Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theorizing the Third Wave 1108471625, 9781108471626, 9781108578684

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Figures
Tables
Contributors
1 Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theoretical Foundations
Part I. Where Is (Social) Meaning?
2 Social Meaning and Sound Change
3 The Social Meaning of Syntax
4 The Social Meaning of Semantic Properties
5 Pragmatics and the Third Wave: The Social Meaning of Definites
6 The Cognitive Structure behind Indexicality
Part II. The Structure of Social Meaning
7 Sociolinguistic Signs as Cognitive Representations
8 Perceptions of Style
9 Features, Meanings, and Indexical Fields
10 Reconciling Seemingly Conflicting Social Meanings
11 Biographical Indexicality
Part III. Meaning and Linguistic Change
12 Emergence of Social Meaning in Sociolinguistic Change
13 Multiethnolect and Dialect in and acrossCommunities
14 Changing Language, Changing Character Types
15 Social Meaning and the Temporal Dynamics of Sound Changes
16 The Role of the Body in Language Change
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation

The “third wave” of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning. Lauren Hall-Lew is Reader in Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on differences in speech among speakers of different social backgrounds and in different social contexts. Emma Moore is Professor of Sociolinguistics and British Academy MidCareer Fellow (2019–2020). She researches the social meaning of syntax and has edited three other CUP volumes: Analysing Older English (2011); Language and A Sense of Place (2017); and Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax (2019). Robert J. Podesva is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Interactional Sociophonetics Laboratory. His research examines the social significance of phonetic variation and its role in the construction of identity. He is co-editor (with Devyani Sharma) of Research Methods in Linguistics.

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Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation Theorizing the Third Wave Edited by

Lauren Hall-Lew University of Edinburgh

Emma Moore University of Sheffield

Robert J. Podesva Stanford University, California

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108471626 DOI: 10.1017/9781108578684 © Cambridge University Press 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-47162-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgments List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors 1 Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theoretical Foundations lauren hall-lew, emma moore, and robert j. podesva

page vii viii xii xiv 1

Part I Where Is (Social) Meaning?

25

2 Social Meaning and Sound Change lauren hall-lew, amanda cardoso, and emma davies

27

3 The Social Meaning of Syntax emma moore

54

4 The Social Meaning of Semantic Properties andrea beltrama and laura staum casasanto

80

5 Pragmatics and the Third Wave: The Social Meaning of Definites eric k. acton

105

6 The Cognitive Structure behind Indexicality: Correlations in Tasks Linking /s/ Variation and Masculinity kathryn campbell-kibler

127

Part II The Structure of Social Meaning

151

7 Sociolinguistic Signs as Cognitive Representations annette d’onofrio

153

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Contents

8 Perceptions of Style: A Focus on Fundamental Frequency and Perceived Social Characteristics 176 katie drager, kate hardeman-guthrie, rachel schutz, and ivan chik 9 Features, Meanings, and Indexical Fields marie maegaard and nicolai pharao

203

10 Reconciling Seemingly Conflicting Social Meanings roey j. gafter

222

11 Biographical Indexicality: Personal History as a Frame of Reference for Social Meaning in Variation devyani sharma

243

Part III

265

Meaning and Linguistic Change

12 Emergence of Social Meaning in Sociolinguistic Change qing zhang

267

13 Multiethnolect and Dialect in and across Communities pia quist

292

14 Changing Language, Changing Character Types rebecca lurie starr

315

15 Social Meaning and the Temporal Dynamics of Sound Change meredith tamminga

338

16 The Role of the Body in Language Change robert j. podesva

363

17 Afterword penelope eckert

382

Index

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Acknowledgments

This volume has been a long time coming. We owe its progress to the gracious help of many. We want to thank Katherine Hilton and Zuzana Elliott for their work on the entire volume: to Katherine for formatting the papers into a single volume and identifying terminological inconsistencies between chapters, and to Zuzana for her help with compiling the index. We would like to thank all the external reviewers of chapters: Jenny Cheshire, Lynn Clark, Paul Foulkes, Sophie Holmes-Elliott, Sam Kirkham, Erez Levon, Claire Nance, Chris Potts, Teresa Pratt, Barbora Soukup, Lauren Squires, Meghan Sumner, Walt Wolfram, Alan Yu, and Lal Zimman, as well as one anonymous reviewer of the complete manuscript. Finally, we dedicate this volume to our colleague, mentor, and friend, Penny Eckert. Each chapter has grown from a seed that she has planted and nurtured with passionate intellect. This book exists because of her profound influence on the field in which we work and her profound influence on each of us personally.

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Figures

2.1

2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5

2.6

2.7

3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5a 3.5b

goat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for women by year of birth, by primary phonological environment, controlling for speech style. page 32 goat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for men by year of birth, by primary phonological environment, controlling for speech style. 33 boat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for women by year of birth, by ethnicity, controlling for speech style. 34 boat F2 trajectories for women by intersectional category. 37 boat F2 single-point measurements for ‘Emily’ and ‘Irene’, by style task. Interview speech is in the lightest grey, and wordlist speech is in black. 39 boat F2 single-point measurements for ‘Emily’ and ‘Molly’, by topic. Talk about ethnicity is in light grey, all other talk is dark grey. 41 Proposed, partial indexical field change for variation in the English goat vowel in the Sunset District neighbourhood of San Francisco in the late twentieth century. 44 The location of Bolton relative to Greater Manchester (the bolded outline), the city of Manchester, and the rest of England. (This work is based on data provided through EDINA UKBORDERS with the support of the ESRC and JISC and uses boundary material which is copyright of the Crown. © Crown Copyright/database right 2017. An Ordnance Survey/ EDINA supplied service.) 60 The communities of practice at Midlan High. 61 Negative concord by social class. 64 Negative concord by CofP. 65 The proportion of negative concord by topic for the Geeks. [Raw Ns are given within each bar.] 66 The proportion of negative concord by topic for the Populars. [Raw Ns are given within each bar.] 66

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List of Figures

3.5c The proportion of negative concord by topic for the Townies. [Raw Ns are given within each bar.] 3.6 Distribution of topics by CofP in sentences containing negation by postverbal indeterminates. [Raw Ns for each topic are given above each bar; percentages were calculated by dividing the number of times each topic was discussed by the total numbers of sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates, and multiplying by 100.] 3.7a Percentage of vernacular features occurring in Geek sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates. [The Ns above each bar show the number of vernacular features as a proportion of the total number of possible occurrences with a specific type of negation.] 3.7b Percentage of vernacular features occurring in Popular sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates. [The Ns above each bar show the number of vernacular features as a proportion of the total number of possible occurrences with a specific type of negation.] 3.7c Percentage of vernacular features occurring in Townie sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates. [The Ns above each bar show the number of vernacular features as a proportion of the total number of possible occurrences with a specific type of negation.] 6.1 /s/ production across gender of speaker (a) and phonemic boundary used for low masculinity vs high masculinity sod/ shod talker (b). 6.2 Effects on perceived masculinity of /s/ placement (a) and low/ high masculinity sod/shod talker (b). 6.3 Effects of listeners /s/ production on speaker evaluation effect for male (a) and female (b) participants. 6.4 Effect of sod/shod response pattern on speaker evaluations of /s/ placement (a) and sod/shod response pattern (b). 7.1 Between-subjects experimental conditions. 7.2 Frequency accurate responses in Business Professional prime conditions, by old versus new item status and trap backness. 7.3 Proportion ‘old’ responses, by social prime, backness, and old versus new item status. 8.1 Probability of identifying a talker as heterosexual, based on the estimated probabilities from the model presented in Table 8.3. 8.2 Tag clouds of responses to Kamamalu in the lower pitch guise when talking about the weather, when perceived as a lesbian (in the left panel) and as a gay man (in the right panel).

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66

67

70

70

70

140 141 143 143 159 166 169 186

189

List of Figures

x

8.3

8.4

8.5

8.6

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4

12.1

12.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 14.1 14.2 14.3

14.4

15.1

Tag clouds representing Fiatuina’s perceived style in the work clip when she was perceived as a heterosexual woman with a multiethnic background, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right). Tag clouds representing Stanchmonsta’s style in the places clip when he was perceived as a gay man, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right). Tag clouds representing Jeffrey’s perceived style in the friend clip when he was perceived as a heterosexual man, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right). Tag clouds representing Kent’s perceived style in the friend clip when he was perceived as a heterosexual man with Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right). Two dimensions of variation in the individual. Zakaria in interview with an American host (based on fig. 3 in Sharma 2018). Shift to IndE when countering doubt with Indian audience. Two dimensions of indexical contrast (inter- and intra-individual) for three sample individuals in a speech community. Use of the local variants in two professional groups. Factor weights for rhotacization, lenition, and interdental; proportion for neutral tone. Use of the local variants among the yuppies. Map of Denmark with the island of Funen and Odense where Vollsmose is situated. Sociogram of class 9A. Grayed boxes indicate boys. Sociogram of class 9B. Grayed boxes indicate boys. Number of sequences coded as ‘staccato’ per speaker. Number of sequences coded as Funen intonation per speaker. The (t) variable, participant distribution. Postvocalic rhoticity by style and age group (N = 34). Postvocalic rhoticity by style and Heartlander identity for 21–29 age group only (N = 18). NORM (Thomas & Kendall 2007) plot of cot, caught, caw, court, core, low, and coat lexical sets, wordlist data by age group (vowels normalized using Bark Difference Metric). NORM plot of cot, caught, caw, court, and core lexical sets among the 21–29 age group wordlist data, by Heartlander identity (vowels normalized using Bark Difference Metric). A variation score, reproduced from Podesva (2008: 6).

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193

194 244 248 249

259

272 273 295 298 298 301 303 306 323 324

325

327 340

List of Figures

15.2 British English LFI across ordered utterances, reproduced from fig. 8 of Sharma and Rampton (2011: 18). 15.3 Speaker random smooths by vowel. 15.4 Schematic illustration of temporal sensitivity and temporal extremity. 15.5 Dimensions of dynamism in six Philadelphia vowel changes. 15.6 price and goat in speaker 13A. 15.7 price in speakers 13A (solid lines/arrows) and 13B (dashed lines/arrows). 15.8 Hypothesized partial indexical field for price-raising; the social/affective meanings in bold text in the center are those associated with raised price. 16.1 Screenshot from dyadic recording illustrating capture of head-on images for each participant. 16.2 Effect of smiling on goat f2. 16.3 Open-jaw setting during speech (left) and when not speaking (right) (Pratt & D’Onofrio 2017: 19). 16.4 Interaction between F1 (lowering) and age (generation). 16.5 V-shaped trajectories for goat indicating extensive lowering.

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341 349 350 351 354 355

357 367 369 371 375 377

Tables

2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2

6.1

7.1 7.2

7.3 8.1

Predictors and levels included in Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). page 31 Social subcategories of women for the second-wave analysis. 36 Distribution of sentential negation types at Midlan High by CofP. 62 Factor 1: scale targeted by totally. 90 Differential ratings for positively correlated attributes for totally. 92 Differential ratings for negatively correlated attributes for totally. 92 Differential ratings for positively correlated attributes for -issimo. 95 Perception for negatively affective attributes: differentials. 95 Aggregate the-% for US House Representatives by party (Acton 2019: table 1). 119 Comparison of aggregate the-% in the House Proceedings and McLaughlin Group, organized by speaker’s political leaning (Acton 2019: table 4). 120 Factor analysis of MRAS responses. Loadings range from 0 to 1, with higher loadings indicating stronger contribution from the item to this factor. 138 F1 and F2 values for stimuli used in memory paradigm. 161 Summary of fixed effects from generalized linear mixed effect model predicting response accuracy, for Business Professional social prime conditions only (N = 396). 165 Fixed effects, generalized linear model predicting ‘old’ responses in entire dataset (N = 787). 168 Overview of self-reported talker demographics, with self-selected pseudonyms. 181

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List of Tables

8.2 Model fit to the perceived gender of the talker, with gender treated as binary. A higher estimated coefficient indicates a greater likelihood of identifying the talker as a man. 8.3 Model fit to the perceived sexual orientation of the talker, with sexual orientation treated as binary (i.e., gay/lesbian vs heterosexual). A greater estimated coefficient indicates a higher likelihood of perceiving the talker as heterosexual. 8.4 Perceived ethnicity for Stanchmonsta in the places clip when he was identified as a gay man in the lower and higher pitch guises. Slashes are used to separate labels for responses when the talker was perceived as multiethnic. 8.5 Perceived ethnicity for Jeffrey in the friend clip when he was identified as a heterosexual man in the lower and higher pitch guises. 9.1 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the guises used in Pharao et al. (2014). 9.2 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 of guises (after Pharao & Maegaard 2017). 9.3 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the STREET guises with female voices. 9.4 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the MODERN guises with female voices. 11.1 Biographic indexicality and language change. 12.1 N-th and n+1st Order Indexicality of Standard Putonghua and Cosmopolitan Mandarin. Adapted from Table 5.3 in Zhang (2018: 166). 13.1 The variable (t). χ2-test showed a significant gender difference, p < 0.001. 13.2 The variable (et). χ2-test shows a significant gender difference, p < 0.001. 13.3 Staccato and Funen intonation. Names in italics indicate boys. 14.1 Pronunciations of standard British, American, and Singaporean varieties of English corresponding to relevant Wells lexical classes (Roach 2004; Labov et al. 2006: 13–15). 15.1 Dependent variable measures, Ns, and visual orientation of the six vowel changes. 16.1 Summary of mixed-effects linear regression model of goat f2. 16.2 Summary of mixed-effects linear regression model on F2 of goat.

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185

187

188 205 208 211 212 257

286 302 304 305

322 347 369 373

Contributors

ERIC K. ACTON, Eastern Michigan University ANDREA BELTRAMA, University of Pennsylvania KATHRYN CAMPBELL-KIBLER, The Ohio State University AMANDA CARDOSO, The University of British Colombia IVAN CHIK, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa EMMA DAVIES, University of Edinburgh ANNETTE D’ONOFRIO, Northwestern University KATIE DRAGER, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa PENELOPE ECKERT, Stanford University ROEY J. GAFTER, Ben-Gurion University LAUREN HALL-LEW, University of Edinburgh KATE HARDEMAN-GUTHRIE, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa MARIE MAEGAARD, University of Copenhagen EMMA MOORE, University of Sheffield ROBERT J. PODESVA, Stanford University NICOLAI PHARAO, University of Copenhagen PIA QUIST, University of Copenhagen RACHEL SCHUTZ, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa DEVYANI SHARMA, Queen Mary, University of London REBECCA LURIE STARR, National University of Singapore LAURA STAUM-CASASANTO, Cornell University MEREDITH TAMMINGA, University of Pennsylvania QING ZHANG, University of Arizona

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Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theoretical Foundations Lauren Hall-Lew, Emma Moore, and Robert J. Podesva

1.1

Why Theorize the Third Wave?

The goal of this volume is to advance sociolinguistic theory. It focuses on a growing research area about how social information is encoded in language, known by some as the ‘third wave’ of variationist sociolinguistics (Eckert 2012). While this approach has been growing in popularity in recent years, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out. This book will provide empirically motivated, explicit statements about key concepts, their historical development, and their contemporary implementation in third-wave research. Each chapter takes up an important theme for theorizing the third wave and presents new empirical data that sheds light on the topic at hand. The papers collectively make a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also offering a foundation from which variationists can engage with social meaning in productive ways. We examine variation at a variety of levels of analysis, including phonetics, morphosyntax, and semantics; from multiple analytical perspectives, including language production and perception; across a range of cultural contexts, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Traditional first- and second-wave approaches have treated variation as a window into language change (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog 1968), and have examined the stratification of variation according to both macrosocial categories (e.g., gender, class) and locally significant categories (e.g., jocks, burnouts). Proponents of a third-wave approach focus on linguistic variation as a resource for taking stances, making social moves, and constructing identity. These social practices are possible only because linguistic variants carry meaning and take on new meanings in situated interaction, and as components of styles. While this term has been used by numerous scholars to refer to a wide array of things (see discussions in Rickford & Eckert 2001; Schilling 2013), we 1

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follow Irvine (2001) in viewing distinctiveness as its defining characteristic. Zhang (this volume) also takes this perspective in defining style as ‘an emergent system of distinction . . . constituted by linguistic and other semiotic resources and practices that make distinction meaningful’. Consequently, a key component of third-wave work is examining how meaning-making operates within stylistic practice. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the third-wave approach, addressing what we see as its principles and aims. In doing so, we expand on the overview of the third-wave approach as presented in Eckert (2012) and Eckert (2019), while also offering new avenues for research. Our aim is to highlight what the third wave has to offer to a theory of social meaning in language, drawing upon the volume’s chapters to illustrate our discussion. As such, this introduction highlights the content of the volume’s chapters, but it also makes explicit the theoretical perspectives that unite scholars engaged in taking a social-meaning-based approach to variation as evidenced in current work in the field. We thus introduce the contribution of each chapter not through the traditional style (a final subsection with one paragraph dedicated to one or two chapters) but in an integrated way, referring to the chapters to demonstrate the growing diversity of the third-wave approach as well as the fundamental principles that unify their shared perspective. The volume is structured around three sections. The papers in the first section, Where Is (Social) Meaning?, examine the question of how thirdwave research characterizes meaning. It focuses on issues relevant at different levels of linguistic representation, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics itself. The second section, The Structure of Social Meaning, then takes up the issue of how meaning is structured, taking the indexical field (Eckert 2008) as a starting point. It examines the structure of signs, how social meanings relate to one another, and how conflicts among meanings are resolved. The third section, Meaning and Linguistic Change, considers the role that social meaning might play in processes of language change. While an interest in social meaning developed largely independently of the issue of change (cf. Labov 1963), third-wave variationists have increasingly noted that attending to meaning can help elucidate the question of why linguistic change transpires in the way that it does. This final section will thus bring our volume back into dialogue with the broader field of variationist research. In doing so, it highlights the intersection of first-, second-, and third-wave research. In the remainder of this chapter, we present the fundamentals of an approach to variation that centres on social meaning. We start by outlining what social meaning is and discussing how the connections between variable linguistic forms and their social meanings arise. Section 1.3 turns its attention to linguistic form. In particular, we underscore the centrality of markedness and offer

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Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation

3

thoughts on how a form’s domain of linguistic representation (e.g., syntax vs phonetics) may bear on its social meaning. While Sections 1.2 and 1.3 focus on meaning and form, respectively, Section 1.4 discusses the nature of the association between the two, highlighting the properties of underspecification and multiplicity. Section 1.5 theorizes how to conceptualize the emergence of meaning when considering multiple forms at once, as opposed to single linguistic features in isolation. Section 1.6 takes up the practical question of how one goes about studying social meaning; we review a number of approaches and identify their strengths and drawbacks. Finally, we conclude by offering some thoughts on where the study of social meaning might be headed. Our goal for this chapter is neither to enforce a status quo nor prescribe a path forward, but rather to establish a common ground from which a variety of sociolinguists can set out on new explorations. 1.2

What Is Social Meaning? Meg and Kim are talking about where they shop for clothes with a group of their friends. Kim says she shops at a high end department store, and several other girls say they do too. Meg turns to look at the fieldworker recording their interaction and says, ‘They’re all posh, these, aren’t they?’ Kim changes the subject. From ‘Midlan High’ School fieldwork, see Moore, this volume

Social meaning is the set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction. That set of inferences may be linked to the pragmatic function of the utterance itself (Acton, this volume; Beltrama & Staum Casasanto, this volume). In the interaction above, Meg uses a right dislocated tag (the demonstrative pronoun these, which is co-referential with subject they in the preceding clause) and a tag question (‘aren’t they?’). We know that structures that occur at the right periphery of the clause, like right dislocation and tag questions, can be focusing and, as such, they can have expressive, evaluative and/or affective functions (Ashby 1988; Fretheim 1995; Lambrecht 2001). Research on tag questions has also suggested that their status – as part way between a declarative and a question – gives them a conducive function (Hudson 1975); they simultaneously express the speaker’s viewpoint, while encouraging a specific response to it (Kimps 2007: 272). So we might draw inferences based on the construction of the linguistic item we hear: in this case, that Meg is being evaluative and attempting to conduce agreement around the evaluation. But we do not just draw inferences by reading the pragmatics of a construction. We also rely on inferences about the sort of person who produces the utterance, the situation they are in, the nature of the relationship between interlocutors, the speaker’s orientation to the content of the talk, and more. So, in the interaction above, Meg’s utterance gains social meaning if you

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know that, while Kim and Meg have been friends since the first year of school, Meg has recently been spending time with another group of girls who have a reputation for being more wild, daring, and rebellious than girls like Kim. This has created tension between Meg and Kim as they begin to explore their emerging differentiation. This distancing is evident in the distinction between Meg and Kim’s social practice, but it’s also there in Meg’s orientation to her talk: in the deixis of they and these, in the labelling of Kim and her friends as ‘posh’ (a pejorative term linked to the practices of those associated with higher social classes), and, as mentioned, in Meg’s efforts to conduce the fieldworker to align with her viewpoint. Unlike semantically based inferences, the inferences drawn about social meaning are inherently indeterminate (Podesva 2007; Eckert 2008; Maegaard & Pharao, this volume; Gafter, this volume). While the syntax of right dislocated tags might make them focusing and/or evaluative, they are not inherently negatively evaluative or directly indexical of a rebellious style of speech. The ability to read Meg’s right dislocated tag in this way comes from its stylistic framing: the syntactic configuration, the lexis, the phonology, and everything that we know about the interaction and its participants. Yet, neither researchers nor language users attend to all components of social meaning at the same time: variationist studies often focus on how a single variant works in a specific social interaction, and there is evidence that the disparate experiences of individual language users makes them pay attention to different aspects of language (e.g., Hay et al. 2006; D’Onofrio, this volume; Drager et al., this volume). The computational complexity of interpreting social meaning in any given interaction makes the enterprise of third-wave sociolinguistics challenging, but also an area rife with possibilities for new research directions. Meanings are also made indeterminate by the simple fact that the kinds of inferences that might be drawn are manifold. For example, language users make inferences about stance, which refers to those meanings that are constructed around evaluation of some object of talk and the alignment between interlocutors (Du Bois 2007). So too do they make inferences about persona, or the characterological traits interactants evoke through situated linguistic practice. At the same time, social types are related to larger ideological constructs like class, ethnicity, and gender (see Moore & Podesva 2009). It is also the case that different components of a construction (like right dislocation) might link to different levels of meaning. So, while Meg’s use of deixis in they and these clearly portrays her stance towards Kim (and the other girls in the interaction), the simple fact that right dislocation is more commonly used by kids who are engaged in anti-school practices at her school might cause us to note something about her persona (although, of course, how frequency interacts with meaning is a complex question; see Hay, Jannedy, & MendozaDenton 1999; Snell 2010). Likewise, Meg’s pejorative use of the word posh

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might lead us to recognize disassociation from a higher-class social type. Note that all of these meanings are contextual: how we understand the deixis in they and these requires us to understand who Meg is talking about and to; linking right dislocation to a persona type relies on our knowledge of the system of distinction she is embedded in; and her use of the word posh is triggered by her alignment in a specific discussion about taste and economic capital. Each of these linguistic artifacts (deixis, right dislocation, use of ‘posh’) function as signs by Saussure’s (1916) definition, in that they encompass a linguistic form that is associated with a meaning. However, following Peirce (1895), Silverstein (1976, 2003), Eckert (2016), and Gal (2016), we might highlight the interpretative element of this process: signs are associated with meanings, but the precise meaning is an artifact of an interpretative process, and one that is ideologically mediated. For example, Gafter (this volume) shows that pharyngeal phonemes in Hebrew can signify any one of a range of potentially conflicting social meanings (historical and prescriptive accuracy; Mizrahi ethnicity; low socioeconomic status; Arabic first language). The social meaning(s) that listeners arrive at, however vaguely, can only be determined in the moment of use, dependent on the particular ideologies made relevant in context. That is to say that, while all linguistic forms have the potential to signify social meaning, a form only does so when our system of ideas and beliefs creates a link between the form and a type of social meaning (such as stance, persona, or social type). This is the process of indexicality, as articulated in linguistic anthropology. At its core, indexicality is a process of association, where a linguistic form points to some dimension of its conventional context of use (e.g., Silverstein 1976, 2003; Ochs 1992). In many variationist approaches to indexicality, the relevant dimension of context is the typical user of a particular form. For example, in suburban Detroit, negative concord has the potential to index burnout identity, as burnouts use the form more often than their jock peers. But associations with social types or social groups is just one of many dimensions of context, any of which could emerge as relevant. Another relevant dimension could be the kind of stances typically taken while using a form. The same feature, negative concord, can be indexically associated with the rebellious stances that its users typically take while using it (Eckert 2000; see also Moore, this volume). Whatever type of social meaning we study, indexicality stands as a core concept in theorizing social meaning, as it represents one of the primary means through which the connection between a linguistic form and its social interpretation arises. Indexicality is central to third-wave research. One of the foundational concepts is Silverstein’s (2003: 194) indexical order, which refers to the degree of ideological complexity of a linguistic form, where change to that complexity is ‘always already immanent’. Sociolinguists have built on the

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concept of the indexical order in different ways. On the one hand, Johnstone et al. (2006) describe it as a hierarchical process such that the social meanings of language are initially unconscious but may, over time, become stereotypical. This process is imagined as operating as a movement through structured (and temporally dependent) orders of indexicality that can be related to Labov’s (1972) description of variables as indicators, markers, and stereotypes. Importantly, in this model of indexicality, the social meanings identified are almost exclusively related to the main correlations measured in firstand second-wave research (e.g., persona types, such as ‘Pittsburghers’, or social types, such as ‘working class’). In order to understand the ways in which persona and social type are embodied (and constructed) in interaction, others have invoked a more fluid indexical field (Eckert 2008; Moore and Podesva 2009) – a semiotic space where potential meanings co-exist, but in which specific social meanings are only activated by the existence of cooccurring associations and/or certain ideological conditions. So, to go back to the previous example, and drawing on the relationship between stance and social meaning (see Kiesling 2009), if one is attending to Meg’s negative stance towards Kim, then this might facilitate an indexical link to a persona type which frequently makes negative and face-threatening evaluations (so a Townie persona in Meg’s school rather than a Popular one). But the indexical relationship might also operate from macro to micro. For instance, Meg’s use of right dislocation might be interpreted as constitutive of a working-class social type (by someone unfamiliar with the local dynamics of the discourse in which it appears). This might lead to certain stances being assumed which reflect ideologies about how working-class people present themselves (e.g., as brash and direct). As Gal and Irvine (1995: 995) note, there is no ‘view from nowhere’, and where we are standing determines what we perceive. The indeterminacy of social meaning can lead to a number of different indexical paths. Indexical relationships can be transformed into iconic ones (Irvine & Gal 2000) through a process of iconization, whereby the indexical link comes to be ‘as if the linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence’ (Irvine 2001: 35). Iconic relations between form and meaning are grounded in local ideology, and, in so being, they can erase the indexical orders through which a form’s social meaning has developed. Zhang (2005; this volume), for example, details how rhoticity in Beijing Mandarin is iconized as an ‘oily’ sound befitting the ‘smooth operator’ persona and their slippery qualities. Similarly, a speaker’s small body is iconic of high fundamental frequency (f0, the acoustic correlate of pitch), given dominant ideologies of gender and age. In both of these cases, the forms (rhoticity and f0) can index a wide range of stances, but the iconic meanings serve to erase alternative inferences. Importantly, the process of iconization is culturally specific, as illustrated by Drager et al. (this volume), who argue for an

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iconic relationship between pitch and body size that challenges dominant Western ideologies. Their data from Hawai‘i demonstrate that a higher f0 is associated with larger body size, and that this association depends on the listener’s concurrent perception of the speakers’ ethnicity. This shows that even these iconic relations are ideologized and conventionalized. Whereas indexical meaning points to dimensions of the context in which forms are used, and iconic meaning obscures the arbitrariness of such connections, semantic meaning refers to ‘the content conventionally associated with words’ (Beltrama & Staum Casasanto, this volume), presenting another path along which lexical and morphosyntactic forms can come to be connected to social meanings. In their work on the social meaning of the Italian intensifier, -issimo, Beltrama and Staum Casasanto show that listeners draw stronger social inferences when the intensifier is used on nouns (e.g., gelati-issimo). Importantly, listeners hear speakers as strikingly more outgoing, more excitable, and friendlier when they use -issimo in these contexts. Beltrama and Staum Casasanto suggest that these social meanings are not independent of the fact that the linguistic structure in question is an intensifier. In other words, the conventional semantic meaning of intensification bleeds into social interpretations of the speakers, or the social meaning. Finally, the link between form and social meaning also derives from the points of contrast between alternatives, or systems of distinctiveness (Irvine 2001). That is, the use of any given form may give rise to a particular interpretation specifically because it was used instead of another form that might have been used in the same discourse/pragmatic context. In our example, for example, Meg’s ‘these’ positions her very differently in relation to Kim and her friends than ‘these girls’ would have. In interpreting the utterance, Meg’s interlocutor might reasonably conclude that Meg is disaligning with Kim and her shopping preferences – not because ‘these’ on its own is inherently impersonal, but because it is less personal than ‘these girls’ would have been. Acton (this volume) explains that an approach to social meaning based on alternatives grew out of similar concepts in the fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistic variation, and goes on to offer an extended analysis of demonstratives like the one briefly discussed here. Although we have identified four ways that the connection between a linguistic form and its social meaning(s) are forged, we do not wish to suggest that these operate independently of one another. Zhang’s (this volume) discussion of erhua and retroflex initials illustrates this point well; although there is something iconic about the surface realization of retroflexion, meaning also arises from listeners’ recognition of the fact that another form could have been uttered. And even when linguistic forms are highly iconized qualia, or sensuous qualities (Gal 2013: 32) ‘[s]uch terms always occur in contrast sets’. For instance, when certain types of political discourse are described as ‘plain’

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speech, this is contrasted with more elaborate or florid styles, and when Beijingers are described as ‘oily’, this is contrasted with a more corporate style. 1.3

How Does the Form Affect Social Meaning?

What do we currently understand about how the form (or ‘sign vehicle’) itself affects the social meaning? As Acton (this volume) notes, the markedness of a form is key to social meaning. Here, markedness relates to occurrences of a form which are more noticeable – perhaps because they are less frequent, or because they violate dominant social norms, or require more interpretive effort. Hence, markedness alludes to asymmetry between linguistic variants. The markedness of a form is fundamental to understanding its social meaning, because more marked forms are more likely to accrue meaning than less marked forms. This is exemplified by Silverstein’s (2003) analysis of the tu/ vous distinction. A speaker’s choice to use vous for ‘you’ in French is ideologized as ‘marked or elevated in value’, whereas tu is ideologized as ‘neutral’ (Silverstein 2003: 209). This markedness arises from a construal in person reference, from ‘literal’ (e.g., surface form of 2nd person plural used for 2nd person plural) to ‘figurative’ (e.g., surface form of 2nd person plural used for 2nd person singular). This creates an asymmetry, which is then ideologized as marking social value: first deference, then honorification. Markedness may also arise from a mismatch between underlying semantic meaning and grammatical formulation. For instance, Beltrama and Staum Casasanto (this volume) show that listeners have to rely on pragmatic inference to decode intensifiers like ‘totally’ when they are used with non-gradable predicates. Intensifiers typically have semantic meaning related to reaching the top, or at least the very high region, of a bounded scale. In Beltrama and Staum Casasanto’s study, listeners generally perceived speakers using totally as excitable. However the degree to which a speaker sounds excitable depends upon whether or not they use totally with predicates that are graded (e.g., the bus was totally full) or non-gradable (e.g., she was totally born twenty years ago). In this comparison, the nongradable predicate is more marked because we have to work harder to understand the pragmatics: because we can’t be ‘a little bit’ born twenty years ago, we understand the use of totally to reflect the speaker’s attitude to being born twenty years ago, rather than the extent to which they were actually born twenty years ago. The precise nature of the relation between markedness and meaning is yet to be fully theorized, in part because markedness itself may derive from different sources. For example, one way in which a variant might be more marked is if it occurs with low frequency. But what constitutes ‘low frequency’ differs with respect to the speaker, listener, or interactional context. For example, among all the readers of this chapter, there will be many who find the right dislocation in

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‘They’re all posh, these’ to be marked, but there will be some for whom it is less marked than other syntactic alternatives. As another example, Hall-Lew, Cardoso, and Davies’ and Starr’s papers (this volume) both detail changes in markedness over the course of a community sound change, showing how frequency-based markedness can shift between generations, in dialogue with the community’s changing structure. The markedness of form can be due to factors other than frequency, and these are also relative. Research like Drager et al.’s (this volume) shows how the connection between the sign vehicle (low pitch) and the sign object (sassy, arrogant) is mediated by the perceived persona (gay cis man; Hawaiian ethnicity). Of course, this perception might vary. D’Onofrio’s paper (this volume), also shows how the markedness of vowel perception depends on the listener’s cognitive representation of the kind of speaker they are listening to, and this representation may be dynamically updated based on immediately prior experiences. The markedness of a form will also be influenced by the markedness of the other forms with which it co-occurs, as demonstrated, among others, by Maegaard’s and Pharao’s analysis of segmental and prosodic variation (this volume). While this kind of markedness may be in part due to a kind of frequency effect – for example, the listener’s personal experience of a given frequency relative to a type of speaker, or the forms with which it co-occurs – markedness may also be related to features of the form itself. For example, Podesva’s analysis of vowel fronting (this volume) shows the greater stylistic potential of those variants that are realized with jaw lowering, perhaps because of the context-specific indexicalities of an open-jaw articulatory posture and the markedness of this posture. The manifestation of markedness may also differ, in part, between levels of linguistic representation, given differences between the frequency and distribution of phonetic and phonological variation on the one hand and morphological, lexical, and syntactic variation on the other, and their abilities to allow for and constrain different kinds of stylistic expression. The relevant aspects of linguistic structure that contribute to the markedness of phonetic or phonological features will typically differ from those that condition morphological or syntactic features. For example, Starr’s study (this volume) of low back vowel realization depends on marked differences between Singaporean forms and British form on the one hand and American forms on the other, along with the phonological contrasts between different low back vowels that differ by variety. In contrast, Acton’s analysis (this volume) depends on the relevant dimension of markedness for different demonstratives is whether or not anthropomorphization is part of the demonstrative’s semantic entailment. Beyond differences in markedness, the effect of form on social meaning differs more generally with respect to the level of linguistic representation. One key difference is between variables capable of scalar variation, on the one hand,

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and variables that are only discrete. For variables with a scalar dimension, meaning may map onto only parts of the scale (Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016; Dickson & Hall-Lew 2017; D’Onofrio 2018). Furthermore, that form– meaning relationship may also differ from, or augment, the form–meaning relationship for the same variable at a discrete level. Podesva (2006), for example, shows how presence of a released word-final /t/ is recruited for stancetaking in one domain (i.e., precision), while variation in the phonetic realization of that variant can be recruited for other kinds of stancetaking (i.e., only long, intense releases index prissiness). Debates about the semiotic potential of discrete (or ‘digital’) signs, on the one hand, and continuous (or ‘analog’) signs, on the other, goes back to at least Lévi-Strauss (1969: 28; see Chandler 2017: 184), with the classical distinction framing the continuous as more ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ than the latter. Nowadays, the important semiotic distinction between the two is rather that discrete signs ‘impose digital order on what we often experience as a dynamic and seamless flux’ whereas continuous signs ‘can signify infinite subtleties’ which ‘blend into one another’ (Chandler 2017: 184). Consequently, the socioindexical analysis that is possible for any given study is in part dictated by the linguistic variable in question. Another general difference between levels of linguistic representation is that while social meaning in the sound domain is likely to be iconic (either from the start or eventually), it has been argued that the meanings of morphosyntactic variation are typically understood in relation to standardness (e.g., delinquent, tough) (Eckert 2019). Morphosyntactic variables (at least those typically studied by variationists) also tend to be more sharply stratified than phonological ones (Cheshire 1999: 61), and this patterning may limit the range of social meanings they can acquire. For instance, if a form – such as nonstandard were (e.g., ‘I were really happy’) – correlates strongly with working class speakers, then this may constrain the social meanings it can develop (such that its social meanings are linked to attributes which are also indexically linked to the working class, like ‘toughness’ or ‘resilience’). On the other hand, if a phonetic variable can be used in a scalar way, then there is more potential for it to signify a wider range of social meanings. So, while word-final /t/ release might correlate with higher social class groups, the ability to produce long, intense releases exploits articulatory movement to communicate affect. Eckert (2019) describes a ‘cline of interiority’ with variables capable of indexing internal, personal affective states at one end, and those which most typically index external public social facts at the other. However, the extent to which this cline of interiority maps onto different levels of linguistic representation remains an open question, especially given that variationist research on the social meanings of syntax lags behind understanding of the social meanings of phonetic and phonology (see Acton, Beltrama, & Staum Casasanto, and Moore, this volume).

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What Is the Nature of the Association between Form and Social Meanings?

The association between a form and its social meanings is indeterminate, by virtue of its underspecification (e.g., Podesva 2007) and multiplicity (e.g., Eckert 2008). It is not, however, chaotic or unconstrained, but structured by historical possibility. Underspecification refers to the insight that the form–(social) meaning relationship is inherently vague. It emerges in a stylistic context, rather than being necessarily predetermined. This is one of the distinguishing features of the third-wave approach to variationism (Eckert 2012): while the form–meaning relationship in the first and second waves is observed to be something that could be uncovered by the analyst (e.g., a ‘working class variant’ or a ‘regional dialect feature’), the third-wave argument for underspecification posits that that form–meaning relationship is determined by how it is deployed in interaction. The third-wave approach to variationism also shifts analytical focus towards the ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning: how a speaker navigates all the possible meanings available in a given interaction, and what those meanings are, and why. This mapping of one form to multiple potential meanings, or multiplicity, is perhaps most straightforwardly understood with reference to Eckert’s (2008: 435) concept of the indexical field, ‘a constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable’. The tag-cloud method used by Drager et al. (this volume), for example, effectively demonstrates the vast range of social meanings that might be indexed by a single variant. Maegaard and Pharao (this volume) argue that a variant can have multiple indexical fields, where the field that a listener orients to is influenced by the preceding speech. Gafter (this volume) shows how the meanings in a variant’s indexical field need not be uniform or compatible, and can even be contradictory, or exact opposites (see also Sharma, this volume). Similarly, underspecification and multiplicity also mean that competing variants might have complementary or orthogonal meanings rather than opposite meanings (Hall-Lew et al., this volume; Campbell-Kibler 2011b). 1.5

What Happens When Multiple Signs Come Together?

Thus far, we have been conceptualizing social meaning in terms of single signs in isolation, and indeed, many studies concerned with social meaning take single linguistic features as their objects of study. But in situated linguistic practice, any given sign is produced alongside a multitude of others. In the example at the start of this chapter, for example, Meg engages in lexical (posh), syntactic (right dislocation), and discourse (tag question) practices that – separately and together – convey social meaning. In this section, we consider

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the range of stylistic processes through which multiple signs conspire to produce meaning. As we will see, meaning emerges in a variety of complex ways. Perhaps the most straightforward approach to theorizing how meaning emerges from the co-occurrence of linguistic features is the compositional approach. Such an approach begins with the assumption that each linguistic feature is associated with its own set of meanings. The meaning of a style consisting of several features can then be reliably derived by relating the meanings of the style’s component features. For example, Podesva (2008) argues that a caring doctor persona emerges when a medical student frequently releases word-final coronal stops (which indexes competence in a professional environment), produces rising intonational contours on assertive declaratives (which facilitates taking a talk-sustaining, non-threatening stance), and occasionally phonates in a weak falsetto just on discourse markers (which he argues indexes restrained expressiveness) when meeting with a patient. Here, the emergent social meaning is the union of the style’s component features’ meanings, since all such meanings are compatible with one another. In cases where meanings are incompatible, meanings are intersective. In Copenhagen Danish, for example, the meaning of fronted /s/ is ambiguous between sounding ‘homosexual’ and ‘immigrant’ (Pharao et al. 2014). But when fronted /s/ occurs in the context of ‘street’ prosody, its associations with sexuality disappear, and speech is interpreted as overwhelmingly ‘immigrant’. In this example, the meaning of one feature (‘street’ prosody) disambiguates the meaning of another (fronted /s/). While a compositional view of social meaning is both useful and necessary – as any given linguistic feature is meaningful in its own right – it can offer only a partial account of the way that meaning emerges from co-occurring linguistic features. Compositional approaches assume that the meanings of features preexist and exhibit some degree of stability. But speakers constantly exercise stylistic creativity by lifting features out of familiar contexts and packaging them in new ways, through a process known as bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966; Hebdige 1979). At its essence, bricolage is a process of recontextualization, a ‘transformational’ process whereby some aspects of meaning are retained from a feature’s earlier contexts and, crucially, new meanings emerge (Bauman & Briggs 1990: 75). For example, when Chinese yuppies embed English technical terms (marketing, securities, proposal) in Cosmopolitan Mandarin speech, the terms acquire a host of new social meanings (e.g., a global orientation) that are not present in their conventional English-language contexts. The meaning(s) of any given sign can therefore not be interpreted independently from the meaning(s) of other signs. A compositional approach is also incomplete on its own because clusters of linguistic features (rather than individual features alone) can themselves function

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as sign vehicles. We might label this a constructional approach to social meaning. African American drag queens, for example, can draw on obscenities and features of white women’s language to construct a (non-white) drag queen style (Barrett 1999). Similarly, young people in Vollsmose, Denmark, are seen to combine ethnolectal and local regional (Funen) dialect features, and to do so in gender-differentiated ways to construct different persona (Quist, this volume). In both of these cases, the meaning that emerges from the co-occurrence of features cannot be straightforwardly derived from the meanings of individual features. To model the unfolding of meaning construction in real time, Tamminga (this volume) details a method of quantifying microcovariation between six different vocalic variables, theorizing the pairing of regression-based models and discursive evidence to push the ‘[q]uantitative frontiers for social meaning’. The fact that meaning can arise in constructional fashion does not invalidate approaches that assume compositionality. Instead, it appears that individual features as well as unique combinations of features both contribute to the interpretation of a unit of speech, and an adequate theory of social meaning must permit both possibilities. While a theory of social meaning that can handle the simultaneous and joint contributions of multiple signs has yet to be fully articulated, such a theory must include the following properties. First, individual signs differ in the degree to which their principal social meanings have been conventionalized, or enregistered (Agha 2003, 2007). Often in these cases, the meanings of the most heavily conventionalized signs (what Campbell-Kibler 2011a compares to a red stiletto) are stable across very different social contexts and can neutralize the social meanings of other, less conventionalized signs. In cases of indexical shift, some signs may be undergoing de-enregisterment at the same time as new signs are becoming more conventionalized (Hall-Lew et al., this volume). Second, and in a related vein, the order in which signs are spoken in an utterance may influence the kinds of inferences listeners draw (Maegaard & Pharao, this volume; see also Levon & Fox 2014). Finally, levels of linguistic representation do not operate independently of one another. For example, Moore (this volume) illustrates the value of conceptualizing syntax as ‘housing’ and thereby constraining the meaning of phonetic features that appear within a particular syntactic structure. Along the same lines, it is reasonable to think that the iconic meaning of intensification (i.e., extremeness) can constrain the kinds of phonetic resources that are produced during the act of intensification; that is, low intensity, low pitch, and reduced vowels are generally incompatible with extremeness. 1.6

How Do We Study Social Meaning?

Thus far, we have taken for granted that social meanings can be observed or inferred by scholars of social meaning. In point of fact, the analytical practice

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of identifying social meanings is far from straightforward, and researchers have followed a number of strikingly contrastive approaches. While an exhaustive discussion of the full range of methods is not possible here, we briefly sketch out the dominant approaches and discuss some of the advantages and limitations of each. The earliest approach taken in modern variationist sociolinguistics is the triangulation of meaning through a series of correlations. Labov (1963) found that the centralization of (ay) and (aw) was more common among fishermen (whose livelihood was most affected by the flourishing tourist economy), boys who are committed to staying on the island, and Vineyarders with positive orientations to the island. Taken together, we have strong evidence for Labov’s claim that centralization indexes a pro-island stance. No one of these correlations constitutes robust evidence for Labov’s interpretation on its own, but together they make a more compelling case. A major strength of the triangulation approach is that it can be taken with nearly any corpus, provided that there are sufficient numbers of speakers, and sufficient numbers of social factors. In spite of the advantages of triangulation, the approach has a number of limitations. First, it is unclear what constitutes sufficient evidence. How many correlations must be shown to corroborate a claim about meaning? Second, meanings are unlikely to converge on a single social meaning (cf., e.g., Trudgill’s 2008: 244 myopic framing of identity as ‘national identity’). As the chapters by Gafter, Hall-Lew et al., and Maegaard and Pharao (this volume) illustrate, the indexical fields of some features might contain radically divergent, even conflicting, meanings. Finally, it is not always clear, a priori, which correlations should be considered. Traditionally, in the kind of variation studies Eckert (2012) has labelled ‘first-wave’, linguists have sought correlations between sociolinguistic variants and membership in predefined demographic categories typical of the Western sociological tradition, like age, gender, race, and class. While correlations of this type reveal a great deal about the trajectory of linguistic change, they do not tell us much about the social meaning of variation; the most specific meaning we can attain under this type of analysis is a social address, which we might view as an agegender-race-class coordinate. The second approach to studying social meaning, ethnography, enables researchers to observe which distinctions matter in a community and also make connections with its members, who might shed light on the linguistic features we linguists are interested in. Moore’s (this volume) two-year ethnography with girls at Midlan High led her to identify four salient groups of girls at the school. One of these groups, the Townies, exhibit a strong anti-school orientation and partake in practices deemed dangerous by their non-Townie peers, such as drug-taking and sexual activity. Eden Village girls, by contrast, are the ‘good girls’ who wear pastels and glittery accessories. Towards the end

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of her fieldwork, Moore asked Eden Village girls to reflect on their use of tag questions, asking them if they say ‘innit?’ One girl, Leah, responds, ‘No, we don’t say “innit”. That’s Townies,’ and goes on to offer ‘int[th] it’ as the canonical Eden Village form. This example reveals not only that released /t/ is salient in this community, but that it serves to differentiate locally salient social groups: Townies and Eden Village Girls (see Moore & Podesva 2009). The ethnographic approach is exemplified in a number of chapters in this volume, including Moore, Hall-Lew et al., Quist, and Zhang. While the ethnographic approach provides ethnographers with both access to and insight into communities under investigation, the analysis is reliant upon the researcher’s interpretation of the practice they observe and how it correlates with language in use: community members might not be able to articulate the social meaning of most types of linguistic features, particularly less salient features (Eckert 2016). Models like Silverstein’s indexical order and Eckert’s indexical field clearly show the distributed, ideological (and therefore cultural) location of social indexicality, which necessitates that, by definition, most indexical relations lie below the level of conscious awareness. Experimental methods are well suited for identifying the meaning of less salient features. Among these, social evaluation methods are used most commonly in sociolinguistics, including by Maegaard and Pharao, Beltrama and Staum Casasanto, and Drager et al. in this volume. These typically take the form of a matched guise study, in which researchers obtain assessments of stimuli that differ in terms of a single linguistic feature. Often, guises are constructed through the acoustic manipulation of speech (e.g., Levon 2006; Campbell-Kibler 2007). Listeners are asked to evaluate speakers on a number of social dimensions (with the best studies basing these dimensions on concepts found to be relevant to the community under study), and differences in social evaluation are attributed to differences in guise. For example, Campbell-Kibler (this volume) shows that stimuli containing fronter /s/ are perceived as less masculine than otherwise identical stimuli with backer /s/. Given the cognitive complexity of social evaluation tasks (i.e., listen to a form, decide what is being said, reflect on how it was said, and evaluate a speaker on the basis of how it was said), scholars have begun using more implicit approaches for accessing social meaning. One class of these is speech perception paradigms where researchers disclose social information about a speaker before asking listeners to identify what they heard (e.g., Niedzielski 1999; Hay & Drager 2010; also Campbell-Kibler, this volume). For example, listeners who are told that a speaker is a business professional are more likely to classify a backed trap token in the frame blVk as black than block (D’Onofrio 2018). This classification sheds light not only on how speech is perceived, but also reveals that speakers conventionally associate backed trap with a business professional persona (one aspect of the vowel quality’s

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social meaning). Other, even more implicit, tasks include the false memory (D’Onofrio, this volume) and eye-tracking (D’Onofrio 2015) paradigms. Experimental methods are attractive because they enable researchers to isolate specific linguistic features. They are particularly useful for hypothesis testing, in cases when researchers can independently motivate potential social meanings of the features in question. Conversely, they are not particularly well suited for exploratory work. In the matched guise paradigm, for example, the only social meanings that can be identified are those corresponding to the social attributes on which listeners are evaluating speech. Another limitation of most experimental methods is that subject pools are either too limited (i.e., college undergraduates) or too general (i.e., crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific Academic). Given that some social meanings are specific to particular communities, it would be useful to administer experimental studies to members of the communities in question, as in Flores-Bayer’s (2017) study of the sh-ch alternation in East Austin, Texas, or Lawrence’s (2017) study of goat and goose variation in York, England. For smaller communities (of practice), experimental methods are not viable options, as listeners as community members are likely to recognize the voices under analysis, which would compromise a considerable degree of experimental control. While experimental methods are useful for establishing listeners’ connections between linguistic forms and their interpretations, they leave open the question of whether speakers exploit social meanings to achieve social ends. One means of investigating the strategic use of linguistic variants is to examine patterns of intraspeaker variation. For example, Podesva (2007) shows that Heath, a gay medical student, produces falsetto more often and with greater phonetic strength when talking with friends at a barbecue than when talking with a patient or his father. He argues that Heath recruits falsetto to construct a ‘diva’ persona at the barbecue – a situation where Heath has very different interactional goals from the other two situations. Apart from cross-situational analysis, intraspeaker variation can be examined in a variety of other ways. Several contributions in this chapter look intra-situationally to identify stretches of speech when speakers exhibit marked shifts in variation patterns, under the assumptions that these shifts in form indicate shifts in social meaning. Hall-Lew, Cardoso, and Davies (this volume) locate the timing of an indexical shift among those speakers who show topic-based style-shifting, as compared to the older and younger speakers, who do not. Sharma uses the Lectal Focusing in Interaction (LFI) approach (Sharma & Rampton 2015; Sharma, this volume) to identify shifts in stance and footing, and Tamminga (this volume) advances a bottom-up approach to quantitatively identify when a particular linguistic feature exhibits peaks or valleys. Other contributions in the volume (Hall-Lew et al., Gafter, Starr) use word lists or reading passages

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(compared to interviews) to investigate what speakers’ orientations to read speech reveals about their language ideologies and participation in standard language markets. Importantly, these studies recognize that culturally specific, historically situated ideologies about reading can provide better explanations for reading styles than attention paid to speech. All of these intraspeaker studies assume that intraspeaker variation provides a window into speaker agency, where agency (or performativity) may operate either above or below the level of consciousness. The intraspeaker approaches discussed can capture shifts in style where social meaning is relatively stable. In other words, shifts must last sufficiently long that they can be observed and identified using quantitative methods. We hasten to point out that shifts in linguistic form can be much more ephemeral, and stress that qualitative methods can be used to analyse such shifts. Although variationists are rarely trained in the methods of discourse analysis, it offers a principled, rigorous approach for analysing how linguistic variables are strategically deployed in interaction (e.g., Schilling-Estes 2004; Coupland 2007; Kiesling 2009; Moore & Podesva 2009). We feel compelled to point out here that discourse analysis is not equivalent to analysing the content of speech; it is a grounded approach that attends both to linguistic form and interactional dynamics. Under ideal circumstances, qualitative analysis will be conducted against the backdrop of a larger quantitative study, which can provide a sense of the range of variation possible in a community. Zhang (this volume), for example, deeply investigates the speech of Rebecca, a Chinese yuppie whose individual patterns are best understood in relation to the wider community patterns published in Zhang (2005). Also, although we present discourse analysis as a distinct approach from the examination of intraspeaker variation patterns, the approaches can be successfully combined. Sharma (this volume) uses LFI to identify moments where Indian English exhibits a spike and then correlates this with an interactional position (e.g., countering doubt) that can be independently motivated based on an analysis of the discourse. This last example illustrates perhaps the most important point of this section, which is that methods will ideally be combined to provide the fullest analyses of social meaning. Some methods are better suited than others for hypothesis generation, while others are better suited for hypothesis testing. We think there is a need for more hypothesis testing in third-wave variationist work (see Acton, Beltrama and Casasanto, and D’Onofrio, this volume, for examples). Some methods are better suited than others for analyses of community-specific meanings, while others are better suited for analysing more heavily conventionalized social meanings that are shared across communities. So even while we advocate for more hypothesis testing, we simultaneously underscore the need to examine how social meaning plays out in specific communities (see Hall-Lew et al., Moore, and Quist, this volume). And finally, some methods are

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better suited for identifying meanings that listeners infer, while others are better suited for identifying meanings that speakers exploit. 1.7

Looking Forward

The intellectual tradition of a variationist approach to social meaning organically favoured community studies of speech production, with a focus on ethnographic fieldwork and attention to patterns in variable realization, especially in English. This history has resulted in an imbalance of evidence and areas of theorization, and points to several clear areas of development in the field of social meaning and linguistic variation. There continues to be a dearth of third-wave research on non-English varieties, relative to other subfields of linguistics. While the current volume includes analyses of Danish, Hebrew, Italian, and Mandarin, and while there are other notable examples of non-English work (e.g., Stanford 2010), an obvious way forward for our field is the incorporation of a much greater diversity of language varieties, especially those from the Global South and nonWEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) sociocultural contexts. Starr (this volume) and Hall-Lew, Cardoso, and Davies (this volume) further show how the components of indexical fields reconfigure at a broader timescale, from generation to generation, relative to the wider sociohistorical context. These analyses were driven, however, by a desire to accurately model the association between the form and its social meanings, rather than by an a priori drive to model change in social meaning. Attending to the nature of the form–meaning link makes visible the fact that variationism’s focus on changes in form has been to the detriment of simultaneous changes in meaning, even though both kinds of change (potentially) happen together. Here we suggest that variationist sociolinguistics should do better to centre questions of meaning (e.g., Wong 2005; McConnell-Ginet 2011). For example, while both Beltrama and Staum Casasanto’s paper on intensifiers (this volume) and the paper by Acton on definites (this volume) are essentially synchronic studies, they inspire variationists to think of new ways of theorizing change in social meaning, perhaps through drawing clearer connections to research from historical linguistics such as reanalysis and grammaticalization, or research from computational linguistics on sentiment analysis. A more radical approach to centring meaning would be to dispense with the notion of the linguistic variable (i.e., more than one way of saying the same thing), in recognition of the fact that sometimes/often/always using a different linguistic form results in saying something rather different. As Moore (this volume) notes, Cheshire (1987: 257) has argued that misplaced focus on the linguistic variable has ‘prevented any real progress being made in our

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understanding of syntactic variation’, but it’s possible that the notion of the linguistic variable has also retarded our understanding of the social meaning of language variation at all levels of linguistic representation. Rather than organizing an analysis around a linguistic variable (like intensifiers), one might centre the meaning of intensification and examine the totality of linguistic features recruited at moments of intensification. Such an approach would force us to take a stylistic approach that considers how multiple features work together and yield a more explanatory theory about how different levels of linguistic representation relate to one another. One of the more undertheorized and exciting corners of the third-wave enterprise is a focus on the relationships between linguistic variation, social meaning, and cognition. While work by Campbell-Kibler (e.g., this volume) and D’Onofrio (e.g., this volume) is beginning to query a cognitive representation of indexicality, there remains a great potential for developing the field as an area of cognitive science. For example, Campbell-Kibler’s paper argues that a variety of linguistic practices in production and perception rely on different cognitive representations of the sign; this general and yet precise hypothesis has the potential to motivate new studies that could interface with the existing fields of language attitudes and psycholinguistics. Another clear area of advancement for the study of linguistic variation and social meaning is a better engagement with parallel theoretical traditions. Soukup (2018), for example, makes a strong case for situating third-wave work (more) explicitly with respect to interactional sociolinguistics, since both appear to draw on essentially an agentive, dialogic model of communication (Bakhtin 1986 [1953]). Soukup argues that a shift in focus in third-wave theory towards the interaction order (Goffman 1983; Schiffrin 1994) and contextualization (Gumperz 1982; Bauman & Briggs 1990) may aid the field’s current analytic goals, such as a strong focus on the contribution of the listener to the meaning-making process. While there is no question that variationist studies of social meaning have been influenced more or less by interactional sociolinguistics, it is also the case that the field can benefit from deeper engagement as it continues to grow. The three editors of this volume are friends, who were fortunate to have been mentored by Penny Eckert – the person most closely associated with the third wave. We have similar intellectual influences and similar perspectives on what the interesting questions are about linguistic variation. In the process of writing this introduction, however, we nonetheless encountered areas of disagreement where we discovered diverging understandings of some key concepts. Are all forms always already signs? Are all forms always potential signs, but not signs unless used? Are there some forms that are not ever signs? Each of these three perspectives was taken up by one of the editors of this volume, in spite of our having all been mentored by Penny Eckert. Indeed, most of the chapters in this

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volume, diverse as they are, have been authored by Eckert’s students, and all chapters were inspired by the contribution Eckert has made to the field of variationist sociolinguistics. The fact that the editors of the volume disagree indicates that there is still much work to be done. Consequently, one vision we very much share is that this volume will attract the interest of a diverse range of scholars who, inspired by Penny Eckert’s work, and what they read here, will share our goal to further increase our understanding of the relationship between social meaning and linguistic variation. note We thank Penny Eckert for comments that have helped us clarify the material in this chapter. Any remaining shortcomings are our own.

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Part I

Where Is (Social) Meaning?

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Social Meaning and Sound Change Lauren Hall-Lew, Amanda Cardoso, and Emma Davies

Why does a sound change spread faster among one group of people than another? While variationist sociolinguistics was founded on the idea that a variant’s social meaning might be part of the answer (Labov 1963), this proposal is still the source of active debate (Eckert & Labov 2017). Eckert (2008a, 2012) calls for a renewed focus on social meaning, articulating the core interest of ‘third wave’ research. In 2011, Eckert presents a third-wave account of the fronting of the goat vowel in Northern California, and in the current paper, we examine the same sound change in a different part of the same region, drawing on a very different speaker sample. We join some recent work that highlights the benefits of combining analytic perspectives from all of Eckert’s (2012) three waves (e.g., Schilling 2013), particularly with respect to the study of sound change (e.g., Moore & Carter 2015). By directly comparing insights from parallel analyses of the same data, we argue that all sound change researchers can potentially benefit from considering a third-wave perspective, in the sense that social change results in indexical change, and this may explain the trajectory of a sound change. 2.1

The goat Vowel and California English

The focus of this paper is the English mid-back vowel, goat (Wells 1982, represented in other work as (ow) or boat), and the variation in its production by a sample of speakers from San Francisco, California. We treat the lexical set ‘goat’ as representative of three allophonic classes: toe, bowl, and boat, where toe refers to post-coronal environments (e.g., so, doe, know), bowl refers to prelingual environments (e.g., toll, roll, coal),1 and boat refers to all other phonological environments (e.g., go, joke, hope). The relevant dimension of phonetic variation for goat most studied in California is variability in the second formant (F2) of the vowel nucleus, which is taken as a proxy for fronting or backing. The vowel off-glide is typically considered less variable along F2, so previous work has tacitly assumed that it is less diagnostic of social variation in California English than variation in the nucleus. Monophthongization has not been shown to accompany fronting, so ‘front’ 27

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realizations of goat have been presumed to be relatively more diphthongal than ‘back’ realizations. Unrounding also accompanies fronted realizations of goat, but is not the focus of the present analysis (but see Podesva, this volume). The fronting of the goat vowel is often studied in conjunction with the fronting of the goose vowel (also represented as (uw) or boot). The parallel fronting of these two vowels has been attributed to English of the Southeastern United States, with English in the Western US characterized as having fronting of goose but not goat (Clopper & Pisoni 2006; Labov et al. 2006). However, a growing number of studies have identified a gradual increase in goat-fronting among speakers in the West (e.g., Hall-Lew 2005). For example, in Clopper and Pisoni’s (2006) data, goat (what they call ‘/o/’) is nearly as front in their Western sample as their Southern sample. In California English, goat-fronting has been attributed to a broader, systemic process of vowel reorganization known as the California Vowel Shift (CVS; see Eckert 2008b). Studies of the CVS that include goat have analysed speakers from coastal Northern California (Luthin 1987; Hall-Lew 2009; Eckert 2011), coastal Southern California (Podesva 2011; Kennedy & Grama 2012), and inland Northern California (Podesva et al. 2015). All show that goat is fronting over time, to varying degrees between and within different Californian communities. The inspiration for the present paper is Eckert’s (2011) analysis of the goat vowel among pre-adolescent children in the San Jose area. Building on her analysis of the bat-ban vowel split (2008b) in the same speaker sample, she examines the affective qualities of goat variation and shows its contribution to the construction of persona styles that take on local value in the emerging heterosexual market. These styles become gendered through association with more widely circulating ideologies about gender, namely that girls are licenced to be flamboyant while boys are not. The newness of innovative sound changes makes them ideal resources for the expression of innovative styles, indexing trendiness (Eckert 2011: 95). Their emergence shifts the indexical order (Silverstein 2003), and previously existing styles potentially take on new indexes (e.g., traditional, conservative) by virtue of the distinctiveness that results from the new stylistic contrast (Irvine 2001). The gradient nature of phonetic variation potentially correlates with a gradience in social meaning, such that the most fronted tokens of goat, for example, may be heard as the most flamboyant and, if stylistically and contextually licensed, the most trendy. All things being equal, the explanation Eckert (2011) proposes for why particular people or social groups lead in sound changes is at least partially down to who is licensed to use the innovative variants. Here we analyse the same phonetic variable but from a rather different dataset, applying the theoretical perspective of Eckert (2011) while

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simultaneously demonstrating how the three waves of language variation and change research work best in tandem, as Eckert has asserted since her original proposal (e.g., ‘all three waves are part of a whole’, Eckert 2005). Our data come from twenty-four interviews recorded in the Sunset District of San Francisco, California, in 2008. The fronting of goat among San Franciscans was first reported by Luthin (1987) and confirmed by Hall-Lew (2009). Our first-wave analysis tests for correlations between internal and external constraints on variation in goat production, using Census-based social categories. Our second-wave analysis uses social categories derived from ethnographic fieldwork to examine the same correlations. Our third-wave analysis seeks to explain these correlations with an indexical analysis based on ethnographic insights and patterns of intraspeaker variation. We argue that all three perspectives are necessary for a complete understanding of English vowel production in San Francisco’s Sunset District. 2.2

Methods and Social Context

The fieldwork methods and ethnographic context to this study have been described in detail elsewhere (Hall-Lew 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014; Wong & Hall-Lew 2014). In brief, San Francisco’s Sunset District in 2008 had been a location of major social transition with respect to the ethnic identity of its residents: it was initially settled by whites or ‘European Americans’ (henceforth EuAs because of the local salience of their various European national identities), most prominently Irish Americans, who had moved westward from neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city. Between the 1960s and 1990s, it became increasingly populated by Asian Americans, most of them Chinese Americans (henceforth ChAs) and specifically of Cantonese or Toisanese heritage, who had moved westward from Chinatown. Many of the EuA founder population moved out to other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and many young residents at the time of fieldwork in 2008 were completely unaware of the neighborhood’s association with Irish identity. The representation of local authenticity in the Sunset District thus shifted over a short period of time from Irish-heritage norms to Chinese-heritage norms. A resident’s own sense of local belonging is therefore closely linked to their age and ethnicity. And as gender norms shifted over this same time period, gender identity and speaker age are also mutually informative. The speakers and dataset analysed here are those described in Hall-Lew et al. (2015) and Cardoso et al. (2016), with two additional speakers added (Appendix A). They represent twenty-four of the thirty speakers analysed in Hall-Lew (2009). While the analysis by Hall-Lew (2009) was based on formant data from a relatively limited number of hand-aligned tokens, the present analyses are based on formant data obtained via automated phone-alignment

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(Rosenfelder et al. 2014). For all vowels, tokens without primary lexical stress and tokens immediately followed by a vowel were omitted. The dataset only examines goat (which was excluded by Cardoso et al. 2016). Exhaustive error checking resulted in the elimination of 115 tokens, for a final sample of 6,585 tokens of goat from 24 speakers (mean 274, min 124, max 454 tokens per speaker). While most previous work on goat in California has been based on singlepoint measurements of F2, here we analyse F2 single-point measurements and F2 trajectory measurements using Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). These trajectories are represented by five equally spaced measurement points from 20 to 80 per cent of the way through the vowel, with F2 values presented in non-normalized Hertz. Separate GAMM models were run for men and women, to reduce the number of factors in each model, so that the models can simultaneously account for phonological context and speaker year of birth. Gender coding is based on the speakers’ gender presentation at the time of the interview; no participants identified as non-binary. GAMMs are used to account for differences in the shape of the F2 trajectory by the inclusion of smooth terms and random smooths (see, e.g., Wood 2006; Winter & Wieling 2016; Sóskuthy 2017). This makes it possible to determine whether the F2 trajectory differs in terms of frontness, the shape of the trajectory, or both. For example, F2 might be fronter across the entire trajectory for younger speakers, but older speakers might have flatter trajectories, resulting in a greater age difference at the nucleus of the vowel trajectory than at the offglide. We fit two sets of GAMMs to account for factors that affect the whole vowel class and factors that affect a subset of the vowel class: we model F2 trajectories for goat vowel (‘goat models’) and F2 trajectories for only those cases when goat follows non-coronal consonants and does not precede a liquid (‘boat models’). The predictors and levels for the statistical analysis presented below are given in Table 2.1, and the model specifications are given in Appendix B. The goat GAMMs model F2 trajectories as a function of speaker year of birth, the vowel’s primary phonological environment (boat, toe, bowl), and a first-wave, task-based elicitation of speech style (Labov 1966). Random smooths (which are similar to random slopes in linear mixed effects models, but also account for shape differences) are included for speaker, by phonological context. The boat GAMMs also model F2 trajectories as a function of speaker year of birth and style, and again with separate models for men and women. Since phonological context is accounted for, the boat models can include speaker ethnicity where the goat models cannot. Ethnicity coding is based on the speaker’s identity as expressed in the interview, with all non-EuA and non-ChA participants excluded in the present study (see Hall-Lew 2009 for the patterning

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Table 2.1 Predictors and levels included in Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). Model

Predictors

Levels

goat models

Phonological Context Speech Style Task

boat, toe, bowl

goat models, boat models goat models, boat models boat Models

Speaker Year of Birth Speaker Ethnicity

Interview, Reading Passage, Word List Continuous Chinese American (ChA), European American (EuA)

of some non-Chinese, Asian Americans). Random smooths are included for speaker by speech style and by word. Model comparisons are used to evaluate the effect of different predictors on F2 trajectories (Sóskuthy 2017). In line with Sóskuthy (2017), all terms relating to a factor are first removed, testing main effects (overall comparisons). If the overall comparison is significant (i.e., the factor improves the model), then the smooth terms alone are removed (shape comparison). The shape comparisons determine whether including the shape of the F2 trajectory for that factor improves the model. Only those predictors that significantly improved the models are discussed. 2.3

goat in San Francisco’s Sunset District: A First-Wave Analysis

We first present a correlational analysis of goat-fronting with respect to primary phonological environment, then move on to a social analysis based on first-wave social factors. While year of birth is a continuous factor in all of the models (see Table 2.1), Figures 2.1–2.3 show speaker year of birth in decade bins to provide clearer visuals. Primary phonological environment was defined according to the three allophonic classes previously described: toe, bowl, and boat. Preliminary analysis found preceding palatals pattern with other, anterior coronals, and so these were included with toe. Previous literature (see Section 2.1) has shown that goat fronting is promoted by a preceding coronal consonant (toe) and inhibited by a following liquid (bowl), and the same result obtains here. Figures 2.1, 2.2, and Appendix C show this effect for women and men, respectively. For both men and women, toe is fronted relative to boat, and shows a large degree of fronting at the nucleus, while bowl is backed relative to boat, and shows further backing in the second half of the vowel, likely due to coarticulation with the liquid (Hall-Lew 2011).

