to be raised in researcher-community relationships. Illustrative examples come from a variety of relationships and situations experienced by the staff of North Carolina Language and Life Project during the past decade.

One of the initial issues to be confronted in such partnerships involves the relationship of power and authority. Although researchers may assume a variety of situated roles and relationships with community members, they still fill the primary role of “language expert.” This expertise, in turn, raises issues of ownership. To what extent is there an opportunity for community members to have rights and privileges with respect to language data from their community? How can researchers enable community members to assume ownership and become engaged in language heritage activities given this asymmetry in expertise?

Another critical dimension in the researcher-community relationship is the issue of presentation. What aspects of language should be presented publicly and how should they be framed? Issues of presentation are particularly delicate given the fact that most community-based sociolinguistic studies focus on socially stigmatized varieties contextualized by the principle of linguistic subordination—both by outsiders and by local community members themselves. How do researchers present their studies of socially stigmatized linguistic structures at the same time that they celebrate the linguistic heritage represented by these items?

Finally, there are issues of social and economic capital associated with researcher-community partnerships. How might the community profit from research while researchers enhance their professional careers through their scholarly presentations about the language of these communities? Can an authentic symbiotic relationship between the researcher and the researched really exist? Notwithstanding the apparent success reported for some community-based partnerships with sociolinguists, there are a number of persistent ethical and practical questions that need to be addressed. We propose, in conclusion, a set of guidelines for community-based research that ranges from issues of public dissemination to issues of maintaining enduring community-researcher partnerships.

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Session 4bTHR: Thursday, April 15, 3:50-4:10, Ferguson Forum

Some early creole-like data from slave speakers:
the island of St Helena, 1695-1711

Laura Wright
Cambridge

One of the more unanswerable questions about language in the Southern states of America has to do with the language of the first African slaves who were imported into Virginia in the early 1600s. It is reasonable to assume that they originally spoke a variety of West African languages, but did they also learn to speak an English-lexifier creole, picked up either on board ship or in holding-places such as Fort Cormantin in Ghana, and/or did they speak the kind of non-Standard English spoken by their slavers?
I do not have answers to these questions directly, but there is some data which sheds light on the seventeenth-century speech of slaves in one of the British East India Company’s possessions, that is the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. The East India Company and the free planters who lived on St Helena from 1675 were slave-owners. The slaves came from Guinea, Angola, Java, India, Madagascar, Sumatra, Borneo and Malaya, amongst other places, and there is evidence in the Court Records (the St Helena Consultations, now kept in the British Library) that such slaves spoke three or four separate linguistic codes. In the late seventeenth century the slave community on St Helena seems to have been at least trilingual. They are presented in the Court Records as speaking:

1. the kind of non-Standard Southern English spoken by the free planters and the soldiers. This is the default language in which the slaves and everyone else is recorded as speaking before the Court. It is possible that the Court Recorder standardised the slaves’ English and that it is presented as more competent than it really was, but there is no evidence for this.

2. some slaves reported that they could not understand others who spoke in Portuguese, a language used deliberately by rebelling slaves so that non-rebelling slaves would not understand. This may have been contemporary Portuguese, or a Portuguese-lexifier creole.

3. Pidgin English. There is very little pidgin in the slaves’ testimonies but there is some, and as it is at such an early date it is important. It is compounded by the fact that some slaves are recorded as using Pidgin English to talk to each other as well as to the Governor and Court, and the speakers who use Pidgin English are also recorded as using English, and hence are codeswitchers, possibly for social and stylistic reasons.

5. there is mention that some slaves spoke to others in their ‘country language’; that is, presumably the language used in their country of origin.

Although St Helena is many thousands of miles from the United States of America, it was a regular stop on the slave-trade route, just as the plantations in the Caribbean and in Virginia were. Slavers had to sell their human cargo at any port that would give them a price, and slaves could be on board a ship that called at several ports before being sold. Hence, what is known about the situation of speakers on St Helena is of interest for studies of slave speech on any of the British-owned plantations.

 

 

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