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F2

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BOAT

4

5

1

2

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BOWL

4

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20s/30s

40s

60s

70s

80s

90s

YOB

Figure 2.1 goat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for women by year of birth, by primary phonological environment, controlling for speech style.

2

TOE

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3

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BOAT

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Figure 2.2 goat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for men by year of birth, by primary phonological environment, controlling for speech style.

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70s

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White

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F2

1500 YOB 90s 80s 70s 60s 40s 20s/30s

1250

1000

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3 4 Measurement Point

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5

Figure 2.3 boat GAMM predictions for F2 trajectories for women by year of birth, by ethnicity, controlling for speech style.

The model comparisons also indicate a change in apparent time among women with goat vowel trajectories showing higher F2 values among younger speakers than older speakers (Appendix C). There is no correlation with year of birth and F2 among the men (p = 0.347). Figure 2.2 indicates that the backed productions of the 1960s speakers, and the relatively fronted productions of the 1920s speaker, are the reason for this, suggesting the benefit of future analyses including a larger speaker sample with stronger representation of older speakers. The results also suggest minimal difference between speakers born in the 1960s and before, suggesting that the fronting of goat may have begun in the 1960s or 1970s. The change in apparent time among women is evidenced in all three phonological contexts, even before liquids. Additionally, model comparisons do not support any interaction between year of birth and phonological context (overall p = 0.994, shape p = 0.960). The trajectory analysis further reveals that the offglide of boat (but not toe and bowl) is also fronting, along with the vowel nucleus, and the shape of the trajectories also indicates change, with older women showing more curved trajectories and younger women more monophthongal trajectories. In other words, the shape of the F2 trajectories differs by year of birth (flatter for younger women than older women) and by phonological context (semi-circular for boat, but sloped downward for toe and bowl), but the shape of F2 trajectories in those phonological contexts is not changing, nor are the average F2 trajectories changing in apparent time at

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different rates for the different phonological contexts. It does not appear to be the case that any one phonological context is leading the change, contrary to previous characterizations of the post-coronal context ‘leading’ the change. Instead, the entire vowel category is fronting, and equally so in each context. However, because the main effect of phonological environment is so strong, for simplicity’s sake, most of this paper focuses only on an analysis of the phonological context, boat. Since all tokens that follow coronals (and palatals) are excluded, an analysis of boat allows us to focus on the variation among those tokens which are less strongly conditioned for fronting by phonological environment. Briefly, before switching to the boat subset only: the F2 trajectories of goat also differ depending on the first-wave definition of speech style, for both men and women, and in the expected direction for both (i.e., fronter in interview speech and backer in word list speech). However, this result is not borne out in the analysis of the F2 trajectories of the boat subclass for either men and women (see Appendix C). It is possible that there is a confounding factor that resulted in a significant style effect for the goat models, or the result might just be due to the lower statistical power in the boat subset of the data; there are nearly twice as many tokens of toe (N = 3,862) in the dataset as there are for boat (N = 2,060, mean = 86 tokens per speaker). With respect to ethnicity, Figure 2.3 shows the GAMM predictions for the boat model for women by year of birth and ethnicity, controlling for style. There are no clear patterns for the men. All women show an apparent time change in the midpoint of boat. However, ChA women produce boat with trajectories that are more fronted than those produced by EuA women. The F2 trajectory shape also changes differently in apparent time between groups. The model reveals that, among the ChA women, the nucleus of boat shows a stronger year of birth correlation than the offglide, while among the EuA women the reverse is true. However, both groups appear to show younger speakers producing realizations that are more monophthongal than those produced by older speakers. Zooming into this speaker subgroup we now see a distinction between speakers born in the 1960s and those born in the 1940s and earlier, pushing back the possible date of sound change actuation by a decade or so more than previously posited. The results from this first-wave analysis show some significant social patterns. These results, based on FAVE alignment, FAVE extraction, and GAMMs of vowel trajectories, largely corroborate the results from Hall-Lew (2009), which was based on hand alignment, single midpoint extraction, and basic linear regression, and done on a slightly different speaker set. The contrast between men and women fits well-known patterns of gendered variation. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find that ChA women have a more advanced variant than EuA women. Vowel trajectories also indicate that the ChA women

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are producing goat with the more typical regional pattern of vowel nucleus fronting, while the EuA women show some fronting of the off-glide. From a first-wave perspective, members of racially white ethnic groups are typically seen to be leaders of regional sound changes in US English, not their racially non-white counterparts (Labov 2001; although see Cheshire et al. 2011 for nonwhites leading sound changes in London). Hall-Lew (2009) suggested that the reason for these patterns was because Chinese American women experienced the largest shift in social position in the neighbourhood, from being the most peripheral members of the community to rapidly becoming the most central. To explore that idea further, we consider additional analytical perspectives. 2.4

goat in San Francisco’s Sunset District: A Second-Wave Analysis

Our second-wave analysis expands on the first-wave analysis by providing a more in-depth look into social subcategories motivated by ethnographic insight (Hall-Lew 2009).2 First, based on our first-wave results, we exclude all men from this second-wave analysis, but will return to them in the thirdwave analysis. Next, we re-operationalized the first-wave social factor of ethnicity into four levels instead of two, based on the ethnographic insight that these identities indexed local authenticity in distinct ways (Table 2.2). The first-wave category of Chinese American is split between speakers of Cantonese or Toisanese heritage and those of other backgrounds, and the first wave category of European American is split between speakers of Irish heritage and those of other backgrounds. We continue to refer to this factor as capturing both race and ethnicity, since there are components of both racialized and ethnic experience unique to each group. Finally, the first-wave social factor of age is re-operationalized here into a binary factor, based on the additional ethnographic insight that 1970 marked an important generational divide in terms of ethnic experience in the neighbourhood: 1970 is also, coincidentally, the sample median for the women, and so speakers were divided into those born before or after 1970.

Table 2.2 Social subcategories of women for the second-wave analysis

Younger (Y) Older (O)

Chinese-heritage

Label

N

European-heritage

Label

N

Cantonese (C) Non-Cantonese (nC) Cantonese (C) Non-Cantonese (nC)

YC YnC OC OnC

2 2 2 0

Irish (I) Non-Irish (nI) Irish (I) Non-Irish (nI)

YI YnI OI OnI

1 2 2 1

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Since race, ethnicity, and age all bear on the experience of local belonging in the community, each speaker is assigned to one of eight coding levels that combine their racial and ethnic subcategory type with their broad generational cohort (Table 2.2). The nature of social change and population movement during the period under study predictably resulted in a quantitative imbalance at this level of analysis. In 2008, most ChAs in the Sunset District were of Cantonese or Toisanese heritage, and few of the remaining EuAs were of Irish heritage. Indeed, the numbers are low for all groups, and so we perform an exploratory, descriptive analysis for reasons of data sparsity (i.e., the results are not verified by GAMM models). The F2 averages in Figure 2.4 suggest a different result for racial and ethnic identity depending on the age group. While we see no racial/ethnic difference among the older women,3 second-wave ethnic subcategories differentiate between productions of the boat vowel among the younger women. The young Chinese Americans are the most differentiated: Cantonese Americans show the frontest productions and the non-Cantonese show the backest productions. The one Irish-heritage young woman is relatively back compared to her two non-Irish counterparts, and all three speakers fall within the range defined by the ChA productions. The generational difference between Cantonese-heritage ChA women is greater than that of the EuA women of any heritage. Since there are no older non-Cantonese ChA women, it is not possible to comment on the generational differences of this group, but the very backed productions of the two younger non-Cantonese women allows us to

Older

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YCW YnCW YIW YnIW 1500

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F2

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Figure 2.4 boat F2 trajectories for women by intersectional category.

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tentatively suggest that the apparent time effect is probably led by women of Cantonese heritage. This second-wave analysis suggests that the correlation between change in the boat vowel and speaker ethnicity may be more nuanced than originally thought. By drawing on locally relevant, ethnographically informed, social categories we have uncovered suggestive evidence that the apparent time pattern is quite different for women of Cantonese/Toisanese heritage than women of other Chinese backgrounds. While remaining cautious about the low numbers of speakers involved, this result nonetheless adds support to the idea that there is something about the boat vowel that is of particular indexical relevance to the Chinese American women. To unpack this more, we turn to an analysis of intraspeaker variation and indexicality. 2.5

goat in San Francisco’s Sunset District: A Third-Wave Analysis

Why is the apparent time fronting of the boat vowel strongest among the Cantonese American women? As Eckert (1989: 259) wrote about the Jocks and Burnouts, ‘the most extreme users of phonological variables . . . are those who have to do the greatest amount of symbolic work to affirm their membership in groups or communities’. To see if that might also be the case here, we need to establish a definition of ‘extreme user’ and what ‘symbolic work’ is potentially being accomplished by that use, and how. In this section, we will focus on the latter (i.e., the social meanings indexed by the variation), and how phonetic variants become resources for doing local social work through the consideration of intraspeaker variation. Even though we considered all the men as well as all the women, when building separate statistical models for each speaker, we find virtually no intraspeaker variation other than for the three Cantonese American women who were born in the 1970s–80s. We suggest that these speakers differ from the others in terms of their greater exposure to linguistic variation and their greater challenges in negotiating legitimate access to indices of local identity. We approach our intraspeaker analysis in two ways: style and topic. The former, style, is operationalized as in Hall-Lew (2009): speech from interviews versus speech from reading passages and wordlists. The latter, topic, results from an augmentation of the extensive stance coding conducted by the third author (Davies 2017). Davies coded nine of the twenty-four speakers according to stance positioning, alignment, and topic. Here, we focus on the results for the one topic that most relates to the indexicalities identified in the first- and secondwave analyses: ethnicity (e.g., utterances such as ‘I think they’re all, like, Asian’) (Davies 2017: 8). For this paper, we coded the remaining thirteen speakers with respect to that topic. As before, we focus only on the boat subset to control for known effects of phonological environment. The data are sparse at the

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intraspeaker level, and here we switch to analysing normalized single-point measurements of boat F2, taken at the FAVE default of halfway between the beginning of the vowel and its F1 maximum, using a Z-score transform referred to as Lobanov normalization (Kendall & Thomas 2009–14).4 Separate mixedmodel linear regressions were run for each speaker of the form: F2 N ~ Following_place + Preceding_place + Style + (1|Word).5 Significance was inferred from any result of p < 0.05 resulting from a model comparison between one model with and one model without the factor ‘style’. Starting with style, and comparing each speaker’s production of boat in interviews, reading passages, and word lists, we find that twenty-two of the twenty-four speakers show no apparent differences between tasks. Two speakers show a robust style effect, but in ways that are exactly opposite to one another. The left half of Figure 2.5 shows stylistic variation for Emily, a woman of Cantonese/Toisanese heritage, born in 1970; the right half shows variation for Irene, a woman of Taiwanese heritage, born in 1983. Comparing them to one another, the result of our second-wave coding is visible here: despite being thirteen years older, Emily has a slightly fronter production of boat, overall, than Irene (mean normalized F2 –0.878 and –1.176 respectively). With respect to style, Emily shows a typical pattern found for different

0.0

Normalized F2

−0.5

Factor (style) Interview Reading passage Wordlist

−1.0

−1.5

−2.0

Emily

Irene Speaker

Figure 2.5 boat F2 single-point measurements for ‘Emily’ and ‘Irene’, by style task. Interview speech is in the lightest grey, and wordlist speech is in black.

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styles and sound change, producing her backest boat tokens in word lists and her frontest tokens in the interview and reading passage contexts. Irene, however, produces her frontest boat tokens in the word lists, and her backest tokens in the interview and reading passage. Why might these two speakers be showing opposite patterns? If we focus on the fact of Emily being older than Irene, then one explanation is that these data reflect an indexical shift operating in tandem with the vowel shift. (See Starr, this volume, for a similar situation in Singapore.) We follow Silverstein (2003) here in interpreting production differences between interview, reading passage, and word list tasks as reflecting differences in ‘register demand’ (p. 218), where the word list task is a register, ‘where grapheme-to-phoneme citation forms are called for, pronouncing words all by themselves reading from a disjoint alphabetic visual’ (p. 219) – in other words, evoking the standard. The results indicate that Emily oriented to the back variant of boat in her standard register, while Irene oriented to the front variant in hers. This might indicate a switch during this brief time period in terms of which variant indexed standardness. This kind of semiotic change is, of course, necessary for any language change that goes to completion, since at the completion stage the older variant is no longer in existence and cannot remain functioning as the standard. It follows, then, that semiotic change is related to changes in the frequency of use of a variant, and for a phonetic variable, the acoustic extremes of the incoming variant. Of course, this argument might seem a bit thin resting on the data of only two speakers. Why do none of the other speakers show any effect of this style task? And why are these two speakers the ones who do? Neither is the frontest or backest boat speakers in the dataset, nor is their range of variability any different from the other speakers. And if it’s just about being Chinese American women born in the 1970s and 1980s, then why does Molly, who also fits that demographic, not show this stylistic effect? First we will present the results for an intraspeaker analysis of topic, focusing only on speech coded as being about ethnicity versus speech not about ethnicity. The split is simple and binary: there is no further coding as to what ethnicity was being talked about, the speaker’s affect or attitude towards the topic, or any other stance information. Figure 2.6 shows the only two of the twenty-four speakers who had a significant effect6 of topic as a predictor for their boat vowel production, and not exactly the same two as for the style effect. Like the style results, the effect for topic for these two speakers is highly reliable, accounting for variation in boat in mixed effects regression models that include two fixed effects of phonological environment and word as a random intercept. Here, the direction of the effect is the same: both speakers produce backer realizations of boat when talking about ethnicity than when talking about other topics. We see

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Normalized F2

2000

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Molly Generation

Figure 2.6 boat F2 single-point measurements for ‘Emily’ and ‘Molly’, by topic. Talk about ethnicity is in light grey, all other talk is dark grey.

that both speakers are Chinese American women born in the 1970s or 1980s: again Emily, but this time Molly (b1971, Northern Chinese), rather than Irene. We note that while Emily and Molly pattern very similarly to one another with respect to the topic effect, Emily’s average production of boat is front of Molly’s (mean normalized F2 –0.878 and –0.969, respectively), again demonstrating the result seen in our second-wave analysis between Cantonese and non-Cantonese heritage Chinese American women. Here we see it obtain between two speakers of essentially the same age. Why should there be an effect of ethnicity, at all? Recall that topic coding does not specify which ethnicity was being discussed or the stances that were taken towards the topic. However, one of the other topics that Davies (2017) coded for was family, and the results for that topic are similar: Emily and Molly use backer variants when talking about family than other topics. From this, as well as the fieldworker’s knowledge of the interview structure and a qualitative analysis of the transcripts, we infer that the topic of ethnicity for Emily and Molly is usually about Chinese ethnicity. Their topic effects may be part of a more widespread indexical association between a backed production of boat and East Asian ethnicity. The monophthongization and backing of boat were both features Chun (2004) identified as being part of the ‘mock Asian’

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performances by Korean American comedian Margaret Cho.7 A similar indexical link is posited by Bauman in her 2016 study of members of an Asian American sorority in New Jersey: an entirely different context, but comparable with respect to gender and ethnicity, and another context in which local belonging was deeply tied to the negotiation of ethnic meaning. Bauman (2016: 75) says of her regionally diverse speaker sample, ‘the goat vowels of Asian speakers from fronting regions are even backer than the goat vowels of non-Asian speakers from non-fronting regions. This suggests that Asian Americans are not simply failing to participate in a White-led change, but that they are actively backing goat as an index of Asian identity.’ These indexical associations between backed back vowels and (East) Asian ethnicities may be related to influences from the various dominant heritage languages (see HallLew 2009: 170–1). If this analysis is right, then, for one very particular point in the Sunset’s history, we are positing two coexisting meanings in the indexical field (Eckert 2008a) of boat. The backed variant is the older variant. For some speakers, in some contexts, it might index some quality of being old or traditional (or ‘standard’). However, additionally, the backed variant is the ‘Asian’ variant. For some speakers, in some contexts, it might index some quality of being Chinese American. This is not a contradiction, but an example of one of the fundamental features of indexicality, which is its underspecification. As Eckert (2016: 70) notes, ‘specific meanings emerge only in context’. This speaks to perceptual studies that show how the relevant social meaning of a variant depends on who is speaking and the context of that talk. Only certain indexicalities are available to particular speakers. Why are these three speakers, and none of the others, the ones who show significant intraspeaker variation? Here we put forward a possible explanation based on the intersection of age, ethnicity, and gender, and an ethnographically informed understanding of all three. It is not a coincidence that the speakers who grew up during a period of intense social transition are the ones who show style shifting. While we operationalized age as continuous in our first-wave analysis, and binary in our second-wave analysis, here we consider age in terms of a speaker’s decade of birth, and what it conveys about their likely social experiences. Speakers born during the 1960s are fairly homogenous in their experience of the Sunset District neighbourhood as an ‘Irish Parish’ or, at least, a community with a white majority. The speakers born in the 1970s and 1980s experienced an intense period of racial and ethnic transition. Those born in the 1990s were again fairly homogenous in their experience of the Sunset as a ‘new Chinatown’, or, at least, a place with an Asian majority. Thus, speakers raised in the 1970s and 1980s were not only exposed to more linguistic variability than the generations before and after them, but they had to navigate more

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complicated social experiences as they grew up, with more potential identities to align or disalign with (see Hall-Lew 2009, 2013, 2014). A child acquiring English during this period would not necessarily know if their ethnic identity gave them legitimate access to local belonging, or not; nor would they necessarily know if a fronted goat vowel was the marked or unmarked variant. In contrast, speakers raised in the 1990s would have grown up on the other side of a major social change, a time when the Asian majority was clear, and need to negotiate racial or ethnic identity less present. Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, the new English-speaking community norm was also a fronted variant of goat. For both reasons, variation in the goat vowel ceased to be a useful resource for style shifting. Furthermore, it is also not a coincidence that the speakers with less power and more precarious legitimacy in the local social order are the ones showing style shifting. Chinese Americans were both the incomers and the historical subjects of infamously intense anti-Chinese racism in San Francisco, racism which has been especially associated with the Irish (see, e.g., Godfrey 1988). Moonwomon’s (1992) analysis of social class differences among white women in the Sunset District reveals blatant anti-Asian racism in the local discourse at the time. Following Eckert (1989: 259), Chinese Americans would perhaps be most likely to be ‘the most extreme users of phonological variables’, because they were ‘those who ha[d] to do the greatest amount of symbolic work to affirm their membership’ in the local neighbourhood community. Within the Chinese American community is the additional contrast between those of Cantonese and Toisanese heritage, who have a deeper historical connection to San Francisco specifically and California more generally, and those of other (especially Mandarin-speaking) Chinese backgrounds, who in earlier years (before the 1990s) may have experienced a kind of additional outsider status. The experience of ethnicity intersects necessarily with generational experience. Finally, it is not a coincidence that women are the ones showing styleshifting, if we reframe gender as a correlate for difference in legitimacy and competition for social resources. As Eckert (1989: 257) noted, ‘we should expect to see larger differences in indications of social category membership among women than among men. If women are more constrained to display their personal and social qualities and memberships, we would expect these expressions to show up in their use of phonological variables.’ It is that constraint, then, that accounts for the gendered pattern. Here we see this play out among Chinese American women from a particular generation: those are the speakers who were the most constrained, with the least amount of power. The speakers who are starting from the position of the lowest local legitimacy have the most complex social space to negotiate.

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2.6

Discussion

We propose to account for the patterns of interspeaker and intraspeaker variation shown here through an analysis of indexical shift that happened in parallel to, and interaction with, that sound change in progress (Figure 2.7), that is, an indexical change in apparent time.8 We posit that, prior to the 1960s, the backed variant of the goat vowel was the unmarked variant. By definition, as the sound change proceeded, tokens became more and more fronted, and fronted tokens became produced more and more frequently. We argue that, by the time of data collection in 2008, the fronted variant was the unmarked variant for many of the younger speakers (since for some of them it was the only variant they ever produced). This implies a necessary switch in markedness at some point during the progression of the sound change. Following the logic of Silverstein’s (2003) indexical order, with shifts in markedness come shifts in indexicality. For example, it would be expected for the older variant of a sound change to acquire associations with the past as it becomes more marked and less frequent, while at the same time a newer variant of a sound change would be expected to gradually shed stigma and associations with youth as it becomes less marked and more frequent. We argue that this has happened with goat-fronting in San Francisco English, and that this is part of the reason why we see no intraspeaker variation from speakers in the older and younger age groups. The way goat variation patterns for members of the middle age group then provides evidence for what indexicalities emerged around the time of the switch in markedness. In some ways, this age-based pattern recalls the situation for Martha’s Vineyard first described by Labov (1963). The mere fact of style shifting appearing in the middle of a sound change follows from a view of phonetic variation as semiotic, with indexicality as ‘always already immanent’ (Silverstein 2003: 194). A change in markedness makes it likely for a sound

before 1950

Ethnic Change

Housing discrimination (pop. EuA)

Indexical Change

(none known)

1950s–1960s

In-migration of ChAs (still majority EuA) GOAT variant backed: unmarked fronted: marked

1970s–1980s

Shift to Asian, mostly ChA, majority (peak racial tension)

1990s–2000s

White flight (new majority Asian)

GOAT variant GOAT variant fronted: unmarked backed: Chinese; East Asian backed: marked fronted: flamboyant either: unmarked; marked (non-)standard; (non-)local

Figure 2.7 Proposed, partial indexical field change for variation in the English goat vowel in the Sunset District neighbourhood of San Francisco in the late twentieth century.

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change to become a stylistic resource, and a change in the local semiotic landscape makes certain indexical meanings more likely than others. The differences in word list production between two members of the middle age group suggest a change in which variant was considered standard; formerly the backed variant, but later the fronted variant (followed by the loss of any association with standardness). Additionally, for this same age group, there may have been a relatively brief indexical association between a backed goat vowel and Chinese (or Asian) ethnicity, but this was only available to Chinese (or Asian) Americans, and was only of use to those speakers in the 1970s, the generation that was most deeply invested in negotiating local social change. One possible reason we see a word list effect for the speaker born in 1983, but no topic effect, could be that that speaker’s adolescence would have been much less defined by the ethnic concerns central to the speakers born in the early 1970s (see also Hall-Lew 2013, 2014). Both older and younger generations were raised during periods of time when their ethnic identity and the community’s ethnic identity was clear: either they were part of a minority or they were part of a majority. Ethnicity was a part of those speakers’ experiences, but the use of ethnically indexed variants was not going to change their status in the community in any way. Therefore, variation in the boat vowel was a stylistic resource that was either unavailable or unnecessary to speakers who grew up on either side of that social change. However, Emily, Irene, and Molly grew up during the neighbourhood’s peak period of social change, where local belonging was directly tied to ethnic identity and stylization, and to whether their ethnic identity was the source of social conflict. So, for Emily and Molly, phonetic variation was available as a symbolic resource for positioning themselves relative to their rapidly changing community. Following from this, we propose that variation in the goat vowel was a semiotic resource only for those speakers without legitimate access to indexing local place identity in San Francisco’s Sunset District, speakers who have to compete for that legitimacy. It is not a useful resource for Monica (b. 1991), for example, who is part of the generation in which Chinese Americans have completely legitimate access to participate in the construction of local identity. A number of predictions fall out of this analysis, such as the expectation that there would be no significant differences in goat production among Cantonese- and non-Cantonese-heritage women born in the 1990s. Recalling the results from our first-wave analysis, speakers who more traditionally held access to local legitimacy can be seen to not use fronted variants at all (e.g., men, who are presumed to hold greater legitimacy since there is no evidence that this community differs from the patriarchy typical of the wider culture). As for the EuA women, who show a sound change in progress but not one as advanced as the ChA women, we predict that a close analysis might also show a stylistic use of goat vowel variation,

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particularly among those of Emily and Molly’s generation, who experienced a loss in local legitimacy just as speakers like Emily and Molly were gaining it (see Hall-Lew 2013). For these speakers, the backed variant might have emerged as an ambivalent index of local legitimacy: in indexing an older time, it indexes a time of a white racial majority, but also might mark a speaker as backwards or old-fashioned. The question remains as to why men seem to not be participating in goat fronting. Not only is their apparent time correlation weak, but no men in the sample differentiate goat production by style or topic. In addition to general patterns of gender and sound change (e.g., Eckert 1989), many of the men in the current speaker sample are of similar age to the speakers in Eckert’s (2011) work from the same general region. If we take the indexical potentials identified in that study (and in Podesva 2011), fronted goat is probably also available to some San Franciscans as an index of a particularly stereotypical, flamboyant, Californian persona. This particular meaning has been described in other work, including the original studies of goat-fronting in the San Francisco Bay Area by Luthin (1987) and Hinton et al. (1987). Pratt and D’Onofrio’s (2017) analysis of two mock-Californian performances finds that the male comedian uses boat-fronting while the female comedian does not, potentially suggesting more of a comedic effect (and, therefore, stigma) resulting from a man using the fronted variant than there is for a woman. At the same time, Podesva et al.’s (2015) study of Redding, California, reveals a stronger apparent time effect for boat-fronting among men than women, which may speak to the well-known large cultural differences between inland, rural California, on the one hand, and coastal, urban California on the other. In other words, perhaps the ‘flamboyant Californian’ is not a prominent figure in Redding and so does not block the progression of the sound change among men who might otherwise be motivated to avoid indexing flamboyance. While there is no direct evidence here of resistance to sound change (e.g., Hall-Lew 2013), there is ethnographic evidence of a discourse of working-class masculinity linked to the Sunset District neighbourhood that suggests that the men in this study may be motivated to avoid markers of flamboyance (see Hall-Lew 2009). Our proposed analysis is summarized in Figure 2.7, which provides a social timeline alongside an indexical analysis for variation and change in the goat vowel in the Sunset District. This can be thought of as akin to a partial indexical field. Only a limited number of indexes are given because of the limited nature of the corpus. Also, in contrast to previous indexical fields, we tie the analysis to a timeline to argue that different parts of an indexical field can be impossible to access in certain social contexts. Multiple and potentially contradicting indexes occur in the 1970s–80s because this is the period of social transition, where indexes depend greatly on the speaker and the context. Some of these meanings would have been

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emerging for the marked variant in the 1950s–60s, and existing but fading for the marked variant in the 1990s–2000s. Unlike a typical indexical field, our analysis includes markedness, not necessarily as an index but as a necessary semiotic descriptor that accounts for this emergence and loss of social meaning. We propose that indexical change may follow a similar trajectory for any sound change, provided that the sound change shows a similar switch in markedness. 2.7

Conclusion

While Trudgill (2008: 278) states that ‘we do not need social reasons in order to explain what happens’ in language change because ‘[t]he numerically superior variant . . . is always the survivor’, we argue that changes in a variant’s frequency happen in social contexts and have sociolinguistic consequences that explain how a change progresses. A social meaning account of sound change is possible by combining the perspectives of all three waves. In a first-wave analysis, we show that the goat vowel is fronting in apparent time, but only for women, and in a phonetically different way for Chinese American women than European American women. We also find that, while the coarticulatory pressures are highly predictive of its realization, goat is fronting at the same rate across all environments. In a second-wave analysis, we show that younger women are more differentiated by ethnicity than older women when ‘ethnicity’ is defined in terms of those distinctions that have emerged in the Sunset District. We further see individual differences in speakers’ production of goat in interviews, reading passages, and word lists, with the speakers brought up during the peak of social change being the speakers with most stylistic variation. In a thirdwave analysis, we suggest that goat-fronting might have previously had a richer signalling potential for Chinese (especially Cantonese) American women than for the other examined groups. By 2008, this indexicality had ceased to be of any real value for the youngest speakers, in that Cantonese American women had gained completely legitimate access to participate in the construction of local identity, in line with those other groups. Overall, a third-wave focus on the indexicality of the boat vowel builds on and justifies the social accounts that were proposed above from first-wave and second-wave perspectives (see also Schilling 2013; Moore & Carter 2015). The first and second-wave studies give us the data to ask the question, and the third-wave approach gives us the theory to answer it. Why does a sound change spread faster among one group of people than another? Because sound changes undergo changes in indexicality as well as changes in form.

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Appendices

Appendix A Speaker Sample Name

Gender

Ethnicity

Enid Jenny Emily Monica Molly Irene Cheri Amy Mary Ethel April Grace Lou Sal John Hector Pete Skylar Richard Don Bruce Danny Aaron George

woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman man man man man man man man man man man man man

Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (non-Cantonese) Chinese (non-Cantonese) European (Irish) European (Irish) European (Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (Cantonese) European (Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish) European (non-Irish)

Year of Birth 1932 1949 1970 1991 1971 1983 1942 1968 1978 1959 1989 1991 1922 1962 1977 1981 1984 1991 1967 1941 1944 1963 1979 1990

Appendix B F2 GAMM Model Specifications goat models (1) Parametric terms (average): phonological environment, style (2) Smooth terms (shape): measurement points, year of birth (3) Difference smooth terms (shape): measurement points by phonological environment, measurement points by style, year of birth by phonological environment (4) Interaction terms (shape): F2 trajectory by year of birth, F2 trajectory by year of birth by phonological environment (5) Random smooths: speaker by phonological environment (6) AR1 error model included

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boat models (1) Parametric terms (average): ethnicity, style (2) Smooth terms (shape): measurement points, year of birth (3) Difference smooth terms (shape): measurement points by ethnicity, measurement points by style, year of birth by ethnicity (4) Interaction terms (shape): F2 trajectory by year of birth, F2 trajectory by year of birth by ethnicity (5) Random smooths: speaker by style, word (6) AR1 error model included

Appendix C GAMM Model Comparison Table Including Only Significant Model Comparisons Model

Comparison

X2

DF

p (X2)

goat (Women)

overall: phonological context shape: phonological context overall: year of birth shape: year of birth overall: speech style

51.9 30.6 15.0 12.4 30.2

16 14 15 9 8

< 0.0001 < 0.0001 = 0.012 = 0.003 < 0.0001

goat (Men)

overall: phonological context shape: phonological context overall: speech style shape: speech style

47.9 29.1 57.6 30.4

16 14 8 6

< 0.0001 < 0.0001 < 0.0001 < 0.0001

boat (Women)

overall: year of birth shape: year of birth overall: year of birth x ethnicity shape: year of birth x ethnicity overall: ethnicity shape: ethnicity

31.0 19.2 8.0 8.2 12.6 9.4

10 6 5 3 8 5

< 0.0001 < 0.0001 = 0.006 < 0.0001 = 0.001 = 0.002

boat (Men)

No significant model comparisons for year of birth, speech style, or ethnicity

First column: GAMM model. Second column: type of comparison (overall F2 trajectory or shape of F2 trajectory) and terms dropped in the nested model. Third column: difference in log-likelihood. Fourth column: difference in degrees of freedom. Fifth column: p-value.

notes Thanks to the many research assistants who have been involved in this project over the past decade: Claire Drohan, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Keelin Murray, Ruaridh Purse, Julie Saigusa, Annabel Schwenk, Amanda Wall, Abigail Wee, Gussie White, and Kieran

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Wilson. Thanks also to Sam Kirkham, Emma Moore, and Rob Podesva for vital reviewer and editorial suggestions on earlier drafts. The results presented in this paper were first shown at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin, and we thank the audience members there for their feedback. All errors are our own. 1. Some speakers in this sample show variable L-vocalization. We included tokens of bowl with vocalized /l/ in the bowl category. 2. Second-wave analyses often entail long-term participant observation and, typically, focus on a smaller community than the large residential neighbourhood represented here, such as a Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). However, the recruitment methods resulting in the present speaker sample were such that any Community of Practice is represented by at most three individuals; most of the participants in the sample are strangers to one another. 3. Due to discriminatory housing laws, the older Chinese Americans in this sample were not raised in the Sunset District, but were raised in San Francisco Chinatown and moved to the Sunset area once legally able to do so, living there for the rest of their lives. While little is known about the English accents of their Chinatown school teachers, the lack of difference from their European American age counterparts either suggests that this was not a factor for this vowel, or that by 2008 their productions had converged to local norms relative to their age cohort. 4. Vowel normalization is not typically required for intraspeaker studies, but here we are comparing intraspeaker variation between speakers, and wanted to be able to use comparable units for that comparison. 5. Since preceding coronals and palatals were excluded from the boat subset, preceding_place encompasses three levels: labial, dorsal, and pause. Although /h/ is not expected to have the same effect as other dorsal consonants, it was included in the dorsal category because descriptively it patterned like dorsals and not like pause. 6. Significance was inferred from any result of p < 0.05 resulting for a model comparison between one model with and one model without the factor ‘topic’. Separate mixed model linear regressions were run for each speaker of the form: F2N ~ Following_place + Preceding_place + Topic + (1|Word). 7. Note that Margaret Cho was born in San Francisco in 1968 and attended the same Sunset District high school that many of the speakers here did. 8. We thank an anonymous audience member at the NWAV46 meeting for first coining this phrasing.

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3

The Social Meaning of Syntax Emma Moore

The study of syntactic variation has lagged behind the study of phonological variation in sociolinguistics, despite early claims that ‘[t]he extension of probabilistic considerations from phonology to syntax is not a conceptually difficult jump’ (Sankoff 1973: 58).1 Documented challenges to the study of syntactic variation include the increased difficulty in circumscribing a linguistic variable when dealing with levels of the grammar above phonology (Tagliamonte 2012: 206–7), and problems of convincingly quantifying syntactic variables which occur less frequently than phonological variables (Rickford et al. 1995: 106). Added to this, it has been argued that syntactic variables are less subject to social evaluation than phonological variables (Labov 1993, 2001: 28; Levon & Buchstaller 2015) and, even when they are, they tend to have ‘quite fixed social meanings associated with external facts like class and particularly education’ (Eckert 2018: 190). It could be argued that the evolution of third-wave sociolinguistics, and its focus on the social meaning of linguistic variation, effectively neutralizes the ‘challenges’ outlined here. Take the heavily debated problem of establishing semantic equivalence for syntactic variables (Labov 1978; Lavandera 1978; Dines 1980; Romaine 1984; Cheshire 1987; Winford 1996; Moore 2012). While it has been considered relatively straightforward to apply the concept of the linguistic variable to phonological variation, it is generally accepted that its application to syntactic variation is problematic on the basis that syntax has pragmatic functions which determine the use of alternative forms. So, how one expresses negation may not just reflect how standard or non standard a linguistic form is, but also how emphatic or intense the expression of negation is required to be (Labov 1984; Eckert & Labov 2017: 469). In other words, it has been argued that studies of syntactic variation require a consideration of the pragmatic or interactional social meanings entailed in the use of a particular syntactic form, whereas studies of phonological variation do not. However, the move from ‘a substitution class approach to variation (where variants compete to fill a linguistic “slot”) to a stylistic approach (where the manner and nature of a feature’s occurrence may be just as important as its relative frequency)’ (Moore 2012: 71) problematizes the notion of ‘linguistic variable’ even when 54

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applied to phonological variation. If, as has been argued (Moore & Podesva 2009; Jaffe 2010; Eckert 2016: 70), the meanings of linguistic variables are underspecified, then understanding their social meanings requires more than examining alternate forms; we also need to consider how forms are used in social interaction and as components of styles. In other words, we need to undertake the kind of analysis that has been proposed for syntactic variation. Cheshire (1987: 257) has argued that misplaced focus on the linguistic variable has ‘prevented any real progress being made in our understanding of syntactic variation’, but one could argue that the linguistic variable has also retarded our understanding of the social meaning of language variation at all levels of the grammar.2 For instance, Campbell-Kibler (2011) has shown that the different variants of (-ing) have distinct meanings which don’t necessarily operate oppositionally, as one would expect them to if the variants were truly two sides of one variable coin. A stylistic approach to variation also neutralizes the ‘challenge’ of syntactic forms occurring less frequently than phonological ones. Traditional variationist work has focused on the ways in which linguistic forms are distributed among social groups, and this has implied that social meaning resides in frequency (so a particular form means ‘working class’ if it is found more frequently in the speech of working-class groups). Notwithstanding the issues around equating ‘a correlation’ with ‘a social meaning’, several researchers have suggested that, in certain circumstances (for instance, when a form is highly enregistered as local), infrequency rather than frequency may make a variant more noticeable (Hoffman 2004; Buchstaller 2009; Snell 2010; Podesva 2011; Levon & Buchstaller 2015: 320). For a theory of social meaning, what matters may not necessarily be how often a form occurs, but the social work it does when it is used; that is to say, its power as a component of style. Of course, how frequency interacts with social meaning is an empirical question, much like whether or not syntactic variation is less meaningful than phonological variation. Commentary suggesting that syntactic variation is less socially meaningful than phonological variation points to three kinds of evidence: (i) that syntactic variables are more sharply socially stratified (and less nuanced) than phonological variables (Cheshire 1999: 61); (ii) that social meaning attaches to surface, rather than ‘deep’ structures because ‘[v]ariables take on social meaning in the fast give and take of interaction, as people associate what they articulate and what they hear with aspects of the context’ (Eckert & Labov 2017: 481); and (iii) that phonological variation is perceived differently from syntactic variation (Labov 1993, 2001: 28; Meyerhoff & Walker 2013; Levon & Buchstaller 2015). The first of these claims is difficult to evaluate, given that it is made on the basis of a very limited analysis of a very limited number of syntactic forms. Cheshire (1987, 1999, 2005) has written substantively on this, pointing out that we simply do

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not know enough about syntactic variation in speech, given that the study of syntax has followed from written models of grammar. The items selected for observation have tended to be those defined by their relationship with the codified written standard. This means that we have more often analysed the social stratification of syntactic variation that is more morphosyntactic or lexical in nature (such as tense markers or forms of negation), than we have variation that is more ‘purely’ syntactic (such as right or left dislocation phenomena). It is hardly surprising that highly codified syntactic items pattern more sharply than those which are less subject to overt prescription. So, it is possible that perceived differences between the social meanings of phonological variation and syntactic variation is a consequence of standardization processes acting more readily on the kind of syntax that has been studied, rather than on any inherent property of syntax itself, as implied by Levon and Buchstaller (2015: 323). The second and third claims are related. The notion that social meaning attaches less readily to deep structures (what Labov 1993 refers to as ‘the Interface Principle’), and that syntactic variation is, therefore, less readily perceived, has been problematized by Levon and Buchstaller (2015). They compare perceptions of non-standard phonetic and syntactic forms and suggest that there is, at best, only a weak version of the Interface Principle (Levon & Buchstaller 2015: 337). Furthermore, by comparing perceptions of (th)fronting and the Northern Subject Rule, they argue that there are factors other than a variable’s status as phonological or syntactic that may interact with perception, including its ‘social history, its contextual relevance, and other social and cognitive constraints’ (Levon & Buchstaller 2015: 340). Their research is supported by the findings of Smith and Holmes-Elliott (in preparation) who show that speakers’ styles shift differently around two ‘“entirely structural” variables (Labov 1993) with a set of highly complicated rules of use’: speakers from the Scottish community of Buckie use lower rates of negative concord when speaking to a community outsider, but do not use lower rates of never for didn’t when speaking to the same interviewer. Smith and Holmes-Elliott (in preparation) suggest that this difference indicates that the relationship between syntax and the ‘sociolinguistic monitor’ (the cognitive mechanism which evaluates the social significance of utterances according to Labov et al. 2011) is more complex than has been suggested.3 It could also be taken to provide further evidence that our interpretation of social meaning has been too narrow: it is only surprising that negative concord and never for didn’t pattern differently if we expect all syntactic features to index the same kinds of social meaning. Eckert (2016: 69) has noted that first-wave variationist studies have tended to assume that ‘variables all range along a single vector of formality or attention to speech’. This assumption is evident in the research on the perception of

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syntactic variables mentioned previously (and in many studies of syntactic variation besides). Following Labov et al. (2011), Levon and Buchstaller (2015) only consider reactions to the dimension of ‘professionalism’ when analysing the perception of the syntactic variable they test. ‘Professionalism’ is presumably a proxy for ‘ability to use the appropriately formal style of speech’. Similarly, Smith and Holmes-Elliott (in preparation) more explicitly operationalize style as the ability for speakers to change the way they talk to a community insider (‘informal’) versus a community outsider (‘formal’). So, while these studies imply that syntactic forms have social meaning, the social meanings ‘tested’ are limited to the single vector identified by Eckert. The consequences of this are apparent in Smith and Holmes-Elliott’s inability to explain the ‘curious’ finding that there is no gender differentiation in how Buckie speakers use negative concord (the form differs according to interlocutor, but not speaker gender). If the single vector of formality or attention to speech is taken to be the way in which community members internalize the class-stratified pattern of variation (Eckert 2016: 69), then we are forced to assume that the linguistic forms avoided in more formal interaction are stigmatized because of their association with the lower social classes. Viewed through the traditional variationist lens, then, where non-standard equals ‘stigmatized’ and standard equals ‘prestigious’, it is difficult to explain the gender patterns in Smith and Holmes-Elliott’s data. This is especially the case when we consider that negative concord is ‘arguably the most common stigmatized variable in the English language’ (Eckert 2000: 216), and women have been found to avoid stable stigmatized variables more than men (Labov 1990). However, viewed from a stylistic perspective, where the social meaning of linguistic forms depends upon the manner in which they are used and the practice they entail, we might simply conclude that, whatever the social meanings of negative concord are in Buckie, this form is not (or at least not solely) linked to stigma. For instance, it could be that negative concord indexes familiarity or incommunity status or, more likely, some other social meaning that it is only appropriate to express when in familiar company. The conflation of ‘non-standard’ and ‘stigmatized’ is particularly unhelpful when studying syntactic variation. As implied previously, many un(der)examined syntactic items could be described as ‘non-standard’ (by virtue of their divergence from written standards) but they are not necessarily used to distinguish socially stratified social groups in ways that are easily linked to stigma and prestige. For instance, Cheshire (1999: 74–6) suggests that ‘lone wh-clauses’ (wh-clauses that occur as independent constructions in a single speaker’s turn) have distinct discourse functions: they enable ‘a speaker to simultaneously propose a topic and invite other speakers to take it up’. It is unlikely that these kinds of constructions are broadly socially stratified in the way that, say, the use of /h/-dropping is. Nonetheless, we might expect them to

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show some correlation with the kind of speakers who attempt to control the conversational floor. Much of the early language and gender research noted that men tend to dominate conversations in this way (see, for instance, Maltz & Borker 1983) and, indeed, Cheshire (2000) found that lone wh-clauses were used almost exclusively by male speakers. But the ‘almost’ is important here. Male speakers do not use these forms by virtue of their gender identity per se, but because the relative societal status of males and females makes males more apt to employ this discourse function than females. Importantly, Cheshire’s data suggests that use of lone wh-clauses is not about their ‘stigma’ or ‘prestige’, but about how useful they are pragmatically to particular social groups. Of course, the view that features index pragmatic function directly, and social category indirectly, is longstanding (introduced by Ochs 1992, but elaborated since by, for instance, Eckert 2008). It also has a long history in the debate about how to study syntactic variables. For instance, Cheshire (2005) discusses Macaulay’s (1991) finding that get-passives occur almost exclusively with animate subjects and that these are more frequent in the speech of working-class participants. She notes that ‘[o]ne factor affecting the use of the get-passive, then, is quite simply, what speakers choose to talk about’ (Cheshire 2005: 99). It is only recently that we have seen calls to incorporate this kind of analysis into variationist understandings of the social meaning of phonological variables. As Eckert (2016: 80) has observed, ‘one does not have to go to syntax to see the pragmatic potential of variation’. She goes on to discuss how phonetic variables can encode the expression of emotion and that ‘[a]ffect interacts with, is part of the construction of, macrosocial categories, as certain populations find themselves in particular affective states more often’ (Eckert 2016: 80).4 In sum, many of the difficulties in conducting studies of syntactic variation become irrelevant when we take a stylistic approach to the study of language variation. Furthermore, it also appears that the dynamic and integrative approaches that have been suggested to study syntactic variation are equally necessary when taking a stylistic approach to the social meaning of phonological variation. Nonetheless, there are clearly differences between phonology and syntax. As Eckert (2018: 190) has pointed out, differences in segmental size and availability mean that syntactic features are different from phonological features.5 Eckert and Labov (2017: 483) have also argued that ‘low frequency and sparse distribution’ prevent linguistic variables from developing social meaning. While this discussion points out that higher frequencies do not necessarily result in more noticeable social meaning, more frequent phenomena clearly have more opportunities to develop social meaning in the first place, and to change social meanings in the long term. Eckert (2018) has also pointed to the embodied quality of phonetic features which gives them potential to

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become sound symbolic resources. This, too, clearly differentiates them from syntactic features. Nonetheless, if our goal is to uncover the social meaning of linguistic features by studying how language is vivified in linguistic practice then we also need to think about the way in which phonetic and phonological variation is embedded in syntactic structure. More specifically, we need to consider how grammatical levels work synergistically to convey social meaning (Moore & Podesva 2009: 449). As Eckert and Labov (2017: 485) note ‘the realization of a phonological variable is a short (and frequent) event in a syntactic series of events’. That is to say, speakers utter phonological features in the context of syntactic constructions, and listeners perceive them within syntactic frames. The dearth of research on syntactic variation has meant that we are a long way from understanding how grammatical levels might work in this co-dependent way to affect social meaning. To advance research on social meaning, the study of syntactic variation is no longer avoidable: if we want to understand how phonological variation is embedded in practice, then we need to pay more attention to syntax because ‘syntactic variation and syntactic change are intimately and inextricably part of the social construction of discourse’ (Cheshire, Kerswill, & Williams 2005: 141). Having argued for the place of syntax in a study of social meaning, the remainder of this chapter will provide an example of how an integrated analysis might work in practice. Despite arguing for a more expansive approach to the study of syntax which incorporates less familiar syntactic features, I focus here on perhaps one of the most well-studied linguistic features, negative concord. This is deliberate because, while there have been studies which show that less conventional syntactic features can carry social meaning (in addition to those studies discussed, see, for instance, Carter & McCarthy 1999 on get-passives; Macaulay 1989, Cheshire 2005, and Moore & Snell 2011 on right dislocated tags; and Moore & Podesva 2009 on tag questions), there have been few studies which interrogate the more nuanced social meanings of an established ‘variable’ like negative concord. Furthermore, to my knowledge, there are no studies which consider how negative concord varies according to the content of talk, nor are there any studies which consider how it varies in-step with phonological features. Of course, Eckert (2000) presents an analysis that considers how negative concord and a number of phonological variables shape community-of-practice styles. However, this analysis does not examine how negative concord ‘houses’ phonetics and phonology in ways which affect the meaning potentials of the forms involved. In this chapter, I will consider how phonological features cluster together within units of negative concord, rather than analysing whether or not negative concord is simply found in the same corpus as specific phonological variables. In this way, I aim to gain

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a better understanding of how phonology and syntax work synergistically and in step to communicate social meaning. 3.1

Data and Methodology

My data come from a two-year ethnography of thirty-nine female adolescents at a high school, which I call Midlan High. Midlan High is situated in the town of Bolton, in the northwest of England, as shown in Figure 3.1. Bolton was traditionally part of the county of Lancashire, but since 1974, it has been in the county of Greater Manchester. The fieldwork location was a school situated in a predominantly upperworking class/lower-middle-class area of Bolton. However, the school’s catchment area extended into less affluent areas as well. The students were aged twelve to thirteen at start of study and fourteen to fifteen at completion. I gathered approximately fifty hours of recordings, with each recording

Figure 3.1 The location of Bolton relative to Greater Manchester (the bolded outline), the city of Manchester, and the rest of England. (This work is based on data provided through EDINA UKBORDERS with the support of the ESRC and JISC and uses boundary material which is copyright of the Crown. © Crown Copyright/database right 2017. An Ordnance Survey/ EDINA supplied service.)

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involving one to four girls. The recordings took place only after I had been attending school for six months. During the fieldwork, I would go into the school at lunchtime and hang around with the kids, doing whatever they were doing, and networking around the cohort to ensure I spent time with a range of different students. After hanging out with a group for a while, I would ask them if they minded being recorded. My data collection did not follow an interview regime. I typically recorded groups chatting together and the recordings tend to reflect group dynamics and practices. My data comprises a 262,000-word corpus, and 196,400 words of fieldwork notes. My ethnography identified four communities of practice (CofPs). These ranged from the most rebellious and anti-school Townies to the elitist and trendy pro-school Eden Village clique. The social groups are broadly arranged on a pro-school to anti-school continuum (as is typical of school ethnographies), although this is something of a simplification. The social groupings also reflect distinct social practices which include ways of dressing, activities both within and outwith school and, as I will show, ways of speaking. The styles of the groups are summarized (necessarily rather superficially) in Figure 3.2 (see Moore 2003 for a more detailed description of these CofPs). At the outset of my study, the Populars and the Townies were one social group, but as my project continued, the Townies broke off from the Populars as they started to engage in more risky social activities like drug taking and sex. In addition to my ethnographic observations of these CofPs, I also collected information on the girls’ postcode areas, parental education, and parental occupation, and this information was used to create a social class index. As discussed, my analysis will study the occurrence of negative concord. As Hughes et al. (2005: 25–6) observe, there are three main ways to negate a sentence such as I said something in English. These are shown below. Type 1: The verb can be negated: I didn’t say anything Type 2: The postverbal indeterminate can be negated6: I said nothing Type 3: Both verb and indeterminate can be negated: I didn’t say nothing

Townie

Popular

Geek

rebellious, antiauthority

independent (from adults)

sensible

elitist

sporty/heavily made up style

cool/sporty/ feminine style

practical/ unisex style

trendy/‘girlie’ style

anti-school

Eden Village

pro-school

Figure 3.2 The communities of practice at Midlan High.

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Type 3 is an example of negative concord (also referred to as multiple negation, or double negatives). It is ungrammatical in Standard British English, but grammatical in several non-standard varieties of British English. Table 3.1 shows how these three types are distributed across the CofPs at Midlan High. Notice that, while the frequency of Type 1 and 3 seem to be affected by CofP membership, all social groups use a remarkably similar proportion of Type 2 variants. Labov (1972a: 782) says of Type 2 that ‘in most cases, the operation of negative postposing produces a marked form’. Given the preceding discussion, I would not wish to propose that any of these types are simply different ‘ways of saying the same thing’ (Labov 1972b: 323), but the quantitative data in Table 3.1 suggests that, however Type 2 forms function, they do not serve to differentiate the CofPs at Midlan High. Consequently, Type 2 forms were excluded from this analysis, which compares 547 tokens of Type 1 and Type 3 negation. Each token of negation was coded for a number of linguistic factors, namely, the form of the indeterminate, the verb, the form of the negative element, the position of the indeterminate, the total number of indeterminates in the negated sentence, and the clause type. Given the focus of this chapter and space constraints, I will say no more about the distribution of these linguistic factors, other than to comment that the linguistic effects in this dataset were comparable with those found in previous studies. A more detailed account of the linguistic constraints can be found in Moore (2003). Because of the relatively structured nature of negation, certain phonological and lexical items are likely to occur in tokens of negation with postverbal indeterminates. Consequently, in addition to coding occurrences of negation, I also considered where the following occurred within the coded tokens: occurrences of word-final and word-medial /t/, (h)-dropping, (th)-fronting, word-final (ing), and one morpholexical form: the occurrence of non-

Table 3.1 Distribution of sentential negation types at Midlan High by CofP. Type 1: I didn’t say anything

Eden Village Geek Popular Townie

Type 2: I said nothing

Type 3: I didn’t say nothing

N

%

N

%

N

%

69 233 141 47

71.2 77.7 69.5 43.9

27 63 47 22

28.1 21.0 23.4 20.6

0 4 15 38

− 1.3 7.4 35.5

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standard contracted verb forms. So, in an example like her mum dint say anything to her, I was able to code for the following: (i) word-final /t/ in the word dint (a contracted form of didn’t). Although there are several ways in which this variable can be realized, I distinguished between a fully released alveolar plosive and any other non-standard form (which was most typically a glottal, but could also be a deleted or palatalized form); (ii) whether /h/ was realized or not in words like her; (iii) whether ‘th’ is realized as /θ/ or /f/ in the word anything; (iv) whether ‘ing’ is realized with /ŋ/ or /n/ in the word anything; (v) whether the verb was realized as a non-standard contracted form, such as dint for didn’t. Obviously not all of these features were present in every sentence containing negation with a postverbal indeterminate but, given that each speaker had several tokens, it was possible to produce a frequency for (i)–(v) across all of the speakers’ tokens. The addition of this analysis meant that it was possible to consider how negative concord occurred alongside other linguistic features. This allowed me to consider how language forms actually clustered together in chunks of talk, rather than them simply being found in the same corpus. I outline the results of this analysis in the next section. 3.2

Results and Discussion

3.2.1

Correlates of Negative Concord

Eckert (2000: 216) has described negative concord as ‘almost a touchstone variation’, given how common and stigmatized it is across varieties of English. Consequently, it is unsurprising that language variation and change research has shown a strong correlation between this form and social class, such that it is more frequently found in the speech of lower social classes (Labov 1972a; Cheshire 1982; Eckert 2000; Smith 2001; Anderwald 2005; Childs 2017). This relationship with social class status is also evident to some extent in my data from Midlan High. Figure 3.3 shows the percentage use of negative concord for each speaker in my sample. Each speaker is represented by a symbol which indicates their social class status according to the key underneath the graph. Figure 3.3 shows that those with the highest social class cluster at the lower end of the scale, as shown by the white squares. However, the social class pattern is not consistent across the scale. Social classes II, III, and IV are distributed across the scale, and the four highest users of negative concord include speakers from all three of these classes. In addition to a correlation with social class, Cheshire (1982) and Eckert (2000) have also found negative concord to occur more frequently in the speech

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60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% Class I (highest)

Class II

Class III

Class IV (lowest)

Figure 3.3 Negative concord by social class.

of social groups characterized as ‘delinquent’. These studies suggest that, while negative concord has a strong correlation with social class, the form enters into and is affected by sociolinguistic practice in more localized and specific ways. This finding is also evident in the Midlan High data. Figure 3.4 again shows the percentage use of negative concord for each speaker, but here each speaker is represented by a symbol which indicates their CofP membership. With a few anomalies, this graph clearly shows a progression across the CofPs, with EV girls using no negative concord, Geeks largely also using none, with two exceptions, Populars split between those who have no use and those who have a moderate use, and Townies, who have the highest use of negative concord across the sample. A comparison of Figures 3.3 and 3.4 suggests that there is a more robust correlation between negative concord and social practice than between negative concord and social class. Figure 3.4 corroborates the earlier finding that negative concord correlates with adolescent groups who are considered to exhibit ‘delinquent’ behaviour. The Townies are simultaneously the group who most frequently use negative concord, and most frequently and consistently engage in risky and illegal social activities such as drinking, taking drugs, having underage sex with older boys, and partying. But there is also evidence that talk about delinquent behaviour occasions more negative concord irrespective of social group. The graphs in Figure 3.5 display the proportion of negative concord by topic for the ten

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60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% EV

Geek

Popular

Townie

Figure 3.4 Negative concord by CofP.

speakers who show variable use of negative concord. Overall, when using negative concord, the girls in the study talked about relationships with boys, delinquent behaviour (this included illegal activities and other forms of misbehaviour), and behaviour which wasn’t delinquent (for instance, going shopping or engaging in a hobby). There were also some tokens of negation which were occasioned by the circumstances of the recording situation itself (for instance, arguing with a peer about where to sit during the recording). These were labelled ‘current interaction’. In Figure 3.5, grey indicates percentage of standard negation, and black indicates percentage of negative concord. As Eden Village speakers are categorical in using only standard forms of negation with postverbal indeterminates, there is no graph for this CofP. While the graphs in Figure 3.5 should be judged cautiously due to the low counts for some topics, they nonetheless indicate that there is more negative concord in talk about delinquent behaviour and boys than there is in talk about non-delinquent behaviour, irrespective of social group. However, it’s important to note that these figures disguise the extent to which different groups talk about different things.7 Figure 3.6 shows that the Geeks and the Populars talk about non-delinquent topics much more than the Townies do (when using negation). And, although it looks like the Populars and the Townies talk about delinquent topics the same amount, note how much the Townies talk about boys compared

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(a)

Geeks

Current Interaction 0

1

Non-delinquency 2

58

Delinquency

1

6

Boys

1

6

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

negative concord

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

80%

90%

100%

90%

100%

standard negation

Populars

(b) Current Interaction 0

Non-delinquency

1

4

Delinquency

51

6

22

Boys

0%

5

10%

7

20%

30%

40%

50%

negative concord

60%

70%

standard negation

Townies

(c) Current Interaction

3

Non-delinquency

9

16

Delinquency

13

Boys

0%

2

13

13

10%

20%

16

30%

40%

negative concord

50%

60%

70%

80%

standard negation

Figure 3.5 The proportion of negative concord by topic for each CofP. [Raw Ns are given within each bar.]

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100% 90%

60

80% 70%

55

60% 50% 40%

29 26 30%

25

28

20%

12 7

10%

7

5 1

1 0%

Townies Boys

Populars Delinquency

Nondelinquency

Geeks Current Interaction

Figure 3.6 Distribution of topics by CofP in sentences containing negation by postverbal indeterminates. [Raw Ns for each topic are given above each bar; percentages were calculated by dividing the number of times each topic was discussed by the total numbers of sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates, and multiplying by 100.]8

to the Populars. Furthermore, given that most of the Townies’ talk about boys involved talk about underage sex, whereas the Populars only ever talked about boys in relation to their attraction to them, the Townies talk about boys could be considered to involve discussion of a particular kind of delinquent behaviour. Reviewing the results so far, it would seem that negative concord might not just correlate with class, and social group, but it might also index specific forms of social practice too. This is apparent in how the form correlates with content of talk (i.e., what people talk about) and with speaker persona (as encapsulated by CofP membership). With respect to the potential social meanings of negative concord, then, the data considered so far suggests that there is an indexical relation between negative concord and delinquency (and, indeed, any number of social properties or stances that are ideologically associated with delinquency). The fact that the Townies use negative concord more than anyone else most likely arises from the fact that they are the delinquent group, par excellence. That is to say, the relationship between negative concord and the

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Townie persona is an n + 1st indexical order (Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008: 484; Moore & Podesva 2009: 476–7). But what is it about negative concord that enables it to operate as an index of delinquency? Labov (1972c: 381) notes that negative sentences can ‘provide a way of evaluating events by placing them against the background of other events which might have happened but which did not’. As noted in the opening discussion, Labov (1984: 50) has also observed that the introduction of indeterminates to a clause adds intensity and that negative concord itself is further intensifying (see also Greenbaum & Quirk 1990: 226 [e]). When discussing the functions of negation, Giora (2006: 992–4) also notes its emphatic effects, observing that ‘a negation marker might, at times, be an intensifier, highlighting the information within its scope’. As Labov (1984: 43) himself acknowledges, the definition of ‘intensity’ is difficult to establish. Nonetheless, Beltrama (2016: 4) observes that ‘all intensifiers can be seen as devices that, roughly speaking, strengthen the meaning of the expression they combine with’. Consequently, we might assume that speakers call for intensity at moments of emphasis, for instance, when an utterance requires enhancement or discourse prominence. If negative sentences also function as evaluators, it may be that they serve to emphasize a speaker’s assessment of the content of their talk. Extract 3.1 is taken from an interaction between two Townie girls, who were discussing how teachers treat kids who are in the ‘bottom set’ (i.e., the teaching group containing young people who are considered to have the weakest academic abilities). Amanda is describing how she and her friends are disobedient and ‘delinquent’ – they talk throughout the class and smoke (‘going for a fag’) – but are not reprimanded by the teacher for doing so (‘DTs’ refers to detentions).

Extract 3.1 Yeah, cos in last year, in Science, I was in bottom set and I was with all them. It was everyone, like Ellie, Will, Sam, Paul – everyone. And they’d all be there and we’d just talk all the way through. And because we were in bottom set, they expect us to be like that. And they don’t give you DTs or nothing like that. They just go, ‘Alright, quiet. You’ve had your laugh,’ and everything. And they know what we’re doing. They talk to us, the teacher, going, ‘Oh yeah. Go on, you can go for a fag,’ stuff like that. And they don’t really care and you don’t – I dint learn nothing last year.

There are two instances of negative concord in the extract which are highlighted in bold. The structure of the first, ‘they don’t give you DTs or nothing

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like that’ could be seen to strengthen the surprising claim that teachers don’t punish disobedient students. The second instance of negative concord, ‘I dint learn nothing last year’, is articulated with heavy stress on the indeterminate ‘nothing’. Its structure could be seen to emphasize how very little Amanda learnt in a situation that is intended for learning. Extract 3.1 provides some clues as to why negative concord is a good syntactic vehicle for ‘delinquency’. It suggests that discussion of delinquency itself might facilitate the use of intensifying linguistic strategies. After all, reporting delinquency entails the provision of some kind of surprising or remarkable information, given that engaging in delinquency entails subverting normative behavioural expectations.9 The subversion of expectations is seen in the instances of negative concord in Extract 3.1: we wouldn’t expect teachers not to punish delinquent students, and we wouldn’t expect students not to learn something in their classes. This suggests that speakers may use high frequencies of negative concord in discussions of delinquency because such talk requires the use of linguistic strategies which permit the emphasis of unexpected information. But this is not the whole story. It is, of course, also the case that using a form like negative concord adds flavour to a delinquent style. If it didn’t, we would expect all speakers, irrespective of social group, background or forms of practice, to use negative concord as a means of expressing intensity and emphasis. But this is clearly not the case. Irrespective of its discourse function, negative concord is the kind of form that is corrected by teachers and other authority figures, who would never utter the form themselves. It does no harm to the persona of a Townie girl to be heard using linguistic forms which are evaluated in this way when the discourse context permits it. Consequently, how negative concord enters into the styles of the CofPs at Midlan High may reflect the interaction between its discourse function and its well-established social meaning as an anti-establishment linguistic device.10 3.2.2

Co-present Linguistic Features

I now move on to a consideration of how negative concord occurs alongside other linguistic forms. The graphs in Figure 3.7 show the proportion of the vernacular co-occurring features discussed previously that are found in sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates. Tokens of negative concord are represented by the solid coloured bars, and standard negation is represented by the hatched coloured bars. The data represented here needs to be interpreted cautiously, given the low data counts for some environments. To take the Geeks’ use of contracted verb forms as an example: when their negation was standard, there were thirty-five instances in

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(a)

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1/1

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1/1 45/49

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7/7

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8/8 48/50

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90% 100/122

80% 70%

14/21

60% 3/6

50% 40% 30%

2/6 12/41 12/48

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29/29 11/11 73/83

90% 24/31

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70% 60%

12/20 14/23

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% contracted verb

(th)-fronting

/h/-dropping

standard negation

/t/

(ing)

negative concord

Figure 3.7 Percentage of vernacular features occurring in sentences containing negation with postverbal indeterminates. [The Ns above each bar show the number of vernacular features as a proportion of the total number of possible occurrences with a specific type of negation.]

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which they could have contracted verbs, but they only did so four times (or 11.4 per cent of the time). In the context of negative concord, there were two instances in which the Geeks could have contracted verbs, and they did so once (or 50 per cent of the time). The analysis also does not fully account for the linguistic constraints on the variation which may govern the occurrence of variable forms. However, given that the syntactic context in which co-present features are analysed is limited to instances of negative concord, there are a smaller number of contrasting linguistic environments in which forms may occur (compared to datasets which compare variants across all syntactic environments). For instance, instances of word-final (ing) in this limited dataset are largely restricted to clause-final instances of anything and nothing, and instances of (th)-fronting are generally limited to occurrences in these same words. Notwithstanding these limitations, the first thing to notice is that there are two variables that all groups use in remarkably similar ways. Vernacular pronunciations of /t/ and (ing) are used frequently by all social groups, irrespective of whether or not a speaker uses negative concord. The fact that vernacular variants of /t/ and (ing) are used at high frequencies even by a social group as linguistically conservative as the Geeks suggests that their potential social meanings in this dataset are not ideologically linked to the same stigmatized associations that negative concord seems to index. This clearly demonstrates that there is no direct correlation between the label ‘non-standard’ and the meaning ‘stigmatized’. Vernacular variants of /t/ and (ing) may well have social meanings that are primarily associated with dimensions of affect rather than prestige, and that the tendency to express these dimensions runs across all of the speakers in this sample irrespective of social group. It is notable, for instance, that my recordings situate all speakers as selfreflexive, open, and laid-back. This, of course, would require more data and analysis to verify, but the role of phonetic variables in communicating affect likely explains these findings. They suggest that social meanings may operate at different levels. That is to say, some social meanings may go across a large stretch of discourse, whereas others may be specific to a particular section of talk within a larger unit. This, in turn, will affect the frequency of different linguistic forms on the basis of their relationships with the social meanings articulated. The second thing to notice in these figures is the extreme patterns in the Townies’ data. The Townies use all of the vernacular forms frequently and, notwithstanding some small effects for context, they do so irrespective of whether or not they are using negative concord or standard negation. This contrasts with the other CofPs who combine features in more nuanced ways. For instance, the Geeks only use high frequencies of /h/-dropping and contracted verb forms when they are using negative concord, and they use very little (th)-fronting (although the only tokens I have of them doing so are in standard negation, rather than negative concord). The Populars show a small

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but probably insignificant effect according to whether or not /h/-dropping and (th)-fronting occur in negative concord or standard negation, whereas contracted verb forms seem to show a slightly bigger effect for negation context. However, the key thing to notice about the difference between the Populars and the Townies relates to the overall frequencies of (th)-fronting: Populars use this feature far less than the Townies overall. What does this brief analysis of co-occurring features add to our understanding of the social meanings of the linguistic forms discussed in this chapter? The fact that all CofPs have a high use of contracted verb forms and /h/-dropping when using negative concord, and that, for the Geeks at least, this contrasts with the frequency of these forms in standard negation, suggests that the meaning potentials of these forms are compatible with the meaning potentials of negative concord. That is to say, it is likely that they have meanings that are compatible with ‘delinquency’ or, more precisely, those stances and alignments ideologically related to delinquency. This could include, for instance, being tough, being cool, being fearless, being reckless, or being outspoken. That (th)-fronting also seems to pattern in this direction means that the same is probably true for this form too. However, the fact that the Townies use this form so much more than the other social groups suggests that there is something more extreme in its meaning potential, and perhaps that its use may be more risky because of these more extreme associations. It may not be a coincidence that, of all of the forms studied, (th)-fronting is most likely the newest. Given claims made in the sociolinguistic literature about the relationship between this feature and youth norms in the late 1990s/early 2000s (Williams & Kerswill 1999; Kerswill 2003; Stuart-Smith, Timmins & Tweedie 2007; Stuart-Smith & Timmins 2010), it was likely a relatively new change in progress in this community when the data was collected. Furthermore, the greatest users of (th)-fronting in Lawson’s (2009) study of adolescent boys in Glasgow were those aligned with a violent counter-culture. As a form of intensification, negative concord might ‘strengthen the meaning of the expression [it] combine[s] with’ (Beltrama 2016: 4), therefore the risky meanings of (th)-fronting may be all the more apparent when combined with this syntactic form.11 Given this, it is not surprising that we find it being used by the Townies to add layers to their linguistic repertoire. After all, this is the group who split off from the Populars in their pursuit of newer, more daring, more rebellious practices. The relationship between negative concord and other co-occurring features suggests that this syntactic construction can also enter into symbiotic relationships with other features in ways which allow meaning to be layered. Of course, this is not to say that the social meanings of the co-varying forms are directly equivalent. The indexical field of a linguistic feature is complex, consisting as it does of a ‘constellation of ideologically related meanings’ (Eckert 2008: 454). Therefore, it is likely that the linguistic features that correlate with negative concord only do so relative to a subset of the potential meanings of negative

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concord. Nonetheless, co-occurrence suggests that some parallel meanings exist and I discuss the implications of this in the final section. 3.3

Conclusion

The evolution of third-wave sociolinguistics, and its focus on the social meaning of linguistic variation, provides opportunities for the study of syntactic variation. By focusing on occurrences of negative concord in data collected during an ethnographic study, I have demonstrated that – in addition to tracing the social correlates of this form – it is possible to observe the ways in which the pragmatic function of a linguistic feature interacts with the styles of particular communities of practice. My understanding of the nature of social meaning was deepened further by considering how several phonological features and one morpholexical feature varied in step with negative concord. This multilayered approach analysed the type of individual who uses negative concord, what individuals used this form to talk about, and how the form is constructed within a larger discourse frame. This enabled me to observe where different kinds of linguistic variants (syntactic, phonological, morpholexical) shared parallel meanings. More generally, by viewing patterns of variation holistically, I demonstrated that not all non-standard variants index stigmatized social meanings (as shown by the different ways in which the various phonological variants patterned with negative concord), but also that the meanings of a more obviously ‘stigmatized’ form (negative concord) are nuanced by the precise contexts in which the feature is uttered and how it is uttered. This analysis has suggested that more research on syntactic variation has the potential to elucidate our understanding of the contexts in which all kinds of linguistic variation occur. The paucity of research on syntactic variables is no longer just a problem for understanding syntax; it’s a problem for understanding how the social meaning of linguistic variation operates across grammatical categories. We cannot escape the fact that speakers utter phonological variation in the context of syntactic constructions. We could choose to see this as simply inconvenient – something to be ignored or overcome in our research designs. Alternatively, we could choose to see it as an opportunity to learn more about how the social meaning of language is structured. As the analysis in this chapter has suggested, the fact that syntactic items like negative concord must co-occur with phonological variables in spoken discourse (by the very nature of their structure) may allow us to more easily identify the meaning potentials which pertain across grammatical levels. That is to say, if the social meaning of syntactic variables can be (relatively easily) discerned from the discourse context, then we can use this to start examining the meaning potentials of the phonological forms which vary in step with them.

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This potential has not been fully recognized in research on social meaning because of the focus on phonological variables at the expense of other levels of the grammar. Cheshire (1987: 268) has argued that it doesn’t make sense to treat phonology and syntax in the same way. To some extent, it doesn’t. As I noted earlier, there are clearly differences between syntactic variation and phonetic and phonological variation. These differences likely have consequences for the ways in which meaning might attach to certain language features, and for how that meaning might develop or change. For instance, while the data in this chapter has suggested that negative concord and (th)fronting have shared meaning potentials, there are plenty of unanswered questions. For instance, what happens when (th)-fronting (or any other nonstandard phonetic variant, for that matter) occurs in another context – say in an imperative (for example, Try to th[f]ink for yourself), or in a right dislocated tag (for example, It’s a waste of time, this th[f]ing)? That (th)-fronting can occur in a range of syntactic constructions, each of which have their own pragmatic functions and, potentially, their own social meaning potentials, suggests that (th)-fronting has a much broader indexical field than negative concord. (This is, of course, true for nearly all phonological variables.) Nonetheless, our ability to unpack that indexical field may rely upon our ability to observe (th)-fronting in the precise syntactic environments that flavour its meaning potentials. So while it makes sense to separate out levels of linguistic representation, failing to acknowledge how they interact in the process of meaning-making greatly reduces our abilities to tell the whole story about language variation and social meaning. This chapter began by evaluating the challenges to the study of syntactic variation, noting how these challenges have led to syntactic variables being under-represented in variationist research. I argued that these challenges are largely neutralized when our goal is to understand the social meaning of linguistic variation. However, in examining the co-occurrence of syntactic variation and variation at other levels of the grammar, I hope to have demonstrated that increased research on syntactic variation will not just help us to understand the social meanings of syntax, it will also help us understand the social meaning of language variation full stop. notes Thanks to Jenny Cheshire for an initially anonymous critical and insightful review of the first draft of this chapter, and to Julia Snell for further helping me to clarify my ideas. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. 1. Here, and throughout this chapter, I use the term ‘phonological variation’ as shorthand for phenomena that is both phonetic and phonological (and more phonetic than phonological in a large number of cases). Although not ideal, I use ‘phonological variation’ because it is the term most commonly used in the existing literature which

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discusses differences between syntactic variation and phonetic/phonological variation (see, for instance, the quotation from Sankoff in the first paragraph of this chapter). Of course, the linguistic variable is a heuristic analytical device (Labov 1978) that was never intended to reveal much about social meaning. Rather it was intended to simplify the comparison of forms so that language change could be easily modelled. See, for instance, García (1985: 203, 213) who notes that Weiner and Labov (1983) approach their discussion and analysis of the passive with ‘a bold simplification of the problems of meaning’ (p. 31). See also Campbell-Kibler (2016) for a discussion of the limits of the sociolinguistic monitor as currently conceived. While Eckert presents phonetic variables as being the primary carriers of affect, see Ochs and Schiefflin (1989: 22) who argue that ‘[o]ne cannot argue for a clean division of labor between areas of the grammar assigned to logical and affective functions. One cannot argue, for example, that syntax exclusively serves logical function while affective functions are carried out by intonation and the lexicon. Affect permeates the entire linguistic system. Almost any aspect of the linguistic system that is variable is a candidate for expressing affect.’ Eckert (2018: 190) also argues that ‘referential components’ differentiate syntactic and phonological features because the former are primarily propositional, such that ‘whether a sentence is negative or positive depends upon the nature of the proposition, but once negation occurs, there’s a choice whether to use the standard or the non-standard form’. However, it’s not clear how this referential function is any different from the fact that occurrences of a phonetic variable are occasioned by the need for a speaker to produce an utterance containing the variable. So, whether /t/ occurs depends upon whether a speaker utters /kat/ or /kab/, and one could equally argue that there is then a choice about whether to use a particular variant. Nonetheless, as discussed, the very structure of a syntactic item might determine what the form can pragmatically communicate, and this may determine (and even restrict) the social meanings associated with it. The term ‘indeterminate’ is used following Labov (1972a: 775) who states that ‘the label “indeterminate” was first applied by Klima (1964) to distinguish any, ever and either from other indefinites like some, primarily on the basis of their co-occurrence with negative and question features’. Figure 3.5 also suggests that the context in which the Townies use the largest proportion of negative concord is ‘current interaction’ (recall that this is talk occasioned by the recording situation itself). However, as can be seen in the Townie’s graph, the figures here are very low (there are only five instances of negation with postverbal indeterminates in this context, and three of these are negative concord). It is possible that the correlation between negative concord and the current interaction indicates something about the nature of Townie peer interaction which differs from the peer interaction of other groups, but more data would be required to substantiate this. To give an example: for the Townies, there were ninety tokens in total (as can be seen from adding up the raw figures for all this CoP’s topics). There were thirty times in which Townies talked about boys. So the percentage Townies talked about boys was 33.3 per cent (30 divided 90, multiplied by 100).

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9. It may be that the context of the study facilitated the occurrence of negative concord to some extent. It may be a particular useful linguistic device for young people who wish to articulate a ‘delinquent’ identity to someone they know reasonably well (the fieldworker), but who is, nonetheless, an outsider. 10. See, also, Eisikovits (1991), who found that male adolescents used non-standard don’t (vs doesn’t) when talking about anti-establishment values and affirming the speaker’s ‘toughness’. 11. This might explain why the Geeks only ever use (th)-fronting with standard negation. Of course, as I elaborate in the conclusion, the indexical field of (th)fronting is likely to be broad, and precise social meanings will be conditioned by the component of the larger style in which it occurs. This will further differentiate the uses of different CofPs. So, while it may seem surprising that the Geeks use (th)fronting at all, the precise ways in which (th)-fronting enters into their repertoire may be subtly, but significantly, different from the ways in which this form enters into the Townies’ repertoire. Discourse analysis is required to explore this further, and I hope to undertake this analysis in subsequent work.

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Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1989. Language has a heart. Text 9(1), 7–25. Podesva, Robert J. 2011. Salience and the social meaning of declarative contours: Three case studies of gay professionals. Journal of English Linguistics 39(3), 233–64. Rickford, John R., Thomas A. Wasow, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Juli Espinoza. 1995. Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting as far as constructions. Language 71(1), 102–31. Romaine, Suzanne. 1984. On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica 18(3–4), 409–38. Sankoff, Gillian. 1973. Above and beyond phonology in variable rules. In C. J. Bailey and R. Shuy (eds.), New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 42–62. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23, 193–229. Smith, Jennifer. 2001. Negative concord in the Old and New World: Evidence from Scotland. Language Variation and Change 13(2), 109–34. Smith, Jennifer, and Sophie Holmes-Elliott. in preparation. Mapping syntax and the sociolinguistic monitor. Snell, Julia. 2010. From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(5), 630–56. Stuart-Smith, Jane, and Claire Timmins. 2010. The role of the individual in language variation and change. In C. Llamas and D. Watt (eds.), Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 39–54. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins, and Fiona Tweedie. 2007. ‘Talkin’ Jockney’? Variation and change in Glaswegian accent. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2), 221–60. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2012. Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Weiner, E. Judith, and William Labov. 1983. Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics 19(1), 29–53. Williams, Ann, and Paul Kerswill. 1999. Dialect levelling: Change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In P. Foulkes and G. Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London, UK: Arnold Publishers, 141–62. Winford, Donald. 1996. The problem of syntactic variation. In J. Arnold, R. Blake, B. Davidson, S. Schwenter, and J. Solomon (eds.), Sociolinguistic Variation: Data, Theory and Analysis. Selected papers from NWAVE 23. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 177–92.

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The Social Meaning of Semantic Properties Andrea Beltrama and Laura Staum Casasanto

4.1

Introduction: Linguistic Constraints on Social Meaning

Studies within the third-wave approach have unveiled the fluid nature of social meanings, showing how speakers can creatively recruit and recombine linguistic resources to make social moves and construct identities. However, as noted in Chapter 3, the question as to whether there is a motivated connection between social meanings and the grammatical properties of linguistic forms is less explored. We believe that tackling this issue would not only help us attain a better understanding of how social indexicality emerges and circulates; it would also illuminate the relationship between socially and grammatically conditioned variation, shedding light on how a third-wave approach can be combined with other perspectives to develop a comprehensive approach to the study of linguistic variation. A growing body of literature has recently taken a step towards addressing this question by asking whether, and how, the semantic meaning of a variant can contribute to determining its socio-indexical value (Acton & Potts 2014; Glass 2015; Jeong & Potts 2016; Acton 2019, this volume). The current chapter aims to provide a contribution in this direction by taking into examination the linguistic category of intensifiers, a type of expression that is deeply embedded in both sociolinguistic and semantic variation. Focusing on totally in US English and -issimo in Italian, we show that these expressions are perceived as more prominent indexes of speaker qualities in contexts in which they combine with non-scalar predicates, and thus require extra work on the part of the interlocutors for being interpreted. These results contribute to our understanding of how social meaning is linguistically grounded, while providing additional support for the generalization that social meanings tend to arise from marked forms across domains of variation (Bender 2000; Campbell-Kibler 2007; Podesva 2011; Acton & Potts 2014).

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Intensifiers: Between Sociolinguistic and Semantic Variation

The category of intensifiers (e.g., very, really, so), has been shown to participate in different levels of language variation. 4.2.1

Intensifiers and Sociolinguistic Variation

Extensive work in variationist sociolinguistics has shown that intensifiers are not homogeneously distributed in socio-demographic space, and tend to change rapidly in any speech community (Bolinger 1972; Macaulay 2006; Rickford et al. 2007; Tagliamonte 2008; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2009; Brown & Tagliamonte 2012; Kwon 2012, among others). Specifically, it has been claimed that intensifiers’ use correlates with speaker age (Labov 2001; Ito & Tagliamonte 2003; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2009), gender (Tagliamonte 2005, 2008), social class (Macaulay 2002), and specific textual genres (Biber 1988; Brown & Tagliamonte 2012; Lim & Hong 2012). Intensifiers have also been claimed to index a rich constellation of social meanings, even though no study, to our knowledge, has specifically explored their social indexicality. Intensification, for instance, has been associated with the construction of a ‘high-involvement’ style (Andersen 2000; Brown & Tagliamonte 2012); hyperbole and exaggeration (Paradis 2000); a desire to sound captivating and creative (Bolinger 1972; Waksler 2012); a high degree of solidarity among members of the same group (Anderson 2006); and a stance of rebelliousness and emancipation from institutional norms (Macaulay 2002; Kwon 2012). By the same token, intensifiers can evoke higher-level persona-based features. Among others, Zwicky (2011) refers to certain uses of so as ‘Generation X so’, suggesting an association with young1 white women in the United States, ‘no doubt because of its prominence in the movies Heathers (1988) and Clueless (1994)’ (Zwicky 2011: 4). In sum, sociolinguistic research has highlighted intensifiers as a rich object of investigation for the study of language variation, both with respect to the demographic correlates of the speakers and their social meaning. The factors predicting the variability of these expressions, however, are not limited to the social context. As we shall discuss, intensifiers do indeed come in a variety of different alternatives with respect to their grammatical properties and, more specifically, their semantic meaning. 4.2.2

Intensifiers and Semantic Variation

We take semantic meaning to be the content conventionally associated with words, as well as the rules whereby the content of such words can be assembled to produce interpretable sentences. With respect to communication, this type of

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content crucially underlies language users’ ability to describe reality, as well as to judge whether such descriptions are true or false in a particular context. For example, very in (1) tells us that Paul is not just tall, but that he greatly exceeds the minimum height that we consider is necessary to count as a tall person. (1)

Paul is very tall.

From this perspective, intensifiers can be classified as ‘linguistic devices that boost the meaning of a property upwards from an assumed norm’ (Quirk et al. 1985: 591). This semantic contribution comes with a basic condition of use: intensifiers require the availability of a scalar, non-discrete dimension (Eckardt 2009), whose intensity they can modulate accordingly. We shall call this requirement the scalarity requirement. Scalarity Requirement: An intensifier modifying S carries the presupposition that S is a gradable property.

Notably, we observe a striking degree of variability in the mechanism through which the requirement is satisfied. In particular, instances of intensification can be classified in two groups. In the most canonical cases, the target scale is directly provided by the semantic meaning of the modified predicate. Let us consider so and totally in US English and the suffix -issimo in Italian. In (2), for instance, both full and tall are adjectives that inherently encode a scale which can be directly targeted by the two modifiers. Because gradability is supplied in the lexical material surrounding the intensifier, we dub this semantic variant lexical intensification. (2)

a. Bob is so tall! b. The bus is totally full. c. Gianni e` alt-issimo. Gianni is alt-ISSIMO. ‘Gianni is extremely tall’.

In other cases, however, no scale is made available by the surrounding expressions. Let us consider (3): the state of dating a person or being employed are intuitively all-or-nothing ones, which hardly lend themselves to be graded2; mahi mahi fish is a biological category, whose membership is defined on a discrete, rather than continuous basis. In all these cases, however, the intensifiers are not only perfectly interpretable; they also retain the boosting function that distinguishes them among other types of modifying expressions in natural language. Given the absence of an explicit scale in the surrounding lexical material, we label this variant of intensification non-lexical intensification. (3)

a. Bob so dated that kind of guy before! b. True story: This one time? I totally got fired on April Fool’s Day. c. Abbiamo appena preso questa lampugh-issima.

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We.have just caught this mahi.mahi.fish-ISSIMO. ‘We just caught this quintessential mahi mahi fish’.

The source of scalarity in these examples seems to vary from case to case. So in (3-a) and totally in (3-b) appear to be intensifying some sort of scalar attitude of the speaker towards the proposition, which we could roughly paraphrase in terms of ‘certainty’ or ‘surprise’ (Irwin 2014; Beltrama 2018); -issimo in (3-c), instead, conveys that the exemplar of fish at stake embodies the quintessential properties of the category to a high degree, though it does not specify what these properties might be. The fish could be particularly big, colourful or tasty, but what dimension is relevant ultimately depends on the context (Beltrama & Bochnak 2015). The distinction between lexical and non-lexical intensification raises a number of questions for linguistic analysis. From the perspective of semantics, a growing body of literature has aimed to unveil and model the compositional rules whereby intensifiers can combine with non-lexical scales, focusing on the empirical and theoretical differences between lexical and nonlexical intensification, as well as the deeper conceptual connection between them (McNabb 2012b; Bochnak & Csipak 2014; Beltrama & Bochnak 2015; Beltrama 2018). From the perspective of sociolinguistics, the nonhomogeneous semantic landscape of intensification raises the issue as to whether, and how, semantic variability is linked to socially conditioned variability. 4.2.3

Connecting Two Realms of Variation

Thus far, semantic and sociolinguistic variation have been seen as independent domains in the study of intensification. While the semantic literature has engaged with intensification as an abstract, language-internal phenomenon, the variationist literature by-and-large focused on lexical variants, to the exclusion of non-lexical ones. The decision to restrict the focus to gradable adjectives – a well-circumscribed, easily codeable domain – is motivated by the need to find not just the intensifiers themselves, but also the contexts where an intensifier ‘could have occurred but did not occur’ (Ito & Tagliamonte 2003: 263), in compliance with Labov (1972)’s principle of accountability. While justified by the goal of providing a rigorous treatment of the variable’s distribution, this methodological decision comes at the expense of an adequate empirical representation of the phenomenon. From a meaning-based perspective, for example, restricting the focus to gradable adjectives fails to do justice to the semantic complexity of intensification, and in particular the distinction between lexical and non-lexical uses of intensifiers; from a sound-based perspective, furthermore, coding intensifiers as merely present-or-absent precludes the possibility of taking into account the different possible phonetic

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realizations of intensifiers (and intensification in general).3 As a consequence, the approach adopted by the literature we have reviewed here crucially misses out on the opportunity of exploring how the sociolinguistic properties interact with other empirical properties of these expressions – be they semantic features or other parameters of variation. Focusing on totally and -issimo, we aim to take a step towards filling this gap by asking the following: How does the type of targeted scale – i.e., lexical vs non-lexical – affect an intensifier’s likelihood to carry social meanings? We believe that investigating this question could be advantageous not only to refine our theory of social meaning, but for the study and understanding of language variation more broadly. Not only does the non-homogeneous semantic behaviour of these intensifiers constitute an ideal test bed to further understand how social indexicality is constrained by the linguistic features of their carriers; it also provides a window into the relationship between grammatically and socially conditioned variation, affording the opportunity to complement the focus of the extant sociolinguistic literature on intensification. 4.3

From Semantic to Social Meaning: Hypothesis

4.3.1

From Markedness to Social Meaning Salience

Recent work within the third-wave approach has suggested that not all linguistic forms are equally likely to be invested with social meanings. Specifically, the likelihood of an expression to become a social index is not just determined by language users’ agency and creativity, but is also shaped by its structural properties. In particular, various studies pointed to the following generalization: given a variable, the variant with the richest social meaning tends to be the one that is linguistically marked. Throughout this chapter, we adopt a standard view across different linguistic subfields of linguistics in treating marked variants as a variable’s less frequent, natural, simple or predictable instantiations; or, following a definition provided in a sociolinguistic investigation, ‘those forms which depart more strongly or unexpectedly from a listener’s customary experience’ (Campbell-Kibler 2007: 27). This generalization has been discussed especially in relationship to markedness asymmetries grounded in frequency: Bender (2000) shows that zero copula are perceived as more strongly associated with African American ethnic identity in environments in which the variant is least frequent (i.e., before NPs); similarly, Podesva (2011) shows that rising intonation in declarative sentences, by virtue of being highly infrequent in comparison to rise-fall contours, emerges as a better linguistic resource for doctors to construct a ‘caring persona’ to put patients at ease;4 conversely, Jeong and Potts (2016) show that questions asked with falling intonation, the least frequent tune for this speech act, convey an especially

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rich package of social information; finally, Callier (2013) argues that creak in mid-phrasal position, where it is less frequent, is perceived more negatively than in phrase-final position. In addition, the correlation between the salience of social meaning and markedness can also be grounded in expectations generated by our grammatical knowledge. For example, Acton and Potts (2014) show that demonstratives like this and that are less expected, and hence more marked, in contexts in which they are unnecessary for referential purposes. In precisely such contexts these expressions emerge as a viable stylistic resource to foster a sense of affective and epistemic proximity with the listener. (4)

That Henry Kissinger sure knows his way around Hollywood.

In a similar vein, Acton (2017, this volume) argues that in English the determiner the establishes affective distance between the speaker and the referent when used to modify plural noun phrases (e.g., ‘the Americans’). Conducive to highlighting this effect is the fact that, in this particular construction, the determiner is also semantically redundant, and hence marked. Because the same content could have been conveyed with a simpler bare plural (e.g., ‘Americans’), the presence of the determiner calls the listener’s attention to the fact that a more complex construction than the default is being used, emphasizing the determiner’s ability to bundle object-level individuals as a collective, and thus convey distance. The emerging picture is one in which linguistic markedness – both in its frequency-based and grammatically based notion − provides a non-social common denominator shared by many linguistic forms invested with social content, suggesting that the circulation of social meaning can be driven by forces endemic to the linguistic system. Before proceeding to see how this generalization can help us make specific predictions about the social meaning of intensifiers, two caveats are in order. First, we are aware that the labels normally used to characterize marked forms in sociolinguistic studies and linguistic theory more generally – for example, infrequent, complex, noticeable, unpredictable, unexpected – are often descriptive, rather than explanatory; and that they are notoriously controversial and widely debated in the field.5 However, we also believe that, insofar as a systematic correlation between these properties and social meaning salience is empirically attested, such terms remain relevant to better characterize how social meanings are distributed across natural language expressions. Second, this generalization does not mean that any instantiation of markedness necessarily gives rise to social meanings. In particular, it is possible to find linguistic forms that would qualify as marked according to at least one of the criteria discussed, and that yet do not seem to be particularly rich social meaning carriers. Consider the contrast between truth-conditionally equivalent expressions such as ‘they stopped the car’ and ‘they caused the car to stop’. As discussed

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in Horn (1984), these two alternative ways of recounting an event can be framed in terms of a markedness asymmetry grounded in a Manner implicature, where the latter formulation, by means of being more complex and prolix, is typically regarded as marked vis-à-vis the former. But while the marked status of the second alternative does have important consequences on its semantic interpretation – marked forms of this kind tend to convey a more specific, less stereotypical meaning than their unmarked counterparts6 – they do not always convey a richer constellation of social meanings.7 Yet, we do not believe that these counterexamples invalidate the empirical and theoretical import of the association between markedness and social indexicality. First, as discussed, pragmatic incarnations of markedness of this sort can also be linked to richer social meanings, as shown for, among others, demonstratives and determiners (Acton & Potts 2014; Acton 2019, this volume). Second, even if some linguistically marked forms fail to show an association with particularly rich social meanings, the generalization still holds that marked variants tend to be considerably more common than unmarked ones among forms that are enregistered as social meaning indexes. In conclusion, even though the association between markedness and socialmeaning salience might not have universal scope over all linguistic forms, this observation remains important for sociolinguistic theory, to the extent that it serves as a viable category to better understand the emergence and circulation of social meanings across different linguistic forms. At this point, we can move on to the investigation of intensifiers, with a focus on the following question: Can the semantic variation that characterizes these expressions allow us to make predictions concerning the social salience of their different variants? 4.3.2

Markedness and Intensification

As discussed, the two semantic variants of intensifiers differ in terms of the dimension that they target: lexical intensifiers operate over a scale that is directly provided via the semantic meaning of the subsequent predicate; nonlexical intensifiers, by contrast, operate over a scale that needs to be retrieved from the broader communicative context. We suggest that non-lexical occurrences of intensifiers, by virtue of having to retrieve the scalar dimension from a source located outside the given lexical material, require a more complex chain of steps on the part of the listener to be interpreted. Following the generalization that forms associated with especially complex or effortful interpretation processes tend to be marked (Givon 1991), we consider non-lexical uses of intensifiers as marked, and hence more likely to be invested with social meaning.8

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Let us consider how this complexity asymmetry emerges for each of our case studies, starting from totally. (5)

a. The bus is totally full. Lexical b. Man in ‘I have drugs’ shirt totally had drugs. Non-lexical

As seen, the presupposition scalarity in (5-a) is straightforwardly satisfied by the meaning of full; by contrast, no scale is supplied by the event of possessing drugs, leading us to interpret totally in (5-b) as operating over an attitude on the part of the speaker. We suggest that observing a semantic mismatch between the intensifier and the semantic meaning of the subsequent expression makes the non-lexical variant of totally more suitable to violate our expectations than the lexical one. As we normally interpret the semantic meaning of sentences by assembling the semantic meaning of their parts, recruiting the attitude scale targeted by totally leads us to deviate from this process, taking an extra step that is not normally required in interpreting an utterance. Furthermore, the interpretation of non-lexical intensifiers poses a non-trivial underspecification problem: besides introducing a scalar dimension in the interpretation, both the speaker and the hearer must converge on exactly what scalar dimension is being intensified, inferring it on the basis of world knowledge, contextual information or other elements. Again, the case of totally in (5-b) illustrates this further element of complexity.9 Let us consider the following examples. (6)

a. Mary is totally coming to the party. b. A: I don’t remember if Josh was born in January. B: Yeah, he was totally born in January. c. This one time I totally got fired on April’s Fool Day.

In these examples, each occurrence of totally invokes a different scalar dimension. In (6-a) the intensifier seems to be targeting the epistemic certainty of the speaker (≈ definitely); in (6-b) it modulates the speaker’s commitment to their assertion, similar to what absolutely does; finally, for (6-c) the relevant scale seems to be one concerning the speaker’s surprise at the fact described by the utterance, which would be best characterized by an expression such as WTF! or Wow!. The different nature of the scales targeted by totally is confirmed by the non-interchangeability of the possible paraphrases. For example, while replacing totally with definitely in (7-b) preserves the meaning of (7-a), this is not the case if we replace the intensifier with a surprise marker, as in (7-c); conversely, while replacing totally with a surprise marker preserves the meaning of (8), as in (8-b), the substitution cannot work for (8-c). (7)

a. Mary is totally coming to the party. b. ≈ Mary is definitely coming to the party. c. ≠ Wow! Mary is coming to the party!

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(8)

a. This one time I totally got fired on April’s Fool Day. b. ≈ Wow! This one time I got fired on April’s Fool Day c. ≠ I definitely got fired on April Fool’s Day.

The same dual level of scalarity can be observed for -issimo in Italian. Let us consider a contrast between a lexical and a non-lexical use again. (9)

Gianni e` altissimo. a. Gianni is alt-ISSIMO. ‘Gianni is extremely tall’.

Lexical

Abbiamo appena preso questa lampugh-issima. b. We.have just caught this mahi.mahi.fish-ISSIMO. ‘We just caught this quintessential mahi mahi fish’. Non-lexical

Similar to what we observed for totally, using the suffix with nouns like lampuga entails a compositional mismatch between the scalarity required by the intensifier and the categorical nature of the semantic meaning of the host. It is this incongruence, which is not found with hosts like tall, that makes nonlexical uses of -issimo marked: in this particular linguistic environment, the suffix is not expected in light of the rules of the grammar, and hence is more likely to come off as particularly salient, catching the listener’s attention. In particular, the interpretation of the non-lexical variant requires retrieving scalarity by the broader context – here, by associating the referent of lampuga with the gradable quintessential properties of a mahi mahi fish. Furthermore, the presence of the intensifier forces the listener to determine what such quintessential properties are. The listener will have to figure them out, making a decision based on their world knowledge about the subject matter, as well as the context in which the intensifier is used – for example, the size of the fish, its colourfulness, its tastiness, etc. As such, the use of -issimo in combination with nouns requires a context-based inference that closely resembles the one that was observed for pinpointing the target scale of non-lexical totally. The emerging picture is one in which, from the perspective of semantic meaning, the interpretation of non-lexical intensifiers involves a complex chain of extra steps, highlighting this variant of intensification as marked with respect to its lexical counterpart. We argue that this distinction at the semantic level leads us to a clear prediction about what we should expect in terms of social meaning salience. If marked linguistic forms, by virtue of being particularly surprising or unexpected to the listener, tend to emerge as especially suitable carriers of social meanings, we expect that both totally and -issimo, in their non-lexical variants, should be perceived as more prominent indexes of social meaning than their lexical counterparts. Returning to the broader theoretical issue motivating this study, confirming this hypothesis would help us understand how social meaning is, to a certain extent, constrained by the grammar, allowing us to re-incorporate the notion of

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linguistic system into a theory of social indexicality. A crucial contribution of the third-wave approach, in particular, was to highlight speakers’ ‘local indexical work’ vis-à-vis ‘the power of the internal workings of the linguistic system’ (Eckert 2012: 453–4); shifting the focus on social meaning, in other words, highlighted language users’ agency and creativity in using linguistic variation as a semiotic resource, suggesting that the sociolinguistic life of linguistic variables could not be reduced to their place in the broader linguistic structure. This, however, does not entail that the socio-indexical and language-internal properties of linguistic forms ought to be considered as only accidentally related. In this perspective, focusing on markedness – and especially on a type of markedness that is grammar based, rather than frequency based – would yield crucial insights into how the structural properties of language (e.g., the scale targeted by intensifiers) affect how speakers’ recruit linguistic variation to perform indexical work, providing an important theoretical contribution to a third-wave approach to sociolinguistic variation. We now proceed to test this hypothesis via two social perception studies. One study investigates the social meaning of totally in US English; the other study investigates the social meaning of -issimo in Italian. Since our hypothesis on the relationship between scale types, markedness and indexicality is not geared towards English specifically, we expect it to work across different languages, once the proper conditions are met. Focusing on these two case studies will thus grant us a broader empirical basis to test our predictions. 4.4

Experiment 1: totally

In Experiment 1, we test our hypothesis for totally. A social perception emerges as a viable methodological avenue for two reasons. First, it makes it possible to construct a series of controlled conditions in which we manipulate the type of scale targeted by totally, while leaving the rest of the proposition unchanged. Second, it allows us to compare the social perception of these two conditions to the social perception of the sentence without the intensifier, providing us with the ‘zero occurrence’ case that can be used as a baseline to assess the social meaning of the intensifier in each variant. 4.4.1

Methods

4.4.1.1 Building Test Scales To construct the evaluation scales to be used as dependent variables in the study, we conducted a pilot study aimed at collecting open-ended social judgements and commentaries on the use of totally with different types of adjectives. The study was designed with the software Qualtrics and subsequently circulated on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Sixty subjects,

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self-declared native speakers of US English and between eighteen and thirtyfive years old, were recruited and paid $0.50 for participating.10 Each subject saw in written form one sentence containing either an instance of lexical or non-lexical totally, and was then prompted to provide four adjectives to describe the speaker. (10)

a Speaker: John is totally bald.

Lexical

b. Speaker: John is totally coming to the party. Non-lexical

Based on these results, the most frequently mentioned evaluation dimensions were selected as representative of the socio-indexical meaning of the intensifier. Four of these dimensions were described as being positive correlated to the use of totally; four dimensions, by contrast, were described as being negatively correlated.11 Positively correlated: Friendliness, Coolness, Outgoingness, Excitability Negatively correlated: Articulateness, Maturity, Intelligence, Seriousness 4.4.1.2 Stimuli Two factors were crossed in a 2x4 design. The first factor manipulates the semantic variant of totally along the lexical vs non-lexical axis of variation by presenting the intensifier in combination with two distinct classes of adjectives (Table 4.1). To cue lexical totally, the intensifier was used next to bounded adjectives, which lexicalize a bounded scale as part of their lexical meaning (e.g., ‘bald’, ‘full’, ‘straight’). To cue the attitudinal, nonlexical reading, instead, we used unbounded adjectives, which fail to lexicalize a bounded scale and thus present a mismatch, offering an attitudinal scale as the only possible target for the intensifier. The second factor manipulates the modifier accompanying the adjective and comes in four conditions: the target intensifier, totally; two control intensifiers, really and completely, and the bare, unintensified form. On the one hand, completely, contrary to totally, has not grammaticalized a use in which it can target attitudinal scales and is therefore exclusively able to target lexical scales (on the more constrained distribution of completely in comparison to totally, see Irwin 2014; Beltrama 2018). As such, it should give rise to an ungrammatical combination. On the other hand, really has a less selective semantics than

Table 4.1 Factor 1: scale targeted by totally. Adjective Type

Example

Variant

Bounded Unbounded

bald, full, straight tall, big, large

Lexical Non-lexical

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totally. It does not require the availability of an upper-bounded scale, but, as discussed in the semantics literature, can modify bounded and unbounded scales alike (Constantinescu 2011; McNabb 2012a). As such, the intensifier should always operate at the lexical level, showing no semantic difference across the adjective types. We predict that, if an effect of the semantic variant of totally is observed on the social meaning, the same effect should not be observed on the two control intensifiers. Finally, the bare form of the adjective serves as a baseline condition to assess the contribution of each intensifier to the social meaning. Having this contrast is necessary to filter out any effect on social meaning that is contributed by other elements in the sentence, such as the adjectives themselves. Twelve items, each with a different set of adjectives, were crossed in a Latin Square Design. Example (11) provides a full paradigm for an item across all conditions. (11)

I just met the new boss. He’s {totally/completely/really/ ∅} {bald/tall}.

4.4.1.3 Procedure and Statistical Analysis Every subject saw a total of twelve written sentences. Following each sentence, subjects were prompted to evaluate the speaker along the eight dimensions in Section 4.4.1.1, presented in the form of a 1–6 Likert scale (1 = minimum value, 6 = maximum value). The study was created with Qualtrics and carried out online. Thirty-six selfdeclared native speakers of US English, aged eighteen to thirty-five, were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk and compensated $2 for their participation.12 For statistical analysis, mixed-effects models were run for each attribute with the R statistical package lmer4 (Bates et al. 2015). The fixed effect predictors included Adjective and Intensifier and their interactions, and the random effects included random intercepts for subjects and items. When a higher-level main effect or interaction was significant, we followed up with post hoc comparisons. All comparisons were carried out with a Tukey HSD Test by using the Multcomp package in R.13 4.4.2

Results

As we predicted, the nature of the adjective following totally crucially impacts the social perception of the intensifier. Specifically, for all positively correlated attributes except for Excitable, the combination of totally and unbounded adjectives was rated significantly higher than the bare adjective with no intensifier. No significant contrasts are found for totally with bounded adjectives across the tested attributes. With these predicates, however, totally displays a trend to raise the perception in the same direction observed for unbounded adjectives. Concerning the other intensifiers, no significant contrast is observed; however, it is worth

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observing that the combination of completely with bounded adjectives tends to be associated with lower ratings than the bare occurrences of the bounded adjectives. Table 4.2 reports the differences between the perception of the sentence with the intensifier and the perception of the sentence with the bare form for the corresponding adjective type. Results for totally are in bold face. Significant contrasts between intensified and bare form are indicated with *. 14 For all negatively correlated attributes, totally with unbounded adjectives is rated significantly lower than the corresponding bare forms, again unveiling a robust effect of the type of targeted scale on the perceived social meaning. No significant contrasts are found for totally with bounded adjectives, even though totally displays a trend in the same direction observed for unbounded predicates with these predicates as well. Concerning the other intensifiers, completely with unbounded adjectives displays a trend to decrease the rating, with effects that near significance (all p-values < 0.1). No effect is observed for really. Table 4.3 reports the differences between the rating of the sentence with the intensifier and the rating of the sentence with the bare form for the corresponding adjective type. Results for totally are in bold face. Significant contrasts between intensified and bare form are indicated with *.

Table 4.2 Differential ratings for positively correlated attributes for totally. Unbounded

Attribute

Excitable Outgoing Friendly Cool Average

Bounded

bare

totally

completely

really

bare

totally

completely

really

3.51 3.65 3.68 3.02 3.47

+0.61 **+0.74 *+0.65 **+0.85 **+0.72

+0.25 +0.26 +0.37 +0.06 +0.23

+0.01 +0.26 +0.34 −0.02 +0.14

3.19 3.80 3.94 2.97 3.47

+0.54 +0.05 +0.00 +0.17 +0.19

−0.05 −0.39 −0.44 −0.18 −0.26

−0.08 +0.05 +0.17 +0.00 +0.04

Table 4.3 Differential ratings for negatively correlated attributes for totally. Unbounded

Attribute

Articulate Mature Intelligent Serious Average

Bounded

bare

totally

completely

really

bare

totally

completely

really

3.68 3.68 3.60 4.22 3.80

**−0.87 **−0.93 **−0.84 ***−1.01 ***−0.90

−0.54 −0.54 −0.37 −0.55 −0.50

+0.23 +0.11 +0.34 −0.14 +0.13

3.47 3.77 3.77 4.22 3.81

+0.03 −0.42 −0.19 −0.31 −0.23

+0.55 +0.31 +0.17 +0.00 +0.26

−0.02 −0.03 +0.08 +0.00 −0.22

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Discussion

In Experiment 1, we tested the interaction between the salience of totally’s social meaning and the type of scale targeted by the intensifier. While for each dimension of evaluation the direction of the effect of totally is consistent across conditions, the effect is considerably stronger when totally comes in the non-lexical variant, confirming our prediction. In other words, while totally by itself carries an indexical package biased towards a positive association with Cool, Excitable, Friendly and Outgoing and a negative association with Serious, Mature, Articulate and Intelligent, the semantic markedness of the variant crucially affects this content, making it most salient when a lexical scale is not available and the intensifier operates at the non-lexical level. Concerning the effect of the other intensifiers, no systematic pattern emerges. As predicted, really has a minor impact on all the evaluation scales and presents no significant difference across the tested adjective types. Concerning completely, we also observe that the intensifier does not change the social meaning of the bare form in a systematic way, even though it closely approximates the effect of totally on unbounded adjectives, nearing statistical significance with respect to the negatively affected attributes. In sum, the findings suggest that, when an intensifier can either come in a lexical or a non-lexical variant (e.g., totally), its social meaning is significantly more prominent when it targets a non-lexical scale – that is, in its marked occurrence. 4.5

Experiment 2: -issimo

Experiment 2 tests whether semantic markedness affects the social meaning associated with -issimo, comparing the social perception of the suffix with gradable adjectives and with nouns. 4.5.1

Methods

4.5.1.1 Building Test Scales As with the study on totally, we ran a pilot study to build the evaluation scales to use in the experiment. The study was designed with the software Qualtrics and subsequently circulated via social networks and word-of-mouth advertising.15 Fifty subjects, who self-declared to be native speakers of Italian and were between eighteen and forty years old, volunteered to participate. The questionnaire was structured in a similar fashion to the one used for totally: participants were asked to provide four adjectives to describe a speaker that would use -issimo in a sentence. Both lexical and non-lexical variants of the suffix were presented. The six evaluation dimensions corresponding to the most frequently mentioned adjectives in the

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pilot were selected. Three of these dimensions emerged as positively associated and three as negatively associated with the use of -issimo. Positively correlated: Outgoing, Friendly, Excitable Negatively correlated: Intelligent, Mature, Poised16 4.5.1.2 Stimuli Two factors were crossed in a 2x2 design. The first factor manipulated the semantic variant of the intensifier by presenting -issimo with two kinds of hosts: gradable adjectives, representing the lexical variant, and nouns, representing the non-lexical one. The second factor manipulated the presence vs absence of -issimo. Once again, the bare form was used as the baseline condition to isolate the effect of the intensifier on social meaning. Contrary to the previous experiment, we didn’t include a comparison to intensifiers like really or completely; this decision was motivated by the fact that Italian has no comparable morphemes with comparable meaning in suffix position.17 A full set of stimuli is offered below. Twelve items, each with a different set of adjectives, were crossed in a Latin Square Design. Example (12) provides a full paradigm for an item across all conditions. (12)

Conditions: Noun + issimo / Noun bare / Adj + issimo / Adj Bare Luca ha mangiato un {gelati-issimo/-∅ / gelato gustos-issimo/-∅}. Luca has eaten a {ice.cream-ISSIMO/-∅ / ice.cream tasty-ISSIMO/-∅}. ‘After lunch Luca ate an {ice-cream-ISSIMO / ice-cream / tasty-ISSIMO icecream / tasty ice-cream}.’

4.5.1.3 Procedure and Statistical Analysis Every subject saw a total of twelve written sentences, one sentence for each condition. Each sentence was followed by the evaluation of the speaker along the six dimensions specified, in the form of a 1–6 Likert scale (1 = minimum value; 6 = maximum value). The study was created with Qualtrics and carried out online. Thirty-two selfdeclared native speakers of Italian, aged eighteen to thirty-five, offered voluntary participation to the experiment. For statistical analysis, the same procedure discussed for Experiment 1 was used. The fixed effect predictors included Host and Intensifier and their interactions, and the random effects included random intercepts for subjects and items. 4.5.2

Results

We found main effects of Intensifier and Host, as well as a significant interaction between them (all p-values < 0.001). Table 4.4 reports the contrasts between -issimo and the corresponding bare form for adjectives and nouns, with significant contrasts indicated with *.18

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Table 4.4 Differential ratings for positively correlated attributes for -issimo. Attribute Attribute Outgoing Excitable Friendly Average

Adjective bare 3.26 3.20 2.83 3.05

-issimo **+0.63 **+0.76 +0.17 **+0.52

Noun bare 3.11 2.98 2.82 3.02

-issimo *** +1.44 *** +1.86 ***+0.64 *** +1.32

Table 4.5 Perception for negatively affective attributes: differentials. Adjective

Attribute

Mature Smart Posed Average

Noun

bare

-issimo

bare

-issimo

4.16 3.73 4.20 4.03

−0.35 −0.10 **−0.57 −0.34

3.75 3.60 3.97 3.77

***−1.54 *** −1.14 ***−1.61 ***−1.44

The presence of -issimo significantly raised the rating of all attributes across both kinds of hosts. The only exception is Friendly, for which -issimo with adjectives did not change the perceived social meaning (even though it showed a consistent trend with the other scores). However, the perception of -issimo with nouns was significantly higher than with adjectives (all p-values < 0.001). The analysis revealed a main effect of Intensifier and Host, as well as a significant interaction between them (all p-values < 0.01). Table 4.5 reports the contrasts between each intensifier and the corresponding bare form, with significant contrasts indicated with *. As can be noted from Table 4.5, the effect of -issimo is not uniform across hosts and attributes. For Mature and Smart, the suffix caused a significant lowering of the rating with nouns, but did not have a significant effect with adjectives (although both attributes show a lowering trend). Concerning Poised, the suffix had a lowering effect across both hosts. For all attributes, however, -issimo’s effect is significantly larger with nouns than with adjectives. 4.5.3

Discussion

We tested the hypothesis that the use of -issimo with nouns should be a particularly ripe site for the emergence of social meaning. The findings

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show that the suffix shows a systematic difference in social meaning between nominal and adjectival uses. When occurring with nouns, the suffix always brings about a substantial effect on the ratings in the predicted direction. By contrast, the effect of -issimo on gradable adjectives is not present for all attributes; even when it is present, it is remarkably weaker than the one of -issimo with nouns. These results substantiate the hypothesis that, for -issimo as well, the type of targeted scale crucially affects the indexical value of the intensifier, with the marked variant showing more prominent indexical value. 4.6

General Discussion

Results from two social perception experiments showed that semantically marked variants of totally and -issimo are perceived as stronger indexes of social meaning than their unmarked counterparts. This observation is consistent with the generalization that, across different domains of linguistic variation, marked variants are stronger social-meaning carriers than unmarked ones. As a predictor of the intensifier’s markedness, we used the type of scale that the intensifier targets, a well-known source of variability in the grammatical properties of intensifiers. These findings indicate a principled connection between the semantic and socio-indexical components of the meaning of intensifier; as such, we take them to be an important step towards understanding how social meaning, besides being shaped by the socio-ideological context in which language users operate, is also constrained by the structural properties of linguistic variables. At the same time, the results from the experiments raise several issues that, if investigated properly, could lead to further advances in understanding the interaction between semantic meaning and social indexicality. We would like to linger on one issue in particular: while the two studies suggest that semantic features can help us understand why certain variants of the intensifiers have a social meaning, can semantics also help us understand why the two intensifiers have that particular social meaning, as opposed to another? This question, in particular, is warranted by the observation that the social indexicality of -issimo and totally are remarkably similar, both in terms of the positively and negatively affected social qualities. This parallelism indicates that the sociolinguistic properties of these two expressions might be connected to their semantics in ways that are not limited to the markedness asymmetry discussed above, but are also linked to other aspects of their conventional meaning. In particular, we highlight two aspects of the semantics of intensifiers that could represent promising starting points for further research, with a caveat: since the emergence and circulation of social meanings is the result of a continuous process of circulation, renegotiation and reanalysis (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2005; Moore & Podesva 2009; Eckert 2012), an

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exhaustive answer to the questions above is contingent on an in-depth analysis of the sociocultural practices in which the use of intensifiers is embedded within a certain community, which goes beyond the scope of the current article. First, it is possible that part of these social qualities could have an iconic nature (Irvine & Gal 2000), similar to what has been suggested in many thirdwave investigations (Eckert 2008). In the case of intensifiers, the very operation of reaching the top, or a very high region, on a scale might trigger the association with attributes that likewise embody an element of extremeness, such as being particularly excitable or outgoing (see Waksler 2012 for a similar observation). This would crucially explain why, despite the asymmetry in prominence between marked and non-marked occurrences, both intensifiers seem to be associated with a congruent social meaning across both lexical and non-lexical variants, suggesting that intensification could retain a core social meaning across the board, which can be more or less amplified depending on the linguistic context. If this hypothesis is right, then we should predict that the social meaning kernel of intensifiers might be foregrounded by a variety of linguistic means besides their semantic properties. For example, the phonetics of intensifier realization in speech might also contribute to emphasizing the iconic association between scalar extremeness and social qualities, similar to what has been proposed to link the use of extreme F0 values to the construction of an ‘emotionally animated’ persona (Podesva 2011). Second, we observe that the steps involved in the interpretation of nonlexical variants of -issimo and totally, and in particular the requirement that the interlocutors be attuned with respect to what the target scale is in a given context, appear to foster an interactional stance of proximity and convergence between the interlocutors. For example, the interlocutors must share sufficient world knowledge to figure out what the quintessential properties of a noun like mahi mahi fish or book are; likewise, they must share a congruent stance on the propositional content of an utterance to determine the attitude targeted by totally is about surprise, certainty, or something else. Crucially, this very interactional work involved in the interpretation of the intensifier, which is not required for the lexical variants, could yield important insights into the nature of the social qualities that tend to be associated with these expressions. Building on the idea that durable social meanings are ultimately grounded in the temporary social relationships that interlocutors inhabit in interaction (Ochs 1992; Moore & Podesva 2009; Kiesling 2019), a possible hypothesis would be that the association with qualities such as ‘friendly’ and ‘outgoing’ directly stems from the alignment that is presupposed by the semantic interpretation of these expressions. From this perspective, a parallelism emerges between this aspect of totally’s indexicality and the social effects of other expressions that similarly index a marked stance of inclusiveness, including Acton and Potts (2014)’s demonstratives and certain uses of tag questions fostering agreement

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(Moore & Podesva 2009) and perspective taking (Denis et al. 2016) among the interlocutors. A prediction of this hypothesis would be that a similar mapping between semantic features and social meaning should also be found for intensifiers that feature a non-lexical variant similar to those of totally and -issimo. At first glance, the use of intensifiers that modify individual-denoting expressions – including proper nouns, years and referential pronouns – appears to provide preliminary support to this idea.19 (13)

a. This bar is {so/very/completely} San Francisco. b. It was a {very/completely} Barack Obama thing to say. c. It’s a {very/completely} 1990 shirt.

In all these cases, the relevant scale appears to be the result of an aggregation of properties associated with the referent via a relation of typicality. For example, the evaluation of ‘a very San Francisco bar’ possibly revolves around properties such as ‘liberal’, ‘gay-friendly’, ‘culturally lively’, and other stereotypical attributes that emerge as the result of the world knowledge and attitudes that the interlocutors share.20 While we leave systematic testing of this hypothesis to further investigation, informal judgments collected on English speakers appear to confirm this intuition, suggesting that, at the very least, uses of very with arguments like San Francisco tend to have a rather similar constellation of social meanings to those of totally and -issimo. Besides advancing our understanding of the relationship between social meaning and grammatical properties, the current study could also provide a window into the study of linguistic variation more broadly. In particular, given the difficulty in circumscribing the variable space of non-lexical intensification from a canonical Labovian perspective, the investigation of their social meaning could be a proxy into the study of sociolinguistic issues that extend far beyond the themes commonly addressed in third-wave studies. For example, what might the difference in social meaning between lexical and non-lexical uses tell us about the trajectories of grammaticalization in which totally and -issimo are embedded? How do social qualities such as those associated to the intensifier speak to the demographics of language innovators at a particular time and place? An especially promising avenue to explore, in this sense, is the connection between intensifiers and younger speakers, which has been pointed out in most of the extant variationist work on this phenomenon (see Section 4.2.1). For example, it would be interesting to compare non-lexical intensifiers with other pragmatic variants that have been claimed to have emerged only recently, and to be predominantly used more be younger people, such as quotatives (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2005; Buchstaller 2006, among others), discourse markers (Tagliamonte 2005; D’Arcy 2007, among others), and extenders (Wagner et al. 2015, among others). A semantically-informed exploration

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of the use, distribution and development of these forms could shed novel insights on the mechanism whereby younger speakers creatively ‘push’ the use of these forms towards novel contexts and patterns, thus providing a realtime window into how innovation informs the composition and interpretation of meaning within a given community. Another important point of connection between intensification and broader issues in sociolinguistic variation concerns the perceived association of totally and -issimo with speakers embodying low degrees of articulateness. Far from being unique to intensification, these associations have been long discussed with respect to several non-standard variables; concerning negative concord, for example, they have been linked to values such as street-savviness and alienation from educational institutions, which have been shown to be central to certain communities of practice involving younger speakers (e.g., the Burnouts, Eckert 2012). The question remains thus open as to how intensification could likewise serve as a symbolic resource to create specific styles and cultural practices, and how such styles and practices compare to those informed by other types of non-standard variables, especially among younger speakers. A final issue revolves around the relationship between the high degree of emotive involvement conveyed by intensifiers and the contexts in which such expressions are used more often; in particular, this particular aspect of their social meaning might reflect the fact that intensifiers are particularly easy to find in settings that emphasize the role of appealing to the hearer’s emotions, such as narratives (Brown & Tagliamonte 2012). The emerging picture is one in which, having a better grasp on who uses intensifiers more often, and when, would allow us to compare the case study investigated in this chapter with other variables that are typically associated with youth, yielding important insights into why intensifiers have the social indexicality that they have. Our hope is that, precisely for this reason, integrating a first-, second- and third-wave approach with a semantically informed perspective might lead the way for an integrated approach to the study of linguistic variation, both with respect to intensifiers and other phenomena. notes 1. The adjective ‘young’ is to be understood relative to the time this work was being developed. 2. It is, of course, possible to conceive of a situation in which two people are ‘kind of dating’; or in which someone is on the way to being fired, but is still somehow employed. In both such cases, though, gradience is associated with these predicates via world knowledge, rather than being encoded as part of their grammaticalized meaning. In the remainder of the chapter, we suggest that intensifiers precisely have the power of associating gradability to non-gradable linguistic objects. We thank Lauren Hall-Lew for commenting on this issue.

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3. We are grateful to Lauren Hall-Lew for pointing this out. 4. In addition, Podesva suggests that the markedness of rising contour is grounded not just in its frequentistic distribution, but also in phonetic detail, where high values of acoustic frequency independently contribute to make this intonational pattern stand out. 5. See Haspelmath (2006) and Hume (2011) for a critical overview. 6. For further details, see Horn (1984) on the principle of the division of pragmatic labour. 7. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. 8. As Givon (1991: 337) puts it, ‘[t]he marked category tends to be cognitively more complex – in terms of attention, mental effort or processing time – than the unmarked one’. Again, this does not mean that all constructions with high complexity should feature the same type of markedness. For example, as an anonymous reviewer points out, a sentence with many negations will be certainly complex, and yet should not be regarded as marked in the same way in which an intensifier is. Yet, to the extent that totally and -issimo can be seen as patterning with similar examples of markedness discussed in the previous literature, we believe that they can also be considered as marked forms. 9. It is important to point out that this kind of pragmatic indeterminacy, to a certain extent, is shared by a lot of linguistic expressions, most of which do not necessarily qualify as complex. For example, as an anonymous reviewer points out, adjectives like smart or beautiful, and gradable predicates in general, require that the interlocutors coordinate on what dimensions contribute to determining beauty or intelligence, and what the threshold for having the property is in a given context (Kennedy & McNally 2005; Sassoon 2012, among others). Yet, we believe that non-lexical variants of intensifiers do introduce an especially high amount of such indeterminacy. A crucial question raised by these cases, in this perspective, revolves around how much indeterminacy is needed to stand out as a marked form, independent of the association with social meaning. We see this as a very important issue to better understand the connection between complexity and markedness in future work. 10. The average time for completing the task was approximately two minutes. 11. It is important to observe that these are all personality factors, making this investigation of ‘socio-indexical meaning’ different from many other studies of the same. We had no particular reasons to focus on these types of attributes, as opposed to broader identity factors. The selected attributes were simply those that were mentioned more frequently in the pilot study. As for the reason why this was the case, we speculate that intensifiers might evoke particular social types that people don’t have good names for; or that, alternatively, they are so common across different identity categories that people do not associate their use with any such group, preferring instead to mention personality features. 12. The study took approximately ten minutes to complete. 13. The function glht was used to generate p-values. 14. * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01; *** = p < 0.001. 15. The need to have native speakers of Italian precluded the use of Mechanical Turk for this study.

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16. The original dimensions in Italian are: Estroverso (=‘outgoing’), Amichevole (=‘friendly’), Entusiasta (=‘excitable’), Intelligente (=‘intelligent’), Maturo (=‘mature’), Posato (=‘poised’). 17. Due to the absence of intensifiers in suffix position in Italian, no comparison case was included. The original study, however, did include a comparison with the prefix -super; the rationale behind that comparison, however, does not fall within the scope of the current chapter. See Beltrama (2016): section 5.5 for details. 18. * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01; *** = p < 0.001. 19. Note that the fact that completely is interpretable in this context, however, doesn’t mean that they have identical semantic properties. In particular, as discussed in Section 4.4, completely is not as felicitous as totally in targeting scales grounded in the speaker’s epistemic attitude towards the proposition. (i)

a. We’re {totally/#completely} coming to the party. b. I {totally/#completely} got fired on April Fool’s Day.

20. Of course, these associations remain highly contingent. For example, it is also possible that there are kinds of San Franciscans with a kind of real-world knowledge that would assign the property ‘Irish’ or ‘working class’ to the city. This reinforces the idea that attaching world-knowledge based scales to proper nouns has more to do with speakers’ identity than with the grammar. We thank Lauren HallLew for this observation.

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Biber, Douglas. 1988. Linguistic features: Algorithms and functions. In Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 211–245. Bochnak, M. Ryan, and Eva Csipak. 2014. A new metalinguistic degree morpheme. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) 24, 432–52. Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree Words. The Hague, NL: Mouton. Brown, LeAnn, and Sali Tagliamonte. 2012. A really interesting story: The influence of narrative in linguistic change. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18(2), Article 2. Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2006. Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: The case of the quotative system. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(1), 3–30. Callier, Patrick. 2013. Linguistic context and the social meaning of voice quality variation. Ph.D. dissertation. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2007. Accent, (ing) and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82(1), 32–84. Constantinescu, Camelia. 2011. Gradability in the Nominal Domain. Ph.D. dissertation. Leiden, NL: Leiden University. Denis, Derek, Martina Wiltschko, and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2016. Deconstructed multifunctionalIty: Confirmational variation in Canadian English through time. Paper presented at Discourse-Pragmatic Variation & Change (DiPVaC) 3. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa. Eckardt, Regine. 2009. APO: Avoid pragmatic overload. In M. Mosengaard Hansen and J. Visconti (eds.), Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 21–41. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4),453–76. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 87–100. Glass, Lelia. 2015. Need to vs. have to and got to: Four socio-pragmatic corpus studies. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2), Article 10. Givón, Talmy. 1991. Markedness in grammar: distributional, communicative and cognitive correlates of syntactic structure. Studies in Language 15(2), 335–70. Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42(1), 25–70. Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 11–42. Hume, Elizabeth. 2011. Markedness. In M. Van Oostendorp, C. Ewen, E. Hume, and K. Rice (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, Vol. 1. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 79–106. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 35–83. Irwin, Patricia. 2014. SO [totally] speaker-oriented: An analysis of ‘Drama SO’. In R. Zanuttini and L. R. Horn (eds.), Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 29–70.

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Ito, Rika, and Sali Tagliamonte. 2003. Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32(2), 257–79. Jeong, Sunwoo, and Christopher Potts. 2016. Intonational sentence-type conventions for perlocutionary effects: An Experimental investigation. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) 26, 1–22. Kennedy, Christopher, and Louise McNally. 2005. Scale structure, degree modification and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 81(2), 345–81. Kiesling, Scott F. 2019. The ‘gay voice’ and ‘brospeak’: Toward a systematic model of stance. In K. Hall and R. Barrett (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford, UK, and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kwon, Soohyun. 2012. Beyond the adolescent peak of toykey. Paper presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS). Chicago: University of Chicago. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns, Vol 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lim, Ni-Eng, and Huaqing Hong. 2012. Intensifiers as stance markers: A corpus study on genre variations in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Chinese Language and Discourse 3(2), 129–66. Macaulay, Ronald. 2002. Extremely interesting, very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(3), 398–417. Macaulay, Ronald. 2006. Pure grammaticalization: The development of a teenage intensifier. Language Variation and Change 18(3), 267–83. McNabb, Yaron. 2012a. Cross-categorial modification of properties in Hebrew and English. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 22, 365–82. McNabb, Yaron. 2012b. The Syntax and Semantics of Degree Modification. Ph.D. dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago. Moore, Emma, and Robert J. Podesva. 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38(4), 447–85. Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 335–58. Paradis, Carita. 2000. It’s well weird: Degree modifiers of adjectives revisited: The nineties. In J. M. Kirk (ed.), Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam, NL, and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 147–60. Podesva, Robert J. 2011. Salience and the social meaning of declarative contours: Three case studies of gay professionals. Journal of English Linguistics 39(3), 233–64. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Rickford, John R., Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky, and Isabelle Buchstaller. 2007. Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new. American Speech 82(1), 3–31. Sassoon, Galit W. 2012. A typology of multidimensional adjectives. Journal of Semantics 30(3), 335–80.

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Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3), 193–229. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2005. So who? Like how? Just what?: Discourse markers in the conversations of Young Canadians. Journal of Pragmatics 37(11), 1896–1915. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2008. So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. English Language and Linguistics 12(2), 361–94. Tagliamonte, Sali, and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2005. When people say, ‘I was like . . . ’: The quotative system in Canadian Youth. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 10 (2), Article 20. Tagliamonte, Sali, and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2009. Peaks beyond phonology: Adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language 85(1), 58–108. Wagner, Suzanne Evans, Ashley Hesson, Kali Bybel, and Heidi Little. 2015. Quantifying the referential function of general extenders in North American English. Language in Society 44(5), 705–31. Waksler, Rachelle. 2012. Super, uber, so, and totally: Over-the-top Intensification to mark subjectivity in colloquial discourse. In N. Baumgarten, I. Du Bois, and J. House (eds.), Subjectivity in Language and Discourse. Bingley, UK: Brill. Zwicky, Arnold. 2011. GenX so. Arnold Zwicky’s Blog. http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/ 11/14/genx-so/.

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Pragmatics and the Third Wave: The Social Meaning of Definites Eric K. Acton

It is time to integrate the study of variation with the study of meaning in Eckert (2011: 4–5), The Future of Variation Studies. language more generally.

5.1

Introduction

For half a century, variationist sociolinguistics (Labov 1963) and Gricean pragmatics (Grice 1975 [1967]) have been united by a question at the center of both enterprises: Why do speakers say what they say the way that they say it? But despite this kindred interest, the two traditions have proceeded largely in silos. Pragmatics in the tradition of Grice has focused primarily on pressures to say relevant, truthful, and informative things in clear and concise terms, and on the inferences engendered by these pressures (see, e.g., Horn 2004 for a helpful overview). In the main, the inferences examined concern the relevant utterance’s descriptive meaning – that is, they concern the nature of the events being talked about and the referents involved. Inferences about the traits, moods, attitudes, and relations of the interlocutors themselves – that is, social meaning – have received considerably less attention, and the vast majority of pragmatic research examining such matters has been in the area of politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson 1987). Pragmatic research on politeness and descriptive content has yielded profound insights, but the space of meanings that fall outside of these realms is vast and largely undocumented by the pragmatic cartographer (though see, e.g., Davis & Potts 2010; Acton 2014; Acton & Potts 2014; Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017; Burnett 2017). Meanwhile, a great bulk of work in the variationist sociolinguistic tradition traces variation in language use to linguistic and social structures and features of the context of utterance (see Eckert 2012 for a helpful overview). In many such analyses, social meaning plays at most a minor role. Indeed, some works argue vigorously against the idea of social meaning having any explanatory 105

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importance for certain phenomena (e.g., Trudgill 2008). In those cases, the theoretical picture is akin to a prototypical case of Newtonian mechanics, with a naturally inert body (the speaker) subjected to multiple exogenous forces (social and linguistic factors), the net effect of which results in movement in a particular direction (the production of a particular variant) – absent any selfpropulsion. But from the beginning of the modern variationist movement (Labov 1963) there have been analyses that place meaning at the heart of language variation and change, where variants take on distinctive social meanings, in turn making them differentially useful to speakers depending on their communicative goals in the context at hand. On this third-wave view (Eckert 2012), what speakers say and how they say it is not merely the product of exogenous forces but also depends upon speakers’ beliefs about how listeners would evaluate a given variant – and, in turn, how useful the variant would be in helping them achieve their desired ends. In foregrounding meaning and agency in the study of variation, Eckert’s (2008, 2012) theorizing of third-wave variationism has not only had a profound impact on the field of sociolinguistics in its own right, it has, as I aim to illustrate herein, also done a great deal to render visible the underlying kinship, indeed the interdependence, between sociolinguistics and pragmatics. And as the third wave of variation studies swells, that interdependence comes ever more clearly into focus. The goal of the present work, very simply, is to uphold Eckert’s exhortation in the epigraph. More specifically, I intend to show that (i) despite historical differences in their methods and empirical foci, third-wave variationism and pragmatics share much at their foundations; and (ii) the two traditions are not only compatible, but mutually enriching – together providing broader empirical coverage and deeper theoretical insight than the sum of each tradition taken on its own (see also Cheshire 2005; Cameron & Schwenter 2013; Acton 2014; Acton & Potts 2014; Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017; Burnett 2017). The remainder of this work is structured as follows. In Section 5.2, I lay out what I take to be among the key theoretical underpinnings of both traditions. Building on this foundation, I then present two sociopragmatic principles of language use and interpretation (Section 5.3). As I will show in Sections 5.4 and 5.5, these principles underlie a wide range of phenomena observed in the third-wave and pragmatics literature, and exemplify the benefits of pursuing pragmatics and third-wave variationism together. I will focus on two cases of social meaning (historically, the stuff of third-wave variationism) that are rooted in semantically based inferences (historically, the stuff of pragmatics). First, I apply the principles to a conspicuous moment from a 2008 US presidential debate in which Senator John McCain referred to then Senator Barack Obama as ‘that one’ – a phrase that was widely

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criticized as othering. I then show how the principles explain why using a the-plural (e.g., the Democrats) to talk about all or typical members of a group of individuals generally depicts that group as a bloc of which the speaker is not a member, and to an extent that using a bare plural (e.g., Democrats) does not (Acton 2019). This latter case also demonstrates the utility of the two sociopragmatic principles in the quantitative study of variation. In particular, Acton (2019) shows that speakers opt for theplurals over bare plurals at significantly higher rates when talking about groups of which they are not a part or from which they wish to indicate distance – a pattern clearly related to the sociopragmatically derived difference in social meaning between the two forms. Thus, though the social meaning here is rooted in semantics, it exemplifies the broader, welldocumented pattern in third-wave variationism whereby differences in meaning engender differences in distribution, and vice versa. Indeed, the scope of the sociopragmatic principles presented herein is not limited to cases of semantically based social meaning. Rather, as I will discuss, they apply just as well to sociophonetic phenomena examined in third-wave variationist research. Taking all this together, one finds that meanings are deeply context sensitive, bound up with ideology, and diverse in kind and source (see, e.g., Silverstein 1976), yet all the while united by general principles of language use and interpretation. The task before us then is to press forward toward uncovering diversity in the realm of meaning-making and the unifying principles that underlie it. 5.2

Principles of Pragmatics and Third-Wave Variationism

The work of this section is to provide an overview of key principles underlying the two traditions, focusing on what unites the traditions and how they complement each other. Due to limitations of space, I will keep my comments relatively brief. For more on the foundations of pragmatics and third-wave variationism respectively, see, for example, Grice (1975), Horn (2004), Labov (1963), and Eckert (2008, 2012). 5.2.1

Language Users Are Purposive Agents

As noted, the defining feature of third-wave variationism is its view of speakers as goal-oriented agents who (consciously or not) design their utterances largely according to the effects they wish to achieve, the manner in which they wish to achieve them, and the nature of the linguistic resources at their disposal. Eckert’s (2012) conception of the third wave depicts speakers as ‘exploit[ing] linguistic variability to [convey] social meaning’ (p. 88). Whether a speaker

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uses a given variant, then, is not merely a function of the forces of linguistic and social structure (though such forces are no doubt instrumental) but also of the potential difference in impact of using that variant over another. At this level of abstraction, this principle is central in pragmatic research. In Grice’s (1975) seminal work on implicature, he describes ‘talking as a special case or variety of purposive, indeed rational, behavior’ (p. 47). As Horn (2004) points out, Grice’s work and the neo-Gricean (Horn 1984; Levinson 2000) and relevance theoretic (Sperber & Wilson 2004) programs that followed are united by a perspective whereby (consciously or not) speakers seek to design their utterances so as to achieve their intended effects at the lowest possible cost. Thus, both traditions conceive of speakers as agents selecting from a variety of possible utterances in an attempt to best achieve their desired ends. To be sure, the methods and empirical foci vary between the two traditions. But this diversity in approach makes the two traditions all the more complementary. Within pragmatic research, the speaker-goals of interest generally concern conveying relevant descriptive (roughly, literal) content and direct enrichments thereof – the ‘exchange of information’. Costs in pragmatics are most often operationalized as saying something that requires considerable effort to produce or process (violating Grice’s Manner maxim); and saying something for which one lacks sufficient evidence (violating Grice’s Quality maxim). In pragmatic research on politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson 1987), the range of costs and benefits is expanded to include things like face threat and maintenance. But beyond pragmatic studies of politeness, relatively little attention has been given to social goals and costs as a broad class, and there can be no doubt that the social considerations that influence our utterances extend far beyond issues of being polite and providing relevant information in a concise manner. Still, pragmatics has delivered deep insights into the rationality-based principles underlying language use and interpretation (see, e.g., Horn 2004) – principles that, appropriately generalized, apply to descriptive and social meaning alike, as I will discuss. On the third-wave side of things, there is generally less talk of rationality or costs and benefits, but speakers are clearly viewed as goal-oriented agents. Here, however, the goals most often examined have little to do with descriptive content, but instead tend to involve conveying social meaning. But despite the focus on social meaning, the findings and theory growing out of this research are applicable to the study of linguistic meaning more broadly. For instance, because social meanings are often highly malleable, context-sensitive, and ideological, third-wave research, in taking on social meaning as a central object of study, has foregrounded and illuminated the multitude of considerations underlying utterance design and interpretation, stretching well beyond descriptive content, effort, and face concerns.

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Thus the shared conception of language users as creative, goal-oriented agents in pragmatic and third-wave variationist research unites the two traditions, while their differences in methods and empirical foci lends them complementarity – a point I will continue to develop. 5.2.2

Utterances’ Meanings Are Underspecified, and Language Users Seek to Enrich Them

The context-sensitivity and underspecification of meaning is arguably the raison d’être for pragmatics as a field of study. Third-wave variationism, too, clearly adopts a view of utterance meaning as underdetermined by the utterance itself: ‘the meanings of variables are underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles’ (Eckert 2012: 87). In addition to viewing utterances’ meanings as underspecified, both pragmatics and third-wave variationism hold that language users enrich the meanings of utterances beyond their entailments. Were this not so, there would be no notion of conversational implicature, nor would it make sense to speak of the particularized social meaning of a variant in a context. 5.2.3

Language Users Have Context-Sensitive Expectations for Utterances

The familiar Gricean maxims can be understood as specifying expectations for utterances (Grice 1975; Horn 2004) – that they will generally be truthful, relevant, informative, and so on. And as Keenan’s (1976) work on Malagasy (and Horn’s 1984 analysis thereof) suggests, the weight of these expectations can shift from one situation to the next. The variationist literature likewise highlights the role of context-sensitive expectations in language use and interpretation. Indeed, context-based variation is the sine qua non of variationist research, and variationist research has shown that language users are at least on some level aware of such variation and form and interpret utterances accordingly (e.g., Bell 1984; Campbell-Kibler 2007). 5.2.4

Language Users Make Associations and Generalize, and Draw on Ideology in Doing So

The basic picture here is this: if we observe two things co-occurring, or if our ideology suggests they co-occur, we tend to form a link between them and to expect them to co-occur in the future. Put another way, if we find that a situation s instantiates some feature, we will increase our assessment of the probability that whatever else we believe to have held in other situations instantiating that feature and that is not inconsistent with s holds in s.

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Such a principle underlies key aspects of pragmatic theory. Horn’s division of pragmatic labor (1984: 22), claims that unmarked variants ‘tend to become associated [. . .] with unmarked situation[s], representing stereotype[s] or salient [situations]’. Levinson suggests that listeners ‘assume that stereotypical relations obtain between referents or events, unless this is inconsistent with [other assumptions or contextual features]’, and notes the influence of ideology on stereotypes (Levinson 2000: 114–15). The pragmatics literature also cites cases of short-circuited implicature, where an inference is not calculated in real time but rather achieved based on association with past uses of a similar form (see Horn 2004) – so that something like, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ can automatically be interpreted as a request, rather than involving a complex process of reasoning. The notion that language users make associations and generalizations has been richly developed in third-wave variationism (Eckert 2008, 2012), where it plays a starring role. In particular, this principle is manifested as indexicality in the sense of Peirce (1955) and Silverstein (2003). In brief, a linguistic unit comes to be associated with particular traits, stances, moods, etc., in virtue of the actual contexts of use and the ideological matrix in which it occurs, and in turn can be used as a sign – specifically, an index – of those traits, stances, and so on. Third-wave variationist research has fruitfully applied this meaning-byassociation perspective to a wide variety of variables, from the phonological (e.g., Benor 2001; Zhang 2005) to the lexical (e.g., Kiesling 2004), to the morphosyntactic (Moore & Podesva 2009). 5.2.5

Language Users on Some Level Know that the Above Hold

The final principle I wish to note here is that language users – whether consciously or not, and surely to varying degrees – know that the aforementioned principles hold. It is this overarching principle that gives the former much of their theoretical importance. Being aware that one’s interlocutor is a purposive agent, for instance, is what allows one to ascribe to the interlocutor an intention to communicate something to begin with. Similarly, without language users having some knowledge of context-sensitive conversational expectations, we should be surprised to find the great degree of systematicity observed in discourse. And without a view of language users as being aware that their interlocutors make indexical associations, it doesn’t make sense to talk of speakers, ‘exploit[ing] the indexical value associated with’ linguistic forms (Eckert 2012: 96). 5.2.6

Taking Stock

In brief, central to the programs of pragmatics and third-wave variationism is the idea that language users are purposive agents, with context-sensitive

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expectations for discourse, who generalize, draw associations, read into utterances, and on some level know that the foregoing holds. The two traditions have distinctive ancestries and perspectives, but share this common foundation. Taking these perspectives together, it is clear that language users have remarkably rich resources for making meaning in context, including the form, descriptive character, and indexicality of their utterances; discourse expectations, other aspects of context, and ideology; and general principles of use and interpretation grounded in rationality. All of these elements have a crucial role to play, together providing for a massive array of potential meanings and ways of expressing them. Combining these perspectives not only sheds light on the richness and contingency of meaning in language; as I aim to show in the remainder of this work, it also provides a better understanding of the relevant dynamics and the effects they produce. To that end, in the next section, I offer two additional sociopragmatic principles of use and interpretation – rooted in the previous discussion and equipped to illuminate a wide range of phenomena from the pragmatics and third-wave variationist literature.1 5.3

Two Sociopragmatic Principles

5.3.1

Consequences of Speaker Rationality

The foundation of the two principles presented in this section is the principle that language users are purposive, rational agents. As suggested in Section 5.2.1, one way to spell out that principle on the speaker side of things is to say that in designing utterances, speakers attempt to opt for the utterance that they believe will have the highest possible net benefit (benefits less costs) in the context. It is worth emphasizing that possible goals/benefits are many (Grice 1975; Keller 1994, i.a.). They can include anything from conveying propositional content; to showing a sign of (dis)respect to one’s addressee; to coming off as articulate, friendly, or tough; to expressing joy, anger, or apathy; to changing the topic of conversation. Costs, too, can come in multiple forms, from expending planning, articulatory, or processing effort; to violating social norms; to overcommitting oneself; to running the risk of sounding like a phony (Lakoff 1973; Brown & Levinson 1987; Horn 2004; Campbell-Kibler 2007, i.a.).2 Of course, given our finite capacities, there are limits on how good we are at predicting what utterances will best serve our needs, and we will only put so much effort (conscious or unconscious) into making such determinations before we speak (see, e.g., Cameron & Schwenter 2013 on limits to rationality). That point notwithstanding, we may still reasonably conceive of speakers as doing their best, within limits, to optimize the anticipated mix of costs and benefits in selecting their utterance. Crucially, insofar as this holds, when

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a speaker issues some utterance u, we know that there is no alternative utterance α that the speaker thought would offer a higher net benefit than u. 5.3.2

The Hearer’s Perspective

Let us now consider the perspective of a hearer, who has just observed an utterance u and is interpreting it. In addition to calculating any entailments provided for by the semantics of the utterance, what types of inference might the hearer draw? For one, there are those inferences derived from the principle discussed in Section 5.2.4 – that language users make experience- and ideology-based associations and generalizations. If, for instance, the hearer hears u as bearing the mark of a particular regional accent, they might well conclude that the speaker is from the relevant region, and may also ascribe further properties to that person based on previous experiences with or ideologies about people from that region, and so on. The same can of course happen at the level of the semantic content, too. If the speaker has said, ‘I have a cat’, a hearer might (though need not!) presume, based on previous experience with that phrase and beliefs about the kind of cat a person might reasonably have, that the cat in question is a stereotypical domestic feline (see Levinson 2000). But there is yet another potential layer to interpretation, derived from the presumption discussed in Section 5.3.1: namely, that speakers attempt to pick the utterance that best suits their needs. As noted, insofar as this presumption holds, it means that when a speaker says u there is no alternative utterance that the speaker thought would offer a better mix of costs and benefits. Now if I hear an utterance u, and, prima facie, it seems that the speaker ought to have preferred some alternative α to u, that suggests that my beliefs about the speaker or the broader situation are faulty and should change so as to be consistent with the speaker’s actual choice. In response, I may entertain hypotheses as to why the speaker did indeed prefer u to α, and update my beliefs about the speaker/situation – that is, draw inferences – based on which hypotheses I think best explain the speaker’s actual preference for u. One potential hypothesis would be that α is simply not part of the speaker’s repertoire.3 Drawing that conclusion in and of itself means changing one’s beliefs about the speaker – moving, for instance, from believing that the speaker is a local to abandoning that belief. The other option is to presume that α was available to the speaker, who chose not use it. In such cases, it stands to reason that an utterance u will be less obviously preferable to an alternative α: (i) the less costly α appears to be relative to u, (ii) the greater the apparent overlap in benefits between α and u, and (iii) the greater the overall benefits of α appear to be (Acton 2019; see also Levinson 2000; Katzir 2007, i.a.). And the less obvious it is why u is preferable

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to α, the more strongly that suggests that my belief state could use improvement, and the greater the incentive for me to consider why u might be preferable to α and draw inferences accordingly.4 5.3.3

The Principles

We can operationalize these dynamics via two principles, given in (1) and (2) (see Acton 2014, 2019, for similar formulations). (2a) relies on the notion of markedness. For that, I adopt a modified version of Levinson’s (2000: 137) informal characterization of markedness, given in (3). (1)

FS Principle (full significance): The full significance of a (sub-)utterance u depends upon context and what makes u distinctive relative to contextually relevant alternatives.

(2)

RA Principle (relevance of alternatives): Given a (sub-)utterance u uttered in a context C and observed by hearer H, the relevance of a potential alternative (sub-)utterance α to H’s interpretation of u varies: (a) Inversely with how marked (H thinks the speaker would think) α is vis-àvis u in C (b) Directly with (i) how desirably informative (H thinks the speaker would think) α is in C; and (ii) the degree of overlap in other shared benefits (H thinks the speaker would think) α has with u in C

(3)

Marked forms, relative to their less marked counterparts, are more morphologically complex, less lexicalized, more prolix, less frequent or consistent with the speaker’s grammar and repertoire, or less consistent with contextspecific social norms.

Let’s unpack these principles. Consonant with the immediately preceding discussion, FS says that the interpretation of an utterance or part thereof depends on what sets that utterance apart from relevant alternative utterances. As noted, in the most general terms, alternatives that are most likely to receive consideration are those that seem relatively ‘inexpensive’ compared to the observed utterance, seem to offer a valuable mix of benefits, or both. RA spells out what that might look like more specifically. (2a) covers the bulk of the cost side of things in terms of markedness. Markedness and cost vary directly: marked forms involve violating social norms or expending greater effort than their less marked counterparts require. Infrequent forms, for example, generally take more time and effort to retrieve and process (Podesva 2011; Jaeger & Weatherholtz 2016, i.a.). And violating social norms minimally means taking on the risk of offending a listener’s sensibilities, not to mention perhaps making one’s utterance more jarring and hence harder to process.5 (2b) covers benefits and is left rather general. The only specific item included therein is ‘desirable informativity’ – that is, any entailments or

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associations borne by the utterance/alternative that the hearer has reason to think that the speaker wishes to invoke. Any entailments or associations borne by an utterance/alternative that it appears that the speaker would not want to invoke would count as a strike against that utterance/alternative. This provision concerning desirable informativity does the work of the familiar default assumption (Horn 2004) in pragmatics that speakers will provide as much relevant information as possible, without requiring that they desire to do so in every case. There are of course other potential benefits that an utterance/alternative may afford a speaker, which RA provides for. As with all other potential costs and benefits thus far, determining what those potential benefits might be in the eyes of the speaker depends importantly on one’s prior beliefs about the speaker and the broader context, coupled with whatever evidence the actual utterance provides. In brief, these principles state that utterances are evaluated not only according to their own character but also according to what sets them apart from alternatives that appear to offer a favorable mix of costs and benefits in context. Before putting the principles to work, a few additional notes are in order. First, these principles are deeply context sensitive. As RA acknowledges, which alternatives are given consideration is a function of who is doing the considering, who the speaker is, and other aspects of the context. A particular form may accord with one speaker’s repertoire and not another’s (making it considerably more marked for the latter individual); the social norms in force change from one situation to the next; a hearer’s assessment of the benefits of a potential alternative utterance depends on that hearer’s beliefs about the speaker’s goals; and so on. Secondly, whether and which alternatives are considered depends importantly on the nature of the utterance itself. Example (2a), for example, states that the relevance of an alternative depends not simply upon the markedness of that alternative in some absolute sense, but rather upon how marked it is relative to the observed utterance. Hence, the more marked an utterance is, the more relevant a given alternative will be, ceteris paribus. This accords with pragmatic principles like Horn’s (1984) division of pragmatic labor, whereby marked forms tend to be ascribed special significance, and with linguistic research concerning salience (e.g., Podesva 2011; Jaeger & Weatherholtz 2016; Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017). For Podesva (2011), for instance, social meaning is especially likely to attach to forms that are particularly salient, which in his framework is bound up with markedness. Finally, it bears repeating that costs and benefits can come in many forms and from many sources – whether from an utterance’s semantic or indexical character, its social acceptability, its production and processing requirements, or what have you. Inferences may thus be derived on the basis of entailments, sociohistorical and ideological associations, iconicity, or any mix thereof.

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Moreover, as the remainder of this chapter will show, the inferences are not relegated to any one dimension of meaning; they may be social, descriptive, or both. With these points in mind, let’s now put these principles to work, beginning with the case of McCain’s that one. 5.4

The Principles at Work: That One

I begin with the following quote from a 2008 presidential debate between Senator John McCain and then Senator Barack Obama. (4)

SEN. MCCAIN: It was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate – loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies [. . .] You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one [gesturing to Obama]. You know who voted against it? Me.

McCain’s use of that one drew extensive negative press, being called, for instance, a ‘slightly dehumanizing phrase’ (Walls 2008). Of course, that one doesn’t entail that the speaker views the referent as contemptible or subhuman, as the exchange in (5) illustrates. (5)

[Two adults looking adoringly at newborns through the window of a hospital nursery] A: Which one is yours? B: [smiling] That one there on the far left is my Annie.

Here, (5) is perfectly compatible with the sense that speaker B admires Annie. Why, then, would McCain’s use of that one be interpreted as dehumanizing? FS and RA both point to a central role for context in interpretation, so let’s consider some key aspects of the context of McCain’s utterance. In practice, the set of potentially relevant contextual features is large and varies from one hearer to the next, but I take the following to be among the most salient, especially as regards the interpretations of interest. For one, the discourse event was a debate, providing for an oppositional tone. Second, the broader discourse surrounding the event repeatedly emphasized Obama as young, relatively new to federal politics, and perhaps above all African American. McCain stood in contrast as an older, white, long-time politician. Thus the grounds for distinction and othering were already laid. As regards language more specifically, there are relatively narrow and well-established conventions for referring to one’s opponent in a presidential debate, including proper names (typically with titles), gendered pronouns, and perhaps a few stock expressions like my opponent.

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Now to the utterance itself. McCain said, ‘that one’, referring to Obama. This utterance is rather marked as regards context-specific social norms, as the immediately preceding discussion suggests. It is also formally marked relative to pronouns like him, being more prolix. Given the marked status of that one, part (a) of RA predicts that alternatives are likely to be relevant to its interpretation. The next question is which particular alternatives are likely to be relevant. RA predicts that it will be those alternatives that are relatively unmarked or appear to offer benefits to the speaker – either based on sharing benefits with the utterance itself or affording additional benefits in its own right. It’s clear that one of McCain’s central goals in saying, ‘that one’ was to refer to Obama. Presumably, then, any relevant alternative ought to be well equipped to do the same. By RA (a), relatively unmarked alternatives, too, ought to be particularly relevant. (Mister/Senator) Obama, him, and my opponent all score well on both considerations – they are expected and relatively concise, and they refer as desired in the context. As for shared benefits, we might consider alternatives that also involve a demonstrative, on the hypothesis that the speaker deliberately included a demonstrative form because of some benefit it offers. This might bring forms like that guy, this one, or this guy – all similar to the observed utterance in terms of markedness and all affording whatever benefits a demonstrative buys the speaker – into the mix. These considerations yield the hypothetical set of alternatives in (6). (6)

(Mister/Senator) Obama, him, my opponent, that guy, this one, this guy

To be sure, not all of these alternatives would be deemed equally relevant by every interpreter, and there may be other important alternatives worth considering. Nor have we said anything about the phonetic and prosodic character of McCain’s utterance and alternatives thereto. Nevertheless, this is a principled set of alternatives, and, as I will now show, one that explains the widely circulated reactions that the utterance received. Returning to the FS principle, the next step is to consider what sets the observed utterance apart from the alternatives. First, all but one of the alternatives (namely, this one) involves an expression that either by its semantic entailments or by strong associations with prior uses suggests that the referent is human (or is being anthropomorphized). Senators, misters, hims, and guys are generally people. Such is clearly not the case for the highly nonspecific phrase that one. Thus, it may well seem that McCain has gone out of his way to use a form that is silent on Obama’s personhood, especially in light of the availability of less marked forms like him. Hence we have commentators calling the phrase ‘slightly dehumanizing’. Second, unlike all of the other alternatives but that guy, McCain’s phrase makes use of the demonstrative that. A distinguishing characteristic of that is

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that, given its relation to the proximal demonstrative this, it suggests that the relevant referent is nontrivially distant from the speaker. Thus, McCain’s marked phrase is not only silent on Obama’s personhood, but also depicts Obama as being distant from McCain. It is a short ideological step, especially in the light of the broader context of utterance, from indicating distance to depicting the referent as Other. Such are the basic dynamics. We observe an utterance and, particularly if the utterance is marked, we may ask what it is about that utterance that favorably sets it apart from other seemingly viable alternatives in the eyes of the speaker and draw inferences accordingly. In this case, two prominent distinguishing characteristics of McCain’s utterance are the absence of expressions associated with personhood and the inclusion of the ‘distal’ demonstrative that. This isn’t to say that McCain intended the interpretations his utterance received. Rather, the point here is that we have a principled explanation for why those interpretations were what they were. Of course, because the principles are relativized to the individual hearer, they allow for variation in interpretation across hearers insofar as hearers have different ideologies, beliefs, and expectations. Depending on other aspects of one’s assessment of the situation, one might conclude, for instance, that McCain’s use of a demonstrative sprang not from a view of Obama as ‘Other’ but from a desire to set up a sharp contrast between himself and his opponent, given demonstratives’ frequent role in statements of differentiation (Roberts 2002). Indeed, some commentators suggested that the phrase was not indicative of an othering view, as in the following from the Washington Post: ‘It was probably an offhand (read: unintentional) comment from McCain.’6 Thus, these principles make predictions concerning likely interpretations, while still leaving room for inter-interpreter differences. 5.5

The Link to Variation

These same basic dynamics can be used to explain a range of social meanings and effects associated with various terms of reference. Consider for example the use of your son to refer to one’s own child (as said to the child’s other parent). In this case, the form is silent as to the speaker’s relation to the child and, given the availability of a more presuppositionally informative alternative like our son, your son said in such a context licenses an inference that the speaker wishes to express distance from the relevant child. Using the combined with a plural NP (a the-plural) to refer to all or typical members of a group of individuals presents a similar, if slightly more complicated, case. As I have discussed elsewhere (Acton 2014, 2019), such uses tend to depict the relevant individuals as a monolith of which the speaker is not

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a part, and to an extent that using a bare plural does not. The contrast in (7) illustrates. (7a) generally suggests that the speaker is not an American, whereas (7b) is less definitive on the matter. The former is also more likely to depict Americans as a bloc. (7)

a. The Americans love cars. b. Americans love cars. (Acton 2019: ex.1)

In Acton (2014, 2019) I show how these effects can be derived from important differences in the form and semantics of these expressions in the light of the aforementioned sociopragmatic principles. The basic picture is as follows. The-plurals, by their very semantics, pick out particular, object-level individuals as a collective – namely, the collection of all individuals bearing the relevant property in the relevant situation (see, e.g., Sharvy 1980; Abbott 2008). Bare plurals (BPs), in contrast, do not pick out determinate collections of individuals (see, e.g., Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004, 2013). The-plurals are also more prolix and hence more formally marked than BPs, always being one word longer. Thus, the use of a the-plural like the Americans where the speaker might just as well have used a BP like Americans (hence incurring a lesser cost) may well trigger the inference that the speaker is deliberately presenting the relevant group as a bloc. Moreover, the-plurals are closer to first-person forms like we Americans in terms of markedness and potential shared benefits than BPs are, given their formal similarity and the fact that both are definites. Thus, by RA, first-person forms like we Americans are more likely to play a role in the interpretation of a the-plural than in that of a BP, ceteris paribus. And, crucially, first-person forms include the speaker in their semantics, so that the use of a the-plural (which is silent on the matter) where a first-person form is available may well suggest that the speaker is not a member of the relevant group, wishes to downplay their membership, or wishes to highlight their nonmembership.7 Again we see a picture whereby utterances and their parts have meaning not only in virtue of what they entail or are associated with, but also in virtue of what sets them apart from ostensibly viable alternatives. In the cases discussed thus far, the crucial features of the expressions of interest trace back to their semantics – the fact that that one is silent on the personhood of its referent and involves the ‘distal’ demonstrative that; and the fact that the-plurals pick out object-level collectives and are silent as regards speaker membership. From these semantic features, thrown into relief by the availability of relevant alternatives, social meanings are born. Similar dynamics can be found in Davis and Potts (2010) and Acton and Potts’ (2014) research on demonstratives, Glass’s (2015) research on modals, and Beltrama and Staum Casasanto’s (2017) research on intensifiers.

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As I will discuss momentarily, the principles developed in Section 5.3.3 apply not only to semantic meaning, as in the cases examined thus far, but to indexical and iconic meanings as well. First, however, I will show that, as expected from a third-wave perspective, the social meanings of the-plurals are bound up with patterns of variation in use. 5.5.1

Social Meaning Begets Variation, and Vice Versa

The difference in social meaning between the-plurals and BPs leads to a principled hypothesis about the distribution of the two forms: ceteris paribus, speakers should have a higher ratio of the-plurals to BPs in talking about groups of which they are not a part or wish to express distance from than in talking about groups of which they are a part or wish to express an affinity for. Indeed, Acton (2019) shows that this prediction is robustly exemplified in the speech of members of the US House of Representatives – on average, representatives use the-plurals over BPs far more in talking about their opposing party than in talking about their own. Table 5.1 presents a high-level summary of this analysis, based on the full proceedings of the House from 1993 to 2012 (Djalali 2013). Column ‘Dem the-%’ reports, for each party, the number of tokens of the Democrats divided by the sum of the number of tokens of the Democrats and the number of tokens of BP Democrats (and similarly for ‘Rep the-%’). Acton (2019) also identifies other quantitative patterns that are clearly consistent with the social meaning of the-plurals and their BP counterparts. For instance, the analysis shows that representatives, regardless of party affiliation, opt for BPs over the-plurals far more often in statements encouraging cooperation between the two parties. This is unsurprising given that the-plurals deliver the individuals of interest as a bloc, making them less appropriate where the goal is to foster intermingling and collaboration between groups. Furthermore, as compared to representatives in the House, pundits on the US political talk show The McLaughlin Group use the-plurals at higher rates in talking about both of the two parties, consistent with the pundits’ status as outside observers. Moreover, whereas House representatives’ ratio of the-

Table 5.1 Aggregate the-% for US House Representatives by party (Acton 2019: table 1). Speaker Party

Dem the-%

Rep the-%

Dem N

Rep N

Democratic Republican

30.4% 53.3%

54.4% 26.1%

11,352 13,007

18,992 11,042

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Table 5.2 Comparison of aggregate the-% in the House Proceedings and McLaughlin Group, organized by speaker’s political leaning (Acton 2019: table 4). Political Leaning

Corpus

Dem the-%

Rep the-%

Differential (abs value)

Republican

House Proceedings McLaughlin Group Difference House Proceedings McLaughlin Group Difference

53.3% 62.3% −9.0% 30.4% 55.4% −25.0%

26.1% 50.3% −24.2% 54.4% 60.5% −6.1%

27.2% 12.0% 15.2% 24.0% 5.1% 18.9%

Democratic

plurals to BPs is hugely dependent on whether they are talking about their opposing party or their own, the effect is not as stark among the pundits. This, too, accords with an important contextual difference between the two corpora: the pundits face greater pressure to display journalistic objectivity (see Acton 2019 for examples and discussion). The quantitative details of these aggregate differences are displayed in Table 5.2. In this way, differences in social meaning rooted in semantic content engender differences in distribution. Moreover, as a given the-plural is repeatedly employed in contexts suggesting distance between the speaker and the relevant group, associations are formed, shifting the semiotic value of the form (by the principle discussed in Section 5.2.4) which feeds back into patterns of use, and so on. Thus, though in this case rooted in semantics, the relation between differences in meaning and differences in distribution is just as it is in more familiar sociophonetic cases in the third-wave literature. One need not zoom out very far, then, to see that the dynamics are the same whether the source of social meaning lies in semantics or elsewhere. 5.5.2

Applying the Principles to Meanings Rooted in Indexicality and Iconicity

The principles outlined above apply just as well to cases where the source of the meaning of interest is not semantic but sociohistorical or iconic. The dynamics clearly hold in Labov’s (1963) Martha’s Vineyard study, for instance, in which certain inhabitants of the island community were centralizing the nucleus of (ay) at considerable rates, thereby diverging from not only mainland speech norms but also from local norms on the island itself, where centralized (ay) had previously been in decline. For many of its users, then, centralized (ay) was a rather marked variant, with both the local speech patterns of the previous generation and at least certain kinds of prestige working against it. In keeping

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with the FS and RA principles, marked variants raise questions: Why use a marked form when there is an ostensibly less costly form available? Again, under the presumption of basic speaker rationality, the marked form must offer some benefit that an unmarked form would not in the eyes of the speaker. What makes centralized (ay) distinctive relative to the lower variant? Labov suggests that the relevant distinguishing feature of this form was its association with a time when the Vineyard was more autonomous and the fishing industry throve. Thus, in much the same way that saying ‘the Americans’ depicts Americans as a collective (unlike saying ‘Americans’) and does not entail that the speaker is an American (unlike saying ‘we Americans’) – thereby opening the door to inferences about the speaker’s view of and relation to Americans – using a centralized variant of (ay) invokes associations with a bygone era of autonomy on the island (unlike using a lower variant) – opening the door to inferences about the speaker’s stance toward and embodiment of the ideals and character traits associated with that time and place. In the case of (ay), the social meaning is born of associations and ideology rather than semantics, but the core dynamics are the same. As Eckert (2008, 2012) and others point out, iconicity can also be a source of social meaning. In keeping with RA, a markedly fortis realization of a variable – say, a sentence-final /t/ release (e.g., Benor 2001) – being unusual and effortful and hence, in a sense, costly, is likely to raise the question of what benefit it affords over a less marked alternative variant. One salient distinguishing feature of fortis variants is that, unlike less strongly articulated variants, they are iconically linked to ‘emphasis or force’ (Eckert 2012: 97). On encountering a fortis variant, then, one might reasonably hypothesize that the speaker is invoking this iconic link in an attempt to signal something related to force like ‘focus, power, or even anger’ (Eckert 2012: 97). The precise character of the inference will depend on other features of the context, but the iconic nature of the variant constrains the interpretation in principled way nonetheless. (It would be quite surprising to find, for instance, a fortis variant interpreted as indexing languor.) Thus, an inference to social meaning may have its source in semantics, sociohistorically based indexicality, iconicity, or, presumably, any mix thereof. 5.5.3

On Reasoning and Indexicalization

The final matter I wish to discuss before concluding concerns when and how these inferences happen. In the preceding sections, I have tried to be explicit about how the inferences of interest can be understood as deriving from principles of (bounded) rationality. I hope to have been clear, however, that I do not presume that these inferences take place consciously. As far as I’m concerned, in some cases they may, and in others they may not (Babel 2016; Eckert 2016).

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This raises a related point, referenced briefly in the discussion of the social meaning of the-plurals. As observed throughout the third-wave literature and as spelled out in the principle in Section 5.2.4, language users make associations between linguistic units and features of the contexts in which they occur, including the interpretations they receive. Thus, what may begin as an inference that depends crucially upon comparing an observed variant to related alternatives may at some latter stage become so deeply indexically associated with the relevant meaning that there is no need for even unconscious comparison to alternatives in real time.8 Such may be the case, for instance, for certain the-plurals like the gays and the blacks, which immediately strike me as deeply derogatory (Acton 2014, 2019). Nonetheless, as I hope to have made clear, even in those cases the FS and RA principles help explain how the inferences (automatic though they may be) got off the ground and are what they are. That is, though perhaps thoroughly indexicalized at present, the origin of such meanings can be reconstructed in a principled way by examining what sets the relevant linguistic unit apart from related alternatives in the light of the broader ideological and sociohistorical context in which they occur. 5.6

Looking Ahead

We have now seen several cases of how context, associations, and entailments conspire with general sociopragmatic principles to engender social meanings, whether the origins of such meanings are semantic, indexical, or iconic. By way of closing, I wish to demonstrate the deep generality of the sociopragmatic principles discussed herein by showing that they can engender not only social meanings (for example, meanings concerning interlocutors’ traits and stances) but also meanings that directly enrich the descriptive (referential) content of an utterance itself – that is, meanings that further specify the state/event description entailed by the semantics of the utterance. Suppose we have a close friend named Pat, and we know that Pat is a highly educated, rather fastidious, upper-middle-class individual and a scarce user of the –in’ variant of (ING). We ask about Pat’s weekend plans and Pat replies as in (8). (8)

I’m goin’ fishin’!

The use of the –in’ form is marked for Pat, hence raising the question of why Pat didn’t use what for Pat is a less marked form, namely –ing. The question, then, is what about –in’ might make it advantageous vis-à-vis –ing in this context. As reported in Campbell-Kibler (2007) and schematized in Eckert (2008), the –in’ form indexes things like lack of education, relaxedness, easygoingness,

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inarticulateness, and unpretentiousness. We know Pat well, and we know what Pat’s enduring qualities are. It is therefore unlikely that we will infer from (8) that Pat is generally easygoing or inarticulate or uneducated, and it is rather unlikely that Pat would try to communicate as much with (8). Nonetheless, insofar as we maintain the presumption that speakers generally don’t use what for them is a marked form for no reason, we must conclude that Pat used –in’ for a purpose, even if not to claim the traits associated with –in’ as enduring personal qualities. For instance, a particular phonetic realization of a given expression can in principle be used to characterize not only the speaker but also the referent of the expression itself. Hence, Pat’s invocation of the indexical field of –in’ might have been intended to say something about fishing in general, perhaps that it is an unsophisticated pastime. Another reasonable motivation for Pat to use –in’ would be to signal that some subset of the qualities indexed by –in’ will characterize the particular fishing event being described or Pat’s anticipated behavior in that event. We might hypothesize, for instance, that Pat intends to communicate that the fishing event entailed by the semantics of (8) will be an informal and carefree affair. In this case, then, Pat’s use of the marked form associated with relaxedness and easygoingness leads to an inference that enriches the description of the event being talked about. Thus, just as descriptive, semantic meaning can feed into inferences concerning social meaning – as in the case of that one and the Americans – so too, can socioindexical meaning feed into inferences concerning descriptive content. Eckert’s pioneering work at the intersection of meaning and variation has driven the third wave of variation research to a full swell, and cleared a way for seeing the intimate connections between third-wave variationism and pragmatic research. Propelled by this wave, the perspective developed herein leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and within multiple dimensions of meaning – social or descriptive; inferred or entailed; symbolic, indexical, or iconic; and so on. The sociophonetic character of a single phone may enrich an event description, just as the semantic character of a determiner may tell us something about the speaker’s view of the social landscape. No two distinct utterances, no matter how similar and no matter the source of their difference, have identical semiotic potential. And it is now more clear than ever that our understanding of meaning cannot be divorced from our understanding of variation and the social world. notes 1. Due to space constraints, I will limit my discussion of these principles here: for related formulations and more discussion of their motivation, see Acton (2014, 2019).

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2. As Lauren Hall-Lew (p.c.) notes, the discussion of ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ invokes Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic capital. I intend for the terms cost and benefit to encompass the kinds of consideration discussed by Bourdieu (e.g., prestige associated with particular language varieties), but to include other kinds of cost and benefit as well. 3. I thank a reviewer for suggesting that I address this important case. 4. Ceteris paribus, and assuming that the hearer thinks that the difference between u and α is great enough that it might yield nontrivial differences in the profile of costs and benefits. 5. It is worth noting that all of these costs can also be construed as benefits of a sort in certain contexts. If my goal is to be transgressive, for instance, then violating social norms promises benefits for me. But, crucially, even in those circumstances I still incur some cost – if not, my action would carry no value as a transgressive act. 6. Cillizza, Chris. The Nashville Skyline Debate: First thoughts. Washington Post (online). 7 October 2008. Last accessed 12 July 2014. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/ eye-on-2008/the-nashville-skyline-debate-f.html. 7. RA also allows for instances where a BP might signal speaker-nonmembership – for instance, after a first mention where a bare pronoun like we is available. But RA also rightly predicts that the-plurals are at least as likely to signal speaker nonmembership in such contexts, given that the-plurals are more marked and more semantically similar to first-person forms. 8. See also Grice (1975: 58) on the possibility of conversational implicatures becoming conventionalized.

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Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Burnett, Heather. 2017. Sociolinguistic interaction and identity construction: The view from game-theoretic pragmatics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 21(2), 238–71. Cameron, Richard, and Scott Schwenter. 2013. Pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron, and C. Lucas (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 464–83. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2007. Accent, (ing), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82(1), 32–64. Cheshire, Jenny. 2005. Syntactic variation and beyond: Gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4), 479–508. Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998. Reference to kinds across languages. Natural Language Semantics 6, 339–405. Davis, Christopher, and Christopher Potts. 2010. Affective demonstratives and the division of pragmatic labor. In M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager, and K. Schulz (eds.), Logic, Language, and Meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, DE: Springer, 42–52. Dayal, Vaneeta. 2004. Number marking and (in)definiteness in kind terms. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(4), 393–450. Dayal, Vaneeta. 2013. On the existential force of bare plurals across languages. In I. Caponigro and C. Cecchetto (eds.), From Grammar to Meaning: The Spontaneous Logicality of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 49–80. Djalali, Alex J. 2013. House Proceedings Corpus. https://github.com/alexdjalali/hpc. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), 453–76. Eckert, Penelope. 2011. The Future of Variation Studies. Plenary talk given at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 40. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 87–100. Eckert, Penelope. 2016. Variation, meaning and social change. In N. M. Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 66–85. Glass, Lelia. 2015. Strong necessity modals: Four socio-pragmatic corpus studies. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2), 77–88. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 43–58. Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 11–42. Horn, Laurence R. 2004. Implicature. In L. R. Horn and G. Ward Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 3–28. Horn, Laurence R., and Gregory Ward (eds.). 2004. Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Jaeger, T. Florian, and Kodi Weatherholtz. 2016. What the heck is salience? How predictive language processing contributes to sociolinguistic perception. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 1115.

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The Cognitive Structure behind Indexicality: Correlations in Tasks Linking /s/ Variation and Masculinity Kathryn Campbell-Kibler

The third wave of sociolinguistic variation studies has been primarily concerned with linguistic variation’s role in the construction of the social world. One of Eckert’s key contributions to shaping the field (e.g., Eckert 2008) has been her role in adapting from linguistic anthropology the notion of indexicality (Silverstein 1976; Ochs 1992), a semiotic relationship whereby linguistic features are linked to contextually relevant social constructs. Research has documented correlations between the use of such features and their indexical meanings in spontaneous interaction and interviews (e.g., Labov 1966; Eckert 2000), the influence of linguistic features on social perception tasks (for an overview, see Campbell-Kibler 2011) and the emergence and change of indexical links over historical time (e.g., Zhang 2005; Agha 2007). Indexical meanings have also been shown to influence language processing (Strand 1999), as part of a more general set of effects showing the influence of patterns of contextual use on speech perception (Johnson 2006; Docherty & Foulkes 2014). While we have made progress in understanding indexicality at the cultural and interactional levels (e.g., Silverstein 1976, 2003; Ochs 1992; Eckert 2000), we know little about the cognitive processes through which individuals create and use sociolinguistic indexical systems. Labov (1966, 1993) has argued for a specialized processor, named the sociolinguistic monitor, which helps manage the perception and production of socially significant linguistic forms (see also Levon & Fox 2014; Wagner & Hesson 2014). Campbell-Kibler (2016) has argued that a distinct sociolinguistic processor is unnecessary and that existing models of social cognition and linguistic processing can be adapted to account for sociolinguistic behavior. One such adaptation is a model of the mental representation of indexical meaning. Cognitive links between linguistic forms and nonlinguistic concepts are needed to account for multiple distinct sociolinguistic behaviors, but it is not clear whether different behaviors depend on the same links or whether distinct links between the same linguistic/nonlinguistic pairs are found across tasks. 127

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The current study offers a first step to answering this question, taking as an example the indexical relationship between variation in /s/ production and masculinity. Three key sociolinguistic effects are replicated and the correlations between them are examined. These effects are: 1. The influence of speaker identity (gender) on /s/ production (Sachs et al. 1973; Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2015; Zimman 2016) 2. The influence of linguistic forms (/s/ variants) on social perceptions (masculinity judgments) in a speaker evaluation task (Levon 2007; CampbellKibler 2011; Pharao et al. 2014) 3. The influence of social information (masculinity) on the perception of linguistic forms (placement of the /s/-/ʃ/ phoneme boundary) (Strand 1999) The conceptual question is to what degree the effects in question, each of which depends on connecting the same linguistic forms to the same social constructs, are dependent on a common cognitive structure. Since it is more parsimonious to posit a single link used in all three phenomena, I will refer to this approach as Model 1. Model 1 proposes a single association between the acoustic character of /s/ and masculinity, used in all three tasks, which can be weaker or stronger across individuals (and, presumably, across situations or other factors not investigated here). In this view, there will be some individuals who have, for whatever reason, done a particularly thorough job associating /s/ variation to gender. These speakers should show large effects across all three of these tasks, due to the strength of their /s/-gender link, contrasting with other speakers who formed weaker links or none and who therefore show moderate, small, or even reversed effects on all three tasks. If this model is correct, we should see a correlation in effect size across the tasks that is independent from other influencing factors such as orientation to masculinity or sociolinguistic sensitivity. In contrast, Model 2 proposes that instead of a single /s/-gender link used for linguistic perception, social perception, and speech production, there are multiple links, each created and used by distinct, though possibly interacting, systems. This would mean that the speech perception system learns that speakers with particular social qualities are likely to produce their /s/ tokens in a particular region of acoustic space. Independently, the social perception system learns that /s/ tokens with particular acoustic characteristics are to be interpreted as indexing particular social qualities. Because Model 2 depends on distinct links, it allows (but does not require) speakers to show differing behavior across tasks. For example, a speaker who pays little attention to masculinity might never develop an awareness of /s/ variation in their social perception system, but might nonetheless have learned that speakers with specific characteristics commonly deemed masculine (e.g., having a beard, following sports) will pronounce /s/ in the mid-to-back range. Such a speaker

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would show a strong effect of phonemic adjustment, but little to no effect on a speaker evaluation task. Where Model 1 strongly constrains the possibilities by positing a close relationship between all indexical behaviors, Model 2 is essentially a family of models, including all configurations which do not depend on a single indexical cognitive link. The systems may inform each other at specific points during processing, or behaviors may be brought closer together through system-external factors, such as the perceivers’ wider gender ideologies or gendered experiences. For example, we might imagine a speaker who polices masculinity-related practices rigorously, attending closely to the masculinityrelated aspects of their own and others’ identities. Such a speaker might learn and retain /s/ quality as a valuable masculinity-related cue for their social perception, creating a stronger link than others due to their heightened attention to the topic of masculinity. That attention to masculinity might also lead their social perception systems to provide their speech perception system with frequent and clear information about the masculinity-related stylistic cues for speakers they hear, allowing the speech perception system to develop highly stable models for adjusting linguistically to masculinity-related social information for all acoustic features, including those of /s/. Our correlation-based approach can thus offer evidence against Model 1, if no correlations are observed, but will be unable to reject Model 2, given that correlations may emerge under both models. A priori, Model 2 is perhaps more plausible than Model 1, as previous work suggests slippage across sociolinguistic production and perception tasks (e.g., Hay et al. 2017). It is important to note at this point that both models as presented elide a great deal of complexity, particularly with respect to the internal structure of the constructs /s/ production and ‘masculinity’ or ‘gender’. Sibilants have multiple acoustic dimensions and articulatory factors which contribute to them, which may be available for distinct social meanings. Likewise, ‘masculinity’ is an inadequate cover term for a host of categories and traits which play a role in our conceptualizations of and beliefs about ourselves and people we interact with. Based on the previous literature, however, we hypothesize that peak frequency of /s/ and the term masculine itself are reasonable places to begin looking at the particular questions of interest here, while bearing in mind that this simplification will necessarily shape any conclusions drawn. The current study examines pairwise correlations between individuals’ effect sizes in the three tasks: a word list eliciting /s/ productions, speaker evaluation of masculinity of stimuli with fronted and mid /s/, and a forced choice between sod and shod for two speakers high and low in perceived masculinity. Participants also answered questions as to their gender identity, age, race/ethnicity, and regional background and completed the Male Role Attitudes Scale (MRAS), which assesses commitment to traditional US

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norms of masculinity (Pleck et al. 1993; Levon 2014). The results confirm the predicted patterns in each individual task, but show no evidence for correlation across the tasks, suggesting that either the three sociolinguistic behaviors draw on different systems or that the experimental tasks need to be significantly more nuanced to capture their common source. 6.1

Cognitive Underpinnings of the Indexical Link

Indexical links are developed, maintained, and changed through a diverse set of mutually reinforcing practices. Indexical practices include explicit metalinguistic commentary and a wide variety of metapragmatic acts which mark forms as belonging to specific meaningful registers (Agha 2007). They also include socially meaningful speech production, both the indexical invocation of contextual features already acknowledged as present in the discourse and those introducing new contextual elements (termed by Silverstein 1976, 2003, as presupposing and creative, respectively). Finally, they include perceptual processes, including both sociolinguistic perception, though which language cues contribute to the impressions speakers form of each other (Giles & Billings 2004; Campbell-Kibler 2010), and speech perception, which may be influenced by social information (Strand 1999; Hay et al. 2006; Johnson 2006) as well as other extralinguistic factors (Hay et al. 2017). Together, these processes create and maintain indexical links, which speakers perceive as natural reflections of the world, rather than changeable social constructs (Irvine & Gal 2000). The emerging field of sociolinguistic cognition explores the cognitive structures that underlie these sociolinguistic practices. Early work in variation posited a relatively deliberative structure of sociolinguistic evaluation which offered sociolinguistic judgments of a speaker’s own speech and that of others, and corrected speech prior to utterance (Labov 1966). This structure was eventually described as the sociolinguistic monitor (Labov 1993; Labov et al. 2011), whose characteristics have been investigated in a small literature (Levon & Fox 2014; Wagner & Hesson 2014). Campbell-Kibler (2016) argued that instead of a distinct sociolinguistic processor, sociolinguistic cognition might be better modeled by including sociolinguistic behavior in the purview of social and linguistic processing systems already posited, themselves made up of multiple, overlapping systems (Chandrasekaran et al. 2014). Following Johnson (2006), Docherty and Foulkes (2014), and others, Campbell-Kibler (2016) hypothesized implicit links between the linguistic grammar on the one hand and some or all of the systems responsible for social cognition on the other. The current chapter probes further the nature of these links, by asking whether distinct indexical behaviors appear to draw on the same underlying structures.

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While explicit metalinguistic commentary is an important ingredient in indexical practice, there is a well-established disconnect between explicitly reportable beliefs and other indexical practices. As in many other domains, what people say does not always correspond to what they do. Kristiansen (2009) observed that Danish youth explicitly report preferring their local varieties of Danish, but, when evaluating speakers, consistently give more positive ratings to speakers of the ‘modern Copenhagen’ variety over their local varieties. Similarly, Labov (1966) famously reported meeting speakers who not only disparaged stigmatized forms they themselves used, but explicitly denied their own use. Deliberative or verbally reportable phenomena seem to operate distinctly from less-deliberative processes. The relationships between less deliberative indexical practices are not as well understood. A small body of work has explored the influence on speech production and speech processing of situational cues, including speaker social characteristics. This literature suggests that while the production and processing must show some connection to one another, they also show signs of disconnect, where the same cues impact production and/or perception in different ways. For example, Hay et al. (2017) found that speakers sitting in a quiet parked car exhibited more tendencies toward Lombard speech than those recorded in a similarly quiet lab setting, while their perception behavior did not show a similarly clear effect. Walker (2014) found second-dialect effects in both production and perception among US and UK immigrants living in each other’s countries or interested in each other’s sports, but no correlations relating effect size in production to effect size in perception. This disconnect between production and perception in the influence of extralinguistic cues is one example of the broader problem of mapping the production-perception loop (see, e.g., MacDonald 2013; Pickering & Garrod 2013, 2014; Beddor 2015). This chapter explores the relationships across these practices, taking as a case study the relationship between /s/ production and masculinity. Three previously studied tasks are used to collect data from the same participants’ gendered speech production, sociolinguistic perception of masculinity, and adaptation of perceptual phonemic boundaries in response to social cues. The following section describes what is already known about each of these practices with respect to the /s/-gender link. 6.2

Key Indexical Practices

One of the core findings of variationist sociolinguistics has been that speakers display strong correlations between patterned use of linguistic forms and a host of social constructs, including social group affiliation at the broad demographic (Labov 1966) and the locally constructed levels (Eckert 2000); audience or referent (Hay et al. 1999); and topic (Rickford & McNair-Knox 1994), to name

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only a few. We take as our first speech task the meaningful production of speech sounds, in this case the relationship between a speaker’s /s/ production and their gender identity. The use of /s/ variation to mark gender identity has been documented repeatedly, but the picture that has emerged is complex. Multiple studies in English have found a gendered pattern whereby female speakers show higher peak frequencies and/or centers of gravity than male speakers (Sachs et al. 1973; Heffernan 2004; Fuchs & Toda 2010; Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2015). Further, male speakers with more hegemonically normative gender identities, gender histories, and sexualities have shown lower frequencies, overall, relative to those with more complex profiles (Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2015; Zimman 2017). That said, close examination of /s/ production has reflected the complexity of gendered identity as well. Early work on ‘gay speech’ suggested that some gay men’s styles differ systematically from speech heard as normatively heterosexual, including Linville (1998), who found that the gay men in her sample showed higher peak frequency and longer duration of /s/ than the straight men. More recently, Zimman (2010) found that both trans men and ‘gay sounding’ cis men showed higher center of gravity in their /s/ tokens than a selected group of ‘straight-sounding’ cis men. Zimman (2017) showed that some, but not all, transmasculine speakers showed a change in /s/ production over time during their first year on testosterone and that /s/ production shows, if anything, an inverse relationship to f0 among his speakers. In a study spanning multiple facets of identity, Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2015) found a complex interplay between gender, gender history, sexual orientation, and town/country orientation, all shaping the center of gravity of /s/ production in the same small town in California. Hazenberg (2016) likewise found that trans speakers and queer cis speakers show gendered patterns of /s/ production, but within the wider envelope defined by the straight cis speakers. Nor is this gendered complexity limited to LGBT speakers. Stuart-Smith (2007) found that class, age, and gender intersected in Glasgow, with workingclass adolescent girls patterning with the male talkers while middle-class women showed a distinct pattern. Similarly, Levon and Holmes-Elliott (2014) show that /s/ production on UK-based reality TV shows is influenced by interactions between gender of speaker, gender of interlocutors, and class. Taken together, this work shows two key themes: first that gender, and the role of /s/ variation in producing it, is complex and multidimensional, and second, that across populations, higher peak frequency and/or center-of-gravity production of /s/ are repeatedly associated with those identities which are more strongly tied to feminine and/or less strongly tied to masculine meanings, relative to lower frequency productions. Based on this literature, we predict that speakers with a stronger /s/-gender link will show increased gender difference in /s/ production, with women showing higher

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frequency values than men and nonbinary speakers in the middle. We also predict high variability within all three of these categories, reflecting complex meanings which will not be uncovered by the current methodology. The second speech task is that of sociolinguistic perception, the process through which a listener forms a social impression of a talker based on meaningful speech variation. Across multiple studies, acoustic characteristics of /s/ have been linked to perceptions of gender, particularly masculinity. Schwartz (1968) found that listeners were able to identify gender from /s/ and /ʃ/ tokens but were not above chance for /f/ or /θ/. As with production, the link between /s/ variation and the perception of gender goes beyond crosscategory effects, however. Alongside her production findings, Linville (1998) found that listeners judged men as more likely to be gay when they had higher /s/ peak frequency, while Campbell-Kibler (2011) found a strong effect of fronted /s/ on perceptions of both masculinity and sexual orientation in men’s speech. Pharao et al. (2014) and Pharao and Maegaard (2017) showed that this perceptual effect, like the production effects discussed previously, is complex and dependent on context: white-sounding Danish speech was made to sound less masculine by a fronted /s/ while ‘street style’-marked speech, associated with immigrant-descended male adolescents, was not. Levon (2014) found that /s/ quality influenced perceived competence in interaction with pitch manipulation, and perceived gender and sexuality in interaction with pitch and listener’s views on masculinity (using MRAS, see Section 6.3.5). Finally, we are concerned with speech perception, specifically the shifting of phonemic boundaries in response to perceived characteristics of the speaker. Strand (1999) originally documented that the pattern of response to a /s/-/ʃ/ continuum shifted when the same speech sounds were attributed to male and female talkers. As with the other two tasks, this effect is more complex than a binary male/female: the gendered differentiation is exaggerated for speakers judged by naive listeners as more ‘prototypically’ male and female. This effect has been replicated by Munson, Jefferson, and McDonald (2006), who found effects of voice gender and women’s sexual orientation and by Munson (2011), who found effects of both gender of voice and perceived vocal tract length. Each of these three tasks depends on a relationship between the acoustic characteristics of /s/ on the one hand and gender on the other. These relationships are similar in significant ways, in that they show broad effects across two broad gender categories, but also show effects of the complex reality of gender in practice. However, each effect emerges in a different context, with a distinct arrangement of social and linguistic constructs. In this study, we conduct a replication of each of the three effects across the same set of participants, to ask if the size of the effects correlate. If they do correlate, that offers tentative

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support for a model in which they share common cognitive machinery, while a lack of correlation would suggest a model relying on independent structures. 6.3

Methods

To investigate these questions, the study collected small amounts of data for multiple tasks across a large number of participants. Data was collected at ‘the Pod’, a linguistics lab embedded within a large and popular science museum in Columbus, Ohio (Wagner et al. 2015). Museum visitors were approached on the floor of the museum and invited to participate in a study about ‘how we perceive others based on how they talk’. Those who agreed were brought to a conference room with a flat screen TV mounted on one wall. Participants were run in the groups they had come to the museum with, typically family groups. The study as a whole was designed to take less than fifteen minutes, including the consenting process. Participants arranged themselves around a conference table, seated six to fourteen feet from the TV screen. Each participant was given a paper response sheet and consent was solicited and given verbally. All group members were invited into the room and given a response sheet if they wished, but only participants aged sixteen and over were included in the resulting data. The individual tasks were presented in the same order for all participants: word list, speaker evaluation task, forced-choice word identification, speaker evaluation of the forced-choice talkers, MRAS, and demographic questionnaire. Each task will be described in turn. 6.3.1

/s/ Production

Each participant was asked to read a list of five words, each featuring a token of /s/: toast, peace, sound, choice, and spin. A Zoom H2 recorder was passed around the table and each speaker read the same list and was able to hear the other participants in their session. The recordings were forced aligned and hand corrected. The peak Hz value for each /s/ token was calculated using the multitaper method developed by Reidy (2015). A participant-level metric was created by taking the median value for each speaker. 6.3.2

Speaker Evaluation

Four male talkers in their twenties were recorded reading short sentences featuring two tokens of /s/ each. Each talker was prompted to read the provided material in what they considered to be their normal voice, then again while producing noticeably fronted and backed /s/ tokens. The talkers were all linguists who were aware of the study’s goals. Two talkers were selected

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reading the two sentences ‘He could see the planet Venus’ and ‘They searched the bus’ as carrier sentences. In order to ensure similarity across the guises and to avoid one talker’s stimuli being more natural than the other, a single pair of /s/ tokens from a third talker were used for the manipulation. Two tokens of /s/, one front (Peak Hz 9018, COG 8818) and one mid, (Peak Hz 8189, COG 7855) were selected and manipulated to match the duration and intensity of each token as uttered in the carrier sentence, then spliced into the carrier sentences to create two guises for each sentence/talker combination. The acoustic values for the fronted token were in line with previous work for female talkers (e.g. Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2015; Reidy 2015), while the mid token, although lower than the fronted token, were also on the higher end of the range, falling between common values for straight cis men and those for straight cis women. Each participant rated four sentences, two from each talker. Half of the sessions heard talker 1 say the Venus sentence with the fronted /s/ and the bus sentence with mid /s/, and talker 2 say the Venus sentence with the mid /s/ and bus with the fronted /s/. The other half heard the remaining combinations. The four sentences were presented in random order for each session. For each sentence, listeners were asked to make a mark on a visual analogue scale, with endpoints labeled ‘not at all masculine’ and ‘very masculine’. The paper response sheets were scanned as multipage PDF files, then converted to individual JPEG files. A computer vision script was used to retrieve the ratings for each stimulus from the scanned image. When the script was unable to make a definitive measure (for example, due to multiple marks), a human user indicated the correct rating or that the rating was left blank. Ratings were calculated on a scale of 0–100. 6.3.3

Forced Word Choice

Video recordings were taken showing the head and shoulders of eight white male speakers of American English in their early twenties. For each speaker, a clear video clip of them saying the word sod was excerpted and the /s/ token was replaced with a different /s/-like token (step 3 from the continuum described in the following). These eight videos were pilot tested for perceived masculinity by forty-seven participants in the same lab and from the same participant population as the primary study, who rated each talker on a visual analogue scale presented and processed identically to that of the main study. Each rater’s responses were transformed into a z-score to minimize the effect of individual rater patterns on the results and the mean rating for each talker was calculated. The videos rated the most (0.59) and least (–0.56) masculine were selected for the main study.

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Clear /s/ and /ʃ/ tokens were excerpted from a third speaker recorded saying sod and shod respectively. A nine-step continuum between these two extremes was created using the TANDEM-STRAIGHT vocoder.1 The first and last steps in the continuum were discarded and the remaining steps spliced into the two videos previously described, creating a total of fourteen clips: seven from the high masculine talker and seven from the low masculine talker. Each participant was presented with a single token of steps 2 and 8 for each talker and two tokens of steps 3–7, for a total of twenty-four clips. The clips were presented in a random order for each session, with the two talkers mixed together. For each trial, participants circled either sod or shod on their response sheet to indicate which word they heard. Participants were asked to look at the screen as they heard the clip and the experimenter waited until all participants had marked their response sheet and returned their attention to the screen before proceeding to the next trial. Response sheets were scanned into PDF files and the word identification data was entered by hand into a spreadsheet. Responses were coded 0 for sod and 1 for shod and modeled using mixedeffects logistic regression (see below for factors tested). Descriptive analysis of the word identification response identified the middle three steps as the most relevant for establishing participant response. An individual word difference score was calculated by taking the difference in mean response for these central steps between the low masculine and high masculine talker. A larger word difference score indicated a stronger influence of the talker difference on the response. 6.3.4

Sod/Shod Speaker Evaluation

This task was a manipulation test, designed to verify that the main-task participants shared the pilot participants’ masculinity assessment of the two talkers. In addition, it provided for each participant a metric for how strongly they shared that assessment, as a possible predictor for the sod/shod effect itself. Participants were shown a single clip each of the two sod/shod talkers they had just been exposed to, using step 2 of the continuum, the most /s/-like token. They were asked to evaluate the masculinity of each talker on the same visual analogue scale used in the earlier speaker evaluation task, which was processed using the same computer vision script. 6.3.5

Male Role Attitudes Scale

A central concern in developing the methods for this study was the high likelihood of confounding factors. If a correlation is found across tasks, one possibility is that the tasks draw on the same learned associations (i.e. that Model 1 is correct). Another is that they are both strongly influenced by the

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same external factors. One likely external factor is how focused a given participant is on gender. Speakers with a high commitment to traditional gender, for example, might be expected to display high effects across both perceptual tasks, due to the stronger role that masculinity might play in forming their social percept of a talker and in the production task, as they seek to perform a strongly or traditionally gendered self. This could produce correlations across tasks that stem from sources other than the underlying sociolinguistic cognition structure. It is important, then, to include some information about the participants’ gendered ideologies. With such a complex construct, any metric easily applied to a broad population in a few minutes is necessarily going to flatten vital nuance. As a first pass, we turned to the Masculine Role Attitude Scale (MRAS) (Pleck et al. 1993; Levon 2014), which measures orientation to a widely circulated model of masculinity. The scale presented by Pleck et al. (1993) included the following items: Status • It is essential for a guy to get respect from others. • A man always deserves the respect of his wife and children. • I admire a guy who is totally sure of himself. Toughness • A guy will lose respect if he talks about his problems. • A young man should be physically tough, even if he’s not big. Anti-femininity • It bothers me when a guy acts like a girl. • I don’t think a husband should have to do housework. Sexuality • Men are always ready for sex. We chose to exclude the final item, given the presence of children in the research setting. Participants were asked to rate each item on a four-point scale ranging from ‘Disagree a lot’ to ‘Agree a lot’. Responses were entered into a spreadsheet and factor analysis was conducted on the responses to confirm the intended structure and reduce the dimensionality of the analysis. 6.3.6

Demographic Questions

Finally, participants completed a brief demographic questionnaire, which asked: • How old are you?

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• What gender do you identify as? (M, F, both/neither) • Have you been speaking English since you were less than five years old? (yes/no) • What race/ethnicity(ies) do you identify as? • Where have you lived? (Cities or states, provide ages) These responses were entered by hand into a spreadsheet for analysis. 6.3.7

Participants

There were 156 participants in the study, with speech data collected for 139. Of the total sample, 82 participants identified as female, 73 as male, and 1 as genderqueer; 133 identified as white, 6 as multiracial, 5 as Hispanic or Latino, 4 as Asian, 4 as Black, and 4 declined to give their race. Participants ranged in age from seventeen to seventy-two, with a mean of 27 and standard deviation of 10. The MRAS factor analysis yielded three factors with the following structure as in Table 6.1. This structure largely reflects the original MRAS design, particularly with respect to the first factor, here labeled Respect, which consists primarily of the first three items, all focused around confidence and respect. Also as predicted, the two Toughness items load together on the second factor. Unlike in the design, however, the second to last item ‘It bothers me when a guy acts like a girl’ does not load with the ‘housework’ item, but rather with the Toughness items. Regression analysis shows a gender effect for the first two factors, with women showing higher ratings for the first factor and men for the second. No gender difference was seen for factor 3 and no age effects on any of the factors. The third factor showed a highly restricted distribution. The primary item in

Table 6.1 Factor analysis of MRAS responses. Loadings range from 0 to 1, with higher loadings indicating stronger contribution from the item to this factor. Respect Respect from others Respect wife/children Totally sure of himself Talks about problems Physically tough Acts like a girl Housework

0.724 0.725 0.590 0.259 0.200

Toughness

Housework 0.105

0.115 0.107 0.677 0.602 0.541 0.119

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0.307 0.989

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factor 3, regarding husbands doing housework, had a response of 1 (‘Disagree a lot’) for 89 percent of participants. Accordingly, this factor was discarded for subsequent analyses and only the first two were included in the models. 6.3.8

Analysis

The data set for each individual task was analyzed to test for the predicted effect in each case, and to test for mediation by gender, age, and the first two MRAS factors. The effects of race and regional history were not tested, due to the imbalanced data and lack of predictions for these dimensions. All models were fit with a step-down procedure, with fixed effects discarded when nonsignificant at the 0.05 level. The resulting best-fit models were augmented with the participant scores for the other two tasks, to test for mutual influence. All models were attempted with a design-driven random effects structure as recommended by Barr et al. (2013), but were simplified as needed to allow model convergence. The specific models tested will be described in Section 6.4 as the results are discussed. 6.4

Results

The results show a consistent pattern across the different sociolinguistic effects investigated. Each individual task: /s/ production, speaker evaluation, and sod/ shod identification shows the effect documented in the previous literature. However, little to no evidence is seen supporting correlations across the effects. 6.4.1

Individual Effects

Based on previous results, we predicted that men would show lower peak Hz in their /s/ productions than women, that speakers would be rated as less masculine in their fronted /s/ than mid /s/ guises, and that the high masculinity talker would shift /s/-/ʃ/ boundaries toward the /s/ end of the continuum. No predictions regarding nonbinary participants were tested due to there only being one in the data set. Models for each of these predictions also tested the gender, age, and the first two MRAS factors of the participants as potential mediating factors. Participants’ own /s/ productions were modeled using a mixed-effects linear regression model testing the participants’ gender, age, and first two MRAS factors as fixed effects and random intercepts for word and for subject nested within session. Participants’ peak Hz was influenced by their gender identification (p < 0.001), as shown on the left of Figure 6.1, but by no other factors. To evaluate influences on the word identification task, mixed-effects logistic regression models were fit stepping down from a full model with trial, continuum

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step (as a polynomial factor with linear, quadratic, and cubic predictors), talker, perceived talker masculinity, and the interactions between the talker and talker masculinity with listener gender, age, and first two MRAS factors. A random effects grouping factor of participant was included, with an intercept and a random slope for talker and talker masculinity. A random effect for session, with participant nested within it, prevented the model from converging and was removed. Likelihood of a shod response was influenced by the step in the continuum, with more /ʃ/ tokens prompting more shod responses (p < 0.001). The quadratic and cubic predictors also yielded significant results (p < 0.001 in both cases). The right side of Figure 6.1 shows that these effects reflected the predicted categorical response curve, and further shows that responses to the lower masculine talker, as predicted, prompted more shod responses (p < 0.001). Independent of that, the listener’s masculinity rating of the talker also showed a main effect influencing shod responses (p = 0.03), although this last effect should be viewed with caution. While it is present in the best-fit model, it is fragile across models and appears to be driven by respondents who gave unusually low masculinity ratings for the low masculinity talker only. The MRAS Toughness factor also yielded a significant main effect (p = 0.006), such that those showing greater orientation to this component of masculinity were less likely to hear a shod from either talker. Orientation to Toughness did not mediate the effects of talker or perceived talker masculinity, however. To verify the predicted speaker evaluation response pattern, a mixed-effects linear regression model was fit with masculinity rating as dependent variable, (a)

(b)

Figure 6.1 /s/ production across gender of speaker (a) and phonemic boundary used for low masculinity vs high masculinity sod/shod talker (b).

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stepping down from a full model with stimulus speaker, sentence and /s/ form as predictors, as well as gender, age, and the first two factors of MRAS as main effects and in interaction with /s/ form. The random effects structure included subject nested inside session as a grouping factor as intercept. All effects remaining were included as random slopes and tested using model comparison. The two speaker evaluation tasks showed the predicted effects, with the fronted /s/ guises and the low masculine speaker rated as significantly less masculine than the mid /s/ and high masculine speaker respectively. Figure 6.2 shows these two effects. In the first speaker evaluation, responses were reliably predicted by talker (p < 0.001), sentence (p = 0.004), and /s/ form (p < 0.001). Evaluations of the perceived masculinity of the sod/shod talkers were predicted by which talker was being evaluated, in interaction with both the Respect (p = 0.008) and Toughness (p = 0.036) MRAS factors, such that the perceptual difference between the two speakers increases with listeners’ orientation to Respect and decreases with their orientation to Toughness. Taken together, the individual analyses show that all the predicted core effects were found: /s/ production was gendered, /s/ placement was tied to masculinity in sociolinguistic perception, and the /s/-/ʃ/ boundary was shifted across the two talkers in the predicted directions. The MRAS scores were found to be implicated in person perception and speech perception, but not to mediate the effects of interest.

(a)

(b)

Figure 6.2 Effects on perceived masculinity of /s/ placement (a) and low/high masculinity sod/shod talker (b).

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6.4.2

Cross-Task Correlations

In order to test the cross-task effects, the individual best-fit regression model for each of the three effects was taken as a base model for that effect. Additional factors were tested as potential improvements to that model, namely individuallevel metrics of each of the other two tasks, in interaction with the key predictor for the task being modeled. This meant that the model for speaker evaluation rating had listener peak Hz and sod/shod response pattern added as predictors in interaction with /s/ form. The model for participant /s/ production had mid/front /s/ evaluation difference and sod/shod response patterns added as predictors in interaction with gender and sod/shod response had listener peak Hz and mid/front /s/ evaluation difference added as predictors in interaction with sod/shod talker. Both MRAS factors were also tested as mediators for these effects. The results for the converse pairs (evaluation predicting peak Hz and peak Hz predicting evaluation) were the same, so only one of each pair is presented here. Across all such models, none of the tasks had any correlation with each other. Median peak Hz /s/ production did not mediate the influence of /s/ form on speaker evaluation, nor did it show a main effect influence on masculinity ratings, either alone or in interaction with gender. Figure 6.3 shows the relationship between the listener’s own /s/ production and their evaluation of talkers based on /s/, split for men and women. If these two effects were mediated by a similar structure, we would expect that, for the majority of speakers who orient more or less to conventional masculinity, men who show a larger difference in ratings between mid and front /s/ would also show lower peak Hz in their own /s/ productions. Thus we would either predict a general effect of that nature (as would be seen in the graph) or one mediated by MRAS score, particularly the Toughness factor, in which men lead. For female talkers, the prediction is not as clear, but one might hypothesize that female speakers with higher peak Hz might show a stronger connection to /s/ variation and gender in general (not just masculinity) and thus might be expected to show a larger mid vs front /s/ evaluation pattern. In both cases, no such effect emerges. Similarly, we might predict for all participants that a multipurpose /s/masculinity link would lead participants with a stronger link to both show larger speaker evaluation effects and a stronger shift in the sod/shod boundary, such that those with the largest sod/shod effect would show the largest difference between their evaluation of front vs mid /s/. Likewise, we would predict that male talkers with a larger sod/shod effect would either show lowered peak Hz across the board, or those with high MRAS (high commitment to traditional masculinity) scores would be more likely to do so. The left side of Figure 6.4 shows that no such relationship is visible between phoneme boundary shifting and speaker evaluation. The right side of Figure 6.4 appears to show an effect in

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(b)

Figure 6.3 Effects of listeners /s/ production on speaker evaluation effect for male (a) and female (b) participants.

(a)

(b)

Figure 6.4 Effect of sod/shod response pattern on speaker evaluations of /s/ placement (a) and sod/shod response pattern (b).

which sod/shod response correlates with gendered /s/ production, but this pattern is not supported in the model (p = 0.203). This last effect is more ambiguous evidence than the other null results. The other correlations tested are not supported by the models and show clear independence between measures in the visual representations, while this effect shows visual evidence of a trend, but

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no support for that trend being generalizable. Thus while the other tests offer some evidence against a correlation, the link between speech perception and speech production offers no clear evidence for or against a correlation. Taken together, the results indicate that while each of the three effects predicted by previous work were replicated with this data, they showed no correlation with one another, either directly or through the mediating factor of attitudes toward traditional gender roles. 6.5

Discussion

There are at least two possible explanations for the lack of correlation across the three speech tasks investigated. The first possibility is that there is a common link supporting all three tasks, but the constraints of the experimental tasks add enough noise to the measures to obscure the evidence for it. The second is that the core phenomena do not share an underlying common structure, but occur as a result of independent processes. Next steps toward understanding this problem require differentiating between these two explanations. If the lack of correlation is driven by constraints in the experimental task, one obvious potential cause is the simplistic treatment of gender in the current methods. Social structures like gender involve a complex interplay of beliefs and feelings, only some of which are easily articulated by speakers. For a given speaker, there may be a very close relationship between the realization of /s/ and a set of identifiable sociolinguistic styles (California Style Collective 1993; Coupland 2007). However, the relationship between those styles and the explicit task of rating speakers with respect to the word masculinity may be significantly weaker. Some support for this explanation may be seen in the fact that the strength of the sod/shod boundary shifting effect was only weakly predicted by the listener’s individual rating of the masculinity of the two talkers. If the shifting of the phonemic boundary is influenced directly by the perception of a quality succinctly described for all listeners as masculinity, the high masculinity speaker prompts expectations of backer /s/ tokens specifically because he is perceived as high in masculinity. As a result, the effect should be strongest for those listeners who perceive the biggest masculinity gap, giving a robust connection between the evaluation of talker’s masculinity and the placement of the /s/-/ʃ/ boundary. From a third-wave perspective, however, the small size of this effect is not all that surprising. Under this approach, the phonemic expectations are driven by the identification of each talker as exhibiting a particular style, styles which different listeners may associate differently to the label masculinity. There is no reason that variability in the strength of the link between style and /s/ boundary should correlate with variability in the perceived masculinity of the styles themselves, or with variability in the perceptual systems which place those two talkers into particular stylistic categories. As a result, the latter two may overwhelm the first.

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Put another way, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of /s/ includes a range of meanings implicated in gender, not all of which translate directly into changes in a unidirectional continuum labeled with the English word masculine. This issue undeniably contributes to the results we have seen, given previous work on sociolinguistic style and the social construction of gender. Despite this caveat, however, the lack of correlations across any of the tasks does offer a preliminary answer to the questions originally posed in this study. The evidence available in the current data offers no support for a model in which the indexical link between /s/ and gender is represented at the cognitive level by a single common association, accessed by all processes. Rather, like phonetic production and perception, the three core tasks of sociolinguistic cognition appear to function at least somewhat distinctly from one another. A profound insight of Eckert’s overall body of research (see especially Eckert 2000, 2008; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003) is that speakers and listeners engage in meaningful and personally relevant sociolinguistic construction during interactions, using a wide range of language cues which are themselves embedded in complex linguistic systems. The breadth of work in the current volume is testament to the many directions of research that this and related insights have inspired. One developing field inspired by Eckert’s work is sociolinguistic cognition, seeking to better understand the cognitive processes supporting sociolinguistic behavior. The results presented here suggest two future steps in this domain. First, they point to the inadequacy of the construct ‘masculinity’ for experimentally exploring indexical relationships and prompt us to consider ways to capture sociolinguistic style more flexibly in the experimental setting. Second, they offer beginning support for a dissociation between social influence on phonetic perception and production and phonetic influence on social perception. What emerges clearly from the current project is that the processing of indexical relationships at the level of individual cognition shows similar levels of complexity, flexibility and reliance on multiple coexisting systems as the emergence of indexical meaning at the interactional and macro-social levels. notes Many thanks go to Madeleine Manly, who contributed significantly to the project reported here, and to Xin (Anthony) Zhang, Katie Melchioris and Jacquelyn Jarachovic for their help in data collection. 1. Thanks go to Daniel Lawrence (https://github.com/danielplawrence/synthesis_work shop/blob/master/presentation.pdf, accessed October 2017) and J. J. Atria (https:// github.com/jjatria/tandem-custom, accessed October 2017) for their publicly available handouts for using the software.

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Part II

The Structure of Social Meaning

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7

Sociolinguistic Signs as Cognitive Representations Annette D’Onofrio

7.1

Introduction

7.1.1

The Sociolinguistic Sign

As this volume illustrates, the foregrounding of social meaning forms the basis of the third-wave approach to linguistic variation. Speakers exploit the social meaning of linguistic forms, using them as stylistic resources to project personae in interactions. Simultaneously, listeners attribute social meaning to the linguistic styles they observe in the world, encoding relations between the social and linguistic. By focusing on meaning making, the third-wave approach necessarily treats linguistic variation as a semiotic system (Eckert 2016), with linguistic variants as components of sociolinguistic signs. Linguists most commonly appeal to the dyadic model of the sign put forward by de Saussure (1916), in which a linguistic sign encompasses a signifier (the linguistic form) and a signified (the associated meaning). However, signs are ever-changing, complex structures, with the relationship between form and meaning dependent upon any number of contextual factors. Signs are constantly in flux as they are interpreted and re-interpreted in practice (Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008). Following Silverstein (1976, 2003), Eckert (2016), Gal (2016) and others, we can approach sociolinguistic signs according to Peirce’s model of the sign, which incorporates the role of interpretation directly into the model of the sign, rather than treating it as a process that acts on preexisting signs. Peirce’s sign comprises three parts: (1) the sign-vehicle (the signifier, sometimes called the representamen or sign), (2) the object (the signified), and (3) the interpretant (the interpretation). As defined by Peirce, ‘a sign[-vehicle] is a thing which serves to convey knowledge of some other thing, which it is said to stand for or represent. This thing is called the object of a sign; the idea in the mind that the sign excites . . . is called an interpretant of the sign’ (Peirce 153

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1895: 13). When applied to a sociolinguistic variable, the sign-vehicle can be defined as a linguistic form or feature that corresponds to some social object. That is, a sociolinguistic variant might be defined as a linguistic feature that ‘serves to convey knowledge of’ or ‘stands in for’ some social factor, in Peirce’s terms. In the United States, a fronted and raised trap vowel, for example, is a sign-vehicle that may be linkable with the regional origin of the speaker. Variationist work in sociolinguistics has typically framed its work as examining the observable correspondences between linguistic signifiers (signvehicles) and social signifieds (objects), illustrating that different ways of saying the same referential thing can in fact point to patterned social differences, along various dimensions. While the sign-vehicle and object are, of course, crucial components of the sign, equally important is the interpretant, or the ‘interpretation we develop of some sign[-vehicle]/object relation’ (Atkin 2013). For Peirce, the interpretant is indissoluble from the sign-vehicle and object as part of the sign: ‘the triadic relation is genuine, that is, its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist of any complexus of dyadic relations’ (Peirce 1903: 273). In other words, it is not the case that our interpretations of signs act on preformed links between object and sign-vehicle. This two-way relation is not meaningful – it does not signify – without an interpretant. A correlation between a linguistic form (e.g., backing of the trap vowel) and object (e.g., Californian origin) then, doesn’t become socially meaningful until this link is interpreted as such and thereby represented in someone’s mind. The interpretant is vital to notions of indexicality, which are at the core of social meaning-based approaches to linguistic variation (Ochs 1992; Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008). Signification cannot occur without meaning being conveyed to someone, and no sign exists independently of its construal. This fact allows for, and in fact requires, the sign to evolve over time. Every new instance of signification creates a further sign in a listener’s mind. But we do not convey or take up unperturbed copies of links between linguistic forms and social meanings. The interpretant of a sign is always ideologically mediated, informed by a listener’s experiences and expectations, and by myriad attributes of the context in which it is perceived. These subtle shifts in the interpretant are opportunities for change in the social meanings listeners attribute to linguistic forms, and the ways these are linked in their minds. While a group of individuals may reach a consensus about some linguistic form being linked to a particular social meaning, allowing us to study those existing links in perception, the particular nature of these links almost certainly varies from individual to individual, from moment to moment, and is always subject to change. The representations we maintain linking linguistic forms and social meanings are thus necessarily dynamic within and among individual listeners.

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Peirce defines the interpretant as an essentially cognitive construct – ‘the Sign creates something in the Mind of the Interpreter . . . and this creature of the sign is called the Interpretant’ (1909: 493). For theories of sociolinguistic meaning, then, this constitutes both (1) the processes involved in a listener’s interpretation of a form-meaning link, and (2) the cognitive representation that is the result of these processes, which in turn makes possible further instances of social meaning-making. While a majority of work in third wave sociolinguistics has focused on how speakers convey social meaning using linguistic resources in production, a smaller share has explored how social meaning operates in listener perceptions and in cognitive representations. In this chapter, I briefly review the growing body of work that has investigated the social meaning of linguistic variation from a perceptual perspective, revealing the interpretants listeners deploy in online linguistic processing and social evaluations. I then provide a contribution to this work, exploring how social expectations, coupled with aspects of listener background, can influence how interpretants are encoded in memory and how they are later deployed in recognition. Specifically, I use an explicit memory paradigm to test the association between a persona (the Business Professional) and a linguistic feature (the backed trap vowel), shown to be linked in linguistic perception (D’Onofrio 2015). Findings show that expectations about a speaker’s social persona bias how we remember – and mis-remember – a feature of that speaker’s linguistic style. In particular, results suggest that not only do we maintain cognitive interpretants, linking social objects and sign-vehicles in the mind, but these representations can bias memory, leading us to attribute utterances to speakers even when they did not occur. 7.1.2

Studying the Interpretant in Evaluations and Online Perceptions

Since its inception, variationist sociolinguistic work has shown that language use varies according to broad categories such as speaker age, gender, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and others. These patterns are borne out not only in production, but also in perception. Work has shown that we as listeners both (1) glean social information from subtle signals in speech (e.g., Lambert et al. 1960; Giles 1970; Campbell-Kibler 2007; Levon 2007), and (2) use top-down social expectations about a speaker when perceiving language (e.g., Niedzielski 1999; Strand 1999; Hay Warren & Drager 2005). Foundational to the study of perceptions of social meaning is work using the matched-guise paradigm, in which listeners demonstrate that they maintain links between linguistic features and social meanings through evaluations of manipulated speech. In these studies, the presence of a particular sign-vehicle

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in a speech signal is shown to conjure a social meaning in evaluations – even detailed phonetic information can shift listener’s evaluations of a speaker with regard to demographic background, personality attributes, and more (e.g., Campbell-Kibler 2007). Further, the presence of cognitive links between social and acoustic information have been revealed by paradigms that prime social information and examine resulting linguistic processing. For example, Niedzielski (1999) illustrates that when Michigan listeners expect a Canadian speaker, they perceive vowel quality differently than when they expect to hear a Michigander, in ways that reflect their ideological connections between Canadians and particular linguistic forms (in this case, Canadian vowel nucleus raising). Similarly, Hay, Warren, and Drager (2005) illustrate that listener awareness of a sound change in progress in New Zealand is reflected in different expectations of the near-square merger based on a speaker’s perceived age. Such studies have additionally shown that the representations of these links are crucially informed by aspects of the context in which a signvehicle is encountered (e.g., Campbell-Kibler 2011) and the listener’s background and experiences (e.g., Sumner & Samuel 2009). All together, these studies provide robust evidence for the interpretant: listeners cognitively construe linguistic features as linked with social meanings, deploying them when processing and evaluating language. While work in sociolinguistic perception has shown that we must maintain some cognitive representations (interpretants) linking linguistic forms with demographic categories like age and region, recent work has begun to incorporate other types of social information into perceptual work. For example, third-wave studies in production have suggested that rather than projecting large-scale category membership through the use of linguistic features, individuals use these features to project personae in particular interactional moments (e.g., Podesva 2007; Zhang 2008), the accumulation of which builds to broader macro-social patterns of variation. Studies have begun to show that these more highly specified social concepts – personae – also figure in linguistic perceptions. For example, in a phoneme categorization task, listeners who were told that a speaker was a Valley Girl showed an expectation of trapbacking, a feature of that persona’s style (D’Onofrio 2015), and conversely, hearing a backed trap led listeners to rate a speaker as more likely to be a Valley Girl than hearing the same speaker using fronter traps (D’Onofrio 2018). This work suggests that just as speakers use combinations of features in styles to project personae in interaction, listeners maintain cognitive links between persona-based concepts and linguistic features. To integrate findings in sociolinguistic perception with cognitive models of linguistic representation, much work has incorporated social information into exemplar-based theories of speech perception (see Drager & Kirtley 2016, for an overview). Exemplar models propose that encountered instances of speech

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are stored in detail, and these episodes or exemplars are cognitively grouped together into clusters, or exemplar clouds, on the basis of perceptual similarity. These clusters form representations of linguistic units (e.g., a word, a phoneme). When a new utterance is encountered, previously experienced exemplars are activated based on how similar they are to the new token, and this stored information is used in the interpretation of the new utterance (Goldinger 1996, 1998; Johnson 1997, 2006; Pierrehumbert 2001). The processes involved in memory – how episodes are first stored or encoded, and how these episodes are activated or recalled in future experiences – serve as a window into how linguistic information is represented cognitively. Drawing on exemplar models, work in sociolinguistic perception has illustrated that social information must be encoded alongside acoustic information in cognitive representations, explaining how social expectations can activate linked linguistic information in perception (Foulkes & Docherty 2006; Johnson 2006). However, although theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition have frequently deployed experimental tasks that test memory, little work in sociolinguistics has examined memory directly. For example, many current exemplar models propose that listeners do not encode each linguistic episode equally, but instead weight certain exemplars more strongly in representations than others, likely due to differences in attention at the time of encoding (Nosofsky 1991; Sumner et al. 2014, Drager & Kirtley 2016). While any number of factors might influence weighting in encoding or bias in recall of a particular sociolinguistic exemplar, the nature of these social factors has yet to be fully examined. One open question in this area is how a priori social expectations can influence not only online linguistic processing, as shown in previously mentioned studies (e.g., Niedzielski 1999; Strand 1999; Hay, Warren, & Drager 2005), but also encoding and later recognition. The study presented in this chapter provides an exploration of how listeners’ social expectations can serve as such a factor influencing recognition memory. In the study I present, I examine the link between a social persona – the Business Professional (BP) – and a particular vocalic sign-vehicle – trapbacking – in memory. Prior work has illustrated that speakers deploy backed trap as part of more careful, professional, or super-standard styles (e.g. Podesva et al. 2012), and that listeners link the BP persona with trapbacking in linguistic perception (D’Onofrio 2015). Though not easily connected with a broader demographic category like age, regional origin, or sexual orientation, the Business Professional carries with it ideological ties to formality, middle- to upper-middle-class identity, and supra-local orientation. While the origins of the link between this sign-vehicle and social meaning are not abundantly clear, it perhaps constitutes a semiotic opposition to regional trapraising, a feature found in dialects of the Northern Cities, Northeastern, and Southern regions of the USA (e.g. Eckert 2000; Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006).

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trap-raising is often discussed and stigmatized meta-linguistically as associable with hyper-local identities in these areas (e.g., Wagner et al. 2015). Since the BP embodies an upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class persona, it may be the case that trap-backing sounds professional by virtue of its distance from raised trap. This is supported by the fact that trap seems to be backing and lowering in some areas in which trap-raising is stigmatized, particularly among speakers who are highly educated and oriented supra-locally (Prichard & Tamminga 2012; Driscoll & Lape 2015). In the study that follows, I examine the link between backed trap and the BP persona in an old–new recognition task, a paradigm commonly used in work on memory. I ask whether an expectation of a speaker’s persona can influence a listener’s memory for particular sign-vehicles linked with that persona. Specifically, I ask whether phonetic forms that are congruent with a personabased BP prime (backed trap) are remembered better than forms that are incongruent with that social prime (fronted trap). Findings show that personabased expectations modulate how well specific utterances are stored and recognized in a way that confirms existing semiotic links between the BP persona and the backed trap sign-vehicle. This suggests that our sociolinguistic experiences not only inform our interpretants, or cognitive representations; our existing interpretants also bias the way we remember sociolinguistic experiences. 7.2

Methods

7.2.1

The Old–New Recognition Task

In this study, I focus on recognition memory (also called conscious memory, explicit memory, or declarative memory), examining how social information can influence encoding and recognition for words with particular phonetic features. I measure this through the use of an old–new recognition task. This task has been used frequently in work on speech perception in particular, in support of exemplar theories of lexical access (e.g., Goldinger 1996; Nygaard, Burt & Queen 2000; Sumner & Samuel 2005). In this paradigm, listeners are provided with an initial training phase, in which they are exposed to critical items. Training is then followed by a test phase, in which listeners are presented with another series of items that includes both items previously heard in the training task (old items) as well as items not previously heard (new items). At test, listeners are asked whether or not they heard each item in the training task, classifying each as either ‘old’ or ‘new’. Performance on the recognition task can then be assessed based on manipulated aspects of the experimental design. The study presented here adds a top-down social component to the old–new recognition paradigm, examining whether a persona-based prime can influence

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recognition of words that contain a phonetic feature linked with the persona. Prior to both training and test tasks, half of the listeners received a priori social information about the speaker’s Business Professional persona, while the other half did not. I then examine how the combination of this social expectation and the phonetic form of an auditory stimulus modulates memory. That is, I search for evidence that listeners’ existing interpretants affect the ways that exemplars are remembered – an indication of how these exemplars have been encoded into cognitive representations. If an existing link between a social meaning and a phonetic sign-vehicle affects recognition, we would expect a priori social expectations to enhance memory for a phonetic feature that matches that social expectation, as compared to cases where the form and meaning are not linked. Here, this means that we expect enhanced recognition in cases that pair the BP persona and backed trap vowel. Two manipulations were built into the design of the old–new recognition task, both between subjects. First, each listener was provided with one of two social information primes. They were either (1) told the speaker they would hear had been described as a Business Professional, or (2) given no speaker information (Baseline). In the initial instructions, they were told that the speaker ‘would be represented by this picture’, which corresponded to the social prime. For the BP prime, listeners were shown a cartoon picture of a briefcase. For the Baseline prime, in which they were provided with no social information, listeners were shown a green circle (both shown in Figure 7.1). Again, participants were always informed in writing what the icon was meant

Figure 7.1 Between-subjects experimental conditions.

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to represent (the icon alone was not expected to prime the persona without this training). The icon that appeared with each trial corresponded to the assigned social information condition, and did not vary within-subject – each subject saw the same icon repeatedly with each trial. To the participant, the icon was ostensibly used to cue the beginning of a new trial, disappearing each time a response was entered. The second manipulation in this experiment was the backness of the trap vowel in critical auditory stimuli. Half of the listeners heard critical words that contained backed trap vowels, while the other half heard those same words containing fronter trap vowels (though not raised and fronted to the degree found in the Northern Cities Shift, for example). Throughout the experiment, a given listener heard only backer tokens or only fronter tokens, crossed evenly with social prime. The consistency of vowel quality within subjects was used to establish the speaker as either a ‘trap-backer’ generally, or as a user of fronter trap, rather than allowing listeners to attach backer or fronter quality and its associated social meanings to any particular lexical item. The two manipulations yielded four between-subjects conditions in all (Figure 7.1). Again, if social information enhances memory for a linguistically congruent utterance, we would expect better performance in the condition where backness of trap matches the BP prime, as compared to an incongruent condition (fronter trap and BP prime) or a condition that does not explicitly activate a priori social information (backed or front trap in the Baseline prime conditions). Analysis was conducted to assess both the effect of trap backness within the BP prime (e.g., how does memory for backed trap compare with front trap within the BP conditions?) as well as the effects of backness between the BP and Baseline prime, to ensure that an observed effect within the BP prime was due to the combination of social meaning and linguistic signvehicle, rather than a more general effect. 7.2.2

Auditory Stimuli

The critical auditory stimuli consisted of backed and front productions of the same sixteen trap words. None of these words had a minimal pair match with the lot vowel in American English. This made every word lexically interpretable only as trap, regardless of backness of the vowel token. Across both blocks, a given listener heard all of these trap words with backed vowels or with front vowels. Lexical frequency was not controlled, due to the strict requirements that words be monosyllabic and not constitute a minimal pair with a lot word. All listeners heard all words, so lexical frequency effects should not bear on the research question at hand. The author, a female native speaker of American English, produced these words in citation form. Natural speaker productions were used for all stimuli. While many such tasks use

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synthesized stimuli, the words used in this experiment contained segmental clusters whose co-articulatory effects were difficult to synthesize believably, and thus the words were produced naturally. Recording took place in a soundproof booth, using a Turner 2302 microphone and a Rane MS1b preamplifier. Recordings were digitized (44.1 kHz, twenty-four bits) with an Edirol UA-101, recorded into the software program Audacity version 1.3.12.0. When producing these words, the speaker, a trained phonetician, listened to and emulated backer steps and fronter steps on continua that were digitally resynthesized between her natural trap and lot productions, to approximate trap backing (see D’Onofrio 2016 for more information about these continua). Several tokens of each word were produced, and their formants measured. Two tokens (one front, one back) were selected for each word based on clarity of the production, similarity between the two tokens in acoustic features other than vowel quality (e.g., mean pitch, pitch contour, duration), and maximal difference in F2 between the front and back tokens. Across words, tokens were also auditorily considered for perceptual similarity in backness among all sixteen of the front tokens and all sixteen of the back tokens. F1 and F2 measurements for each critical token are shown in Table 7.1. The speaker also produced a series of fillers, including real words and pseudo-words, recorded in the same manner as the critical stimuli. None of

Table 7.1 F1 and F2 values for stimuli used in memory paradigm.

Word

Backed Token F1

Backed Token F2

Front Token F1

Front Token F2

Front-Back F2 difference

back cash class crash dad fact fast gap glad half mask slack snack task that trap Mean Range

1024 978 906 910 960 1000 1006 960 976 1019 949 906 991 970 934 982 967 118

1711 1557 1560 1684 1706 1578 1575 1536 1631 1707 1697 1479 1679 1582 1670 1571 1620 232

936 938 911 923 887 928 962 877 906 1020 1000 945 948 966 923 936 938 143

1913 1856 1821 1858 1889 1860 1907 1989 1849 1850 1884 1752 1946 1861 1903 1821 1872 237

202 299 261 174 183 282 332 452 218 142 186 273 266 279 233 250 252 310

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the filler real words or pseudo-words contained a trap vowel. All items including critical, filler, and pseudo-word items were monosyllabic with a (C)CVC(C) syllable structure. All tokens were cut and scaled for intensity in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2011). 7.2.3

Procedure

The experiment consisted of two main blocks, separated by a distracter task. Participants were seated in front of a computer screen in a sound-attenuated booth. In initial instructions, listeners were provided with speaker information in writing alongside the assigned visual icon (e.g., ‘The speaker you will hear will be represented by this picture: [green circle icon],’ or ‘The speaker you will hear has been described as a Business Professional, and will be represented by this picture: [briefcase icon]’). In the initial block, listeners performed a lexical decision task, in which they categorized a series of auditory words as real words (cash) or pseudo-words (jome). In this task, the visual icon corresponding to that participant’s assigned social prime appeared with each trial, followed by auditory presentation of a word (either real or pseudo word). Upon response to the trial, the icon disappeared. Listeners used a lit button box with buttons labeled ‘WORD’ (left) and ‘PSEUDO’ (right) to respond to each word. They were not presented with any orthographic information about the words. Listeners began with a four-trial practice round to become accustomed to the trial format and button box. They then completed the lexical decision (training) task. The training task included forty-eight trials in all, twenty-four real words and twenty-four pseudo-words. Eight of the real words contained a trap vowel (critical words), and the other sixteen real words were fillers. Listeners either heard all backed tokens of the eight critical trap words or all front tokens of the eight critical trap words. All listeners heard the same twenty-four pseudo-words and the same sixteen filler real words. After the training block, listeners completed a short distracter task, in which they were asked to solve multiple-choice math problems. They were required to provide an answer for each of the problems, and they were given feedback for each answer to incentivize effort in responses. Following the distracter task, listeners completed the test block, the old–new recognition task. Listeners had not been told in advance that they would be tested on recognition of items from the lexical decision task. In the recognition task, listeners heard a series of words (all real words) and responded whether they had heard each word in the previous lexical decision block (‘old’), or not (‘new’). Each trial in the old–new recognition task was visually the same as in the lexical decision task. The visual icon appeared prior to each auditory stimulus. It then disappeared once a response was given, reappearing to cue

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the next stimulus. For the recognition task, listeners used the keyboard to respond, rather than the button box. Listeners were instructed to place their left index finger on the ‘N’ key, for ‘new’, and their right index finger on the ‘O’ key, for ‘old’, to simulate the placement of a button box, but avoiding confusion with the training task. Written instructions between the distracter math task and the recognition task ensured that listeners had located the ‘N’ and ‘O’ keys, as listeners were required to push each key to advance to the next set of instructions. The old–new recognition (test) task also contained forty-eight trials, consisting of real words only (no pseudo-words). In the test block, all of the twenty-four real words heard in training were presented, (eight trap words and sixteen filler words). The remaining twenty-four test trials were ‘new’, or real words not presented in the training task. Eight were new trap words, and sixteen were new filler words. Again, for all sixteen trap words heard in the old-new recognition task, a given listener heard either all sixteen backed tokens or all sixteen front tokens, regardless of old versus new status. All listeners heard the same new filler real words. Two experimental lists per condition were devised to counter-balance the old/new status of the trap words in the experiment. In both blocks, the order in which the auditory words were presented was randomized for each participant. 7.2.4

Participants

Sixty members of the Stanford University community participated in the experiment. Participants were either compensated with course credit or with $7, and the experiment lasted approximately twenty minutes. Following the experiment, demographic information was collected for each participant via a questionnaire, which collected self-reported age, gender, locations lived and ages at which they lived there, and native languages spoken. Participant locations of origin were coded according to the Atlas of North American English’s dialect regions (Labov et al. 2006). This was coded based on where the participant reported living for at least six months between the ages of five and eighteen. If they lived in multiple regions during this time, this was coded as ‘multiple’. Given that trap patterns differently in the West than in other regions, a binary variable was coded for Western versus non-Western origin. Data from participants who did not self-report as native speakers of American English and those who grew up outside of the United States were removed prior to analysis. Participants were also removed if they showed error rates above two standard deviations from mean accuracy on non-critical items in the old–new recognition task (below 66 per cent overall accuracy). After these eliminations, data was analyzed for a total of fifty participants. Prior to statistical analysis, trials in which a participant did not accurately classify critical words as ‘real words’ in the lexical decision task were removed from the old–new recognition dataset (2 per cent of critical trials). For example, if a given listener inaccurately classified

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fact as a pseudo-word in the lexical decision task, their response to the word fact in the old–new recognition task was not considered, as this word was initially not accurately interpreted as the word fact. 7.3

Results

Analysis of results assessed how the experimental manipulations of the linguistic form (backness of trap) and the social meaning prime (BP prime versus no prime) influenced a listener’s ability to accurately classify a word as ‘old’ or ‘new’. First, I assess the influence of backed versus front trap on recognition accuracy within the Business Professional prime. I then provide an overall comparison of the BP results to the Baseline results, to ensure that these findings were induced by the combination of trap backness and social prime, rather than indicating a general pattern of trap backness that would occur regardless of this social expectation. 7.3.1

Recognition Accuracy within the Business Professional Prime

If the BP social prime led to better memory for sign-vehicles that matched that social prime, then we would expect better overall recognition accuracy for backed trap words as compared to front trap words when listeners are told to expect a BP. To assess this difference, I examine the statistical effect of trap backness on overall response accuracy within the BP prime. A generalized linear mixed-effects model with a logit-link function was fit on responses within the BP prime conditions, with accuracy of response as the binary dependent variable (correct versus incorrect). Backness of trap (back versus front) was included as a categorical fixed effect. The model also included as a fixed effect of old versus new status of the item (whether the stimulus was previously presented in the ‘training’ phase (old) or not (new)). This factor assesses whether there were differences in accuracy between hits – accurately recognizing a previously encountered item as ‘old’ – and correct rejections – accurately categorizing an item not previously encountered as ‘new’. I also test the interaction between backness and old versus new status. If backness of trap increases accuracy regardless of old versus new status of the stimuli, this indicates an overall benefit in recognition from the congruence of the phonetic feature and social prime. However, if backness significantly interacts with old versus new status, this indicates that hit rate and correct rejection rate (i.e., responses to ‘old’ versus ‘new’ items) behave differently with respect to backness. Finally, participant factors and their interactions with the other fixed effects were tested. Dialect region (West versus non-West) improved model fit and was included in the final model. Trial order was also tested but was not a significant

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predictor in all following models and it did not improve model fit nor change fixed effects. It was therefore not retained in the final models. Random intercepts of participant and item, as well as random slopes for item by backness were included. A summary of the fixed effects is included in Table 7.2. A significant interaction emerged between trap-backness and old versus new status, indicating that the effect of trap-backness on recognition accuracy is not a general effect, but is dependent on whether listeners are accurately recognizing old items or accurately rejecting new items. This is illustrated in the overall accuracy results for the Business Professional prime, shown in Figure 7.2. Accuracy for backed stimuli is higher than fronted stimuli in old items (left), but the pattern reverses in new items (right). I thus analyze responses to old versus new items in turn. I begin by assessing listener accuracy in responding to old items, testing how often listeners achieved a hit – correct classification of an old item as ‘old’ – as opposed to a miss – incorrect classification of an old item as ‘new’. Accuracy for old items (hit rate) reflects how well listeners recognized previously experienced stimuli. Second, I examine listener accuracy in responding to new items, stimuli that were not previously heard in training. This tests how often listeners gave a correct rejection – correctly classifying new items as ‘new’ – as opposed to a false alarm – incorrectly classifying new items as ‘old’. 7.3.2

Hit Rate (Responses to Old Items)

If social expectations led to better memory for sign-vehicles that are congruent with that expectation, we would expect better accuracy in recognizing old items (higher hit rate) with backed trap as compared to front trap. This expected pattern emerged in results (see left bars in Figure 7.2) – within the BP prime, Table 7.2 Summary of fixed effects from generalized linear mixed effect model predicting response accuracy, for Business Professional social prime conditions only (N = 396). Predictor

Estimate

Std. Error

Z value

P value

(Intercept) Backness = front Item status = old Western origin = West Backness = front x Status = old Backness = front x Origin = West

1.477 0.281 0.364 −0.362 −1.475 0.973

0.367 0.513 0.401 0.398 0.549 0.545

4.019 0.547 0.909 −0.911 −2.686 1.784

|z|)

−4.3391 2.3307 6.9083 −0.5574

0.6230 0.3071 0.8145 0.2754

−6.964 7.589 8.482 −2.024

< 0.0001 < 0.0001 < 0.0001 0.0430

Table 8.3 Model fit to the perceived sexual orientation of the talker, with sexual orientation treated as binary (i.e., gay/lesbian vs heterosexual). A greater estimated coefficient indicates a higher likelihood of perceiving the talker as heterosexual.

(Intercept) lower pitch guise male talker talker perceived as part-Hawaiian lower pitch guise: male talker

Estimate

Std. Error

z-value

Pr(>|z|)

2.3457 −0.7870 −2.7744 0.4222 1.4545

0.5872 0.2496 0.8124 0.1953 0.3352

3.995 −3.153 −3.415 2.162 4.339

< 0.0001 0.0016 0.0006 0.0306 < 0.0001

found that female talkers were more likely to be perceived as lesbian in the lower pitch guise. For clarity, the interaction is shown in Figure 8.1. We interpret the main effect of talker gender as a talker-dependent effect; since it was not predicted, further experimentation is needed to test whether this effect would generalize to other talkers. Additionally, the analysis revealed a link between perceived ethnicity and perceived sexual orientation: talkers were more likely to be perceived as heterosexual if they were also identified as partHawaiian (p < 0.05). As with gender, this result requires further testing with a wider range of talkers and clips before conclusions can be drawn. To examine the possibility of a shift in ethnicity, responses to the question What ethnicity/ethnicities would you guess this speaker identifies with? were examined. In line with Hawai‘i’s extreme diversity, many responses regarding talker ethnicity included more than one ethnic category/label. Thus, a statistical analysis was inappropriate to analyze responses, so tables were used instead. In order to quantify the responses for comparison purposes, some simplification was necessary to avoid exceptionally large tables. To simplify the data, we combined the responses ‘Japanese’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Korean’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Asian

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Figure 8.1 Probability of identifying a talker as heterosexual, based on the estimated probabilities from the model presented in Table 8.3.

mix’ under the single category ‘Asian’. In Hawaiʻi, the term Hawaiian refers to Native Hawaiians, and the term Pacific Islander is not used to refer to Hawaiians but is most commonly used for Samoans and Tongans. Therefore, we combined the labels ‘Samoan’, ‘Tongan’, ‘Pacific Islander’, and ‘Polynesian’ under the category ‘Pacific Islander’ while leaving ‘Hawaiian’ distinct. Hapa is a Hawaiian word meaning ‘half’ that was traditionally used to describe people who are part Hawaiian and part White. Its use has slowly broadened to include multiethnic people who are of Asian or Pacific Islander descent (Taniguchi & Heidenreich 2005). It is therefore treated as a distinct category for this analysis. The labels ‘Filipino’, ‘Micronesian’, and ‘Portuguese’ were left as distinct categories due to differences between the histories of these groups and groups subsumed under other categories. Multiethnic responses were also coded using these categories. This treatment of the data seemed like the most appropriate method given the large number of multiethnic responses and the vague responses (e.g., ‘Asian’) provided by some participants.

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Pitch appeared to affect perceived ethnicity to some degree for most talkers, but the nature of the effect varied across talkers due to the wide range of different ethnicities attributed to the different talkers. The large amount of inter-talker variation is unsurprising since self-reported ethnicity varied across talkers, and listeners accurately identified talker ethnicity above chance in the unmodified guises. Due to space limitations, we cannot present the results for all talkers. To illustrate how pitch can affect perceived ethnicity, we present the results for Stanchmonsta (Table 8.4) and Jeffrey (Table 8.5). These talkers were selected so that the results presented in this section could be compared with the tag clouds for the same talkers in Section 8.4.2. Therefore, we use the same subsets of their data as used in Section 8.4.2; the number of participants is therefore relatively low compared to the overall dataset. When perceived as a gay man (N = 28), Stanchmonsta is perceived as White in the lower pitch guise by the majority of participants. Though he was still commonly perceived as White in the higher pitch guise, he was also identified with a wider range of ethnicities in this guise. Upon examining perceived ethnicity for Jeffrey when he was identified as a heterosexual man (N = 30) (Table 8.5), most striking is that no participants in the lower pitch guise identified Jeffrey as Pacific Islander. Jeffrey was more likely to be identified as either Asian (especially Japanese) or White when in the lower pitch guise. However, this was not the case when he was identified as gay (not shown). Taken together, the results from the quantitative analysis provide evidence that pitch is linked with perceived gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

Table 8.4 Perceived ethnicity for Stanchmonsta in the places clip when he was identified as a gay man in the lower and higher pitch guises. Slashes are used to separate labels for responses when the talker was perceived as multiethnic. Ethnicity

Lower

Higher

Hawaiian/Samoan Pacific Islander White White/Asian White/Filipino Hapa Micronesian TOTAL (n)

0 2 9 1 0 0 0 12

2 2 7 1 1 2 1 16

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Table 8.5 Perceived ethnicity for Jeffrey in the friend clip when he was identified as a heterosexual man in the lower and higher pitch guises. Ethnicity Hawaiian Hawaiian mix Hawaiian/Filipino Hawaiian/Portuguese Pacific Islander (Samoan or Tongan) Pacific Islander/Filipino part-Polynesian Asian (Japanese, Chinese, or Korean) Asian/Hawaiian Filipino Filipino/Hawaiian/Asian Filipino/Asian/White White White/Asian (Japanese, Chinese, or Korean) TOTAL

Lower

Higher

1 1 2 0 0 0 0 6 1 1 1 1 5 1 20

1 0 0 1 3 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 10

However, it is worth noting that the shift is not equal across all talkers and clips. While some voices such as Jeffrey and Stanchmonsta elicit varied responses to gender and sexual orientation by guise, Kealopiko is perceived to be a gay man and Abcde is perceived to be a heterosexual woman by almost all participants, regardless of guise or clip. Furthermore, perceptions of ethnicity vary more across talkers than guises. This variability is consistent with the concept of an indexical field, where links between linguistic variables and social meanings depend on context, including the talker and the presence of other sociolinguistic variables. To explore the indexical field for F0 further, Section 8.4.2 turns to the results of our tag cloud analysis. 8.4.2

Tag Cloud Analysis

In this section, we demonstrate how tag clouds can be used to plot perceived styles and personae from open-response data. The tag clouds we present reveal how perceived stylistic components – even seemingly subtle ones – are often consistent across different listeners, pointing to a link between language and style. In Section 8.4.2.1 we show that listener perceptions of a talker’s style depend on a combination of pitch and the broad social categories that are assigned to the talker. Then, in Section 8.4.2.2, we present data that challenges the previous finding

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that larger bodies are attributed to talkers with lower pitch (cf. van Dommelen & Moxness 1995) and explore a possible link with shifts in perceived ethnicity. Comparisons of tag clouds across topics (not shown) reveal only subtle differences. Despite this, we control topic in the tag clouds presented here in order to maximize comparability across the clouds for any given talker. All responses to the relevant questions within each of the selected data subsets are shown; responses are not altered except to correct misspellings. 8.4.2.1 Perceptions of Styles In their responses, participants provided a great deal of detail about their perceptions of the talkers. This level of detail makes it possible to explore questions regarding the styles attributed to the talkers. In this section, we use tag clouds to explore the following questions: To what extent do the perceived traits depend on the broad social categories attributed to the talker? Do we observe differences in perceived style across the lower and higher pitch guises? And while pitch appears to be linked with perceived gender when treated as categorical and binary (Section 8.4.1), is there also a more nuanced shift in perceived gender evident in the tag clouds? We present the tag clouds which best illustrate the responses to these questions. To address the first of these questions, tag clouds are shown in Figure 8.2 for Kamamalu’s weather clip in the lower pitch guise when she was identified as gay/lesbian. Shown separately are responses for when Kamamalu was

Figure 8.2 Tag clouds of responses to Kamamalu in the lower pitch guise when talking about the weather, when perceived as a lesbian (in the left panel) and as a gay man (in the right panel).

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perceived as female versus male. When perceived as female, she was perceived to be confident, casual, and lazy. When identified as male, Kamamalu was believed to be loud, stylish, cocky, and preppy. Even though these judgments are for the same clip and guise, the styles are widely different, highlighting the ways in which stylistic components are gendered and stressing the need to control for broad social categories when comparing perceived style across guises. Controlling for broad social categories, we next investigated whether we would observe a shift in perceived style across the lower and higher pitch guises. As stated earlier, for Abcde, IceCream, and Kealopiko, there was surprisingly little shift. Since Abcde and Kealopiko are the two talkers whose broad social categories were identified with the most consistency across the guises, this suggests that there is a link between the likelihood of a shift in perceived gender and sexual orientation, and a shift in perceived style. For the other talkers, a shift across guises was observed. One of the most subtle shifts was observed for Fiatuina’s work clip for when she was perceived as a heterosexual woman with a multiethnic background (Figure 8.3). The tag cloud for the higher pitch guise is more heavily populated as more participants identified her as having the aforementioned traits in this guise. Worth noting from Figure 8.3 is the astounding level of detail that participants attended to,

Figure 8.3 Tag clouds representing Fiatuina’s perceived style in the work clip when she was perceived as a heterosexual woman with a multiethnic background, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right).

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and the consistency with which they did so. In both guises, she is perceived as an outgoing local who is friendly, social, and talkative, and as someone with a thin to medium build who is around 5′6″ tall. While not shown due to space limitations, she is perceived as having attended a public school in both guises. Also, in both guises, stereotypically feminine traits, such as nice, sweet, and friendly, are attributed to Fiatuina. However, only in the higher pitched guise is she identified as having highlighted hair. Also of interest is the descriptor ‘Valley Girl’ in the higher pitch guise. While this term is familiar to people worldwide as a California-based style, the participants who label Fiatuina as a Valley Girl describe her as from Hawai‘i. Descriptors in both guises (e.g., ‘gossip’ in the higher pitch guise and ‘spreads rumors’ in the lower pitched guise) are ideologically linked with women and Valley Girls in particular, but only in the higher pitch guise do we observe ‘cheerful’, ‘social butterfly’, ‘skimpy’, ‘ditsy’, and ‘attention whore’ (as opposed to the more neutral ‘attention grabber’ from the lower pitch guise). Thus, the tag clouds in Figure 8.3 provide some evidence that pitch may be linked with the listener’s evaluative stance toward the talker, possibly arising as a result of a link between pitch and perceived gender. While the shift in perceived style between the guises for Fiatuina shown in Figure 8.3 is subtle – much more subtle than the shift in perceptions of style across broad social categories shown for Kamamalu in Figure 8.2 – it is present nonetheless. This subtle shift suggests that pitch is ideologically linked with style in the indexical field. 8.4.2.2 Shifts in Size, School, Skin Color, and Style In this section, we focus on shifts in the perceived styles of three different talkers, with special attention paid to their perceived weight, build, and skin color. Stanchmonsta’s tag clouds, shown in Figure 8.4, are restricted to those responses when he was identified as a gay man for the places clip. In the lower pitch guise, Stanchmonsta was perceived as a blonde, nerdy know-it-all, and he was perceived to be of thin to average weight. In contrast, he was identified as shy, dark-skinned, and as strong or large in the higher pitch guise. Perceived school also shifted across the guises, with a larger proportion of participants indicating that he attended a public school in the higher pitch guise. Jeffrey’s tag clouds, shown in Figure 8.5, are restricted to responses from participants who identified him as a heterosexual man. Jeffrey is described as introverted in the lower pitch guise but broken and antisocial in the higher pitch guise. The different connotations of these words contribute to the different perceived styles across guises and, as with Fiatuina’s tag clouds, may provide evidence of a difference in the listeners’ evaluative stances across the guises. As with Stanchmonsta, Jeffrey is identified as larger in the higher pitch guise. Also in the higher pitch guise, Jeffrey is overwhelmingly identified as having

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Figure 8.4 Tag clouds representing Stanchmonsta’s style in the places clip when he was perceived as a gay man, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right).

attended a public school, and the public schools listed are associated with students who are local, Hawaiian, Pidgin-speaking, and working to middle class. In contrast, only participants exposed to the lower pitch guise identified Jeffrey as attending Punahou, a prestigious private high school known for having large numbers of White, Asian, and upper-class students. That both Stanchmonsta and Jeffrey are perceived as larger (i.e., more muscular and/or heavier) in the higher pitch guise contradicts previous research showing a link between lower pitch talkers and perceptions of large bodies (cf. van Dommelen & Moxness 1995). Both talkers are also more likely to be identified as White or Asian in the lower pitch guise (see Tables 8.4 and 8.5). Therefore, stereotypes about Hawaiian and Pacific Islander men having larger bodies than Asian and White men could potentially be responsible for the shift in perceived body size. Neither talker has sufficient numbers to make tag clouds if holding perceived ethnic category constant, but of the nine participants who commented on weight and identified Stanchmonsta as White and/or Asian, only one identified him as slender in the higher pitch guise and only one identified him as large in the lower pitch guise, suggesting that the unexpected link between higher pitch and larger bodies and lower pitch and smaller bodies may not be entirely explained by a shift in perceived ethnicity. It is possible that the observed shift stems from an association between high pitch and the

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Figure 8.5 Tag clouds representing Jeffrey’s perceived style in the friend clip when he was perceived as a heterosexual man, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right).

stereotypically large bodies of Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (discussed further in Section 8.5.1), which may be generalized to body size regardless of ethnicity. However, more work is needed to substantiate this. To explore perceived body size further, Figure 8.6 shows tag clouds for Kent in the friend clip when he was perceived to be a heterosexual man with at least some Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry. There are fewer responses in the higher pitch guise in this subset of the data, largely due to holding the categories for perceived gender and sexual orientation constant. In line with the trends observed for Jeffrey and Stanchmonsta, Kent was identified as larger in the higher pitch guise, despite controlling ethnicity to the extent possible. Kent’s style is similar across guises. In both guises, Kent is identified as a moke, which is a term used to refer to a (mostly) Native Hawaiian style. Mokes are known for being water men (e.g., surfing and bodysurfing), wearing rubber slippers (i.e., flip flops), driving pick-up trucks, living in the country (as opposed to urban areas), and speaking Pidgin. Mokes are associated with toughness in general, but descriptors that are ideologically linked with toughness (e.g., ‘mean’, ‘bully’, ‘doesn’t care what others think’, ‘tattoos’, and ‘rugged’) are attributed to Kent in the higher pitch guise, whereas Kent is perceived as more easygoing, nice, and affectionate in the lower pitched guise.

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Figure 8.6 Tag clouds representing Kent’s perceived style in the friend clip when he was perceived as a heterosexual man with Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry, in the lower pitch guise (on the left) and the higher pitch guise (on the right).

Perceived school is not shown for Kent in Figure 8.6 due to lack of space, but there was also a shift in perceived high school attended which mirrors that observed for Jeffrey: a greater number of participants in the higher pitch guise identified Kent as having attended Waiʻanae High School. The implications of these findings are discussed in Section 8.5. 8.5

General Discussion

The results from our quantitative analysis demonstrate that pitch is linked with perceived gender and sexual orientation. However, the results are much more complex than this initial finding suggests, with a large amount of variation across talkers. That our results regarding perceived sexual orientation diverge from earlier findings further highlights how socioindexical links are context dependent; the results are tied with the talkers and listeners from our study, and to the particular combinations of linguistic cues present in the stimuli. In addition to the shifts in perceived gender and sexual orientation, we observe a shift in perceived ethnicity. Whether a relationship between pitch and ethnicity is found in Hawai‘i, other parts of the Pacific, or in other regions

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(like parts of the continental United States) with large numbers of Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders remain open questions. The results demonstrate that perceived styles are made up of a conglomerate of perceived traits, including clothes, favorite activities, and hairstyle. Many listeners provided detailed responses, and some of those responses (e.g., highlighted hair) were provided by multiple listeners for the same talker and guise despite not being found for other talkers and/or guises. This confirms Coupland’s (2001: 198) assertion that ‘it is at the level of the person – an individual’s personal and social identity – that our social judgments of speech style reside’. The results also reveal shifts in perceived persona, style, and evaluative stance that depend on a combination of pitch, the individual talker, and the broad social categories attributed to the talker. However, a difference across the guises was not observed for all talkers and, for a single talker, select traits are often shared across the guises, even when the overall style varies. The largest inter-guise differences in perceived style are seen with the talkers who have the largest inter-guise differences in perceived gender and sexual orientation, highlighting just how interconnected broad social categories and stylistic components are. Together, the findings raise questions about the role of F0 in individual speakers’ style-making endeavors that can be addressed in future work. For example, to what extent are the indexical meanings associated with mean F0 tied with specific F0 contours or the range of F0 used in the utterance versus segmental and lexical variables produced by the talker? Additional suggestions for future research are provided in Section 8.6. The analysis also revealed a difference in perceived body size across guises. Specifically, we found that three of the four male talkers were identified as thinner in the lower pitch guise, while no difference was observed for the fourth male talker. This finding contrasts with previous reports that talkers with a higher pitch are perceived as thinner (cf. van Dommelen & Moxness 1995) and as less physically dominant (Puts et al. 2007), and it raises questions about evolutionary accounts of deep male voices that rely on an association between low pitch and physically dominant men (e.g., Puts 2010; Saxton et al. 2016). In Section 8.5.1, we present some possible explanations for why our results regarding size differ from previous work, and in Section 8.5.2, we discuss tag clouds as a tool for investigating the indexical field, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. 8.5.1

F0 and Perceived Body Size

One explanation for why our results differ from previous accounts of perceived body size may be methodological: some of the previous work that reports a link between pitch and perceived body size compares F0 across different talkers’ natural productions (van Dommelen & Moxness 1995), creates differences

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across guises by instructing talkers to manipulate their pitch (Fraccaro et al. 2013), or doesn’t investigate F0 separately from higher formants (Collins 2000). Some of the previous work, however, manipulates only F0 across guises for individual talkers (Puts et al. 2007), as we did. Another possibility for why our results differ from previous accounts is that our study was conducted with an ethnically diverse group of talkers and listeners, in a place where the speaker population is highly diverse. While most of the previous work does not report the ethnicities of their talkers and listeners, the location of the various studies (i.e., Europe, Scandinavia, and the United States), the tradition of treating White ethnicities as unmarked (Brekhus 1998; Riggs & Selby 2003), and the authors’ failure to report ethnicity suggest that the talkers and listeners were at least mostly White. Our results regarding F0 and body size may be attributed to a culturally specific link between higher pitch and larger bodies in the Pacific Island context, a link which may start as an association between high pitch and Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders and then – based on stereotypes around large bodies and Polynesian ancestry – be generalized to large bodied people of other ethnicities. The findings highlight the importance of considering non-White ethnicities and point to the need for future work on sociolinguistic variation in superdiverse centers like Hawaiʻi. One of the talkers – Kent – was perceived to be tougher in the higher pitch guise than in the lower pitch guise. This connection contrasts with previously cited work reporting a link between lower F0 and the perceived ability to win in a fight (Puts et al. 2007), but it is consistent with observations of actual speech acts in the local context, where some speakers appear to use a high mean pitch to construct a tough persona (Kirtley 2015). Therefore, listeners seem to be relying on locally specific associations between high pitch and toughness when making their judgments. Given ideological links between toughness and body size, the association between high pitch and toughness arises naturally as individuals reinterpret the indexical values associated with high pitch, forming what Silverstein (2003) refers to as an n + 1st order index. 8.5.2

Tag Clouds, Perceived Style, and the Indexical Field

Open-response questions are often avoided in experimental work because they are difficult to analyze. However, we argue that the rich data they provide are essential in gaining a better understanding of the indexical field and the full range of social meanings associated with linguistic variants. Tag clouds provide a way of analyzing responses from open-response questions as well as a way to display perceived styles and personae. Examining responses across tag clouds associated with different talkers by a single variant (e.g., F0 or /t/) can help explore the indexical field more generally. The tag clouds in Section 8.4.2 demonstrate that the indexical field is complex; which styles are perceived

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depend on the other phonetic cues in the signal and the other characteristics attributed to the talker. At times, the perceived characteristics contradict one another in surprising ways. Contradictions may be due to differences across individual listeners’ experiences but may also indicate that some linguistic variants are linked with abstracted categories (e.g., ‘outgoing/shy-ness’) rather than individual traits from those categories (e.g., ‘outgoing’ and ‘shy’), a point also made by Schnoebelen and Drager (2014) using results from a similar experiment. Further work is needed to reveal the ways in which individual experience influences the indexical field, and to explore inter- and intra-listener variation in the level of specificity of perceived stylistic cues. One weakness of tag clouds is that they do not provide information about which words were provided by individual listeners. For example, a tag cloud would be interpreted differently if seemingly contradictory descriptors were provided from a single individual rather than if a wide range of different listeners provided them. During analysis, we tested several options for providing this information (e.g., clustering responses from individual participants rather than by semantic similarity; connecting responses from individual participants with a web of lines), but these alternatives were judged to be more difficult to interpret. Instead, we inspected each individual’s responses during analysis, providing information in the text when relevant. We acknowledge, however, that this method could be improved upon. 8.6

Conclusion

In this chapter, we demonstrate how a talker’s mean pitch is linked with perceptions of the talker’s gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and overall style. Given the level of detail provided in responses, we observed a large amount of consistency in the stylistic components attributed to the talkers. In addition, we found that men in the higher pitch guise tended to be perceived as larger, an observation that is contrary to previous reports. Taken together, the results raise a number of questions, such as: just how detailed are representations in the indexical field, and – when listeners have little to no experience with speakers who are similar to the talkers they’re listening to – do they generalize at the same level of detail, or are more abstracted, broad categories attended to exclusively? What kinds of associations reported in the literature may surface in less binary ways than previously reported? And what other previously reported associations might not apply to more diverse groups of talkers and listeners? Our results raise many questions worthy of future investigation, and they also demonstrate the importance of looking beyond quantitative analyses of broad social categories and predetermined qualities to analyses that embrace the complexity of the indexical field.

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Appendices

Appendix A Content of the Clips Used in the Stimuli Pseudonym

Clip label

Clip content

Abcde Abcde

bestfriend work

Fiatuina Fiatuina IceCream

living work friends

IceCream KaMamalu

work family

KaMamalu Jeffrey

weather friends

Jeffrey

house

Kealopiko Kealopiko Kent

thoughts work people

Kent Stanchmonsta Stanchmonsta

friends places work

well my best friend she lives like maybe ten minutes away from me it’s a nice company . and like a lot of really nice, friendly people so . that’s what matters the most it’s different from what I’m used to . it’s um . hh. a lot more people it’s so fast it just goes by so fast that . hh . I’m just like oh my gosh um it’s fun . yeah we hang out sometimes like we knew each other from before so I worked there for like maybe t- one and a half years in high school like my um . hh . my Mom’s family is still over there and we still go back every chance we get it’s lacking rain right now though . so it’s pretty dry we were good friends back in the day and then like I knew he he ‘cause I just wanted to move out of my house just to get a sense of independency not the house we grew up in we moved into that place about like six years ago came to my mind I said I just write ‘om down but hopefully I’ll be like working soon you know hang out with friends and . uh . just hang out with family . yeah things like that um the people they’re fun . yeah . they’re fun to be around honestly it’s kind of . between the two like I left . I worked till the last day I could

Appendix B List of Questions Asked 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9)

What word would you use to describe this person’s style? What three words would you use to describe this person’s personality? What do you think this person looks like? What gender would you guess this person identifies with? Please provide a guess regarding this speaker’s sexual orientation. What ethnicity/ethnicities would you guess this speaker identifies with? Where do you think this speaker is from (please be as specific as possible)? What high school do you think they went to? Do you think you know or have met this person? If so, what is the person’s name?

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Appendix C Correspondence between Font Size and Frequency for Tag Cloud Data N times mentioned

Font size

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 68 72 76

notes 1. This is Larz’s preferred pronoun.

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Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011. Intersecting variables and perceived sexual orientation in men. American Speech 86(1), 52–68. Cole, Jennifer, Erik R. Thomas, Erica Britt, and Elizabeth Coggshall. 2001. Gender and ethnicity in intonation: A case study of North Carolina English. Unpublished manuscript. Coleman, R.O. 1973. A comparison of the contributions of two vocal characteristics to the perception of maleness and femaleness in the voice. Speech, Music, and Hearing Quarterly Progress and Status Report 14(2/3), 13–22. Collins, Sarah A. 2000. Men’s voices and women’s choices. Animal Behaviour 60(6), 773–80. Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 185–210. van Dommelen, Wim A., and Bente H. Moxness. 1995. Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: Sex-specific behavior. Language and Speech 38(3), 267–87. D’Onofrio, Annette. 2016. Social Meaning in Linguistic Perception. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Drager, Katie, Carly Salter, and Megan Macinkowicz. 2010. Perceived style, sexuality, and pitch: An experimental approach. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 39. San Antonio, TX: University of Texas at San Antonio. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (4), 453–76. Fraccaro, Paul J., Jillian J. M. O’Connor, Daniel E. Re, Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine, and David R. Feinberg. 2013. Faking it: Deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness. Animal Behavior 85(1), 127–36. Gaudio, Rudolf P. 1994. Sounding gay: Properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1), 30–57. Hawkins, Francine Dove. 1993. Speaker ethnic identification: The roles of speech sample, fundamental frequency, speaker and listener variations. Ph.D. dissertation. College Park: University of Maryland. Hearst, Marti A., and Daniela Rosner. 2008. Tag clouds: Data analysis tool or social signaller? In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual: 160–70. Hillenbrand, James M., and Michael J. Clark. 2009. The role of f0 and formant frequencies in distinguishing the voices of men and women. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71(5), 1150–66. Jurafsky, Dan, Rajesh Ranganath, and Dan McFarland. 2009. Extracting social meaning: Identifying interactional style in spoken conversation. Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL. Boulder, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics, 638–46. Kirtley, M. Joelle. 2015. Language, identity, and non-binary gender in Hawai‘i. PhD dissertation. Mānoa: University of Hawai‘i.

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9

Features, Meanings, and Indexical Fields Marie Maegaard and Nicolai Pharao

9.1

Introduction

Within third-wave sociolinguistics, the social meaning of variation is seen as an essential feature of language; in Eckert’s words it is a ‘design feature’ (Eckert 2016a, 2016b). This means that understanding the way social meaning is connected to linguistic variation is a central concern for third-wave sociolinguists. In his theoretical framework of indexicality and indexical orders, Silverstein (2003) offers a perspective on variation and social meaning which seeks to explain the fluidity and change of indexical meanings of variation. His notion of indexical order has been taken up by Eckert in her concept of the indexical field and used in her account of how the social meaning of variation on the one hand structures linguistic practice, and on the other hand is changed (or mutated, cf. Eckert 2012) by linguistic acts. In our chapter, we wish to discuss the concept of the indexical field in the light of results from a series of listener-experiments conducted in Denmark in recent years. A particularly attractive aspect of the indexical field is that it easily captures the malleability of social meaning – that is, the finding that the same linguistic variant may be associated with different indexical features. This has been shown in a number of studies using a discourse analytic approach (e.g., Moore 2004; Podesva 2008) as well as in experimental approaches using the matched-guise technique (e.g., Levon 2007, 2014; Campbell-Kibler 2008), and studies combining the two (e.g., Podesva et al. 2015). In a series of studies focusing primarily on the social meanings associated with fronted (s) in different styles of Copenhagen Danish, we have used the matched-guise technique to investigate how the social meaning ascribed by listeners to a specific linguistic variant is influenced by (1) the prosodic context in which it occurs, (2) the co-occurrence of other segmental features in the stream of speech, and (3) the gender of the speaker. The three experiments illustrate different aspects of the indexicality of fronted (s) in Copenhagen Danish, and they are designed to highlight how different social meanings are evoked and how the indexicalities of different features influence each other. We show how the ascription of 203

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indexical value to linguistic variation is a dynamic process and we argue that the concept of the indexical field can help us understand the way meaningmaking takes place, not only in experiments like the present ones, but also in everyday interaction. 9.2

The Role of the Prosodic Context

We chose to look at s-fronting because studies of speech variation in the Copenhagen area have shown that this variation is associated with a variety of social groups. In the first set of experiments (reported more extensively in Pharao et al. 2014) we first looked for relevant social meanings by asking adolescents to reply to the open question, ‘What is your immediate impression of this person? What do you think he is like?’ when they were exposed to eight different male guises. Four of these guises were based on short clips of two different boys speaking the style we term MODERN and the other four were based on short clips of two different boys speaking the style we term STREET. What we have termed MODERN in these studies is a standard style of Copenhagen Danish, and what we have termed STREET is a non-standard style of Copenhagen Danish, typically spoken among young people in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous urban communities (see Quist 2008; Møller & Jørgensen 2013; Jørgensen et al. 2016). These two styles have been found in speech production studies to have very different prosodic features, notably a difference in rhythm, with MODERN being more stress-timed and STREET being more syllable-timed. The two styles differ with respect to a number of segmental and grammatical features as well (Quist 2000, 2008; Hansen & Pharao 2010), but in the 7–8-seconds-long passages we used, we made sure that no tokens of such variables were present with the exception of the variable (s). The clips were taken from recordings of map tasks (Anderson et al. 1991) to ensure neutral and comparable semantic content across the guises. The variable was manipulated using cross-splicing (e.g., CampbellKibler 2008) of what was perceived as a ‘standard’ alveolar [s] with a CoG of 5621 Hz and what was perceived as a fronted [s+] with a CoG of 8973 Hz. The tokens inserted into the passages were taken from recordings of other boys of the same age as those used for the basis of the guises. The results1 of the experiment with open questions revealed that, for all 116 listeners, associations with foreignness (or immigrant background) and homosexuality and femininity were particularly relevant. However, the STREET guises received similar responses whether or not they contained [s+]. This lack of effect of [s+] in the STREET guises led us to follow up with an experiment asking a new set of 234 adolescent listeners (from the same two Copenhagen schools) to rate the same eight guises on a set of eight scales. Here we will focus on the four scales ‘immigrant’, ‘gangster’,

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‘homosexual’, and ‘feminine’ (for details see Pharao et al. 2014). Part of the reason why we decided to do the same experiment with fixed scales was that we wanted to investigate whether the lack of effect of [s+] in the STREET guises was due to the way in which the experiment had been carried out. It is possible that the respondents did in fact associate the speakers more with the traits ‘feminine’ and ‘homosexual’ when the guises contained a fronted (s), but did not find gender and sexual orientation as relevant or salient as the ‘gangster’ and ‘immigrant’ categorizations. Therefore, respondents may have chosen not to point to the perceived ‘femininity’ and ‘homosexuality’ of the STREET guises, even though these parameters had in fact been triggered. By carrying out the experiment with fixed scales, we forced the respondents to fill out the scales for these categorizations as well. The results from the second experiment revealed the same pattern as in the first experiment: all four STREET guises received high average ratings on the scales ‘immigrant’ and ‘gangster’ regardless of whether they contained [s] or [s+], and all four MODERN guises received low average ratings on these two scales. The MODERN guises also received low average ratings on the scales ‘homosexual’ and ‘feminine’ when they contained only tokens of [s], whereas the MODERN guises with [s+] received very high ratings on theses scales. The results are summarized in Table 9.1. The striking difference between the effect of the [s+] variant in the STREET style as opposed to the MODERN style indicates that the indexical field associated with [s+] in Copenhagen-based Danish must contain very different social meanings. Note that although the [s+] cannot be seen to have an effect on the ratings of the STREET guises nor on the MODERN guises with respect to traits that are clearly associated with the STREET style (i.e., ‘gangster’ and ‘immigrant’), the use of [s+] in the STREET style is well attested in production (Maegaard 2010; Stæhr 2010). Thus, drawing on both speech production and speaker evaluation data, we can say that the fronted variant of (s) is compatible with the STREET style in a way that does not affect the associations with ‘immigrant’ and ‘gangster’ (see further on this in the following). Table 9.1 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the guises used in Pharao et al. (2014). Scale

STREET [s]

STREET [s+]

MODERN [s]

MODERN [s+]

Immigrant Gangster Homosexual Feminine

4.5 3.8 1.5 1.7

4.7 4.0 1.6 1.8

1.6 2.2 1.9 1.9

1.8 1.7 3.6 3.5

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Clearly then, the combination of [s+] with distinctly different linguistic rhythm patterns shapes the way in which [s+] is linked to different qualities in the sense of Eckert (2008: 469). Since great care was taken to avoid the inclusion of any other segmental variables as well as lexical and grammatical variables associated with STREET, we feel confident in attributing the observed effects to the combination of rhythm and the (s) variable. 9.3

Combination of Segmental Variables

In a follow-up experiment (Pharao & Maegaard 2017), we wanted to test how a feature that is overtly associated with the STREET style, namely the palatalized variant of (t), [tj], would affect the associations that [s+] has in the two styles. The combination of the variables (s) and (t) is also interesting because they have the same place of articulation in the standard language: they are both alveolar obstruents in standard Copenhagen-based Danish, and they may both be fronted to a dental place of articulation. In a traditional (if rather socially naïve) phonetic approach, one might expect speakers who front their (s) to also front their (t); that is, the affrication phase of their productions of (t) would reveal them to be produced as dental rather than alveolar, a [ts+]. Compared to this expectation, the variant [tj] can be seen as a backed variant of (t), as the place of articulation has been shifted from dental or alveolar to palatal. Additionally, Copenhagen speakers who tend to front their (s) have been found to also have a tendency to use the strongly affricated (t) (e.g., Maegaard 2010). Thus, the combination of [s+] with [tj] should be surprising and therefore ripe for interpretation by listeners. In other words, we would expect the indexical links for [s+] to remain unchanged when it is encountered in combination with a [ts+] where the affrication phase has the properties of a dental and thus equally fronted (t), but to show differences when encountered in combination with [tj]. For this experiment, we created a new set of guises to test for the combined effects of (s) and (t) variation. Given the rather large effect of the presence of [s+] in the MODERN guises from the previous experiment, we hypothesized that the order in which variants were encountered by listeners in the speech stream might affect their responses: if [s+] is very clearly associated with feminine gay men in the minds of adolescents, it is possible that this effect would inhibit any associations that a palatalized variant of (t) might have for them, simply due to the strength of the indexical link for [s+]. We therefore created two sets of eight guises: in one set the first token of (t) occurred before any token of (s) had been encountered, and in the other set a token of (s) occurred before the first token of (t). All tokens of (s) always consisted of the fronted variant from the previous experiment. For each of the voices (two MODERN and two STREET) two separate versions

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were made, one where all tokens of (t) were also realized as fronted (i.e., [ts+], with a spectral CoG in the affrication phase of 6229 Hz), and another where all tokens of (t) were replaced with a palatalized variant (i.e. [tj], with a spectral CoG of 4648 Hz). Two speakers x two styles x two (t)-variants x two orders = sixteen guises in total played to fifty adolescent listeners. Listeners were again asked to rate the speakers represented by the guises on the scales ‘immigrant’, ‘gangster’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘feminine’. Listeners were able to indicate their evaluations during the playback of each guise and during the pause after each guise had been played. The average ratings are presented in Table 9.2. Looking at the average ratings, we find the familiar pattern of the STREET guises getting relatively high scores on the scales ‘immigrant’ and ‘gangster’ but low scores on the scales ‘homosexual’ and ‘feminine’ again, regardless of the segmental variant of (t), and indeed regardless of the order in which the two variables were presented. Somewhat surprisingly we also see relatively low scores on all four scales for the MODERN guises, although still statistically significantly higher here than in the ratings of the STREET guises. It would appear that the lack of variation in the variable (s), which was always presented as [s+] in these guises, has weakened the effect on the scales ‘homosexual’ and ‘feminine’ compared to the effect that was found in the first experiment. More interesting however is the effect2 of the variant [tj] in the guises where the first token occurred before a token of (s): here the scores on the scales ‘homosexual’ and ‘feminine’ are significantly lower than in the other three types of MODERN guises. It would appear then that the presence of palatalized (t) attenuates the effect of the fronted (s) but only if it occurs before a fronted (s) has been heard (for discussion of the details in this dataset, see Pharao & Maegaard 2017). These results show that palatalized (t), much like the prosodic frame typical of STREET, shapes how fronted [s+] is linked to different indexical properties. It is interesting to note that this effect is only observed in the responses to the guises representing the MODERN style. This is likely due to the fact that the rhythm that is characteristic of STREET already inhibits the linking to ‘homosexual’ and ‘feminine’. The results suggest that while the indexical links for [s+] are very different for the STREET style and the MODERN style, the indexical links for [tj] are to some extent shared across the two styles. The results from our second experiment suggest that there is one indexical field for (t) whereas there may be two separate indexical fields for (s) depending on whether it is heard in STREET or MODERN style. In other words, indexical fields may be a property not only of individual variables but also of individual styles. We return to this discussion in Section 9.6.

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STREET [s+][tj]

4.9 3.5 1.1 1.1

Scale

Immigrant Gangster Homosexual Feminine

4.6 3.4 1.2 1.2

STREET [s+][ts+] 4.6 3.4 1.2 1.2

STREET [tj][s+] 4.8 3.5 1.1 1.1

STREET [ts+][s+] 2.8 2.9 2.0 2.1

MODERN [s+][tj]

2.8 2.8 2.2 2.1

MODERN [s+][ts+]

Table 9.2 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 of guises (after Pharao & Maegaard 2017).

3.2 3.1 1.3 1.3

MODERN [tj][s+]

2.0 2.1 2.1 2.0

MODERN [ts+][s+]

Features, Meanings, and Indexical Fields

9.4

209

The Gender of the Speaker

While the previous studies looked at combinations of phonetic properties of speech and kept social factors as comparable as possible by using guises all based on recordings of male adolescents from Copenhagen, our most recent study of the social meanings of (s) and (t) in Copenhagen Danish looks at the same phonetic features but changes the gender of the speakers by using clips of recordings of girls speaking either MODERN or STREET (Lillelund-Holst et al. 2019). The clips come from the same corpus of recorded map tasks used to construct the guises for the experiments with male voices, meaning that they have a similar neutral semantic content (giving directions in a fictional town). The guises were constructed according to the same principles as in the previous experiments: recordings of two girls speaking MODERN and of two girls speaking STREET were selected and tokens of alveolar and fronted (s) and alveolar and palatalized (t) were taken from recordings of other speakers and spliced into the selected clips. Since there was reason to believe that other personality traits would be relevant in the evaluation of girls’ use of fronted (s) and palatalized (t) than those which were used in the evaluation of boys (Maegaard 2007), an experiment with open questions was carried out first, in order to establish which scales would be relevant for adolescents in Copenhagen. Ninety-five high school students from the same two high schools where the experiments with the male voices were conducted participated in the experiment, and for each guise they answered the question ‘What is your immediate impression of this person?’ The responses showed that the trait ‘immigrant’ was also relevant in the evaluation of the female guises (and also reference to the suburbs that were mentioned in the previous experiments, but which we have left out of the presentation here). A trait that may be said to be related to the trait ‘gangster’ but still distinct from it (possibly because the term ‘gangster’ is strongly associated with masculinity and therefore not available for girls) was the labelling ‘plays tough’. However, the responses did not indicate that sexual orientation or gender was relevant in the evaluation of the female guises. Instead, labels which can be subsumed under the headings ‘intelligent’, ‘confident’, ‘helpful’, and ‘annoying’ were the most prevalent in the responses to the open question. In order to be able to quantify the strength of the associations between fronted (s) and palatalized (t) in the STREET and MODERN styles in female speech, another experiment using scales based on the traits previously mentioned were used. Some 108 high school students participated in this experiment. Once again, the order of (s) and (t) was varied between the guises, to see if the effect of order found on some of the scales used with the male guises would also emerge when the guises consisted of recordings of female speech. Two styles x two voices x four segmental variants x two different orders =

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thirty-two different guises. This was considered too much for a single experiment, and therefore half of the listeners heard sixteen of the guises and the other half heard the remaining sixteen guises. Listeners for both lists always heard all styles, voices, variants and orders, but not both orders of each variant for every voice (Lillelund-Holst et al. 2019). As before, ordinal logistic regression models with mixed effects were fit to the data for each scale. Fixed effects included interactions of (s) and prosodic frame and interactions of (t) and prosodic frame as well as simple effects for the order of the segmental variables, the order of the guises, and the two different listener groups. Random effects were listener and guise. However, the statistical analyses revealed that the order of the segmental variables never emerged as significant in the models and neither did the order of the guises or the two listener groups (p > 0.1 or more in all cases). This is not the only difference between the results for the male guises and the female guises. For none of the scales did the variation in (s) emerge as significant regardless of the style it occurred in or whether it occurred before or after the first token of (t) in the guise. For instance, fitting the model to the responses on the scale ‘plays tough’, the interaction of (s) and the prosodic frame has p = 0.94 (and an estimate of 0.03) and the order of the two segmental variables has p =0.32 (and an estimate of –0.24). This is similar to the pattern found for the STREET guises using male voices and is reminiscent of the results for the MODERN male guises in the second experiment. However, whereas the effect of [s+] was weaker for the male voices in experiment 2, we did still observe a statistically significant difference between the STREET and MODERN in that experiment. In this experiment using female voices, no difference is found between the two styles with respect to [s+]. It would appear then that fronting of (s) does not carry social meaning in the speech of adolescent girls, at least not as measured by the eight scales we used on the basis of the previous responses to the open question. The average ratings can be seen in Tables 9.3 and 9.4. As with the male guises, there is a simple main effect of prosodic frame with the guises based on the STREET style being rated significantly higher on average on the scales ‘immigrant’ (p < 0.001, estimate = –3.40) and ‘plays tough’ (p = 0.005, estimate = –1.2). The prosodic frame also affected responses on the scale ‘intelligent’, with the MODERN guises being rated somewhat higher than the STREET guises on average (p = 0.03, estimate = 0.93). The palatalized (t) also carries social meaning: guises with [tj] are rated higher on the ‘immigrant’ scale again irrespective of the prosodic frame (p = 0.028, estimate = 1.25). However, for none of the other scales presented here do we find a statistically significant effect of the phonetic variation included in the guises. Comparing the quantitative results from the experiment with female guises to those from the experiments with the male guises, then, we find both differences and similarities.

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[s+][ts+]

3.6 3.0 2.8

Scale

Immigrant Plays tough Annoying

3.5 2.9 2.9

[s][ts+] 4.3 3.2 3.0

[s+][tj] 4.2 3.3 3.2

[s][tj] Helpful Intelligent Confident

Scale 3.4 2.7 3.4

[s+][ts+]

Table 9.3 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the STREET guises with female voices.

3.3 2.6 3.3

[s][ts+]

3.2 2.5 3.3

[s+][tj]

3.2 2.5 3.3

[s][tj]

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[s+][ts+]

1.7 2.2 2.7

Scale

Immigrant Plays tough Annoying

1.6 2.3 2.4

[s][ts+] 2.5 2.7 2.9

[s+][tj] 2.4 2.7 2.9

[s][tj] Helpful Intelligent Confident

Scale

3.4 3.0 3.2

[s+][ts+]

Table 9.4 Average ratings on a scale of 1–5 for the MODERN guises with female voices.

3.4 3.2 3.4

[s][ts+]

3.3 2.9 3.4

[s+][tj]

3.2 2.8 3.4

[s][tj]

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• Fronting of (s) has a large effect on the perception of MODERN male voices, but no effect on the perception of female voices. MODERN male voices with fronted (s) are judged as sounding less gay and less feminine when they contain a palatalized (t), especially when the (t) precedes the (s). • The palatalized (t) makes female voices sound more immigrant-like regardless of the prosody, but the palatalized (t) has no effect on its own for male voices. • The prosodic frame typical of the STREET style makes both female and male voices sound more immigrant-like and more ‘streetwise’ if we interpret the scales ‘gangster’ and ‘plays tough’ to be related in this way. 9.5

The Indexical Field for [s+]

Eckert’s concept of the indexical field builds on Silverstein’s (2003) theory of indexical order. It is based on an understanding of the social meaning of variation as fluid and ever changing. At the same time, it is – somewhat implicitly – based in an idea of a speech community. In her tentative model of an indexical field for released /t/, Eckert includes findings from several ethnographic third-wave studies of different communities of practice, and she argues that the seemingly quite different social meanings of released /t/ are in fact related. At the same time, released /t/ can take part in constructing very different stances or personae, like for instance nerd girl (as in Bucholtz 2001) or gay diva (as in Podesva 2008), dependent on the style, the context, and the community of practice involved. However, it is not clear how we delimit which indexicalities we can meaningfully place within the same indexical field, since Silverstein’s model for indexical variation is founded in an understanding of different indexicalities being related, as agents are both reproducing and changing the meaning of linguistic variants. Eckert refers to change in social meaning as ‘the result of an ideological move, a sidestepping within an ideological field’ (Eckert 2008: 464). This way, indexicality is dynamic, but meanings are never random: quite on the contrary, the next order index is ‘always already immanent’ (Silverstein 2003: 194). So far, we have presented analyses of several matched-guise studies of variation of (s) and (t) in Copenhagen-based Danish, and in the following we will delve more into the details and discuss how to understand the results within the frame of the indexical field. It should be noted that the use of large-scale surveys with fixed scales does in itself limit the granularity of the indexicalities we have studied. We cannot capture individually held beliefs about the association between particular variants and stereotypical personality traits. However, as we argue in the following, the indexical links that we have found are to an overwhelming degree shared by listeners, both when we ask open questions about their impressions of speakers and when we use fixed scales to study them.

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It is clear from the results presented that the different meanings associated with [s+] are so different that it is hard to imagine them as deriving from the same overarching indexicality, or to see them as in some other way related. The social meanings seem to be triggered by the style of the speaker. However, this is also the case in Eckert’s model of the social meanings of released /t/ in US English, and so, in principle, the different meanings found in our results could also be viewed as all inhabiting different parts of one indexical field (see also Gafter, this volume). But we argue that the two types of social meaning seen here – on the one hand, meanings like ‘feminine’, ‘gay’, ‘snob’, and on the other hand, meanings like ‘streetwise’ and ‘gangster’ – do not clearly derive from any single overarching indexicality. This could be an effect of the method we have used to gauge the social meanings associated with the variant. However, as shown, the responses given both to the open questions and on the rating scales were clearly distinct for the two styles: ‘femininity’ and ‘gayness’ were only used with the MODERN guises and ‘foreignness’ and ‘streetwiseness’ were only used with the STREET guises. 9.6

Sources of the Indexicality of [s+] in Copenhagen Danish

We do not have any reason to assume that the use of [s+] in MODERN and the use of [s+] in STREET are related. The indexicality of [s+] in MODERN could be seen as building on sound symbolic relations between frequency and smallness, as it is also seen in other languages (see Levon, Maegaard, & Pharao 2017; Pharao & Maegaard 2017). By calling this relation sound symbolic we do not intend to claim that [s+] has an inherent and fixed indexicality, which is just waiting to be realized, but rather that there is a potential to exploit since female speakers overall have smaller vocal tracts and therefore are more likely to produce (s) (in any language) with higher peak frequency, which is characteristic of [s+]. As explained by Eckert (2017: 1199), ‘sound symbolism is not a direct importation of natural sound into language, but a conventionalization of natural sounds’. This is just one possible way to understand the indexicality of [s+] in MODERN, and it can be supported by the fact that similar associations can be found in several other languages. On the other hand, as we have shown both in the accounts here and elsewhere (Pharao et al. 2014; Maegaard & Pharao 2016; Pharao & Maegaard 2017), indexical meanings are of course not necessarily the outcome of sound symbolic relations, and sometimes meanings can be very far from each other. Social meanings like ‘gangster’ seem to be almost in opposition to social meanings like ‘feminine’, and tracing the development of this indexicality is difficult. In connection to [s+], the ‘feminine’ type of indexicality is undoubtedly much more salient than the ‘gangster’ indexicality to most speakers in Denmark. Metapragmatic discourse on the indexicality of [s+] is very common when it comes to its use in MODERN (see Pharao et al. 2014; Maegaard &

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Pharao 2016 for examples) but almost non-existent when it comes to its use in STREET, even though several studies show [s+] to be a typical feature of this style in production (Maegaard 2010; Stæhr 2010). Nevertheless, [s+] is used in media imitations of tough, streetwise boys of immigrant background (e.g., the film Terkel i Knibe), and it is reacted upon as ‘immigrant-like’ by university students when we use samples with fronted (s) as examples in undergraduate linguistics courses. Furthermore, the experiment of perceptions of (s) variation previously reported showed that one of the two STREET speakers in the experiment was rated higher on the ‘gangster’ scale in the [s+] guise than in the [s] guise. The effect disappeared when the other speaker was included in the overall statistical model, but nevertheless there was a slight effect for this particular speaker. This all shows that it is not the case that [s+] in STREET is a feature which points to ‘femininity’ or ‘gayness’ in male speakers which is merely drowned out by all the other features of STREET pointing to other meanings. Instead [s+] must be seen as a feature which can trigger many of the same indexicalities as other features of the STREET style. On the other hand, the social meaning of a feature is also influenced by the strength or salience of the style in which it is used. In a study of the indexicality of different styles in a Copenhagen school context, it was found that the use of [s+] in a style which was a less broad version of STREET (only involving intonation otherwise the speech is similar to MODERN), lead to some listeners labelling the speaker as ‘gay immigrant’ (Maegaard 2010). This shows that the difference between the meanings is not an ‘either–or’, but that even though the two meanings seem very different, they can co-exist, even in responses from the same listener. We can interpret findings like this as cases where the categorization of the speaker is not very strong, neither pointing incontestably in one direction nor the other. We assume that the overall prosodic pattern seemed to suggest ‘immigrant’ to the listener, but that the less broad version of STREET means that the speaker was not associated with ‘gangsterness’; only ‘immigrantness’. On the other hand, the fronted (s) influenced the listener in the direction of ‘gay’. Importantly, no listeners in the reported studies have categorized a speaker as being both ‘gay’ and ‘gangster’, which again suggests that some categorizations seem incompatible with each other. Associations with the ‘gangster’ category include both ‘tough’ and (heterosexually) ‘masculine’ (Maegaard & Pharao 2016), and is thus not consistent with being labelled ‘gay’. Eckert defines linguistic style as ‘a clustering of linguistic resources, and an association of that clustering with social meaning’ (Eckert 2001: 123). This is also the understanding of the concept of style taken in this chapter. Furthermore, in actual speech production, the speech will vary with respect to the amount of ‘style-features’ used, and with respect to the indexical values of different features. This argument is based on the understanding that styles

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can be stronger or weaker indexes of certain social meanings, and that we can grade speech as broader or less broad versions of particular styles, depending on the amount and strength of the particular features used in the speech (cf. Podesva 2007). This means that styles must be seen as fluid and gradient and that even though we can list a number of features which belong to the cluster STREET (see Quist 2000; Hansen & Pharao 2010), the social meaning of stretches of speech is also a question of frequency and strength of particular features. In the review of the different verbal guise experiments above, three separate points are important. It was seen that the social meaning of a linguistic feature can vary (1) depending on the prosodic context in which it occurs, (2) depending on the order of other segmental features in the sample, and (3) depending on the speaker categorization. Regarding prosodic context, it is clear from the results that prosodic context is crucial to the interpretation of [s+] in Copenhagen-based Danish. Prosodic context is of course a phenomenon influencing the entire stretch of speech, and not something which can be delimited to specific parts of the utterances, such as is the case for specific phonetic segments. The aspect of interest here is the fact that the indexicality of the different guises are extremely different. This is something we have discussed at length elsewhere (Pharao et al. 2014), and in the present discussion it is included only to give an overview of the different ways we can approach the potential social meanings of [s+]. We will get back to a discussion of possible interpretations of the results, after giving an interpretation of the second study and its results. It was obvious from the first study that prosodic context matters to the perception of the (s) variants. In the second study reported, it was seen that in fact additional segmental variation in (t) also influenced the potential meaning of [s+]. We saw that the presence of a palatalized (t) had an effect on the perception of the MODERN guises, so that the speaker was perceived as less ‘feminine’ and ‘homosexual’, but more ‘immigrant’ and ‘gangster’. However, this was only the case when it occurred before a fronted (s) had been heard. This way, it seems that the [tj] has the same type of effect on listeners’ interpretation of the indexical meaning of the speech as shown for the prosodic context of STREET in the first experiment. The findings from these two experiments can be interpreted in several ways. It is clear that the prosodic context or the presence of [tj] can inhibit the indexical meanings otherwise ascribed to a style. Levon (2014) discusses a similar issue in his review of verbal guise experiments investigating indexical links between linguistic variation and perceived sexuality. He concludes that ‘the extent to which a linguistic form cues perceived sexuality depends on the other social categories or traits that listeners also perceive and on the degree to which listeners believe these various categories and traits to be compatible’ (Levon

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2014: 544). In his further argument and in his accounts of his own studies, Levon points out that sometimes potential social meanings of linguistic features are blocked due to listeners’ categorization of the speaker and their apparent incompatibility with the indexicality of the feature in question. In our case we could see the non-effect of [s+] as indexing gayness in the STREET guises as an effect of blocking or inhibition, due to the listeners having categorized the speakers as ‘immigrant gangster’ types, and therefore not ‘feminine gay’ types. Nevertheless, we are hesitant to subscribe to this interpretation of the results due to the fact that [s+] is, as we have argued, an integrated part of STREET. Therefore, here it does not seem to be a question of blocking, but rather that [s+] does not contribute anything new to the overall social meaning of STREET heard in the prosodic pattern of the samples: if anything, it supports the perception already made by the listener. On the other hand, the concept of (temporary) inhibition of indexical links seems highly relevant in the aforementioned results regarding the order of the different features. Here, the overall presence of the features is the same – the only difference is the order in which they occur. The palatalized (t) only has an effect when it has been heard before the first fronted (s). This is a strong indication that the indexicality of the palatalized (t) triggered by it being the first non-standard feature heard in the guise is of such prominence that the indexicality cannot easily be modified, regardless of the following linguistic features. In other words, the occurrence of a non-standard feature may prime a particular social frame that influences the interpretation of subsequent non-standard features in the utterance. This is what Levon refers to as the ‘strength of the concept-attribute link’, where the concept ‘immigrant gangster’ and its link to heterosexuality is of such strength that this indexical link blocks or inhibits other possible indexicalities related to other linguistic features present in the speech. Finally, we have seen how speaker gender affects the perception of linguistic variation. A fronted (s) has no effect when occurring in the speech of a female speaker, whereas it has a strong effect when occurring in male speech. This could be interpreted as a consequence of the fact that the social meaning of [s+] in male voices as ‘feminine’ is already indexed by the voice quality of the female voice in itself (and apparently the fronting of the (s) does not add to the degree of femininity nor the type of femininity that is evoked). Furthermore, this pattern resembles the pattern previously discussed where male STREET guises were not perceived as any different according to variation in (s), since [s+] could only contribute social meanings already indexed by the prosodic context of STREET. Regarding the impact of variation in (t), we saw that [tj] had no overall effect on its own in the male guises, but that female voices were perceived as more ‘immigrant’ when they contained [tj], in both STREET and MODERN guises and irrespective of the order of (s) and (t) segments. The palatalized (t) is a highly salient feature of STREET, and the result can be seen in connection to the overall

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link between STREET and both masculinity and immigrant background, where speakers of STREET are associated with heterosexual masculinity, gangsterness, and lower socioeconomic and immigrant background (see Maegaard & Pharao 2016). While palatalized (t) is a highly salient feature of STREET, the fronted (s) can only be said to be highly salient in the MODERN style, whereas in STREET it seems to not further develop the potential indexicality already present in STREET. In MODERN male voices, then, it can be argued that what is happening is that [s+] contributes potential meanings of femininity and homosexuality, and is only countered when [tj] occurs before the first [s+] is heard. This implies that when equally salient variants, with quite different meaning potentials, cooccur, the order of the occurrence in the stretch of speech is crucial. All in all, our findings support the understanding of individual features as not having stable or fixed social meanings but rather a range of potential social meanings which can be triggered or inhibited by prosodic context, the order of segmental features, or speaker gender. 9.7

Shaping the Path through the Indexical Field

Our results illustrate the important point that a linguistic feature does not carry a specific meaning on its own, but that the indexicality is dependent, for instance, on linguistic style and speaker gender. This means that it is the clustering of features – not the individual feature – that gives meaning to the variation. This is a well-established point within third-wave sociolinguistics. However, it is nevertheless a point which is relevant to bring up in connection with the concept of the indexical field. One challenge is to decide which meanings of a certain variant that can be seen as part of the same indexical field. In her account of the indexical field, Eckert (2008: 464) states that ‘an indexical field is a constellation of meanings that are ideologically linked’. In that case, it is not obvious that the two meanings of fronted (s) in Copenhagen speech ought to be seen as part of the same indexical field, even though both meanings are part of young Copenhagen styles. Through the argument in this chapter, we have tried to show how indexical order and the notion of an indexical field are highly relevant when investigating relations between linguistic variation and social meaning. We would argue that the necessary way to conceptualize the differing indexicalities of the features dealt with in the reported studies is to see perception of linguistic variation as a dynamic process. Viewing perception as a dynamic process allows us to see how linguistic variation sometimes moves perceived social meaning of the speaker in one direction and sometimes in another; sometimes strengthening already established indexical links, sometimes breaking them down in the moment-by-moment interpretation of the speech stream. These

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movements can advantageously be illustrated by the indexical field. We can imagine how a listener hearing a speaker immediately links the speech to a stereotype and a specific social meaning. This first step into the indexical field has an impact on which social meanings will be part of the stereotypical perception of the speaker. As more features are encountered by the listener in the stream of speech produced by the speaker, new indexical fields are invoked. The important point here is that effects may spill over from one indexical field to the next, effectively shaping the path taken through the indexical field associated with the subsequent variants. In their illustrations of indexical order and the indexical field, Silverstein and Eckert are concerned with the indexicality of features. What we have proposed here is a way to use the concept of the indexical field in an understanding of how styles are linked to social meaning through specific features’ links to indexical fields, and through the way indexicalities of specific features both shape and are shaped by the indexicalities of other features in a dialectic and dynamic relationship. Viewing the production of social meaning linked to linguistic variation as a dynamic process where different paths through the indexical field are taken depending on other indexical meanings in other fields can also work as illustrations of how inhibition and strengthening of specific social meanings take place. notes 1. All of the quantitative results in all of the experiments reported here come from analyses using mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression to analyse the listener responses. In all of the studies, factors with p < 0.05 were interpreted as significant. We refer the reader to Pharao et al. (2014) and Pharao and Maegaard (2017) for details. 2. As before, the effects reported as significant in this study were all established using mixed effects ordinal logistic regression. The significance level was p < 0.05.

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Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), 453–76. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 87–100. Eckert, Penelope. 2016a. Third wave variationism. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.27. Eckert, Penelope. 2016b. Variation, meaning and social change. In N. Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 68–85. Eckert, Penelope. 2017. The most perfect of signs: Iconicity in variation. Linguistics 55(5), 1197–207. Hansen, Gert Foget, and Nicolai Pharao. 2010. Prosody in the Copenhagen multiethnolect. In P. Quist and B. A. Svendsen (eds.), Multilingual Urban Scandinavia: New Linguistic Practices. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 79–95. Jørgensen, Jens Normann, Martha Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen, and Janus Spindler Møller. 2016. Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds.), Language and Superdiversity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 137–54. Levon, Erez. 2007. Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36(4), 533–54. Levon, Erez. 2014. Categories, stereotypes and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society 43(5), 539–66. Levon, Erez, Marie Maegaard, and Nicolai Pharao. 2017. Introduction: Tracing the origin of /s/ variation. Linguistics 55(5), 979–92. Lillelund-Holst, Aleksandra Culap, Pharao, Nicolai & Maegaard, Marie. 2019, “Not from a ‘Danish’ home; typical of trying to sound ‘tough’: Indexical meanings of variation in /s/ and /t/ in the speech of adolescent girls in Copenhagen, Revista de Estudos da Linguagem 27(4), 1701–1736. Maegaard, Marie. 2007. Udtalevariation og -forandring i københavnsk: En etnografisk undersøgelse af sprogbrug, sociale kategorier og social praksis blandt unge på en københavnsk folkeskole. København: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Danske talesprog, Nr. 8. Maegaard, Marie. 2010. Linguistic practice and stereotypes among Copenhagen adolescents. In P. Quist and B. A. Svendsen (eds.), Multilingual Urban Scandinavia: New Linguistic Practices. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 189–206. Maegaard, Marie, and Nicolai Pharao. 2016. /s/ variation and perceptions of male sexuality in Denmark. In E. Levon and R. B. Mendes (eds.), Language, Sexuality and Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 88–104. Moore, Emma. 2004. Sociolinguistic style: A multidimensional resource for shared identity creation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 49, 375–96. Møller, Janus Spindler and Jens Normann Jørgensen. 2013. Organizations of language among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 6(1), 23–42. Pharao, Nicolai, Marie Maegaard, Janus Spindler Møller, and Tore Kristiansen. 2014. Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Language in Society 43(1), 1–32.

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Pharao, Nicolai, and Marie Maegaard. 2017. On the influence of coronal sibilants and stops on the perceptions of social meaning in Copenhagen Danish. Linguistics 55(5), 1141–67. Podesva, Robert J. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4), 478–504. Podesva, Robert J. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. Texas Linguistic Forum 51: Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin 15, 134–43. Podesva, Robert J., Jermay Reynolds, Patrick Callier, and Jessica Baptiste. 2015. Constraints on the social meaning of released /t/: A production and perception study of U.S. politicians. Language Variation and Change 27(1), 59–87. Quist, Pia. 2000. Ny københavnsk ‘multietnolekt’. Om sprogrug blandt unge i sprogligt og kulturelt heterogene miljøer. Danske Talesprog 1, 143–211. Quist, Pia. 2008. Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1–2), 43–61. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23, 193–229. Stæhr, Andreas. 2010. ‘Rappen reddede os’: Et studie af senmoderne storbydrenges identitetsarbejde i fritids- og skolemiljøer. Københavnerstudier i Tosprogethed 54.

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Reconciling Seemingly Conflicting Social Meanings Roey J. Gafter

10.1

Introduction

A focus on the social meaning of linguistic phenomena lies at the heart of the third wave of variationist sociolinguistics (Eckert 2012). One key tenet of this approach is that a given variable is not understood to have a single, fixed meaning. Rather, in each instance of a variable, speakers are argued to index a distinct meaning (or meanings), drawn from a broader set of potential meanings known as the indexical field (Eckert 2008). This field is conceptualized as ‘a constellation of ideologically linked meanings, any region of which can be invoked in context’ (Eckert 2012: 94). If we take this statement to its logical conclusion, an indexical field can be very vast indeed, encompassing indexical meanings that are quite different from one another, to the point that they may seem irreconcilable. For example, no aspect of the framing of the indexical field would preclude a linguistic form from indexing both socially stigmatized traits and high prestige. While it may intuitively seem undesirable to have a theory of social meaning that allows for seeming conflicting constellations of meaning, in this chapter, I argue that it is, in fact, a major theoretical advantage of this approach. Speakers can and do use variables to invoke combinations of meanings that may initially appear contradictory, and the ideal theory is one that captures this empirical fact. The notion that incongruous social meanings may co-occur within a single indexical field is illustrated here through a case of phonological variation in Hebrew. The Hebrew pharyngeal phonemes /ħ/ (voiceless pharyngeal fricative) and /ʕ/ (voiced pharyngeal approximant) are merged by most speakers with the non-pharyngeal phonemes /χ/ and /ʔ/, respectively (Gafter 2014).1 Production of the pharyngeals is associated with a complex set of social meanings. On the one hand, language ideologies view the pharyngeals as historically conservative and thus prescriptively correct (Morag 1990). However, the pharyngeals are 222

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also linked to ethnicity, as producing them is associated with Jews of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) descent. Due to socioeconomic stratification patterns in Israel, with Mizrahis on average having lower earnings than Jews of European descent (Smooha 2003), the pharyngeals have become associated with low socioeconomic status (Bentolila 2002). Complicating the picture even further, because the pharyngeals also occur in Arabic, they are additionally stigmatized as an L2 feature of Hebrew as spoken by Palestinians (Lefkowitz 2004). This range of potential meanings sets the pharyngeals apart from many wellresearched sociolinguistic variables – such as those in Labov’s classic 1966 study of New York City English – which are evaluated by members of a speech community such that the socioeconomic class, style, and prestige associated with particular variants are all neatly aligned (Eckert 1989). In this chapter, I focus on intra-speaker variation in the sociolinguistic variable (ʕ), and show that speakers employ the pharyngeal realization [ʕ] in ways that invoke apparently conflicting indexical associations. While this may seem surprising from a first-wave perspective, I argue that the social meanings invoked by [ʕ] are only contradictory if style is seen as reflecting a speaker’s orientation to the standard language market. Moreover, careful consideration of the range of potential meanings indexed by [ʕ] reveals underlying relationships between apparently contradictory elements of this variable’s indexical field. These data also serve to make a more general point. Eckert (2016) argues that in order to understand how speakers use linguistic features to convey social meaning, sociolinguists must explore a broader range of variables. Doing so will likely mean encountering more linguistic phenomena that pattern in unexpected ways, and more specifically, involve sets of social meanings that are not easily reconcilable (e.g., see Maegaard and Pharao, this volume). The indexical field approach urges us not to conceive of these different meanings as unconnected, but rather, to consider the potential relationships between elements of an indexical field in light of the full range of functions associated with a given linguistic feature. The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. In Section 10.2, I give a brief overview of how ethnicity is understood in Israel; in Section 10.3, I discuss the pharyngeal segments and the linguistic ideologies surrounding them. I then investigate the indexical meanings invoked in the stylistic uses of [ʕ], first among Jewish Hebrew speakers (Section 10.4), and then, exploring a further layer of social meaning, in the use of [ʕ] in Hebrew by a bilingual Palestinian speaker (Section 10.5). Finally, in Section 10.6, I discuss the theoretical implications arising from these data. 10.2

Israeli Notions of Ethnicity

As the Hebrew pharyngeals are closely linked to ethnicity, in order to understand the linguistic patterns, we must first review how ethnicity is constructed

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in Israel. The most contentious ethnic divide is the distinction between the Jewish majority (76 per cent of the population) and the non-Jewish minority, most of whom are Muslim Palestinians (17 per cent of the population).2 These communities also differ along linguistic lines; Jewish Israelis are mostly native speakers of Hebrew, whereas the Palestinian population natively speaks Arabic.3 Although this divide is heavily racialized, in Israel it is conceptualized mostly as a conflict of nationalities, part of a greater clash between Israel and the Arab world (Lefkowitz 2004). When Israelis talk about ethnicity, they generally refer to distinctions within the Jewish community. Modern Israel is a product of the Zionist movement, and, as such, it has always officially adhered to the Zionist ideology of ‘fusion of the diasporas’ – forging a new unified Israeli identity while de-emphasizing differences between Jews from different diasporas (Ben-Rafael 2013). Despite this ideology, distinctions between Jews are an important and persistent part of the social dynamic (Smooha 2003; Sasson-Levy 2013), such that Israelis often speak in terms of an ‘ethnic cleavage’ (Cohen, Lewin-Epstein, & Lazarus 2019). Although the Jewish population consists of many sub-groups that have had quite different cultures and settling patterns, Jewish ethnicity is usually organized around a binary distinction between Jews of European descent, referred to as Ashkenazi Jews, and Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, referred to as Mizrahi Jews4 (Swirski 1981; Smooha 2003; Shalom Chetrit 2010, among many others). In the early years of Israel’s existence, this ethnic binary manifested as socioeconomic stratification, with Ashkenazis enjoying considerably more earnings and education than Mizrahis (Swirski 1981). Although there has since been a considerable shift towards greater ethnic equality, inequality in education and earnings nevertheless persists (Dahan et al. 2003; Smooha 2003; Cohen et al. 2007; Swirski et al. 2008; Cohen et al. 2019), and much of the cultural and economic elite is still thoroughly Ashkenazi (Sasson-Levy 2013). In her discussion of the asymmetric power relations between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis, Sasson-Levy (2013) proposes that ‘Ashkenazi’, as a privileged social category that dominates the power structures while being perceived as ethnically ‘unmarked’, has parallels to the American construction of ‘whiteness’. Indeed, Shohat’s (1989) critical survey of ethnic stereotypes in Israeli cinema shows a stark difference in how Ashkenazis and Mizrahis are portrayed. Ashkenazis are typically described as ‘just Israelis’, whereas Mizrahis are depicted in a stereotypically Orientalist way: uneducated, primitive, vulgar, irrational, sexist, and violent, but on the other hand, also warm, hospitable, and down to earth. While the situation has arguably improved from that described in Shohat (1989), many of these stereotypes do persist (Shohat 2010; Gafter 2016a), and the categories Mizrahi and Ashkenazi remain extremely socially salient in Israeli discourse (Shalom Chetrit 2009; Sasson-Levy 2013).

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Lefkowitz (2004) proposes understanding the rhetoric surrounding Israeli ethnic identity as consisting of two opposing dimensions of meaning: Israeliness and Easternness. In his model, Israeliness corresponds to the imagined Zionist ideal, whereas Easternness is ‘the Israeli instantiation of alterity, of otherness’ (Lefkowitz 2004: 89), which encompasses both the Palestinian Other and the Mizrahi Other. In this model, Ashkenazis are seen as the most Israeli and least Eastern, and Palestinian Arabs as the least Israeli and most Eastern, with Mizrahis occupying an uncomfortable position in the middle. Thus, Lefkowitz argues, the Orientalist discourse, which projects qualities such as backwardness and emotionality onto the Palestinian Arab population, is recursively mirrored in the othering of Mizrahis. The model highlights the basic conflict inherent in Israeli identity, which sees itself as Western and completely different from its Middle Eastern neighbours (Shohat 1989; Sasson-Levi 2013), but also struggles with defining itself as an authentically Semitic and integral part of the Middle East (Levon & Gafter 2019). This tension plays a large role in the ambivalent language ideologies surrounding the Hebrew pharyngeal segments, which are at the focus of this chapter. 10.3

The Hebrew Pharyngeal Segments

One of the most salient sociolinguistic differences among Hebrew speakers is whether they produce the two Hebrew pharyngeal segments, the voiceless pharyngeal fricative [ħ] and the voiced pharyngeal approximant [ʕ]. Whereas Ashkenazis generally merge these segments with their non-pharyngeal counterparts, producing pharyngeals is widely considered the linguistic feature most indicative of Mizrahi ethnicity (Matras & Schiff 2005). This ethnic differentiation has its roots in the history of the language. Hebrew had not been a spoken language for generations until it was revitalized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, even before its revitalization, Hebrew was still used by Jewish communities to varying degrees, especially in religious contexts, leading to the evolution of different pronunciation and reading traditions. One of the many differences between these reading traditions is their treatment of the pharyngeals. Mizrahi reading traditions retained [ħ] and [ʕ], and thus preserved the phonemic distinction between pharyngeals and non-pharyngeals, a distinction which is faithful to Biblical Hebrew (and exists in other Semitic languages as well, such as Arabic). In the Ashkenazi traditions, however, the pharyngeals were lost. Despite conscious ideological attempts to ‘resurrect’ Hebrew in the way it was historically spoken, the Hebrew that emerged from the revitalization was strongly influenced by the first languages of the early revitalizers (Izre’el 2003), as well as by the different Diaspora liturgical traditions (Morag 1990). The early revitalizers were mostly Ashkenazi, but the Mizrahi tradition was

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nevertheless seen as the appropriate model for Modern Hebrew phonology, as it was considered to be more faithful to the Semitic roots of the language. However, the early Ashkenazi revitalizers, who were native speakers of European languages with no pharyngeal segments, did not adopt the pharyngeals. The early Mizrahi adopters of Modern Hebrew, however, continued to use the pharyngeals, setting the stage for the current sociolinguistic situation (Zuckermann 2005). The social power dynamic between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis is reflected both in the social evaluation of the pharyngeals and in their distribution. Not producing pharyngeals is seen as unmarked, a feature of a ‘General Israeli’ pronunciation which is not necessarily Ashkenazi, whereas pharyngeals are perceived as specifically Mizrahi (Blanc 1968; Yaeger-Dror 1988). And indeed, while Ashkenazis rarely if ever use pharyngeals, it is not the case that Mizrahis always use pharyngeals. Many of them do not, and many of those who do produce them, do so variably (Davis 1984; Yaeger-Dror 1988; Bentolila 2002; Lefkowitz 2004). Due to the relative paucity of sociolinguistic community studies investigating these variables, it is hard to assess the extent to which the pharyngeals are currently used by Mizrahi speakers. However, the general pattern observed by the most researchers is that the pharyngeals are produced mostly or exclusively by older Mizrahi speakers, suggesting a linguistic change in which the pharyngeals are in rapid decline (Davis 1984; Lefkowitz 2004; Gafter 2014). Nevertheless, some more homogenous communities (such as the Yemenite community in the town of Rosh Ha’ayin) still exhibit high rates of pharyngeal realizations (Gafter 2014). Although the actual pharyngeal segments may have become uncommon in Israel, they are still a socially salient linguistic stereotype, which even has a name in the speech community: ‘speaking with ħet and ʕayin’ (ledaber be-ħet ve-ʕayin), referring to the two Hebrew letters representing these segments. As part of the more general marginalization of Mizrahis, the pharyngeals are often stigmatized and negatively evaluated (Bentolila 2002). In Gafter (2016a), I argue that the pharyngeal pronunciation is strongly associated with Mizrahiness and is enregistered (Agha 2003) as a Mizrahi feature. I explore the use of the term ‘speaking with ħet and ʕayin’ on Israeli web forums, and show that it appears very frequently in metalinguistic commentary, and is often ideologically linked to the stereotypical aspects of a Mizrahi persona discussed before. This can be seen in the following example, which refers to the addition of Margalit Tsan’ani, a Mizrahi singer, to the cast of the Israeli TV show Koxav Nolad (an Israeli version of American Idol). (1)

‘True, sometimes she’s unpolished, talks with ħet and ʕayin, she’s not trying to be something she’s not, and sometimes that may sound vulgar or tactless, but

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it’s a million times better than the sucking up and showing off of her (show) biz colleagues.’

In (1), it appears that Tsan’ani’s style is both criticized and respected. The writer links her use of pharyngeals to sounding vulgar and unpolished, but also describes her style as real and authentic. This reflects a more general pattern. While many comments see the pharyngeals in strictly negative terms, others evoke the more positive stereotypes associated with Mizrahis, or express an ambivalent attitude that incorporates both. Another important element of the social meaning of the pharyngeals is their positioning with respect to standard language ideologies. Prescriptive norms in Hebrew are not modelled after the prestigious speech of the social elite, but rather, focus on faithfulness to earlier attested forms of the language (Myhill 2004). Therefore, unlike many stigmatized linguistic features, the pharyngeals are not seen as ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’, but rather, as the prescriptively correct form, and as such, they are considered desirable in certain formalized contexts (Morag 1990). Furthermore, since the historic distinction between pharyngeal and non-pharyngeal consonants is always maintained in Hebrew writing, producing them is also more faithful to the orthography. Since the Israeli notion of correctness is quite distinct from social prestige, even highly educated Hebrew speakers rarely speak ‘correct’ Hebrew (Ravid 1995), and there is usually no stigma associated with not producing pharyngeals. And while producing pharyngeals was expected in the speech of newscasters in the early years of Israel’s existence, showing adherence to the prescriptivist ideology, by the late twentieth century newscasters had mostly adopted a non-pharyngeal pronunciation (Yaeger-Dror 1988). Nevertheless, to this day, the ‘correct’ pronunciation still carries certain prestige (Bentolila 2002), and can still be heard in some highly formal settings in Israeli media, such as national holiday broadcasts. The pharyngeals therefore have an unusual combination of social meanings, including both elements – an old-fashioned kind of learnedness on the one hand, and elements of Mizrahi-ness, and the attributes stereotypically associated with it, on the other hand. As such, they cannot be explained along any single axis of meaning. The pharyngeals are therefore a prime example of the usefulness of the indexical field approach. In the next section, I demonstrate that the full range of indexical meanings is crucial to understanding the patterns of stylistic variation, and to uncovering what combination of social meanings speakers are trying to convey. 10.4

Stylistic Uses of the Hebrew Pharyngeals

The salience of the pharyngeals in Israeli society, as well as their wide range of ideological associations, make them ripe for the taking as a stylistic

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resource. In this section, I will describe two different stylistic uses, which, at first blush, seem to have little in common. However, adopting the indexical field approach reveals that the disparate social meanings are in fact very much related. 10.4.1

Reading Styles Compared to Conversational Data

Ever since Labov’s seminal 1966 work, a common method of investigating stylistic variation has been comparing the speech produced during the different elements in the sociolinguistic interview. An often-reproduced pattern is that more attentive reading tasks show an increase in standard variants and a reduction in stigmatized non-standard variants (Schiling-Estes 2008). In Labov’s (1972a, 1972b) influential approach, differences between casual speech and reading are seen as part of a general mechanism, which explains stylistic shifts as a function of how much attention the speakers were paying to their speech itself. This approach privileges the notion of an unselfconscious ‘vernacular’, the most natural form of speech, which is predicted to be more casual and more non-standard. The vernacular contrasts with more selfconscious speech, which, due to self-monitoring, is predicted to have more standard variants. This pattern has much to do with the fact the social prestige and linguistic correctness have usually been aligned in most of the sociolinguistic contexts studied. Here, since the pharyngeals are both socially stigmatized and overtly lauded by prescriptive norms, it is not clear what prediction a first-wave analysis might have for their use in reading styles. As stigmatized variants, we may expect them to be used less often in reading, but as part of the prescriptive norm, we may expect the opposite. In Gafter (2016b), I investigated this question, using data from sociolinguistic fieldwork conducted in two sites in the greater Tel Aviv area. The first field site was the city of Tel Aviv proper, with a sample that consisted of both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi speakers, representing the diverse ethnic make-up of the city. The second sample was from the town of Rosh Ha’ayin, and was quite different, as it consisted only of Mizrahi speakers of specifically Yemenite descent. The sociolinguistic interviews included a word-list reading task, the results of which are of interest here. Although the two field sites had very different rates of pharyngeal realizations in the conversational data, both cases showed the same pattern with respect to the word list: Mizrahi speakers produced significantly more [ʕ] in the word list as compared to the conversational component, but no difference was observed for (ħ). The first finding is that despite the common stereotype of ‘speaking with ħet and ʕayin’, which groups (ħ) and (ʕ) together, they are in fact two separate linguistic variables with distinct usage patterns. As the next sections will show, this pattern of preference for [ʕ] over [ħ] occurs elsewhere, and we will return to

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discuss its importance. However, let us first focus on the results for (ʕ), which pose an interesting challenge. How can we interpret the stylistic shift in the use of [ʕ]? In a first-wave approach, one could argue that the speakers are more faithful to the prescriptive norm when they are more attentive. That in itself is not unlikely, but it cannot be the whole story, since it ignores the fact that these speakers are also knowingly using more of a stigmatized variant. One may reconcile this apparent contradiction by assuming two disjoint meanings, one that has to do with ‘Mizrahiness’ and is associated with social stigma, and another that has to do with the prescriptive norm and is associated with formality. Such an explanation, however, would imply that speakers interpret the pharyngeals in a given situation as meaning strictly one or the other, and that they see these meanings as unrelated, as if their link to the same linguistic variable were merely a coincidence. While that is not theoretically impossible, it does not appear to be the case here. If the appearance of [ʕ] is related only to prescriptive norms, we may expect Ashkenazis to have more [ʕ] in the word list as well. However, all but two of the Ashkenazis in the sample did not produce any pharyngeals in the word list. Thus, if the use of the prescriptive norm is so clearly differentiated by ethnicity, its social meaning is likely linked to ethnicity as well. I argue that the apparent mismatch of social meanings disappears once we do not consider reading styles as simply more formal and standard. While reading does undoubtedly involve a heightened awareness of one’s speech, it does not necessarily lead to more standardness, as speakers may have other goals in mind. Silverstein (2003) proposes to understand the well-attested pattern of fewer non-standard variants in reading styles not as the result of heightened attention, but rather as a response to register demand, which he defines as the demands of particular tasks that are not necessarily differentiated by the degree of consciousness involved in their production. He argues that the socioeconomic patterning of a variant serves as a first-order indexical, and due to the hegemonic nature of what he calls ‘standard register in well-developed standard-language communities’ (Silverstein 2003: 219), reading styles exhibit a convergence with the prestige standard. Note that this reformulation, on its own, cannot explain the patterns of [ʕ] in this data, since more [ʕ] does not correlate with higher socioeconomic status. However, considering the indexical meanings of [ʕ] and what the demands of the reading task actually are in this context allows us to understand the data. Milroy (1987: 172–4) critiques the interpretation of interview and reading styles along a single continuum of meaning, arguing that reading is a distinct social and cognitive activity, which may have its own specialized register and features. This insight highlights the importance of considering how reading is understood as a speech event in the local context. In many communities, the demands of a reading task are likely similar to those described by Silverstein

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(2003: 219), who suggests that when reading aloud, ‘the speaker is asked to make the shift to something like the situation of primordial inculcation of standard register, in schools especially’. Nevertheless, while the associations of reading aloud with standardness and schooling are very common, among the Mizrahi speakers that I interviewed, a different set of associations arises. The ideologies about reading out loud expressed by the speakers reveal that reading skills are very much valued, but crucially, reading is not associated simply with an increased degree of carefulness, but with authentically Mizrahi styles. Many of the speakers that I interviewed made reference to ritualized reading styles, such as reading from the Hebrew Bible and reciting prayers. When they referred to ‘correct language’, they emphasized the importance of doing so according to the Mizrahi tradition, which, of course, includes the pharyngeals. Consider this representative quote from Rinat, a thirty-seven-yearold kindergarten teacher from Rosh Ha’ayin: (2)

‘We Yemenites are more traditional, and we take the Bible seriously. And if you want to read from the Bible you need to speak correct Hebrew.’

A specifically Yemenite tradition practiced by many of the male speakers in the Rosh Ha’ayin sample is studying with a mori, a teacher who prepares young boys for their bar-mitzvah by teaching them the particular Yemenite style of Bible reading. Some of the most striking comments about the importance of the pharyngeals in reading came up with respect to experiences with a mori. Consider this exchange with Udi, a forty-five-year-old man from Rosh Ha’ayin, who uses the phrase ‘I can read’ to refer specifically to his ability to read out loud in the Yemenite style. (3)

‘We’re two brothers, my brother and I, we’re 11 months apart. My brother, when he tried to go to the mori, he would not use pharyngeals. And my father understood that I have the accent, and I can read, and I can follow in his footsteps. The other one can’t follow him in reading the Book.’

While it is unlikely that the speakers understood the word list task as equivalent to ritualized readings, I propose that the ideological links to specifically Mizrahi reading styles were still at play. As we have seen earlier, the field of potential meanings for [ʕ] includes both notions of ‘Mizrahi’ and of ‘correct language’. Crucially, we see that they are not unrelated. Rather, they are intertwined in the speakers’ language ideologies. Furthermore, as discussed in Section 10.3, Israeli prescriptive norms have a notion of Middle Eastern authenticity built into them. Thus, it makes perfect sense for Mizrahi speakers to use more [ʕ] in reading styles, in order to evoke an authentically Mizrahi model of formal recitation. Adopting the notion of an indexical field of meaning has two important implications here. First, under such an approach, the social meaning conveyed

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by the [ʕ], which is related both to Mizrahi identity and to the prescriptive norm, need not be only one or other in every specific interaction. Rather, speakers can draw on a range of indexical meanings to express their social positioning. Second, this approach highlights the possibility of connections between the different indexical meanings of a variable. By adopting this perspective, we can uncover underlying relations between seemingly contradictory social meanings, which reflect the speakers’ understanding of what it ‘means’ to use [ʕ]. 10.4.2

Stylistic Uses on Israeli Reality TV

In Gafter (2016a), I examine speakers who rarely use pharyngeals, but occasionally do so as a stylistic move. The data comes from two reality TV shows, Ha-yafa ve-ha-xnun (an Israeli version of the American show Beauty and the Geek) and Koxav Nolad (an Israeli song contest show similar to American Idol). These ‘occasional pharyngealizers’ all show the same pattern: they use [ʕ], albeit in very low rates, but they do not produce [ħ]. Therefore, once again we see a preference for [ʕ] over [ħ]. Focusing again on (ʕ), I argue that its occasional pharyngeal realization in these cases is used to perform stances and attributes associated with Mizrahi personae. Allow us to consider the Beauty and the Geek data. The show, as the producers put it, places ‘11 beautiful women and 11 nerdy men in a villa’. Each ‘geek’ is paired with a ‘beauty’, and the couples are made to perform tasks which portray the men as highly intelligent but socially awkward, and the women, as their polar opposites – beautiful and socially adept, but not too bright. On the second season of the show, from which the data is taken, only two of the participants produced any pharyngeals: the female contestants Lital and Sivan. Although most of the female contestants were Mizrahi, it is interesting to note that Sivan and Lital made a point of singling themselves out as more authentically Mizrahi in other ways as well. For example, both of them made references to their predominantly Mizrahi hometowns, and to their Mizrahi ethnicity. In order to explore the variation more carefully, the speech of Lital and Sivan in six hours of the show was coded for potential and actual pharyngeal productions. As stated before, the results show a clear difference between the use of (ħ) and (ʕ): while the two women produce the pharyngeal variant for (ʕ) in about 5.5 per cent of its possible occurrences (20/368 tokens), there were no pharyngeal realizations of (ħ) in 320 potential occurrences. Since these women are Mizrahi, and interested in showing it, we may assume that their occasional use of [ʕ] serves to highlight their ethnicity. However, while their Mizrahi-ness does have everything to do with their use of [ʕ], that is

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surely not the whole story; after all, they are no less Mizrahi in the 95 per cent of the time in which they do not produce pharyngeals. A qualitative examination of the instances in which [ʕ] occurs reveals that they are not arbitrary, but rather strategically placed as meaningful stylistic moves. The pharyngeal variant occurs primarily when Lital and Sivan are distancing themselves from their (Ashkenazi) geek counterpart, in a way that invokes the ‘don’t mess with me’ and ‘telling it like it is’ attitudes that are stereotypically associated with Mizrahis (such as the ones invoked in the metalinguistic commentary in (1)). When Lital and Sivan use [ʕ], what is conveyed is not simply Mizrahi-ness, but rather the higher order indexical links to it. Their use of [ʕ] constructs a persona that is recognizable both to their interlocutor and to the TV viewers – a particular way of being Mizrahi, which is intimately connected to the ideologies about Mizrahis discussed before. Thus, although these speakers use [ʕ] very infrequently, we see that it is still an important and meaningful part of their ethnolinguistic repertoire (Benor 2010). We can now consider the connection between the word list data and the reality TV data in the previous section. In both cases, we see a stylistic performance that involves a greater use of [ʕ], but not [ħ]. I propose that although they are quite different, these two sets of data are evidence of a larger pattern: the preference for [ʕ] as a stylistic resource that has to do with Mizrahi authenticity. Now, shifting to a reading style and performing a down-to-earth persona may appear to be two very different, even conflicting, stylistic goals. But as we saw, when Mizrahi speakers use more [ʕ] in the word list they are not simply being more formal, but rather, they are doing so in an authentically Mizrahi way. While the specific social meanings invoked are different in each of these contexts, both cases share a common core – an ideological link to notions of an authentic Mizrahi persona. Although this chapter cannot offer a full explanation of why the stylistic uses of [ʕ] and [ħ] differ, in Gafter (2016a) I propose that it may have much to do with what the non-pharyngeal variant is in each case. Speakers who do not produce pharyngeals merge /ʕ/ with /ʔ/; however, it is important to point out here that in current usage, /ʔ/ is generally deleted, which means that the nonpharyngeal realization of (ʕ) is usually nothing at all (Gafter 2014). The nonpharyngeal realization of (ħ), on the other hand, is a non-pharyngeal fricative that is never deleted. Therefore, in the case of (ʕ), the pharyngeal realization is more perceptually salient (if speakers generally expect full deletion), something which may underlie its broader utilization as a stylistic resource. Whatever the account for the difference in patterning between [ʕ] and [ħ], this divergence in use has likely led to a corresponding difference in their social meanings. While they obviously share many indexical properties, as illustrated by the uses of the phrase ‘speaking with ħet and ʕayin’, the full indexical field for each of them is likely somewhat different. Specifically, while Mizrahi-ness

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is undoubtedly at the core of both, the ways in which [ʕ] is used suggests that it is more intimately linked to notions of Mizrahi authenticity. An interesting question for future research is whether there are stylistic uses that privilege [ħ] over [ʕ], and if so, what social meanings they express. Going back to [ʕ], these data demonstrate the importance of considering an indexical field of meaning for sociolinguistic variables. An indexical field for [ʕ] would be quite vast, and have indexical links to Mizrahi-ness, and all the stances and attributes associated with it, such as ‘down-to-earth’ and ‘warmblooded’, to authenticity, as well as to traditional notions of learnedness and prestige. However, we have seen that these meanings are intertwined and often at play simultaneously. While a first-wave approach would have suggested that we postulate the different uses of [ʕ] having discrete and different social meanings, the indexical field is conducive to revealing their interrelatedness. And by considering the full range of possible meanings for [ʕ], ideological links that may not be intuitive can be uncovered. Crucially, while the indexical field is a useful tool for the analyst, its significance goes further. Since not one but an entire range of indexical links is at play when speakers produce and interpret [ʕ], the indexical field represents a model of social meaning that is more faithful to how speakers intuitively understand it. 10.5

Stylistic Uses of [ʕ] in the Speech of a Palestinian Speaker

While the chapter so far focused on Jewish ethnicity, we must not forget that about a fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians. The phonemic inventory of their native language, Palestinian Arabic, also contains [ʕ] and [ħ]. However, producing the pharyngeals in Palestinian Arabic is far more common than it is in Hebrew, and pharyngeals are often a feature of Hebrew as spoken by Palestinians (Lefkowitz 2004). Thus, language ideologies among Hebrew speakers link them not only to Mizrahi-ness, but also to Arabic (Gafter 2016a). This adds yet another layer of complexity to the love–hate relationship that Hebrew speakers have with the pharyngeals. While surveying the stereotypes of Palestinians (and Arabs more generally) among Jewish Israelis is well beyond the scope of this chapter, they are arguably the most marginalized group (Mizrachi & Herzog 2012), seen as the ultimate Other (Lefkowitz 2004). If so, when a Palestinian produces pharyngeals while speaking Hebrew, would the social meaning be interpreted as a feature of Arabic, and thus simply a marker of group membership? I argue that that is not necessarily the case. In the indexical field approach, one salient meaning does not necessarily preclude the other indexical links – even if they may initially seem irreconcilable. In this section, I demonstrate this by focusing on a particular example of a Palestinian speaker of Hebrew, Lucy Aharish.5 As we shall see, she is by no means a typical example of a Palestinian speaker. Nevertheless, as her usage of [ʕ] shows

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indexical links going far beyond simply ‘Palestinian’, it is of particular interest in unveiling the range of this variable’s indexical field. Lucy Aharish, born 1981, is one of the few Palestinian citizens of Israel who have a successful career in the Hebrew-speaking media (Gafter & Milani 2020). She is a news presenter and reporter, and was host of her own televized talk show, sixat hayom (‘Talk of the Day’) on Israel’s Channel 2. Aharish often expresses views of solidarity with the Palestinian plight and consistently condemns racism against Palestinians. However, she is an ardent supporter of Israel – she does not stray from what is acceptable in the mainstream Jewish left circles, and often criticizes Palestinian society as well. Unsurprisingly, Aharish is a divisive figure. She is seen by many Jewish Israelis as giving an unbiased and fair critique of current affairs, but also suffers from racist online criticism by some right-wing groups. Furthermore, she is often criticized by Palestinians for pandering to Jewish viewers and playing the role of ‘token Arab’ (Younis 2015).6 Unlike most Palestinian citizens of Israel, Aharish grew up mostly among Hebrew-speaking Jews. She was raised in Dimona, a working-class Jewish town in the south of Israel, with a predominantly Mizrahi population. In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Aharish states that although she spoke Arabic at home, she sees her Hebrew as a native language (Halutz 2009). Indeed, the usual style of Hebrew that she uses on her show sounds like that of a monolingual Jewish Israeli, with no trace of the Arabic influence often heard in the speech of Palestinians (a fact which undoubtedly helped her career in the mainstream Hebrew-speaking media). But of course, not all Jewish speakers of Hebrew sound the same. It is therefore worthwhile to explore when Aharish produces pharyngeals, which, unlike other features of Arabic influenced Hebrew (such as the merger of /p/ and /b/), are also a native feature of Hebrew, though variably so. In her TV spots and interviews, Aharish generally does not produce pharyngeals, the common pattern for Hebrew speakers her age. However, the cases in which she occasionally does produce pharyngeals are telling, since she uses them as a meaningful stylistic resource. I will examine in detail a segment from her show in which Aharish, atypically, does produce quite a few pharyngeals.7 In this piece, she discusses Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who is a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). Zoabi consistently expresses views that are considered quite radical by Jewish Israelis, even among leftist circles – she often speaks out against Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state, and is a strong supporter of the Palestinian right of return. There have been several attempts by the Israeli right to prevent Zoabi from running for office, all of which have (so far) been thwarted by the Israeli Supreme Court. Against this backdrop, Lucy Aharish says that she is happy to live in a democracy in which all views can be

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expressed, but nevertheless she is upset that Zoabi is a member of the Knesset, as she thinks that Zoabi’s politics are detrimental to the integration of Palestinians in Israeli society. Analysing when Aharish produces pharyngeals in this clip, once again reveals a clear difference between (ħ) and (ʕ). During the 2:31-minute-long segment, Aharish produces a pharyngeal variant for (ʕ) in thirteen out of thirtyseven potential environments (35.1 per cent), whereas she only produces a sole pharyngeal realization of (ħ), out of forty-six potential environments. It is unlikely that interference from Palestinian Arabic can explain her use of pharyngeals here, since, as stated earlier, she typically speaks Hebrew with no pharyngeals. Furthermore, if this were linguistic interference, there would be no a priori reason to expect a preference for [ʕ]. Thus, her use of pharyngeals here is more plausibly interpreted as a stylistic move, and the question that arises is what social meanings are expressed by it. Due to the strong association of the pharyngeals with Arabic, our first place to look would be her own identity as a Palestinian. However, while that is undoubtedly part of the story, other, higher-order indexicals are also relevant. Aharish, a self-described native speaker of Hebrew, is likely aware of the full range of indexical meanings described for [ʕ], and we must therefore consider meanings beyond a simple connection of pharyngeals with Arabic. A key observation lies in the ubiquity of [ʕ] as compared to almost zero [ħ], a pattern very similar to that described for Jewish Hebrew speakers in the previous section, which suggests that the meanings expressed here may also have something in common with those used by Jewish speakers. A second observation is that Aharish’s use of [ʕ] is not evenly distributed throughout the segment. In the beginning of the segment she presents her position calmly, in a typical newscaster style. However, as she continues speaking, her style noticeably changes: she gets visibly excited, raises her voice, and makes wide gestures with her hands. Most of the productions of [ʕ] (nine out of thirteen) occur during this 50-second stretch, in which Aharish speaks in this more vehement style. In the transcription below, the symbols ħ and ʕ represent potential pharyngeal environments, whereas cases realized as pharyngeal are indicated in bold. (4)

‘yeš li beʕaya ʕim ze še-iša kama ve-meʕavetet et ha-meciut. yeš li beʕaya ʕim ze še-iša koret le-anašim še-rocħim šloša yeladim, koret lahem še-hem lo teroristim. yeš li beʕaya še-iša ʕola ʕal marmara ve-yocet šama be-xol miney hacharot, ve-ʕosa et kol ma še-hi ʕosa, kše-hi šoħaxat leregaʕ, okey, yeš hevdel ben ze še-at nilħemet lemaʕan ʕam falestini ve-lemaʕan ze še-ihye lo štey medinot li-šney ʕamim, leven ze še-at šoxaħat leregaʕ et takfidex gam ba, be-misgeret vaʕadot aħerot, ve-et ze še-at šoxaħat še-yeš lanu yeladim še-anaħnu anaħnu ha-ʕaravim mexakvim be-doħot ha-ʕoni bexol paʕam me-ħadaš. ve-ze

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Roey J. Gafter še-maʕaraxot ha-ħinux šelanu lo metafkedot ve-ze še-maʕaraxot ha-biyuv šelanu lo metafkedot. az wala, lo, lo matim li še-hi tihye ba-kneset, lo matim li še-elu ha-panim še-yeyacgu oti, lo matim li še-hi zoti še-kol paʕam me-ħadaš, biglala, samim otanu ve-omrim: hine, ze ha-parcuf šelaxem, atem gais ħamiši, atem xarot, atem ʕaravim še-kol ha-zman yocim keneged ha-medina.’ ‘I have a problem when this woman gets up and distorts reality. I have a problem when this woman says people who murder three children, she says they’re not terrorists. I have a problem when this woman boards the Marmara8 and makes all kinds of declarations there, and does everything she does, when she forgets for a minute, okay, there’s a difference between fighting for the Palestinian people and for it to have two states for two peoples, and that you forget for a minute your job in other committees, and that you forget that we have children, that we, we the Arabs star in the poverty reports every time. So you know what, I don’t like it that she’s in the Knesset, I don’t like it that that’s the face that would represent me, I don’t like it that she’s the one that every time, because of her, they place us and say: there, that’s what you’re like, you’re a fifth column, you’re shit, you’re Arabs that go against the state all the time.’

During this long tirade, Aharish emphasizes that she is herself is an Arab (‘we the Arabs’). Her use of [ʕ] can serve to reinforce that claim, and strengthen her legitimacy to criticize other Palestinians. But the stance she takes is not just one of aligning with Palestinians, but also with the mostly Jewish audience of the show. And when addressing her target audience, she uses stylistic resources that they can parse. When Aharish is on the proverbial soapbox, her enthusiastic style is recognizable to Israelis; it is very reminiscent of the ‘don’t mess with me, I tell it like it is’ attitudes performed by the reality TV contestants described in the previous section. Like them, she shows a preference for [ʕ], and like them, she is invoking the higher-order indexicals associated with it. Thus, her use of [ʕ], while reinforcing her group membership as a Palestinian, does not serve to distance her from her Jewish audience, but rather, shows that she adopts their linguistic code in an appropriate style for the context. Further evidence that Aharish’s use of [ʕ] here is not simply indexing her Palestinian identity can be found by contrasting it with cases in which she is explicitly asserting it, and in which she utilizes a different set of linguistic resources. In another clip from 2016,9 Aharish discusses an incident in which an attempt to incorporate Arabic announcements on buses was met with backlash from Jewish Hebrew speakers.10 She strongly condemns the negative reaction to Arabic, and references her own status as a native speaker of Arabic. Interestingly, in this 2:40-minute clip, Aharish produces far fewer pharyngeals than in the previous one ([ʕ] in three out of forty-six possible environments

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(6.5 per cent), and no realizations of [ħ]). However, in a clear departure from her usual style, in this clip she does use several Arabic-influenced features that do not occur in monolingual Hebrew (such as a distinctively Arabic dark /l/ in the word yala ‘come on’, an Arabic borrowing often used in Hebrew). I have argued that in the first clip, Aharish utilizes [ʕ] to index attributes associated with Mizrahi speakers. Aharish herself is, of course, not a Mizrahi Jew; however, she grew up in the predominately Mizrahi town of Dimona, and undoubtedly had had ample opportunities to be exposed to such uses of [ʕ]. In fact, in a 2009 interview, Aharish herself reflects on her style being influenced by Mizrahi Jews, and explicitly invokes the stereotype of the hot-headed Mizrahi (Halutz 2009). (5)

‘We (i.e. Palestinians) were too polite but we learned Israeli chutzpah . . . I am an Arab who grew up among Moroccan Jews.11 That’s the worst. You learn the hard-core shticks; they have a very short fuse.’

Once again the social meaning expressed by [ʕ] goes in seemingly contrasting directions: ‘Arab’ and ‘Mizrahi’ are two very different social types in Israel, to the point of being mutually exclusive. However, in using [ʕ], Aharish is not making a claim for Mizrahi identity, but rather, indexing personae associated with Mizrahi-ness. If we consider the potential meanings in the indexical field of [ʕ], we can understand the underlying connections that enable this stylistic move – both meanings are ideologically linked to a notion of Middle Eastern authenticity, which lies at the heart of the indexical construct. To conclude, we see that Aharish follows the same pattern observed for monolingual Hebrew speakers, of privileging [ʕ] over [ħ] as a stylistic resource. I argue that this is no coincidence, since she is also invoking the same indexical meanings used by monolingual Hebrew speakers. Nevertheless, when Aharish uses [ʕ] to index stances associated with Mizrahi speakers, she is not denying her own identity as a Palestinian. Rather, these seemingly contradictory meanings are expressed simultaneously. And once again, the indexical field approach allows us to see that there is no contradiction here. When a variable has a rich set of social meanings, its interpretation in any given case does not have to be fixed to one narrow subset. Rather, the speaker can draw on the entire indexical baggage of a variable to create new intersections and more specific local moves. 10.6

Conclusion

This chapter uses the Hebrew pharyngeals as an illustration of the potential internal complexity of the indexical field. The history of Hebrew and the social dynamic in Israel have imbued the pharyngeals with a set of ideological associations, each of which is highly salient. The pharyngeal realizations of

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these segments are associated with Mizrahis, and with the large indexical baggage that Mizrahi-ness entails. At the same time, they are also valorized by prescriptivist ideals. Moreover, they are linked to the pharyngeals of a different language, Arabic, which carries highly loaded associations for many Hebrew speakers. Given these disparate meanings, one might wonder whether it is appropriate to arrange all of these elements in a single indexical field, or whether it is perhaps more reasonable to assume that speakers access these meanings separately, and do not perceive them to be interrelated. As the data in this chapter demonstrate in relation to the stylistic uses of [ʕ], the various meanings indexed by pharyngeals are not mutually exclusive. Even a particularly salient social meaning, like ‘Palestinian’, does not preclude other potential indexical links; we see, for example, that a Palestinian speaker can use [ʕ] to construct a novel persona, as when Aharish integrates her Palestinian identity with aspects of Mizrahi-ness. The interrelatedness of seemingly contradictory meanings proves crucial for interpreting the word list data. It may be tempting from a first-wave perspective to assume that when Mizrahi speakers produce more [ʕ] in reading tasks, they are simply adhering to prescriptive norms, while ignoring the Mizrahi-related meanings indexed by the variable. However, their language ideologies make it clear that it is not the case. Of course, the greater use of [ʕ] is consistent with prescriptive norms, but also invokes a claim to Mizrahi authenticity. From a third-wave perspective, this is exactly what we expect; speakers do not see the potential meanings of a variable as a list of discrete items from which they must select a single option. Rather, the meaning made in a particular context is an amalgamation of the indexical potential of the field. Crucially, when Mizrahis use more [ʕ] to perform formality, they are not indexing ‘formal’ and ‘Mizrahi’ as separate concepts, but creating a unique intersectional meaning; they are being formal in an authentically Mizrahi way. In fact, that speakers do not see these meanings as disjoint may very well be the reason why, for most Ashkenazis, the notion that the pharyngeal realizations of these variables are ‘correct’ is largely confined to the realm of the prescriptivist standard in the abstract, and is rarely observed in speech data. It is important to note that this approach does not entail the assumption that all meanings associated with a certain variable are necessarily interrelated. Some variables may have sets of social meanings that are perceived as mutually exclusive; it is conceivable that their association with the same linguistic form is seen as an ‘accident of history’. However, we must remember that speakers interact with other speakers, not with etymologies. Once a speaker uses a linguistic form, that form is available for recruitment into novel indexical associations; this may lead to subsequent perceived linkages between elements of the form’s indexical field. For example, in the case of a linguistic feature that happens to serve as a first-order index for two distinct groups that have little to

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do with each other, individuals with the appropriate sociolinguistic knowledge may draw new linkages between the properties associated with these groups. In this respect, an indexical field perspective compels the researcher to consider the full potential range of functions for a linguistic variable, as originally unrelated uses may ultimately form part of a complex ideological construct. While the particular combination of meanings expressed by [ʕ] in this analysis may appear atypical and specific to the historical and ethnolinguistic context of Israel, the underlying mechanism at work in this case is not an aberration. As research in sociolinguistics expands to investigate new variables and communities, we will increasingly encounter examples of linguistic forms whose range of potential social meanings differs significantly from the patterns commonly observed in previous studies. In such cases, even seemingly contradictory meanings may co-occur within a single indexical field. The ideological links connecting various meanings may be difficult for the analyst to uncover, but they form an intuitive part of how speakers understand social meaning – a whole that is greater than the sum of its indexical parts. notes 1. There is further variation in the non-pharyngeal realizations; see Gafter (2014) for details. 2. The demographic data is taken from Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics website, and is based on the 2008 census. www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton64/st02_02.pdf. 3. Whereas most Palestinian citizens of Israel can speak Hebrew, relatively few Jewish Israelis can speak Arabic (Henkin-Roitfarb 2011). 4. The term Mizrahi is similar to, but not strictly synonymous, with the term Sephardi, often used in the USA. 5. For a quantitative examination of the patterns of pharyngeal use in Hebrew among a different group of speakers – bilingual Palestinians in Jaffa – see Gafter and Horesh (2020). 6. Aharish recently married a Jewish Israeli, an event which drew considerable attention from the media. For an analysis of the discourse surrounding her wedding, see Gafter and Milani (2020). 7. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV_XRYhn7sg. I thank Inbal Abarbanel for drawing my attention to this data. 8. This refers to Zoabi’s participation in the Gaza flotilla in May 2010. Zoabi was on board the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara when Israeli commandos boarded the ship, an act for which she was thoroughly criticized and vilified in the mainstream Israeli media. 9. When this clip was broadcast, Arabic was still an official language in Israel, a status which was revoked in 2018 (see Horesh 2020). However, even before 2018, the status of Arabic was often little more than nominal lip service, and only Hebrew was used in many official documents and signs (Amara 2002). 10. www.facebook.com/reshet.todays.talk/videos/1868290133402629. 11. The biggest Mizrahi group.

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11

Biographical Indexicality: Personal History as a Frame of Reference for Social Meaning in Variation Devyani Sharma

Since its inception, the study of sociolinguistic variation has asked how linguistic forms come to be indexed to various levels of social structure, including speech communities and repertoires (Gumperz 1964; Labov 1966; Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968), communities of practice (Eckert 2000), real and imagined audiences (Coupland 1980; Bell 1984, 2001), and participant positioning in interaction (Coupland 1985; Schilling-Estes 2004; Eckert 2008a). The third wave of variation research directed attention away from a longstanding focus on social groups towards the semiotics of linguistic variables (Eckert 2012). Eckert’s definition of indexicality focused not on social groups but on the ‘ideological embedding of the process by which the link between form and meaning is made and remade’ (Eckert 2008a: 463), distinguishing the semiotic process from its possible contexts of occurrence and expanding the focus to encompass properties in the individual such as affect and persona. Nevertheless, because instances of ‘correlation between a form and a sociodemographic identity’ (Johnstone & Kiesling 2008: 10) are so pervasive, social groupings still form the focus of much work on indexicality. The present study sets aside this common interest in social group norms, while in no way questioning their central place in language variation, and examines how this core semiotic process – an ideological linking of linguistic form and social meaning – arises routinely in a different context: through contrasts within individual biography. This does not refer to the well-studied process by which individuals accrue influences from multiple social groups (Figure 11.1a), but rather to their reliance on that personal history of style acquisition as a structured terrain for inferred meaning (Figure 11.1b). The specific examples used also support a related insight of Eckert’s work, namely that ‘the linguistic resources that ethnolectal speakers deploy in their day-today lives . . . can index far more than ethnicity’ (Eckert 2008b: 26). How does a particular style choice gain meaning through a speaker’s personal history of style use? The order in which an individual acquires 243

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Figure 11.1 Two dimensions of variation in the individual.

two lects or variants, or the status of a given lect as ‘dominant’ or as a default for them, can become a frame of reference for specific types of social meanings, referred to here as biographical indexicality. The analysis that follows will offer illustrations of how acquisitional ordering or style ‘dominance’ can be a source of social meaning, independent of shared group meanings for those lects or variants. The first section describes biographical indexicality in one individual. The second moves from the micro-level of individual interaction to macro-social dialect change, showing that biographical indexicality can affect this scale too, in cases of migration and generational change.1 In closing, I reflect on the utility of exploring this dimension of social meaning. I discuss three kinds of indexicalities that are not anticipated under group-oriented models of social meaning, but that are in fact well-attested: accent divergence to signal solidarity, use of prestige and stigmatized forms to signal the same indexical meaning, and use of non-standard forms to signal formality rather than informality. Each of these form–meaning pairings runs counter to group norms of accommodation, prestige, and formality, but can be understood if we allow meaning to also emerge out of an individual’s personal history. The discussion brings together strands of earlier work on the role of biography in variation to argue that, alongside the better-studied domains of sociodemographic and pragmatic indexicality, personal history is also a systematic source of social meaning. Biographical meaning is intended as an addition to, not a critique of, these well-established sources of indexical meaning. The present analysis focuses narrowly on individuals with a first-learned, dominant, or default variety, alongside additional styles, in order to illustrate the potential for intra-individual social meaning in such circumstances. No assumption is made that this holds true for all individuals: some people may

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have no underlying vernacular; others may shift over their lifetime from one to another; repertoires and relationships among a person’s styles may take many forms. For practical reasons, this study focuses on just a small subset of possible repertoire types. 11.1

Biographical Indexicality at the Micro-level: Stance and Interaction

Among individuals who acquire some of their lects or styles sequentially over their lifetime – for example, someone who acquired a local vernacular until their teenage years and then later expanded their repertoire to include a supralocal variety (cf. Eckert 1997: 164; Rickford & Price 2013) – biographically derived contrasts in meaning can be triggered when they shift between styles. These individuals can exploit these contrasts in their personal style history for interactional meaning. 11.1.1

Indexicality in Personal Biography: An Example

To illustrate how biographical indexicality works within a personal style repertoire, I examine style-shifting in the speech of a well-known Indian-American, Fareed Zakaria. The details provided here are taken from a more in-depth analysis of his speech (Sharma 2018). Zakaria is the host of a leading public affairs show on CNN and is an author and media commentator on politics and international relations in the United States. He is a useful case study for sequential development of a style repertoire, as he lived in India as a native speaker of educated Indian English until the age of seventeen, then migrated to the United States and has lived there for twice as long (thirty-five years), deeply integrated into the local culture. He is married to an American, describes himself as American, and often refers to the United States as ‘we’ in political analysis. Zakaria’s long-term immersion in American English has led to robust bidialectalism, observable across a large video dataset of his broadcast interviews and panel discussions over twenty years (retrieved from the public domain – charlierose.com, ndtv.com, youtube.com – details reviewed in Sharma 2018). His proportion of use of American English (AmE) varies significantly with American and Indian audiences: sample data show an average 77.3 per cent use of AmE variants of twelve phonetic variables (to be discussed) with American audiences and 16.7 per cent with Indian audiences, in recordings with very similar, sometimes identical, topic coverage and interactional format. Zakaria can maintain these distinct lectal settings over long periods in American and Indian contexts, pointing to a high level of bidilectalism. However, closer analysis of his style variation takes us beyond audiencebased social meanings. Within situations, we see two further dynamics of style-

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shifting. First, his first-acquired lect, Indian English (IndE), appears to still have subtle cognitive primacy and may still function as a sort of default vernacular (‘a form of language first-learned, most perfectly acquired, which we use automatically and unthinkingly’, Labov 2013: 3). Second, he appears to actively exploit this biographical asymmetry, using IndE to adopt a particular set of stances associated with frankness, personal commitment, or ‘realness’. I use a simple quantitative measure – Lectal Focusing in Interaction (LFI; Sharma & Rampton 2015) – to explore Zakaria’s style-shifting during interactions. In the present case, twelve phonetic variables were coded for Zakaria’s speech, all of which have distinct, largely enregistered realizations in AmE and IndE: four vowels (goat, face, cot, bath) and eight consonants (/θ/, /ð/, wordinternal intervocalic /t/, stressed non-cluster syllable-initial /t/, stressed noncluster syllable-initial /p/, stressed non-cluster syllable-initial /k/, post-vocalic and pre-consonantal/pre-pausal /r/, non-cluster coda and syllable-initial /l/). The procedure takes a long segment of interaction, breaks it down into chunks or units based on clausal boundaries and footing shifts (Goffman 1981: 128), and then, for each unit, calculates the percentage of use of variants from each lect. In the present data, each unit consisted of an average of 11.6 coded variants, across all twelve variables. The analysis generates a graph of how much the speaker fluctuates between their lects in real time during discourse. The extracts and accompanying LFI graphs that follow are from broadcast recordings of Zakaria in interview with a leading public television (PBS) talk show host, Charlie Rose, in the United States (Extract 11.1, Figure 11.2) and on a political discussion panel with Indians in New Delhi, India (Extract 11.2, Figure 11.3). These two figures illustrate the main style dynamics of interest. For comparability, variation is reported in the form AmE style in both figures. Figure 11.2 presents a 10.5-minute extract from the interview with Charlie Rose.2 Zakaria’s overall level of AmE variants in Figure 11.2 is much higher than his level with an Indian audience, shown later in Figure 11.3, showing a clear calibration of his overall style to his audience. But when we look more closely at fluctuations within each interaction – in particular noticeable shifts towards IndE (circled in Figure 11.2) – further influences on his style-shifting emerge. The analysis focuses on the two main dynamics mentioned earlier: Zakaria’s slight asymmetric dominance in IndE, and his associated stance work. One subset of shifts to IndE indicates a subtle asymmetry in Zakaria’s use of his two broad lects across situations. An audience-based model might predict that a heightened need to persuade may lead to greater (or indeed reduced) convergence with the audience (Bell 2001), crucially with the direction of style-shifting reversing depending on the audience. But in Figure 11.2 (lines 24–6) and Figure 11.3 (lines 5–7) we see a defaulting to IndE regardless of audience at moments where Zakaria is under increased pressure to counterargue and persuade his audience.

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Extract 11.1 Countering doubt (American audience)

21 but here’s the problem. a Chinese businessman speaks English so he can par ticipate in our economy he can swim in our sea, as it were 22 but then he can penetrate the l ocal Chinese market which is largely Mandarin speaking 23 we can only swim in one sea you go to Brazil those guys can now speak English and Portuguese Rose: I don’t know if that is true for the following reason most of the people that I know from the private sector their world is global General Electric and all of those companies they generate more than fifty percent of their revenues from business outside of the United States and they hire and put in place a lot of local people who do speak the language 24 and- and- and I ↑say in the book the peop le who get this new world best 25 are actually America’s ↓mul tinationals because they are ↑ l iving it= Rose: =that’s right [and they li- and they learned it early= 26

[and they l- and they =they ↑learned it ear ly because it was a question of ↑survive adapt or ↑die=

Rose: =and opportunity= 27 =↓right now and I think you’re absolut- GE by the way is a perfect examp le of the transformation 28 and it’s a metaphor I think I use it in the book for American foreign po licy

Extract 11.1 corresponds to the first major IndE shift in Figure 11.2 (lines 24–6); Extract 11.2 is from a broadcast panel discussion with an Indian audience. Coded tokens are underlined. In both extracts, Zakaria has encountered a degree of skepticism or opposition from his audience, and is trying to counter this by seeking a new strategy. In both cases we see initial dysfluency (line 24 in Extract 11.1, line 4 in Extract 11.2) at the point of seeking a new persuasive tactic – a signal of a search for a new conversational action (Ehrlich & Romaniuk 2013: 466) – followed by abrupt changes in posture, gaze, gesture, and prosody once attention is diverted to the task of building the newly identified argument. At these moments, shown in bold in the extracts,

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Proportion of American variants

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

1

5

7

9 Utterance unit

11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 43 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71

Figure 11.2 Zakaria in interview with an American host (based on fig. 3 in Sharma 2018).

3

94 96 98 100 102 104

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100% 90% Proportion of American variants

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 Utterance unit

8

9

10

11

12

Figure 11.3 Shift to IndE when countering doubt with Indian audience.

Extract 11.2 Countering doubt (Indian audience)

1 a best case scenario would not- would be to not y’know start this kind of nuclear arms race 2 ↑but if they ended up with one or two crude nuclear devices without proper delivery systems like the Nor th Koreans 3 is it really the end of the ↑world is it s- ↓no 4 I think it’s something- they could be ↑cont ained they could be ↑deterred er- it would keep them- y’know 5 they would ↑pay enormous ↓c osts 6 and I think that’s important to ↑maint ain those ↓c osts 7 because I think they should ↑realize they’re making a ↓choice 8 about whether or not they want to be you know a proper modern power

we see a surfacing of IndE and faster speech rate, regardless of audience. These shifts occur in several places in recordings with both kinds of audiences. Moments of heightened cognitive load or attentional pressure in interaction can cause speakers to rely on more automated or default speech settings (Roelofs & Piai 2011; Abel & Babel 2017; Sharma & McCarthy 2018). Other details in Zakaria’s speech support this interpretation. His shifts to IndE are associated with significantly faster speech rate, potentially a sign of greater nativeness or automaticity (Kendall 2009). His use of AmE variants is significantly skewed to content rather than function words, but his use of IndE

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variants is not. His style with American audiences is more mixed than his style with Indian audiences. And finally, his parentheticals, a unit of structure known to be more rapidly inserted with less direct attention (Local 1992), often shift towards IndE. The fourth IndE ‘trough’ in Figure 11.2 is an instance of a parenthetical (line 102; see Sharma 2018 for details).3 The two other IndE shifts in Figure 11.2, between lines 49 and 57, involve uses of IndE that appear to be more driven by interactional goals than attentional pressures. However, they are not unrelated to this biographical and cognitive asymmetry, and force us to reflect more carefully on ‘the relation between the more and the less intentional uses of variables’ (Eckert 2001: 123). Zakaria’s history of style acquisition may not simply be a constraint on his more agentive style choices. In some of these marked IndE shifts, Zakaria appears to exploit his own style biography – particularly the status of IndE as his first-learned or dominant lect – for certain kinds of stance-taking (Kockelman 2004; Du Bois 2007). The examples that follow exemplify how an individual such as Zakaria may exploit their native, dominant, or first-learned lect (D1) for stance work. Drawing on the different biographical status of their D1 and later-learned styles (D2 . . . Dn), such a speaker can shift to D1 with the effect of ‘Pay attention! This is the real me speaking now.’ The shift can achieve the effect of turning off the perceived artifice of accommodative styles and revealing a more intimate, personal ‘real me’. D1 can therefore come to be linked to stances of personal honesty, realness, and stripped-down frankness. Such stances might include dismissing, rebutting, skepticism, arguing, confiding, asides, irony, teasing, and generally telling it like it is. This may bear some resemblance to Gumperz’s (1976) personalization functions of the ‘we-code’ in bilingual code-switching. Zakaria shows a tendency to shift to IndE for this linked set of stances. The example utterances from Zakaria in (1), all from the hour-long 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, all involved measureable shifts towards IndE, including the two remaining shifts in Figure 11.2 (listed in 1d and 1e.i.). These categories account for the twenty-five marked shifts to IndE in the one-hour interview, where Zakaria shifts to a level of 70 per cent or more IndE variants. This is not to say that these stances necessitate a shift to IndE for him – they can occur in AmE style too – but rather that shifts to IndE are more heavily associated with this set of functions than others. 1.

a. Irony i. And often, by the way, this happens, when people criticize the West from outside, they are often using a Western line. b. Ridicule i. We are discussing whether Hillary fifteen years ago did a corkscrew

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landing on a Bosnian- We are talking about whether McCain uses his wife’s plane. Who cares? c. Dismissiveness i. You know, one issue comes up and we get outraged, we bash them on the head about it. ii. No. It’s more complicated and interesting and challenging than that. Look, when people say the rise of Asia, as somebody who grew up in India, this is nonsense. d. Skeptical stance i. (Rose: Do you think Senator Obama has an enlightened position on trade?) [low falling tone and faster speech rate] No, I don’t think either of the Democrats have an enlightened position on trade. [line 55, Fig 11.2] e. Direct speech + ‘frank talk’ stance marker (‘okay’, ‘look’) i. So the only solution, it seems to me, is that you say, okay, let’s in some way or other subsidize clean energy for you. [line 50, Fig 11.2] ii. You want to also draw some lines and say, look, if you want to be part of this order, you can’t go around invading countries. iii. So what they are recognizing is, look, if you are going to try and apply this treaty on the world, you’ve got to apply both parts.

In all of these examples, the shift to IndE accompanies a kind of ‘let’s be honest’ voicing, one that often brings Zakaria closer to Rose despite his shift away from Rose’s AmE speech style. Communication Accommodation Theory predicts that a lack of accommodation could increase perceived social distance (Gasiorek 2016: 97), and so might be surprising in intimate interactions. But if ‘real me’ style shifts invoke biography to achieve stances of honesty, they can also build intimacy. As with friendly insults, such shifts may generate the implicature that social distance must be low for a divergent code to have been risked at all (Brown & Levinson 1987: 229). 11.1.2

Beyond Group Identity

In this way, Zakaria’s divergences from his American interlocutor – dispensing with surface accommodation and reverting to a natural or perceived default – can support stances of frank talk, and may increase rather than decrease closeness and alignment in the interaction. Although rarely addressed, these ‘real me’ shifts arise routinely in interaction. Divergence as solidarity has sometimes been described in terms of shared positive evaluation of the chosen variety (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1998: 287), a phenomenon that is certainly widespread too. But biographical indexicality need not rely on any consensus evaluation of the variety used, just a recognition that a speaker is shifting to their own first-learned, default, or most personal style. Importantly, this leaves room for people to even shift to a unique personal idiolect, one not shared with

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any other individual or group, yet be perfectly interpretable in terms of social meaning. Divergence for solidarity has been noted in cases where speakers respond to out-group dialects by using their own vernacular (Selting 1985; Gilles 1999). This recalls the emphasis in early Communication Accommodation Theory on positions within a person’s own repertoire as the target of style shifts, rather than literal convergence with an interlocutor (Thakerar, Giles, & Chesire 1982; Giles, Coupland, & Coupland 1991: 15). Like all interactional strategies, ‘real me’ style-shifting has its risks: The listener may be governed more by the negative social status of a variety than its status as a speaker’s personal voice, they may misread the voice, or they may fail to recognize the direction of the shift. In such cases the affordances of biographical indexicality may be highly constrained or even ruled out for a speaker. The proposal here is simply to recognize this type of indexicality as one strategy individuals might use for interactional meaning, one that derives from a source other than group prestige valuations. Adding this to our analytic toolkit might cast a different light on previous analyses too. Soukup (2009: 162–3), for example, observed in her data ‘a preference for strategically deploying [Austrian German] dialect in negative contexts, such as creating antagonistic alignments, ridiculing an opponent, rekeying an utterance in an ironic way, expressing conflict, and/or pouring out anger’. Her interpretation relies on community indexical meanings for the dialect, but the stances she lists – remarkably parallel to those observed in Zakaria’s use of IndE – might also be described as footing shifts that draw on the speaker’s most personal code to invoke a no-nonsense, unvarnished frankness. Styling of a ‘true self’ was touched upon in early sociological work on rhetoric and personality. Hart, Carlson, and Eadie (1980) identified different types of communicators: a Rhetorical Sensitive might accommodate to others freely, whereas the Noble Self sees ‘any variation from their personal norms as hypocritical, as a denial of integrity, as a cardinal sin’ (p. 30). Giles, Coupland, and Coupland (1991: 10–1) speculated that Noble Selves might accommodate less in interaction, being ‘those straightforward, spontaneous persons who see deviation from their assumed “real” selves as being against their principles’. This ideology of personal ‘realness’ underpins acts of biographical indexicality too, in moments where we might perform ‘real’ self-disclosure. Johnstone (1999, 2009) proposed related notions of ‘ethos of self’ and ‘lingual biography’ as central to individual style and stance-taking. One analytic challenge to the present proposal is competing explanations. A person’s first-learned or default variety typically also has indexical associations at the community level, so it can be difficult to tease apart biographical and sociodemographic indexicality. Any ‘frankness’ effect of shifting back to

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one’s vernacular could simply be due to a well-established social indexicality for that voice (e.g., an association of working-class forms with frankness or toughness). Why appeal to biographical indexicality at all? Biographical indexicality can become more visible in the less common situation where a person’s dominant style or lect is not a lower status vernacular in the speech community. Their default may be an upper-class variety or a unique, ‘unregistered’ variety. In these cases we can begin to see the routine role of biography in variation more clearly. When a person’s first-learned lect is an upper-class variety, with a downshifted style added to their repertoire later in life, the speaker may index ‘real me’ stances with their upper-class variety, even though this variety lacks any second-order associations of frankness and tough talk. Upper- or uppermiddle-class British politicians are known to adjust their dialects ‘downward’ to appeal to a wider audience, but dismissive remarks, ironic private asides, rebutting, or counter-arguing – for example, during parliamentary debates – may employ their personal upper-class voice to display personal commitment. Most importantly, these upper-class speakers may use their upper-class style to signal exactly the same frank stances that a working-class speaker achieves with their vernacular, simply because in both cases it is a shift to a more personal code for that speaker. These are not well-behaved Labovian style-shifts: If community prestige norms influence style choice for a specific speech activity, we should see upperand lower-class speakers style-shifting in a parallel (not opposed) direction (e.g. becoming less formal). However, in these moments – which can exist alongside the more familiar formality-based style-shifting – it is the speaker’s personal biography, not shared norms, that licenses the choice of a certain style. We can similarly reflect on cases in which a speaker has a primary style that is entirely unfamiliar to the listener, with no social valuation or association at all. As a thought experiment, we might imagine a speaker of Pitcairn English (or indeed, a speaker of a completely unique idiolect) recently arrived in Chicago, where the locals have no indexical values whatsoever for the person’s vernacular, never having encountered it before. Nevertheless, if the individual can be heard to shift away from an accommodated style to one that sounds like their personal default, even if its forms have no shared value for the listeners, the ‘real me’ stances previously described can be easily inferred. All that is needed is recognition that the speaker has shifted to a more personal style. Many of these scenarios are hypothetical, of course, and more fine-grained tracking of interactional style-shifting, as conducted on Zakaria’s speech, is needed across a range of social situations to further validate this idea. But if our focus in sociolinguistics has indeed been biased towards group norms and indexicalities, we may have overlooked such regularities in the individual. Indexicality may encompass not just meanings generated ‘out there’ in the

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social world but ‘in here’ too, within the structured frame of reference of a person’s life trajectory. We might even ask whether a cross-cultural universal exists, whereby all individuals have at least the potential – however risky – to use their most personal style to adopt a similar set of interactional stances, regardless of its sociodemographic associations. This might help account for dialect stability across prestige levels, and for a range of observed interactional dynamics. The case of upper-class British politicians exemplifies another way in which biography is central to routine interactional meaning. George Osborne, an upper-class politician, was pilloried in the press in 2013 (e.g., The Telegraph, 2/4/2013) for a video recording of him addressing workers at a supermarket distribution centre down-shifting his dialect to incorporate more vernacular features, including glottal replacement of /t/, flapping of intervocalic /t/, h-dropping, use of –in for –ing, and use of wanna. His style ventured too far from his perceived ‘real’ voice, a fake and perhaps disingenuous degree of style-shifting. Podesva, Jamsu, and Callier (2015) showed similarly that US politicians’ speech is judged in part based on listeners’ knowledge of those speakers’ style biographies, not just shared indexicalities of accent features (see also Kirkham & Moore 2016). Style-shifting in interaction is clearly filtered through powerful ideologies of perceived authentic selves, with all individuals risking a backlash if they stray too far stylistically from their listeners’ expectations. At a more general level too, then, individual style biography (not just group affiliations) is integral to how we interpret the social meanings of language variation in interaction. 11.2

Biographical Indexicality at the Macro-level: Dialect Change

The examples so far have explored the micro-level of face-to-face interaction. Individual history can serve as a frame of reference for social meaning at a macro-social level too, in some cases even influencing or accelerating language change. In situations of migration, mobile individuals often encounter a new set of linguistic features (D2), whose meaning they might interpret in relation to their prior frame of reference (D1) rather than according to prevailing community indexicalities. If they are part of a large-scale migration, then this personal experience of contrast between D1 and D2 may be replicated in thousands of other individuals. This can lead over time to wholesale shifts in indexical fields. A number of examples of this effect are presented in this section, mostly involving indexical reinterpretation due to migration, but also in relation to age and generational change. In all cases, the underlying mechanism is the same: A contrast between dialect variants encountered earlier and later within

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individual experience gives rise to new meanings that happen to be shared across a larger group. I start with an example from data collected over three generations in the West London Punjabi community. Glottal replacement of /t/ is a classic vernacular London form, widespread and well known to correlate with less formal speech in Britain (Wells 1982: 302). Second- and later-generation British Asians show stylistic use of this feature that closely parallels that of their white British peers (Sharma & Sankaran 2011). By contrast, some first-generation Asian migrants – individuals who moved to the UK as adults and have very little glottal replacement of /t/ – reserved their sparse use of glottal replacement of /t/ for their more formal speech. They tended to lose these isolated uses in favour of [t] or [ʈ] in more engaged, relaxed speech. This is illustrated in (2). 2.

Priya (female, age thirty-five, sixteen years in London) a. (start of interview, more formal) I’ve go[ʔ] British passport now. b. (start of interview, more formal) No my husband eh went to Punjab and then we go[ʔ] married there and then I came. He- yeah, he’s born and brough[ʔ] up here. c. (engaged narrative, informal) He said through a glass of wa[ʈ]er eh outside- fron[ʈ] of- on top of me!

Reserving [ʔ] for more formal segments of the interview contradicts the expected usage of this form in London. The feature is associated with informality and lower-class status, but these first-generation migrants appear to use it, alongside a few other British variants (e.g., diphthongal goat and face vowels), to signal a polite, formal accommodation to a British style, possibly to signal legitimacy or competence to a community outsider affiliated with a British institution. Their usage prioritizes a cultural or ethnic meaning (Britishness), instead of the usual British class meaning. In their interviews, first-generation individuals were overwhelmingly preoccupied with concerns of post-migration experiences and finding their place in their new community. One first-generation woman described her husband’s advice: ‘He encouraged me to speak more like, like British accent. He said don’t talk like pehndus [villagers]’. It is not surprising, then, that their variation orients to an ‘us–them’ contrast that is more salient to them than internal class hierarchies in British society, indexicalities that many of them have very limited social access to. This shifted set of indexical values arises not primarily out of group consensus on meanings, but because individuals make a similar mapping from their personal dialect experience to a salient new cultural contrast: Their earlieracquired [ʈ] forms become associated with Indianness, and their later-acquired form, [ʔ], with Britishness.

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This shift from class meaning to meanings associated with ethnicity or local belonging can drive change in the system. Cheshire et al. (2011: 186) and Fox and Torgersen (2009) describe Abigail, a thirteen-year-old Albanian girl who moved to London aged eleven but who is a hyper-user of innovative phonetic and grammatical forms found in Multicultural London English, a new dialect that has recently developed in working class communities in London. Her usage, which ‘overshoots’ that of her peers, may similarly reflect a need to show British belonging and authenticity (perhaps intensified by migrating just before adolescence), with a greater focus on the ‘British’ meaning of these innovative forms than their place in the class ecology of London. In the bigger picture, this individual dynamic, repeated across thousands of in-migrating children and teenagers, may systematically boost the use of new Multicultural London English forms in the peer group, speeding up processes of change underway. Several earlier studies have documented precisely the same dynamic: inmigrating individuals using altered indexical values of forms due to their personal history of migration, in particular a salient contrast between their earlier regional forms and new encounters with urban forms. In these cases, as with the case of British Asians and of Abigail, an urban non-standard form comes to be reinterpreted, in that individual’s frame of reference, as bearing prestige through its association with the city, urbanness becoming more salient than local class associations. Kerswill (1994) noted this type of inverted use of a non-standard form, əlowering, in the Norwegian spoken in Bergen. For rural migrants coming to the city, the rural-urban divide was more salient in their personal frame of reference, and they used this form to signal urbanness, rather than non-standardness or informality. Kerswill specifically observes that ‘aspects of a migrant’s earlier background may be of central importance in explaining his or her present-day behaviour’ (Kerswill 1994: 50). Modaressi-Tehrani (1978) observed this again for a vernacular Persian phonetic form in Tehran, (aN)-raising, whereby rural migrants from the peripheral town of Ghazvin showed a use of this variant as prestigious rather than non-standard, due to its urban association within their frame of reference. Labov (2001: 86) has described this process as stylistic reinterpretation: ‘Groups of speakers who are in contact with the community but are still excluded from its main rights and privileges will often participate in the use of linguistic variables with altered stylistic patterns. This applies to minority ethnic groups . . ., children of the mainstream community, and geographic neighbors of smaller size.’ These altered stylistic patterns are remarkably parallel (see Table 11.1) and stem from the specific personal circumstances under which individuals encounter earlier and later dialect forms, along with limited access to prevailing local

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Table 11.1 Biographic indexicality and language change.

Forms

Community meaning

Tehran (aN)-raising

vernacular

Bergen ə-lowering Multicultural London English (various forms) London glottal replacement of /t/ various

non-standard vernacular, stigmatized vernacular, informal contemporary

Contact group peripheral town Ghazvin Gen 1 rural Stril migrants Gen 1.5 (Abigael) Gen 1 Asians children

New meaning prestige standard

(ModaressiTehrani 1978) (Kerswill 1994)

British, neutral

(Cheshire et al. 2011)

British, standard old

(Sharma 2016) (Labov 2001)

indexicalities. On a large scale, when thousands of migrants individually draw similar inferences about new indexicalities based on their past dialect experience and their new social context, wholesale indexical reanalysis can occur, driving language change. The last row in Table 11.1, mentioned in the quote previous from Labov (2001: 86), is a particularly intriguing example, moving the role of contrasts within personal frames of reference to centre stage in language change. A given form may be widespread and unremarkable in an adult population. However, from a child’s perspective, in which age is a particularly salient social property (on a par with the salience of urbanness or Britishness in migration), this form can gain an indexical association of ‘old’, regardless of whether the child has yet developed shared peer group indexicalities or identifications. Here again we see that contrasts within a personal frame of reference can generate new social meanings, often sufficiently regular to drive change. The shared presence of these reallocated meanings across the group is in some ways accidental. Each individual encounters the same sequence of earlier and later lectal forms under similar circumstances. This repeated pattern may of course quickly come to index that group, but the initial contrast need not involve consensus across the group. 11.3

Discussion: Unexpected Indexicalities

Models of style that are primarily based in community norms or identification with groups predict that certain types of indexicalities would be uncommon.

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I explore three of these here, to illustrate how an additional biographical dimension can help account for their prevalence. 11.3.1

Divergence to Achieve Consensus or Solidarity

Convergence with the speech style of an interlocutor, drawing on the principle of similarity attraction, is the foundation of speech accommodation and audience design models. Divergence is often linked to such goals as referee design (Bell 2001), still based in convergence for solidarity, but towards an absent referee. Under this view, actively diverging from an interlocutor with the goal of getting closer to them is less easily explained. However, this occurs routinely in interaction. Many of Zakaria’s ‘real me’ stances – dispensing with the perceived artifice of accommodation and returning to a natural or perceived default – signal intimacy, honesty, shared confidence, and trust. As discussed, this need not be due to a shared valuation of the variety used, though that is also a major source of stance and style variation. (Schilling-Estes (2004) presents a case of complex dyadic style-shifting that may encompass both types.) Convergence and divergence in interaction are not just moves towards or away from the listener, they are also orientations to objects in the discourse (Du Bois 2007), and the status of different styles within a person’s repertoire can help to encode these positionings. As noted, earlier work in dialectology has similarly shown that reverting to one’s own vernacular, rather than accommodating, can reduce rather than increase social distance under some circumstances (Selting 1985; Gilles 1999). 11.3.2

Prestige and Non-standard Forms Used with Same Indexical Meaning

A reasonable expectation of the speech community model of shared norms is that, across the community, linguistic forms associated with overt prestige will be employed for different indexical uses in interaction to those associated with covert prestige, non-standardness, or stigma. Many studies have shown this, but the proposal here identifies one context in which the reverse can occur, namely that individuals from different class groups might use these different linguistic variables to perform similar stances of unvarnished frankness and directness. Community prestige norms would expect their class-linked forms to behave differently, but the biographical status of these forms as ‘native’ or default for the speaker in question, renders them a natural choice for that speaker’s ‘real me’ voicing.4 Figure 11.4 illustrates these two dimensions of indexical work done by sociolinguistic variants, focusing on three sample individuals in a wider speech community. The grey dashed arrows highlight the familiar inter-group dimension of sociodemographic indexical contrast

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259 WORKING CLASS

...

style a1 style a2 style an

style b1 style b2

style c1 style c2 ...

DIASPORA

...

UPPER CLASS

style bn

style cn

Figure 11.4 Two dimensions of indexical contrast (inter- and intraindividual) for three sample individuals in a speech community.

between each individual’s primary style (a1, b1, c1). The black arrows show that these different styles can also perform the same intra-individual function for all three individuals, being singled out in each personal repertoire for ‘real me’ voicing (bold black arrow) regardless of the variant’s sociodemographic indexicality in social space. 11.3.3

Non-standard Forms Used More in Formal Contexts

Finally, within a speech community perspective, we do not expect to see nonstandard forms being used more in formal contexts, almost by definition. However, as noted by Labov (2001), stylistic reinterpretation takes place at the interfaces between groups (e.g., in migration or between generations). The examples presented earlier showed that in migration situations it is common for non-standard forms to be re-valued as statusful due to their association with a city or a host community. This reinterpretation is not primarily the result of community consensus on the meaning of forms, but rather derives from individuals’ frames of reference, with their biographical experience generating new contrastive meanings. 11.4

Conclusion

In all of these instances, a variable does not gain meaning only through group or interactional associations: it can also gain meaning due to the style history of its current user. Eckert (2012: 94) observes that variables ‘cannot be consensual

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markers of fixed meanings; on the contrary, their central property must be indexical mutability’. This article aims to add biography, or personal frame of reference, to the set of sources that drive mutability in social meaning, alongside sociodemographics and pragmatics. What are the implications for theory and method in style research? In methodology, detailed information about personal style biography and acquisitional history is useful for understanding the meaning potential of forms within an individual’s repertoire. This in turn requires an understanding of the relative dominance or balance of styles in a repertoire, and new methods such as tracking shifts under high attentional load, tracking speech rate across styles, and examining patterns of use with content and function words may support this task. A biographical viewpoint on style can also help to integrate the wealth of recent work on lifespan change (Sankoff 2018) into style analysis. In terms of theory, the discussion has revisited the question of where and how social meaning is generated. Eckert’s (2008a) approach to indexical meaning distinguished between two components: the linking of a linguistic form with meaning (x → y), and the ideological embedding of this process (e.g., in interaction or sociodemographic structure). In the majority of classic cases from the literature, y is the social evaluation of a group that uses the form x, and second-order indexicality derives from a chain of indexical associations; for example, the use of African American Vernacular English to index masculinity. However, in the case of biographical indexicality, y is very different: It is a set of stances that draw their meaning not from sociodemographics but from biography, from the status of the form x within that person’s style history, not within that person’s social environment. In the case of Zakaria’s ‘real me’ stance-taking with IndE, this separation from sociodemographic meanings of IndE such as ethnicity allows us to see Zakaria doing exactly the same rhetorical, interactional work as mainstream AmE speakers, not perpetually performing ethnicity with his use of IndE forms (cf. Eckert 2008b). A separation of these two components of indexicality – the semiotic and the situated – thus helps us broaden the latter set, adding biography as a context for social meaning, alongside sociodemographics and pragmatics. Biographical effects help to account for a wider range of systematic indexical dynamics in interaction. They also bring elements of cognition, acquisition, and dominance – standard in bilingualism research – into style research, and relate these to more agentive actions. They may even inform accounts of vernacular stability (sustained reliance on the vernacular for stance work, not just covert prestige) or accelerated change (the role of migrants and younger generations’ frames of reference in stylistic reinterpretation). The core semiotic process remains a form of inferencing that is part of ‘the process by which the link between form and meaning is made and remade’ (Eckert 2008a: 463).

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notes 1. As style variants cluster to different degrees, I use the term style for most alternations between variants in a repertoire and lect or variety for more recognized, enregistered style clusters (e.g., AmE). 2. Figure 11.2 omits a stretch of data between lines 71 and 94 where marked IndE shifts were absent. 3. Dominance and control are not typically central in analyses of style variation, unlike the study of bilingualism, but their potential importance to the execution of styles has been noted increasingly often (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985; Schilling-Estes 2004; Kendall 2009; Guy & Cutler 2011; Hall-Lew, Starr & Coppock 2012; Nycz 2015; Babel 2016; Abel & Babel 2017). 4. Snell (2018) examines working-class dialect use among children in Teeside, England, and also argues that a simple community-level opposition of status and solidarity is insufficient in accounting for the range of stances that these forms achieve.

References Abel, Jennifer, and Molly Babel. 2017. Cognitive load reduces perceived linguistic convergence between dyads. Language and Speech 20(3), 479–502. Babel, Anna (ed.). 2016. Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2), 145–204. Bell, Allan. 2001. Back in style: Reworking audience design. In P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 139–69. Brown, Penelope, and Steven C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Susan Fox, and Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2), 151–96. Coupland, Nikolas. 1980. Style shifting in a Cardiff work setting. Language in Society 9(1), 1–12. Coupland, Nikolas. 1985. ‘Hark, hark, the lark’: Social motivations for phonological style-shifting. Language & Communication 5(3), 153–71. Du Bois, John W. 2007. The Stance Triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 139–82. Eckert, Penelope. 1997. Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In F. Coulmas (ed.), Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 151–67. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope. 2001. Style and social meaning. In P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 119–26.

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Part III

Meaning and Linguistic Change

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Emergence of Social Meaning in Sociolinguistic Change Qing Zhang

12.1

An Emergent View on Sociolinguistic Variation

In ‘Three waves of variation study’, Eckert (2012) traces the treatment of social meaning in variationist research, from the first- and second-wave studies that ‘viewed the meaning of variation as incidental fallout from social space’ (2012: 94) to increasing focus on social meaning in the third wave by treating linguistic variation as ‘a social semiotic system’ (2012: 94) and the use of variation as a meaning-making resource in the stylistic enactment of social personae (2012, 2016). This development is captured in the subtitle of Eckert’s 2012 article, ‘The emergence of social meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation’. By emphasizing the emergence of social meaning, Eckert not only highlights increased attention to the study of social meaning but also articulates an emergent perspective on sociolinguistic variation in the third wave (e.g., Eckert 2008, 2012, 2016). This perspective approaches social meaning as mutable; it is created as linguistic variation is used in stylistic practices. It treats ‘social locations and their evaluations’ as emergent (Eckert 2016: 69) such that sociolinguistic variation does not merely reflect and serve as markers of the social but participates in its coming into being. This chapter further develops this emergent view on sociolinguist variation. It focuses on the third wave’s contribution to the enterprise of sociolinguistic change that treats linguistic and social change as mutually constitutive (Coupland 2014, 2016). Drawing on my research on Cosmopolitan Mandarin (CM) in China, an innovative linguistic style, I treat linguistic innovation and change as emergent stylistic resources that create meanings about (new) social distinction. By examining the processes through which the social meaning of CM emerges, this chapter reveals that CM participates in a broader sociopolitical process of the transformation of stylistic regimes in China. Section 12.2 offers a theoretical discussion of the major conceptual tools that enable an 267

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analysis of the emergence of CM as sociolinguistic change. Section 12.3 draws on my past research to illustrate the emergence of the social meaning of CM as it is used to enact new social personae. Section 12.4 delves deeper into the emergence of social meaning by examining the enregisterment of CM. Finally, Section 12.5 concludes the chapter and discusses the implication of the emergence perspective on variation for the development of a style-based approach to sociolinguistic change. 12.2

Style as Emergent Systems of Distinction

Among other dimensions central to the third wave is treating linguistic variation as a meaning-making resource in the construction of styles. The third wave develops with an increasing concern on the theorization of style (Eckert 2018). Drawing on recent conceptualizations (e.g., Eckert 2000, 2008; Irvine 2001; Coupland 2007; Bucholtz 2011), I treat style as an emergent system of distinction (Irvine 2001), constituted by linguistic and other semiotic resources and practices that make distinction meaningful; it is a sociohistorical process, mediated by ideologies of differentiation. Emphasizing the emergent nature of style and treating it as a sociohistorical process locates the investigation of style (and stylistic resources) within the sociopolitical circumstances and exigencies of particular historical moments, drawing attention to the question of why a particular style comes to be at a particular historical juncture (see also Inoue 2002). The answer to this question is pivotal in embedding linguistic innovation – as emergent stylistic resources – within broader processes of social change. Styles as systems of distinction are fundamentally ideological (e.g., Irvine 2001; Eckert 2008). As the distinctiveness of a style becomes meaningful only when contrasted with other styles (Ferguson 1999; Irvine 2001), ideology, as ‘construed practice’ (Woolard 1998: 10), shapes people’s understanding of socially salient poles of distinction (Ferguson 1999: 95; Irvine 2001: 24); it further shapes the interpretation and evaluation of stylistic elements and practices to create such distinction. Ideology mediates the emergence of meaning in the production of styles as speakers engage in the process of bricolage (LéviStrauss 1966), selecting and combining existing semiotic resources (including linguistic variation) to create distinction (Hebdige 1979). As an emergent dialogic sociohistorical process, bricolage involves movement in indexical order (Silverstein 2003) as semiotic resources imbued with n-th order indexicality take on n+1st order indexicality in a new stylistic ensemble. Such higherorder indexicality – that is, the meaning of a style and its components – has to be recognizable and interpretable not only by the bricoleurs or stylistic agents themselves but also by a broader range of language users in a given population. Following Agha (2007) and Eckert (2008), I examine style as a process of

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enregisterment, a sociohistorical process whereby sets of linguistic (and other semiotic) forms come to be socially recognized as distinct and linked to schemes of cultural values and typifiable social personae or practices by a given population of speakers (Agha 2005, 2007). The examination of the enregisterment of CM in Section 12.4 reveals that the emergence of CM is a contested process fraught with indexical instability and multiplicity, a process whereby CM and its constitutive elements are linked to varied and often conflicting indexical values. The ideological valorization and countervalorization of CM reveals the social positioning of groups of speakers. Such ideologically informed construals anchor linguistic innovation and its social significance to larger sociopolitical concerns. In the next section, I draw on data from my past research on the rise of Cosmopolitan Mandarin (CM), an innovative linguistic style. Its distinctiveness lies in its contrast against the conventional Standard Mandarin, also known as Putonghua ‘common speech’ (PTH), in that it defies the Beijing/ Northern Mandarin-based linguistic norms of PTH by incorporating salient linguistic features from non-Mainland Mandarin varieties and English. 12.3

Making Social Distinction through Cosmopolitan Mandarin: The Emergence of Meaning in the Production of Style

The seismic socioeconomic change in China over the past three decades has brought about increased socioeconomic stratification, including the rise of consumerism and the burgeoning Chinese middle classes. Emergent social groups draw on linguistic and other semiotic resources to forge new identities and (life)styles. The diversification of contemporary Chinese society would not have happened without the fundamental ideological shift away from socialist egalitarianism to valorization of difference (Dirlik 2001). This ideological shift is aptly captured in the often-quoted declarative by Deng Xiaoping (1904–77), also known as the chief architect of China’s policies on economic reform: ‘let some people and some regions prosper before others. . . . The [economic] reform is designed, first and foremost, to break with egalitarianism, and to break with the practice of having everyone “eat from the same big pot”’ (Deng 1994 [1986]: 169). Valorization of difference legitimizes overt display and expression of difference, which requires the use of semiotic resources to create meanings of distinction. Language, and specifically linguistic innovations, thus come to serve as a vital tool in the making of new social distinctions. My research conducted in the late 1990s shows that CM emerges in the era of drastic socioeconomic transformation (Zhang 2005). It is an alternative linguistic style to the conventional standard language, also known as Putonghua (PTH) ‘common speech’, with Northern Mandarin as its base dialect and the Beijing

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Mandarin (BM) phonological system as its norm of pronunciation (Guojia Yuyan Wenzi 1996: 12). ‘Common speech’ as the product of more than half a century of language standardization, a process of popularization and deeliticization, symbolizes a modern Chinese nation and socialist egalitarianism. As a result of intense efforts of linguistic engineering during the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution (1966–76) (Ji 2004), the overly politicized and de-elitized ‘common speech’, adept at expressing conformity and proletarian distinction, becomes ‘semiotically inadequate’ in creating meanings of new social distinctions that are not along the single political line of separating the proletariat from their enemies (Zhang 2018: 12–13). Against this backdrop, language change becomes inevitable and the rise of CM is inseparable from the societal ideological shift and socioeconomic transformation. In the rest of this section, I provide two examples for the use of CM as a stylistic resource and the emergence of meaning as it is used in the construction of new social distinctions.1 In the late 1990s, I conducted research on the linguistic practice of a group of native Beijing yuppies who were among the top echelon of local Chinese professionals working for international businesses, or waiqi. They contrast themselves with their counterparts in state-owned enterprises by presenting a new cosmopolitan professional image. The Beijing yuppies also fashion themselves as cultured cosmopolitans, keenly differentiating themselves from the newly rich, local private entrepreneurs whom they see as uncouth and ostentatious (see Zhang 2018: 46–60). Such distinctions are also created through combining linguistic resources, particularly, the use of four sociolinguistic variables. In the following examples, the realization using the local – BM – variant is followed by the nonlocal variant. First, rhotacization, or er-hua, the most well-known feature of BM, involves the addition of a subsyllabic retroflex -r [ɻ] to the syllable final, causing the final to take on r-coloring and becoming rhotacized (e.g., Chao 1968), as illustrated in Example (1). (See Appendix A for transcription conventions.) (1)

‘flower’ huar [huaɻ] ~ hua [hua]

The second variable is lenition of the retroflex obstruent initials /ʂ/, /tʂ/, and /tʂh/. In BM, these retroflex initials sometimes are lenited, or weakened, and realized as the retroflex approximant [ɻ] (Chao 1968), as shown in Example (2). (2)

‘student’ xuereng [ɕyɛɻəŋ] ~ xuesheng [ɕyɛʂəŋ]

Rhotacization and lenition contribute to the perception of the ‘oily’, or ‘smooth’, characteristic of BM. The ‘oily’ Beijing speech is further associated with Jing you-zi ‘Beijing smooth operator’, a widely known male character type who is glib, worldly-wise, and street smart with remarkable urban versatility and savoir faire.

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The third variable is interdental realization of the dental sibilants /s/, /ts/, and /tsh/ as [θ], [tθ], and [tθh], respectively; see Example (3). This feature is associated with the hutong chuanzi ‘alley saunterer’, a feckless lower-class male character, wandering around in the disappearing traditional neighborhood alleys in the city of Beijing. (3)

‘now’ xianthai [ɕiantθai] ~ xianzai [ɕiantsai]

The fourth variable is the full tone realization of a neutral tone in a weakly stressed syllable, as in Example (4). (4)

‘understand’ ming2bai0 [mɪŋpaɪ] ~ ming2bai2 [mɪŋpaɪ]

In BM and other Northern Mandarin dialects, every stressed syllable has a full tone with a fixed pitch value. When a syllable is weakly stressed, it has a neutral tone (Chao 1968), whose pitch is determined by that of its preceding syllable (Shen 1990). In contrast, most of the Southern varieties, including Shanghai hua, Cantonese, and Min (including Southern Min, also known as Taiwanese) have very limited or almost no use of neutral tone (e.g., Chao 1968; Ramsey 1987; Qian 1995). This tonal variation is stable between Northern Mandarin and southern varieties and commonly found in local-accented PTH of southern Mandarin speakers. Although the full-tone variant is a telltale feature of southern mainland PTH speakers and non-Mainland Mandarin speakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of the world, its use in the PTH of Northern Mandarin speakers for stylistic purposes is a new phenomenon. In this sense, the use of the full-tone variant by BM (and Northern Mandarin) speakers is linguistically innovative. While the previous three local variants are associated with two Beijing character types, the full tone variant is associated with the new character of the ‘cosmopolitan Chinese’ whose emergence in the mainland in 1980s was brought about by the influx of popular culture celebrities and business people from Hong Kong and Taiwan (see detailed discussion in Zhang 2018: 74–5). It should be noted that among the four variables, rhotacization and neutral tone are the two emblematic features of BM. Furthermore, they are also prescribed as part of the norms of Standard PTH, codified in dictionaries, Chinese language textbooks, and the Putonghua Proficiency Test. Quantitative analyses were conducted on data collected from sociolinguistic interviews of fourteen yuppies and fourteen professionals working in stateowned enterprises with comparable linguistic and educational background in their workplaces. The data were coded impressionistically and analyzed using GoldVarb 2.0 (Rand & Sankoff 1990).2 The analysis revealed that the linguistic features varied in similar patterns (see Figure 12.1). The yuppies disfavored the use of all local variants (factor weights of all local variants are less than 0.5). In other words, the yuppies used the local variants a lot less than the state

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Factor Weight/Proportion

1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5

Yuppies

0.4

State Professionals

0.3 0.2 0.1 0 Rhotacization

Lenition

Interdental Neutral Tone

Figure 12.1 Use of the local variants in two professional groups. Factor weights for rhotacization, lenition, and interdental; proportion for neutral tone.

professionals who did not use the innovative full tone variant in a neutral tone environment. In other words, the combined use of nonlocal variants makes the yuppies’ linguistic style nonlocal whereas that of the state professionals can be described as conventional PTH with a prominent Beijing accent. Moreover, because of the use of the full tone, the yuppies’ linguistic style is not simply more standard (i.e., the phonological standard of BM which includes neutral tone) but rather they are moving away from the conventional Beijing Mandarin based mainland Standard PTH. They are using a new Mandarin style: Cosmopolitan Mandarin. It is a supraregional Mandarin style consisting of a fluid set of features drawn from Standard PTH, non-Mainland Mandarin varieties and English. The combination of these features makes it distinctive from the conventional BM-based PTH. Within the yuppie group, women overwhelmingly lag behind in the use of all local variants (see Figure 12.2). This robust intragroup difference reveals that the imbued cultural significance of the variables – the association between the variables and their respective character type – affords them with both meaningmaking potentials as well as constraints on their reuse in the process of bricolage.3 Although the male yuppies used all the local variants more often than their female counterparts, the biggest difference is in the use of rhotacization and lenition, the two features associated with the ‘Beijing smooth operator’, the most well-known local character type. And between the two, rhotacization – the variant with the highest level of metapragmatic awareness as the emblem of the character type – shows a larger difference between the female and male

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Percentage

Emergence of Social Meaning 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

273

Female Yuppies Male Yuppies

Rhotacization

Lenition

Interdental Neutral Tone

Figure 12.2 Use of the local variants among the yuppies.

yuppies. Rhotacization’s enregistered association with the smooth operator – an urban male character – and his ‘smooth’ qualities makes the feature less compatible with the women’s cosmopolitan professional image; further, the deeply locally rooted street-smartness (that is, local knowledge), urban versatility, and resourcefulness may complement the men’s professional persona. The casualness and ease of a Beijing ‘smooth operator’ would jeopardize the women’s credibility and authority as managerial professionals working for international businesses. Their less frequent use of rhotacization (and lenition) thus disassociate the women from the ‘smooth operator’ image. In addition, the women’s less frequent use of lenition, ‘the swallowing sound’ feature in which three retroflex obstruent initials merge to [ɻ], also makes them sound precise. As several studies (Benor 2001; Bucholtz 2001; Podesva, Roberts, & Campell-Kibler 2002) have shown, precise enunciation is a strategy to express learnedness and intelligence. Their ‘clear enunciation’, combined with less use of rhotacization and less variation in rhythm (partly due to their higher use of the full tone variant), makes the women’s speech impersonal and detached, typical of academic and formal business style. It is the extreme opposite of the ‘smooth’, ‘rhythmic’, and ‘melodious’ colloquial Beijing style. The women yuppies use this style to create an intelligent, impersonal, diligent, and meticulous feminine business persona, the hallmark of which is its cosmopolitan outlook. The use of the local and nonlocal variants in the following extracts from Rebecca and David exemplify the subtle differences in the self-styling of their professional personae. Working for the same bank, Rebecca, twenty-eight, is the chief representative, and David, a veteran waiqi professional and twelve years senior, is a deputy representative. The youngest chief representative in the group, Rebecca’s career in waiqi, from 1994 to 1998 when I interviewed

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her, is shorter than most of the other professionals, but she moved up the ranks the fastest. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in international business in 1992, Rebecca was hired by the then-largest state-owned investment company in China. A year later she was recruited by another state-owned credit rating agency, working in ‘capital markets consulting’ (underlining indicates English words used by Rebecca). She worked on launching the stocks of numerous Chinese companies on Hong Kong and international stock markets. ‘Feeling limited by doing only consulting work at the company and hoping to work for a bank in the real investment bank business’, she joined one of the four largest Japanese securities companies. Two years later, in 1996, she accepted a position as the chief representative of a joint venture between a North American bank and a Hong Kong financial group. Her current bank, which had contacted her a year earlier, started heavily recruiting her a month after she had taken up the new position. Considering that the bank ‘just started targeting China as their primary market’, she thought that ‘it was the right moment to join the company’ and it was beneficial to her career development. In her own words: (5)

There will be more opportunities [ji1hui4 T4] to give full play to my talents and more learning opportunities [ji1hui4 T4]. So I came over. I’ve been here [zhe4li3 -R, T3] for about two years.

Through the concise summary of her professional history, Rebecca presents herself as one of a minority of professional local Chinese with appropriate credentials, expert knowledge, professional skills, and experiences who are highly sought after by foreign companies to work in the China market. Her persona of an accomplished banking professional is presented through CM and technical terms in English (underlined). In this short quote, she pronounced ‘opportunities’ twice as ji1hui4 with a full tone (T4) instead of a neutral tone. For the word ‘here’, instead of the rhotacized expression zher4 commonly used by BM speakers, she used zhe4-li3 ‘here’, a non-rhotacizable word and with a full-tone (T3) on the second syllable, which is usually pronounced with a neutral tone. Many technical terms in English were used in her interview, for instance marketing, placement, (A, B, H) shares, securities, roadshow, presentation, and proposal. Also note that she sees the work at the new company as offering valuable learning opportunities, a point she emphasized again in Extract 12.1. In the following extract, she presents learning as an important part of being a waiqi professional. In the interview leading up to the extract, Rebecca complains that some of her junior colleagues with college degrees are not willing to do ‘small things’, such as typing up a proposal and preparing presentations and brochures. In her view, such ‘small things’ are important learning opportunities, as she herself has moved up the ranks through doing small things.

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Extract 12.1 Rebecca: ‘One should start from doing small things’ 1 suoyi wo shi juede [T2] So I think [T2] 2 ren jiu yinggai cong xiao shiqing [T2] zuo qi. one should start with doing small things [T2] 3 Yinwei wo ziji yeri [+lenition] cong zui xiao de shiqing [T2] zuo qi. Because I myself also [+lenition] started from doing the smallest things [T2]. 4 Yeshi [−lenition] zuo le zheme [T0] duo nian also [−lenition] have done so for so [T0] many years 5 manman [−R, T4] lian chulai de. slowly [−R, T4] become experienced. 6 Danshi [−lenition] wo xianzai [-interdental] bu neng shuo but [−lenition] I can’t say now [-interdental] 7 wo ziji duo, bi biren qiang. I myself am much, better than others. 8 zhishao [−lenition] jiushi [−lenition] shuo at least [−lenition] that is [−lenition] to say 9 wo bi neixie gang-gang gang qibu de ren hui qiang. I’m better than those who just-just just started. 10 yinwei wo juede [T2] zhei ren de xintai hen zhongyao. because I think [−lenition] one’s attitude is very important. 11 ni bu neng jiuri [+lenition] shuo you can’t that’s [+lenition] to say 12 xiao shiqing [T2] bu zuo. not do small things [T2]. 13 qishi [−lenition] xiao shiqing [T2] zuo de shihou [T4] in fact [−lenition], when [T4] doing small things [T2] 14 dou shi xuexi de shihou [T4] [they’re] all times [T4] for learning.

In Extract 12.1, Rebecca presents another aspect of her professional image. ‘Cong xiao shiqing zuoqi’ ‘to start from doing small things’ (line 3) is a hackneyed Chinese saying about great achievements being accomplished by doing small things. This phrase is recontextualized here to emphasize her view that success is not solely built on having the desirable educational credentials and professional experiences but is achieved through learning from and doing small things. Despite her fast career advancement, she presents herself in the extract as a hard-working, diligent professional. This diligent professional image is again projected through the use of CM with minimal local features. The key expression of this extract, xiao3 shi4qing0 ‘small things’,

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which has a neutral tone in the second syllable of shi4qing0, is pronounced with a full-tone (T2) in all four occurrences (in lines 2, 3, 12, and 13). When comparing waiqi with state professionals, she thinks that those in state-run work units ‘do not have sufficient pressure . . . with respect to competition’ and that ‘they aren’t diligent enough’. In contrast, her own workday typically starts around eight in the morning and does not end till eight or nine at night. She sees foreign companies having ‘stricter requirements on every aspect [of the job] starting with the most basic dress code’. As a result, waiqi employees ‘may feel a bit [-R] more professional’. However, she quickly points out that ‘there is still some distance between one’s feelings about her/ himself and one’s real ability’. In Extract 12.2, Rebecca – the youngest chief representative and the cream of the crop of local Chinese banking professionals – stresses having a realistic view about oneself and a sense of modesty, citing a colloquial Beijing saying, ‘one has to admit incompetence’ (line 6). She reiterates the importance of learning. This realistic and modest persona is again accompanied by the use of CM features in words that are usually pronounced with local features, that is, yi-dian ‘a bit’ without rhotacization (line 2), qishi ‘in fact’ without lenition (line 4), and juede ‘feel’ with a full-tone (T2) in the second syllable (line 4), and shihou ‘when’ with a full-tone (T4) in the second syllable (line 9). Only when

Extract 12.2 Rebecca: ‘One has to admit incompetence’ 1 Rebecca: ta keneng xiang de xiang de S/he may think think 2 ziji ge:ng geng gao le yi-dian [-R]. a bit [-R] too: too highly about her/himself. 3 QZ: hm hm. 4 Rebecca: qishi [−lenition] wo juede [T2] In fact [−lenition] I think [T2], 5 Beijing hua jiuri [+lenition] shuo a Beijing saying that’s [+lenition] to say 6 zhe ren de ren SONG. one has to admit INCOMPETENCE 7 jiuri [+lenition] shuo that’s [+lenition] to say 8 ni bu xing jiuri [+lenition] bu xing. if you’re incompetent [then you] really are [+lenition] incompetent. 9 yao xue de shihou [T4] jiu de xue. when it’s time [T4] to learn [you] really have to learn.

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she starts citing the Beijing saying does she use the local feature, lenition, in three occurrences of jiushi as jiuri ‘that is’ (lines 5 and 7, and ‘really be’ line 8). Absence of rhotacization, minimal lenition, and frequent use of full tone in neutral tone environments in these two extracts make her speech sound hyperenunciated, careful, and effortful. Such a speech style – together with the content of her talk – instantiates the image of Rebecca as professional, meticulous and diligent. As I discuss next, her linguistic style is in stark contrast with that of her subordinate David, the deputy representative who is twelve years her senior and who has fourteen years of experience in waiqi. David started his waiqi career in 1983 when foreign banks had just started opening representative offices in China. With a bachelor’s degree in English, he was hired as an assistant to the chief representative of a European bank, one of the ten foreign banks permitted to establish their representative office in China in the early 1980s. He had worked for the same bank for ten years before joining the current company about three years ago. In his words, ‘unlike other waiqi comrades who jump [jobs] more often, my [job] history is very simple’. His use of the word tongzhimen (‘comrades’), an outdated (address) term widely used in pre-reform China, to refer to the waiqi cohort is intended to be witty, as waiqi is the so-called capitalist operations in China in opposition to socialism and communism, symbolized by the term tongzihimen (‘comrade’). Referring to the others as ‘comrades’ also reflects his view of waiqi professionals as a community where he sees himself as a veteran among his comrades. In the summary of his work history at the beginning of the interview, David used more BM features than Rebecca. He also used many English expressions, for instance, salary package, rep office, investment banking, project financing, and capital market financing. Unlike Rebecca, who had a degree in international business, David joined waiqi in the early 1980s primarily because of his English-language skills. Hence, one would expect that (like Rebecca) learning would have been crucial in his career development from an assistant to the chief representative to a deputy representative. However, as we see from Extracts 12.3 and 12.4, learning is not mentioned. The following extracts are drawn from David’s description of three levels of waiqi employees: The lower level (e.g., service people, secretaries), the middle level (to which he belongs), and the top level (e.g., chief representatives, managers). In his view, ‘the local basis, their salary package is not as high as that of those expatriates, but [+lenition] the work [-interdental] they do is that of the cornerstone’. He further elaborates on the ‘cornerstone’ work of the local, middle-level professionals in Extract 12.3. In this extract, David fashions himself as the mediator between his upperlevel management and lower-level local employees. Earlier in the interview, he also describes himself as the local intermediary between his foreign employer and the Chinese customer and bureaucracy. Learning on his part is not

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Extract 12.3 David: ‘You shoulder the function of educating them’ 1 ZHONG ceng ne MIDDLE level 2 jiuri [+lention] shuo women [T0] zheixie ren ne that’s [+lention] to say people like us [T0] 3 zai yewu [T0] shang ne in terms of professional work [T0] 4 shi CHENG-SHANG [-lenition] -QI-XIA [we] are the connecting link between the upper [-lenition] and lower levels. 5 gen shangbiar [+R, T0] baochi lianluo. keep in contact with the upper level [+R, T0]. 6 shangbiar [+R, T0] baokuo the upper level [+R, T0] includes 7 ni de expatriates de ZHONGGUO ji de daibiao your representatives who are CHINESE expatriates. 8 shi yi zhong biejiao hao goutong de [they] are the kind who are easier to communicate with 9 yinwei dui shichang bijao liaojie. because [they are] familiar with the market. 10 WAIguo ren ne FOREIGNers 11 ni jiu jianfu zhe ne you shoulder 12 dui ta jinxing education de zheige yige gongneng. the function of educating them.

mentioned explicitly; instead, he emphasizes his role as an educator for his foreign superior (lines 10–12). He told me that in the thirteen years working under a foreign representative, he had worked with about six different representatives. According to him, such a turnover rate was too high, because ‘for every foreign representative, it takes at least a two- to three-year process from unfamiliarity to being knowledgeable about the China market’. It is frustrating for him that his representatives left right at the time when they were becoming familiar with the China market: (6)

Ni HAO3: bu0 rong2yi0 jiao chulai [T0] yi-ge [T0], ta zou [-interdental] le. You took so much pain to complete teaching one, s/he left [-interdental].

The image of the local intermediary-educator, knowledgeable in the workings of the Chinese market, is styled with the use of Beijing local features in all potential environments with only three exceptions in the aforementioned

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extracts. First, in the quote about the cornerstone work that the local professionals do, the second syllable onset of the word gongzuo ‘work’ is pronounced as [ts] rather than the interdental ‘alley saunterer’ variant. The same nonlocal variant is used in the word zou ‘left’ in the quote about his frustration over the turnover rate. Third, when describing his role as an intermediary in Extract 12.3, in line 4, he uses the Chinese idiom cheng-shang-qi-xia ‘connecting link’, within which the second syllable initial in -shang can be potentially lenited but is not. This is because each syllable of this idiom was pronounced with emphasis. His otherwise frequent use of rhotacization, lenition, and neutral tone contribute to a casual, relaxed, and legato style in sharp contrast to the enunciated, controlled, and staccato style of Rebecca. Note that the expression hao3bu0 rong2yi0 ‘very difficult’, which typically has a full tone in each syllable hao3bu4 rong2yi4, is pronounced with a neutral tone in every other syllable. The neutral tone syllable – unstressed and shorter – alternating between a stressed and longer full-tone syllable creates a poetic effect, making his speech sound stress-timed but also conveying vividly his frustration.4 Such a double-trochee effect is in sharp contrast to that of a double spondee if the expression were pronounced with a full tone in all four syllables, hao3bu4 rong2yi4. The poetic effect of neutral tone shows up again in the next part of his interview when he highlights his distinction from some other waiqi professionals. In addition to presenting himself as a mediator and educator, David distinguishes himself from some middle- and high-ranking waiqi professionals who he thinks ‘have a feeling of superiority’ and act like ‘superior Chinese’. He declares himself to be the ‘ta1-ta0-shi2-shi0’ ‘steady and reliable’ kind who ‘do not have inordinate desires’ (e.g., asking for everhigher salaries) but who ‘take the initiative to accomplish their work’ and ‘position themselves as an upright person in society’. Finally, he summarizes his view of waiqi employees:

Extract 12.4 David: ‘I for sure am the feet-on-the-ground type’ 1 ZO::NGjie lai kan [-interdental], To SUMMARIZE [-interdental], 2 wo geren juede [T0] I personally feel [T0] 3 buguan zhei san [-interdental] deng shi na yige no matter which of the three [-interdental] ranks 4 WO kending shi nei bijiao jiao3-ta0[T0]-shi2-di4 neizhong [-lenition]. I for sure am the feet-on [T0]-the-ground type [-lenition].

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David’s self-characterization as a reliable employee who takes initiative at work and keeps his feet on the ground reminds us of Rebecca’s principle of diligence and having a realistic view of herself. However, unlike Rebecca, who presents her professional persona with features of CM, David’s realistic, down-to-earth persona is instantiated through the use of neutral tone in the two focal expressions, both four-character idioms, ta1-ta0-shi2-shi0 ‘steady and reliable’ and jiao3-ta0-shi2-di4 ‘feet on the ground’.5 The first consists of two monosyllabic reduplications in which the use of neutral tone in the reduplicated syllable is expected in both BM and Standard PTH (Li & Thompson 1981: 28–9; Lu 1995: 27). In the second expression, jao3-ta4-shi2di4, the second syllable of this expression is pronounced with a falling tone T4 in Standard PTH. The use of a neutral tone (the tone with the shortest duration) instead after the falling-rising T3 (the tone with the longest duration), jiao3-ta 0-shi2-di4, exaggerates the contrast in the duration and stress between the first and second syllable. In contrast to the measured regularity produced by the use of all full-tone syllables, such uses of a neutral tone alternating with a full tone add variation to stress and tempo, again making his speech sound stress-timed. Note also that the neutral tone is the only local feature used in the aforementioned extract. He used the nonlocal variants of the other variables in all the potential environments in lines 1, 3, and 4. Considering that, in this part of the interview, he distinguishes himself from some other waiqi professional of similar and higher rank, the poetic effect produced by the neutral tone vivifies his self-claimed reliable and down-to-earth persona, but the use of other nonlocal features keeps this persona not too closely aligned with the image of a local Beijinger. The analysis presented shows that the Beijing yuppies in the late 1990s used CM to construct their new cosmopolitan professional identity. The use of CM has been increasing over the past two decades, becoming particularly prominent in radio and television programs about new consumption-based lifestyles (Zhang 2018). The TV hosts in such programs draw on CM to create urban middle-class personae that combine the characteristics of trendiness, sophistication, youthful ebullience, and conviviality (see Zhang 2018: 105–33). However, the question remains: How is this new linguistic style recognized and interpreted by a larger population of mainland Chinese? In the next section, I examine the enregisterment of CM and its constitutive features to reveal a much more complex picture of the emergence of social meaning. 12.4

The Enregisterment of Cosmopolitan Mandarin

Increasing use of CM among Chinese mainlanders has ignited heated debate over the cultural values of PTH vis-à-vis the emergent, alternative Mandarin style. For evidence of this connection, I turn to metalinguistic data from

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popular and social media spanning from the 1990s to the 2010s. My analysis reveals that the emergence of CM is a contested process fraught with indexical instability and multiplicity, a process whereby CM and its constitutive elements are imbued with varied and often conflicting indexical values. The social evaluations found in the current study contest the central position of PTH on all the fundamental cultural values associated with the standard language, namely, normativity, superiority, authenticity, and modernity. 12.4.1

Putonghua and ‘Gang-Tai Qiang’

The most widely used metapramatic label for CM is Gang-Tai qiang, or Hong Kong-Taiwan accent. There is ample evidence that the major features of CM – particularly, the use of full tone instead of a neutral tone and derhotacization – overlap with the stereotypic features of the so-called Hong Kong–Taiwan accent. (Due to the limitation of space, I do not present examples here, but see Zhang (2018: 147–9).) This label is used in governmentsponsored metapragmatic discourses condemning CM and its Mainland Chinese speakers. (7)

. . . It is natural to speak Putonghua with a ‘Gang-Tai accent’ if one grows up in Gang-Tai. . . . The fault is not with ‘Gang-Tai accent’. The fault is with those originally growing up in Henan, Anhui, and Guizhou, but [speaking with] a ‘Gang-Tai accent’. This is to be deliberately unconventional to appear superior or different from others. Being deliberately unconventional, to put it mildly, is intellectually immature and blindly following trends and aping; to put it seriously, is not being an honest person . . . ‘Gang-Tai accent’ is not wrong. If it reflects superficiality and affectation, . . . then it is really wrong. (Chen 2010: 3, People’s Daily)

As shown in Example (7), the metadiscourses produced by the state institutions demonstrate the government’s attempts to control the n+1st order indexicality of the new Mandarin style. Labeling it as Gang-Tai qiang creates an n-th order indexicality that locates its geographical origin outside of Mainland China. In this way, CM is scaled down to a regional accent, confined to the region of ‘Gang-Tai’, and, thus, positioned on the periphery of China and a mainlandcentric view of ‘Chinese culture’. Such indexicality enables n+1st order interpretation(s) of Mainlanders as illegitimate users and their use of GangTai accent as imitation and thus unnatural, inauthentic, and deviant. The imitated fake accent is in turn construed as reflecting the speaker’s defective, problematic character, including lack of self-confidence and creativity, lack of sound judgment, low quality, opportunism, inferior taste or vulgarity, dishonesty, intellectual immaturity, and superficiality.

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12.4.2

Challenging the Normativity and Superiority of Beijing/Northern Mandarin-Based Putonghua

Supporters of CM challenge the assumed normativity and superiority of Standard PTH, specifically, its Beijing and Northern Mandarin basis. As exemplified in (8) and (9), many commenters object to Gang-Tai qiang being singled out as the culprit and the impunity endowed upon Beijing and Northern Mandarin. Many question the taken-for-granted standardness and superiority of the latter and call for banning Beijing and Northern Mandarin accents on TV and radio. (8)

If one wants to criticize others imitating Gang-Tai accent, then they have to simultaneously criticize those who imitate Beijing accent! I don’t think the two are different in terms of superiority and inferiority. (Yun-an 2005)

(9)

I’ve found in many [television and radio] stations that the hosts’ Beijing vernacular is very strong. Why aren’t they criticized! In the regulation of the Broadcasting Association, why does it specifically focus on prohibiting imitation of Gang-Tai accent? Why doesn’t it blame that now many hosts speak in Beijing dialect with a curled tongue? (Rong-yan-lao-si-ji 2007)

12.4.3

Challenging the Purity and Authenticity of Putonghua

In a similar way to the state’s metadiscourse which deauthenticates Gang-Tai qiang, some commenters contest the authenticity and purity of Beijing and Northern Mandarin. As illustrated in (10), a shared strategy among many posts is to claim historical continuity of southern Chinese from ancient Chinese, on the one hand, and to identify emblematic features of Beijing Mandarin (particularly rhotacization and retroflex syllable initials), as the result of Manchu influence brought about by the Manchu conquest (which established Qing Dynasty between 1644 and 1912) on the other. In this way, the base dialect of Standard PTH is conceived as being historically contaminated by non-Han and non-Chinese influences. (10)

You speak in broad Beijing vernacular, tongue-curling sounds and rhotacization, but don’t allow southerners to use modal particles passed down from the ancient [Chinese] language? . . . You with a mouthful of tonguecurling sounds can ascend to the hall of elegance? Calling our modal particles Gang-Tai qiang? . . . Southern ancient language has a long history. Moreover the South is the origin of the Han language. . . . Our Putonghua with southern habits is deemed Gang-Tai qiang? Then what is your Putonghua with Manchu-Qing [Dynasty] enslaved rhotacization supposed to be? (Hen-jia-he-hexie ‘Very-fake-very-harmonious’ 2010)

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Gang-Tai Qiang as an Alternative Style to Standard Putonghua

Many people also view the so-called Gang-Tai qiang as an alternative style to express certain emotions or index social attributes when PTH is considered inadequate. In Example (11), Standard PTH is described as ‘harsh’, ‘didactic’, and ‘officialese’. Likened to ‘linguistic rocks’, it is deemed too heavily charged with political intentions to express the happy emotions of ordinary folks. (11)

It would be a horrifying situation if folks from all over the country have to use Putonghua or Beijing accented Putonghua to express their happy feelings. In fact, there are reasons for the ‘invasion’ of Gang-Tai qiang. If we don’t reflect on and discard the harsh tone, didactic tone, and officialese from the Mainland broadcasting media, then other popular and lively substitutes will naturally ‘invade’. The large amount of political vocabulary and political tone in Putonghua are like pieces of linguistic rocks. (Zhuang 2006)

Similarly, in (12), commenter 4rain (2005) contends that ‘some people feel that such a style of speech [Gang-Tai qiang] is adorable, . . . more amiable and agreeable’. 4rain goes on to explain why Gang-Tai qiang is popular and widespread by likening it to American English whose popularity is derived from the powerful American culture. In this case, we see why the countervalorization of PTH is a high-stake ideological battle for the Chinese state. (12)

all [TV] hosts speak Putonghua, but they just emphasize differences [with different accents]. . . . Some people feel that such a style of speech [Gang-Tai qiang] is adorable, . . . more amiable and agreeable. . . . It feels weird to talk about intimate topics using authentic Putonghua. ... American culture is powerful, so we learn ‘bye bye . . . ..OK! Yes’. GangTai culture is powerful, so we of course have to learn from Gang-Tai. If Beijing doesn’t concede, it can strengthen it culture and cultural influence so that we’ll talk with a Beijing accent. (4rain 2005)

Many others deemed Beijing/Standard Mandarin ‘bumpkinish’ or ‘rustic’ compared with Gang-Tai qiang and hence an inappropriate linguistic style for young, trendy characters and related social attributes. In (13), fedent (2009) first objects to the double standard applied to Gang-Tai qiang and BM in television, and then links Beijing vernacular to qualities of being ‘rustic, oily, and vulgar’, which make it incompatible with young and glamorous characters in what is called ‘idol television dramas’, which are very popular among young people in China. (13)

A nice TV drama, good cast, good plot, but one always hears Beijing vernacular. ‘Wanr’ (play), ‘shir’ (matter), a normal sentence, when rhotacization or exaggerated posterior nasal sounds are added, will

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Qing Zhang immediately make one feel rustic, oily, vulgar. . . . If Beijing vernacular is allowed to be spoken, why isn’t Gang-Tai qiang? . . . Is it a good thing that after 50 years, . . . everybody in the country will speak Beijing vernacular? Then China will really become a country of bumpkins. With the economy development of the Mainland, glamorous idol television dramas will appear sooner or later. I don’t want to hear handsome guys and pretty women in the dramas speaking Beijing vernacular. It seriously affects the enjoyability of the drama. (fedent 2009)

12.4.5

Putonghua vs Gang-Tai Qiang: Recursive Construals

The social evaluations of Gang-Tai qiang vis-à-vis Northern/BM-based PTH do not come from nowhere. While Gang-Tai qiang is a relatively new phenomenon, the contrast based on the geographical origins of the North and the South is reinterpreted drawing on preexisting cultural models of differentiation familiar to many Chinese speakers. Through fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000), the contrast at one level is projected onto other spatial and temporal scales, specifically, those between China and the West, the old and the young, and the past and the present. The high stake in the revalorization of PTH becomes particularly explicit in the recursive interpretations illuminated in the writings of eminent Chinese writers and intellectuals, including 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), Wang Shuo and Lao Xia (2000),6 and Yu Jie (2010).7 Liu Xiaobo (2000) observes that, since the 1990s, Gang-Tai qiang has rapidly spread in mainland China and has become the trendy language of young people. He relates this change to a shift in the types of sentiments valorized in the pre-reform Mao era and the contemporary 1990s: (14)

Mao era’s uplifting politicized expression of grand/lofty emotions . . . has been dominated by the Gang-Tai model of secular ordinary sentiments in the 1990s. . . . Especially the spoiled people of the neo-neo tribe, whenever they need to expression emotions, they will use Gang-Tai qiang. (Liu 2000)

He further predicts: (15)

After a dozen or so years, when members of the neo-neo tribe who have grown up in Gang-Tai qiang become the mainspring of the mainland culture, the Chinese model for expressing sentiments will come to be unified, that is, to be unified to ‘Gang-Tai Putonghua’. (Liu 2000)

Although Standard PTH is not explicitly mentioned, Liu’s comment makes it obvious that it will be replaced by Gang-Tai PTH. This is an audacious remark, countering the official discourse that BM based Standard PTH represents the unified voice of the people of China. In this example, the contrast between Gang-Tai qiang and Standard PTH is reinterpreted as a temporal schism

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between the contemporary and the Mao era; a contrast in emotions is also mapped onto the temporal dichotomy. Closely related to the temporal and emotional dichotomy in Liu (2000), the contrast between Standard PTH and Gang-Tai qiang is interpreted as a quality difference between the hard/harsh and the soft in Wang and Lao (2009). The soft Gang-Tai qiang and the hard PTH is again mapped onto the temporal contrast between the contemporary and the pre-reform revolutionary past, and a generational contrast between young people today and those, like the authors themselves, who grew up during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (16)

Gang-Tai style soft Putonghua is now directly threatening the Putonghua based on Northern Mandarin. . . . Young people nowadays are accustomed to accepting the kind of soft, tender-feeling accent, unlike the hard slogans we were used to hear when we were young. . . . Gang-Tai qiang’s immense popularity really sweeps away everything in a tender-and-soft-aswater manner. . . . Its soft accent disables the red language among young people, the so-called sugarcoated bullet, whoever eats it becomes soft. (Wang & Lao 2009: 227–33)

The preceding analysis of metalinguistic discourse underscores the complex and contested nature of enregisterment as CM comes to take on social significance and becomes an emergent meaning-making resource. The multiple n+1st order indexical values of CM in relation to Standard PTH are summarized in Table 12.1. It should be noted that the distinguishing features of CM (i.e., derhotacization and full tone) do not pose a threat to the conventional Standard PTH at the n-th order indexicality of geographical association. However, it is when these features are combined to form CM that they take on n+1st order indexicalities as the yuppies use them to create social distinction (see also Zhang 2018: 105–33). The ideological construals of CM come to compete with the conventional ‘common speech’, thus challenging the indexical field of the latter (Eckert 2008). Only by examining a wide range of metapragmatic discourses produced by different speakers, including individuals and institutions, can we reveal such multiple valorizations and counter-valorizations of CM vis-à-vis Standard PTH. The analysis reveals an unstable and contested indexical field buttressed by conflicting ideologies not just about language but about larger sociocultural concerns. 12.5

Conclusion

Emerging stylistic resources, including CM, are an integral part of the societywide ideological transformation from social-political conformity to the valorization of differentiation in China. A post-socialist stylistic regime is emerging. What this stylistic regime looks like is beyond the scope of this chapter, but

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Table 12.1 N-th and n+1st Order Indexicality of Standard Putonghua and Cosmopolitan Mandarin. Adapted from Table 5.3 in Zhang (2018: 166).

Order of Indexicality n-th order indexicality: Geographical association

Beijing/Northern-Mandarinbased Standard Putonghua (rhotacization, neutral tone) Beijing, the North State and some individuals:1 supraregional Chinese identity, modernity, national unity, social equality and egalitarianism, authenticity, morally upright

n+1st order indexicality: Social distinction

1

Individuals: rustic, vulgar, inauthentic, orthodox, didactic, old, underdeveloped, hard/ harsh, the past/Mao era

Cosmopolitan Mandarin (derhotacization, full tone) the South, including Hong Kong and Taiwan State and some individuals: ‘Gang-Tai qiang’ inauthentic, neither fish nor fowl, lack of (national) selfrespect and confidence, lack of sound judgment, vulgar, superficial, affected, mammonism Beijing yuppies and TV hosts: cosmopolitan Chinese, being cultured and tasteful, stylishness, trendiness, sophistication, youthful ebullience and conviviality (based on analysis of production data in Zhang (2005, 2018)) Individuals, popular media: trendy, cosmopolitan, soft, advanced, amiable, nonpolitical, young, casual, contemporary/post Mao era

These positive n+1st order indexical values are based on analysis of language standardization and metalinguistic discourses produced by the state media and institutions (see Zhang 2018: 9–11, 150–4).

what is clear is that the status of Beijing – and by extension, the North – as the cultural center of modern China is being challenged. Multiple centers of evaluation are emerging, and Beijing-Mandarin-based Putonghua is not the single, homogenizing voice of a modern, globalized China. Language, and discursive innovation in particular, participates in the configuration of the postsocialist stylistic regime. Linguistic resources constitute the very material that shapes new and changing cultural models of behavior, including ways of being, feeling, and speaking. Furthermore, by virtue of its metapragmatic function, language also interprets, evaluates, and regiments what is new or modern or authentic in a changing Chinese culture and society.

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Taking an emergent perspective on sociolinguistic variation by treating linguistic innovation as emerging stylistic resources, this chapter has demonstrated how the third wave contributes to the development of a style-based approach to sociolinguistic change. To embed the linguistic within the social, a style-based approach addresses the question ‘What is changed?’ by examining linguistic change as part and parcel of all the stylistic resources that constitute the content of change. It addresses the question ‘How it is changed or different?’ by examining the ways through which changing linguistic forms are used to bring about social distinctions and the meanings about such distinctions. It also highlights the mediating role of ideology in sociolinguistic change: (Changing) interpretations and evaluations of the content and form of change as well as changing beliefs about social and linguistic normativity fundamentally shape the process of sociolinguistic change.

Appendices

Appendix A: Transcription Conventions In this chapter, Chinese names are presented with the family name (xing) followed by the given name (ming). Original Chinese expressions and utterances are represented in italics in pinyin, the official phonetic alphabet system of mainland China, and English translation is enclosed in single quotation marks. All English translations are mine unless otherwise noted. The pinyin transcription does not include tone marks except for examples used to illustrate variation in tones. In such examples, the four Beijing/Standard Mandarin tones are marked by numbers: 1 for the high-level tone; 2 for the rising tone, 3 for the falling–rising tone; 4 for the falling tone; and 0 for the neutral tone, for example, piao4liang0 versus piao4liang4 ‘pretty’. The International Phonetic Alphabet is used to transcribe particular sounds, specifically in Section 12.3 in the description of linguistic variables. The following symbols are used in the transcription of speech: underline

Words originally spoken in English are underlined

EMPHASIS

Capitalization indicates emphasis, which may be signaled by increased amplitude or careful articulation end of an intonation unit with a falling contour end of an intonation unit with a rising contour a pause shorter than 1 second

. ? ,

Boldface highlights linguistic features and content that are significant and receive special attention in analysis. Bold capitalized letters in square brackets represent the following types of linguistic feature: [+R]: -r, rhotacization; [-R]: de-rhotacization

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[+lenition]: lenition of zh /tʂ/, ch /tʂh/, and sh /ʂ/ as r [ɻ]; [-lenition]: zh /tʂ/, ch /tʂh/, and sh /ʂ/ realized as [tʂ], ch [tʂh] and sh [ʂ] respectively [+interdental]: interdental realization of z /ts/, c /tsh/, and s /s/ as [tθ], [tθh], and [θ]; [-interdental]: z /ts/, c /tsh/, and s /s/ realized as [ts], [tsh], and [s] respectively [T0], [T1], [T2], [T3], [T4]: represent the tone realization of the syllable: [T0] = neutral tone; [T1], [T2], [T3], and [T4] each represents a full tone in a conventionally neutral tone environment [E]: use of English [L]: innovative lexical item

notes 1. For a discussion on style in the pre-reform era, specifically stylistic ‘indistinction’ as a strategy of distinction, see Zhang (2018: 25–6). 2. For detailed descriptions of the linguistic and social constraints coded for the analyses, see Zhang (2001, 2005). 3. Differences in the career trajectories between the women and men in the yuppie group also contributed to women’s greater use of CM; see Zhang (2007, 2018) for detailed discussion. 4. Various authors have written on the duration of Mandarin tones. T3 is longer than T2, which in turn tends to be longer than T1 and T4 (e.g., Nordenhake & Svantesson 1983; Yu 2010). 5. Other researchers also find the use of local and colloquial linguistic features in the performance of down-to-earth and practical masculine personae (e.g., Pujolar 1997; Kiesling 1998). 6. Wang Shuo is a writer who is well-known for his Beijing vernacular writing style. Lao Xia is believed by some to be the penname of Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner (see, e.g., https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/刘晓波). The book Meiren Zeng Wo Menghan Yao (A Beauty Presents Me with Knockout Drops) (Wang & Lao 2000) is a collection of dialogues between Wang Shuo and Lao Xiao on contemporary Chinese culture and literature. Similarities are indeed found when comparing Liu’s comments on Gang-Tai culture and Gang-Tai qiang in his 2000 article and the essay ‘Gang-Tai “Putonghua” da Fanlan’ (‘Gang-Tai “Putonghua” Runs Wild’) in Wang and Lao (2009). 7. Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie are dissident intellectuals and democracy activists whose many works are banned in mainland China.

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Multiethnolect and Dialect in and across Communities Pia Quist

13.1

Introduction

It has been central to third-wave sociolinguistics to break away from a view of communities as coherent and centralized ‘microcosms’ (Eckert 2004) that reflect global categories such as class and ethnicity. Eckert (2000, 2004) has stressed the importance of seeing community-based practices in a coconstitutive relationship between communities, as well as across borders of communities’ ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ (Eckert 2004: 109). Human geographers Jones and Woods (2013: 29) propose a parallel argument by contrasting ‘a relational perspective’ on localities to ‘a territorial perspective’. Referring to Massey (1994), and her canonical essay ‘A global sense of place’ (Massey 1991), they argue that localities should be understood as ‘interconnected nodes in spaces of flows, stretching back and forth, ebbing and flowing according to how these are positioned by, and positioning, socio-spatial relations’ (Jones & Woods 2013: 33). In their view, a locality cannot be explained by only looking ‘inside it, or outside it; the “out there” and “in here” matter together and are dialectically intertwined’ (Jones & Woods 2013: 33). Adopting a relational view on localities and community-based practices, this chapter argues for a need to extend a third-wave perspective to the sociolinguistic study of ethnolects and multiethnolects (e.g., Wiese 2009; Quist & Svendsen 2010; Cheshire et al. 2011) as a way to account for the heterogeneity and fluidity of multiethnic communities. It will be argued that communities which are typically perceived and presented as ‘parallel societies’ or ‘ghettos’ by politicians, and in more general public discourse, form part of larger (speech) communities in co-constructing the specific contexts for new emergent speech styles and local identities. In line with Eckert (2004: 109), it will be shown ‘how the “outsides” are articulated with the “insides” of communities and how language, along with other semiotic resources, brings the “outside” in and the “inside” 292

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out’. Influence goes ‘in both directions’ as multiethnolect features become locally meaningful in contrast to, not only standard language, but also the regional dialect, and as features associated with multiethnolects are taken up by speakers outside their perceived places of origin (Fox 2015; Quist & Svendsen 2019). As this chapter will make clear, multiethnolect is not a fixed set of linguistic features specific to a defined locality. Rather, multiethnolect features form part of a multitude of linguistic resources (including, e.g., regional dialect, uses of English loanwords, and standard language), which are all used stylistically in the context of a social landscape to index not only ethnicity, but also qualities such as localness, toughness, and masculinity. Thus, in this chapter, we argue that multiethnolects cannot be systematically understood using a centerbased territorial perspective. The argument is structured around an ethnographic study of variation in the social housing neighborhood of Vollsmose in Denmark. After a brief discussion of the notion of ‘multiethnolect’ in a third-wave perspective, the research site and the ethnography will be presented. Then the chapter reports on and discusses the analyses of variation in the use of multiethnolect features and the traditional regional dialect (called Funen) with a particular focus on the supra-segmental features ‘multiethnolect staccato’ and ‘Funen intonation’, and the segmental variables (t) and (et). 13.1.1

A Third-Wave Approach to Multiethnolect

For more than two decades, researchers have studied the speech of young people who grow up in multiethnic urban neighborhoods. Sociolinguists across Europe have documented the emergence of new speech styles, sometimes referred to as ethnolects or multiethnolects (e.g., Clyne 2000; Quist 2000; for a recent overview of studies, see Quist & Svendsen 2020). These have been described as connected to (but distinct from) the migrant languages in a given locality, and adult second language speaker styles or learner language (such as, e.g., ‘Gastarbeiterdeutsch’, Hinnenkamp 2003: 33–4; Rampton 2015). With a focus on community centers and core members (Eckert 2004: 108), many of these studies could be described as example of – what Pratt (1987) critically calls – ‘linguistics of community’. The aim in these studies is ‘structural’ in the sense that a formal analysis of (often decontextualized) nonstandard features is the focus of attention. Quist (2008: 46) calls such an approach a ‘variety approach’ because the goal typically is to conduct a structural analysis and depict a new variety or dialect.1 Subsequently, the variety approach, and the consequences of labeling these new speech styles, has been widely discussed (e.g., Stroud 2004; Jaspers 2008; Bijvoet & Fraurud 2010; Milani 2010; Svendsen & Quist 2010). In particular, Eckert (2008) has pointed out the need to be critically aware of the implications of designating a group of young people’s speech as a multiethnolect or an ethnolect: ‘The term ethnolect

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(like sociolect and the more generic dialect) reflects a view of language as a fixed rather than fluid entity, and of identity as compartmentalized, allowing one to think of an ethnolect as a discrete system indexical of ethnicity alone’ (p. 26). In later studies, by employing the concept of the community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; Wenger 1998), and inspired by Eckert (2000), ethnography was included in studies by Quist (2005, 2012), Maegaard (2007), Svendsen and Røyneland (2008), and Opsahl (2009a, 2009b), among others. Contrasting such studies to the ‘variety approach’, Quist (2008) categorizes them as taking a ‘stylistic practice approach’ as the aim is to study how the new speech styles form part of a ‘multiplicity of stylistic resources’ in a community (p. 50). Language, as well as identity, is understood as fluid and negotiated in these studies – as appealed for by Eckert (2008). However, even though the stylistic practice approach is based in ethnography and, in many ways is in line with newer developments characteristic of thirdwave sociolinguistics, it may still be criticized for not sufficiently situating multiethnolect practices in a larger context than the local community. As Eckert (2008: 26) reminds us, ‘speakers of so-called ethnolects do not live or speak in isolation’. A view on communities that avoid including oppositions and relations that go beyond internal boundaries misses how new contact-induced features of young people’s speech take on social meaning in relations that transcend the local communities. This chapter will demonstrate that relations not only imply how (aligning and oppositional) identities constitute styles in the context of which varying linguistic features are made socially meaningful resources, but also that multiethnolect features relate to uses of other (historically ideologically loaded) features associated with traditional dialect and national standard language (Quist 2017; Quist & Skovse 2020; see also Fox 2015 for a similar argument). That is to say, relations between speakers can reflect personal network relations, but they can also be historical and ideological. 13.2

Vollsmose: A Parallel Society and a Zone of Transition

A main political concern in recent years is the development of so-called parallel societies, understood as communities of immigrants who live in separation from the surrounding society practicing their own cultures, religions, and values (Freiesleben 2016). In his opening speech to the Danish parliament in October 2017, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen stated that ‘now there must be an end to parallel societies where 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants clump together, live according to their own rules, and do not want to be part of the Danish society’. One of the places that he and other politicians usually point to when discussing ‘parallel societies’ is Vollsmose, a suburban social housing

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estate in Odense, the third largest city of Denmark. In Danish public discourse, Vollsmose has a bleak reputation as a place of violence, crime, and unemployment and it is often designated a ‘ghetto’. In a traditional variationist approach to the study of variation, a neighborhood like Vollsmose would most likely be approached as a ‘microcosm’, disconnected from ‘anything beyond its boundaries’ (Eckert 2004: 107–8). When my research team and I2 first came to Vollsmose in the summer of 2014, what we saw seemed to confirm the media image. With its almost complete absence of ethnically white Danes, the visible Muslim majority, and its identical concrete blocks and physical detachment from the surrounding city of Odense, Vollsmose did indeed come across as a ‘parallel society’. However, during our fieldwork, this first impression was thoroughly challenged and gradually nuanced as we gained insight into Vollsmose as a place and the language practices of its inhabitants. Vollsmose is situated in the western part of Odense, the biggest city on the island of Funen (Figure 13.1). The traditional dialect of this region is called Funen (fynsk, in Danish). In terms of demography, geography, and physical structure, there are few places similar to Vollsmose in Denmark, and arguably in Scandinavia in

Figure 13.1 Map of Denmark with the island of Funen and Odense where Vollsmose is situated.

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general. In fact, Vollsmose may be compared to such places as the banlieues of Paris, and social housing estates with majority black inhabitants in the USA (Wacquant 1996). With more than 9,000 inhabitants, Vollsmose is among the largest social housing areas in Denmark.3 It was built in the 1960s and the architecture is typical of the time, consisting of identical concrete blocks with standard apartments for working-class nuclear families. Today more than eighty different nationalities live in Vollsmose. Approximately 70 percent have minority ethnic background, the largest ethnic groups consisting of firstand second-generation immigrants from Somalia, Palestine/Lebanon, and Iraq. Vollsmose faces heavy socioeconomic challenges: the majority of adult residents have no connection to the labor market and are dependent on social security benefits. Moreover, the crime rate is one of the highest in the country.4 Taken together with the fact that Vollsmose is physically detached (by highways) from the rest of the surrounding city of Odense, this place meets the criteria of ‘a ghetto’ as typically defined in sociology (e.g., Wacquant 2008; Jaffe 2012); it is economically, socially, and politically marginalized from the surrounding city and society. All of these characteristics may encourage a center-based, ‘territorial’ approach to Vollsmose, leading us to explore local groups and networks as anchored in this community, and locating speech (i.e. multiethnolect), to this specific place. However, Vollsmose is also, like many other social housing areas, a typical zone of transition (Jørgensen 2010), in the sense that there is a constant flow of new families moving in and old families moving out. The ‘turn-around’ moving rate is high compared to other Danish neighborhoods (Vollsmose Statistics 2012). To many of the inhabitants, Vollsmose offers affordable housing at a time when they do not have many other options, due to, for example, unemployment, health problems, or – as is the case for the majority of people in Vollsmose – because they recently arrived to Denmark as migrants or refugees. Better-off immigrant groups with longer histories of migration to Denmark typically leave Vollsmose as soon as they get the resources to do so. Groups that have left Vollsmose include families of Turkish and Vietnamese descent who came to Denmark and Odense in the 1970s and 1980s. Second and third generations from these backgrounds have got education and jobs and chosen to move to (lower) middle-class areas in Odense, outside Vollsmose. Today, a large number of migrants and refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and Somalia (and presently, refugees from Syria) settle in Vollsmose. Thus, the population mirrors the global movements of migrants and reflects the different migration histories of various ethnic groups. On a global scale, then, Vollsmose is not isolated and unaffected by change and mobility. Moreover, as we shall see in the following, when we look at young people and their speech practices, Vollsmose is also affected by movement, histories, and ideologies on a regional, as well as a national, scale.

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297

Social Landscape in Vollsmose

In our study, we followed forty-five young people, thirty girls and fifteen boys, born in 1998 and 1999.5 One person, a boy, had parents with Danish ethnic background. The other forty-four had parents who migrated to Denmark as young adults – most of them from Somalia, Iraq, and Lebanon.6 Two came from Vietnam and two from Turkey. In this group of young people, only two had a parent with a job. One had a father who worked in a local pizzeria in Vollsmose, the other had a father who was a bus driver in Odense. The rest of the parents, fathers and mothers alike, were unemployed, many of them due to health problems. Thus, the bus driver was in fact the only parent with daily contact outside of Vollsmose. The rest of them spent most of their time inside Vollsmose. These circumstances and demographic facts – unusual in a Danish context as they are – raise questions about (linguistic) contact with the surrounding Funen speech community as well as the role of time and continuity in the development of indexical meanings (Johnstone & Kiesling 2008; Johnstone 2013). They raise questions about whether young people who are born in Vollsmose use (or know at all) the regional dialect of the area surrounding Vollsmose, and whether or not multiethnolect features and associated social meanings in Vollsmose are distinct from the multiethnolect described for young people in Copenhagen. The young people in the study all attended the local public school in Vollsmose. They were between fourteen and sixteen years old and in ninth grade, the last grade in elementary school before vocational education or high school. Thus, these students were at a stage of their lives where they had to make important decisions about what type of education they wanted to pursue. For approximately five months, we made participant observations during their school days, in- and outside classrooms, and we made audio and video recordings of interviews with individuals, group conversations, student counseling sessions and more. The social organization of friendship groups in the two school classes, 9A and 9B, is illustrated in the sociograms in Figures 13.2 and 13.3. These depict the general tendency for gender to be the primary organizational category among the participants. Boys hang out with boys and girls with girls. Ethnicity appears to be an organizational principle among some of the girls. In 9A, the girls Hayah, Bashiqa, Salinah, Adiba, and Sima all have parents from Somalia; they wear head scarfs and they are called, by themselves as well as the rest of the class, ‘the Somalia table’, because they always sit together at the same table. There is also an ‘Iraqi table’ in 9A, with the girls Souz, Zubeida, and Sahara whose parents came to Vollsmose from Iraq. In 9B, the girls Inara, Susu, Haritha, Nyomi, Zudora, and Falisha all have parents from Somalia.

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Pia Quist Sandara

Bo Yahaira

Femida Sjamilla

Bashiqa Hayah Salinah

Mujin

Adiba

Mustafa Aaryan Yacoub Sorena

Ashanti

Souz

Dinah Zubeida Sahara

Sima

Figure 13.2 Sociogram of class 9A. Grayed boxes indicate boys.

Antam

Rami

Inara

Marley

Nhung Hakim

Susu

Haritha

Nuray

Nyomi

Ihsan Ekin

Ahmed Zudora Szaza

Leila

Syoma Falisha

Bilal Luong

Husayn

Figure 13.3 Sociogram of class 9B. Grayed boxes indicate boys.

However, they are not – like in 9A – labeled with a name and they appear to be less ‘fixed’ as a group, as they also socialize with friends from school classes other than their own. The rest of the groupings in 9A and 9B – that is, the majority of them – hang out in more ethnically mixed groups, although the only ethnically white Danish boy, Bo, is by himself, both in the class and the school in general. The rest of the boys group according to differing combinations of multiple ethnicities; in 9A, Aayan, Mustafa, Mujin, and Yacoub, have parents

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from Lebanon, Iraq, and Somalia; in 9B, the only two non-Muslim boys, Luong and Nhung (who have parents from Vietnam) are in two different friendship groups. The friendship groups also reflect varying degrees of positive attitude toward school, and different future plans and orientations. These factors will be addressed when the linguistic variation is presented in the following sections. 13.4

Results of the Quantitative Analysis of Variation in Vollsmose

In Vollsmose, we observed a broad range of nonstandard features that make up a ‘pool of features’ (Cheshire et al. 2011) available for stylistic work among the young speakers. These included most of the same contact-induced features that have been described in Scandinavian urban, multiethnic youth styles before (e.g., Kotsinas 1988; Quist 2000; Ganuza 2008; Freywald et al. 2015; Quist & Svendsen 2019), but also features that have been described by dialectologists as specific to Funen dialect (Pedersen 1985; Køster 2000). The speakers in Vollsmose do not necessarily make conscious distinctions between traditional Funen dialect features and multiethnic features. In fact, very few of them were able to talk about local Funen dialect in the interviews. They did not seem to be aware of the specific Funen dialect as something different from ‘normal’ Danish (as some would call it). Thus, what from a researcher perspective may look like hybrid usage of ethnic and regional features, may for the young people themselves not be perceived as such. Rather, to them, the combined use of ethnically marked and Funen features enregisters (Agha 2007) something local to Vollmose. Nonetheless, in the following, we distinguish analytically between multiethnolect and Funen features and results will be presented in two sections: one focusing on multiethnolect features and another focusing on Funen dialect features. 13.4.1

Multiethnolect Features in Vollsmose

We used speech from forty-two sociolinguistic interviews to undertake quantitative analysis of the variables which occurred most frequently in the interviews. The collaborative work of collecting and processing data is the basis of the analyses presented here.7 The speech of many of the young people in Vollsmose was characterized by a prosody different from that of standard Danish. Mainly due to a different rhythm and distribution of stress, it is heard as ‘staccato’ (Quist 2000, 2008). Pharao and Hansen (2005, 2010) found that the perception of the Copenhagen multiethnolect as staccato was connected to a reduced contrast between short and long vowels when compared to standard Danish. Audibly, the prosody associated with the multiethnolect seems central

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in distinguishing between different registers in Vollsmose. However, any attempt at quantifying multiethnolect prosody in contrast to standard Danish is a complex endeavor.8 Nonetheless, since staccato appeared to be such a strong indicator of multiethnolect, and since it was used by many of the participants in the interviews (some of them quite extensively), we decided to code the material on an impressionistic basis for sequences that we heard as staccato (Skovse 2018: 130–2). Using Praat for all the interviews, we assigned a code to each of the sequences (defined as a ‘stress group’) that we heard as staccato. We coded ten minutes of each interview, beginning after the first five minutes. To control for reliability, the research team listened to each other’s coding to check agreement.9 Using this procedure, we were able to map the differences between the individuals in the study. The bar chart in Figure 13.4 depicts the number of passages in the interviews that were coded as ‘staccato’. It shows an uneven distribution between the participants with a group of boys using much more staccato than the rest. Skovse (2018: 159) grouped this distribution into four quartiles: The first and the second quartile (below the median), included the participants who had no or only one instance of ; the third quartile included participants who had between two and six sequences coded as staccato; and the fourth quartile those who had seven or more instances. Accordingly, we could categorize a group of eight boys and one girl who used staccato ‘a lot’ in the interview, a group of ten girls and one boy who used ‘some’ staccato, and sixteen girls and six boys who used ‘little or no’ staccato. We thus got an indication of staccato being a feature that was used more by boys than girls. As we shall see in the following sections, this difference is parallel to differences we found in the distribution of the segmental variable palatalized (t). Studies of multiethnic youth styles in Copenhagen have shown that the nonstandard pronunciation of (t) as palatalized [tj] is strongly associated with male immigrant speech, more specifically indexing ‘gangster’ and toughness (Maegaard 2007; Møller 2009; Madsen 2015; see also Maegaard & Pharao, this volume). [tj] was also a significant feature in the Vollsmose data. As with the analysis of staccato speech, we used Praat to code for instances of (t) when medial and prevocalic in words like tid (time), tænker (think) and frikvarter (school break), coding realizations as either affricated [tˢ] (as in standard Danish) or palatalized [tj]. Forty-two interviews were coded, and we began coding after the first five minutes. For this feature, all instances of medial prevocalic (t) were assigned a code until we reached forty occurrences (or as many as were found in the interview if fewer than forty instances occurred). The results are summarized in Table 13.1. As with our results for staccato, this shows that boys used the nonstandard variant [tj] significantly more than girls – a result that is also in line with previous studies for Copenhagen speech (Maegaard 2007).

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Figure 13.4 Number of sequences coded as ‘staccato’ per speaker.

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Sequences heard as 'staccato'

Aaryan Bilal Rami Mustafa Luong Ihsan Ahmed Ekin Husayn Nyomi Falisha Syoma Bashiqa Szaza Susu Femida Naiima Leila Sjamilla Nhung Antam Yahaira Yacoub Sulejma Souz Salinah Sahara Haritha Zudora Sorena Sandara Rhea Nuray Mujin Marley Inara Hayah Hakim Dinah Bo Ashanti Adiba

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Table 13.1 The variable (t). χ2-test showed a significant gender difference, p < 0.001.

13.4.2

Gender

[t]

[tʲ]

N

Girls Boys

946 (94.4%) 469 (83.9%)

56 (5.6%) 90 (16.1%)

1,002 559

Regional Dialect in Vollsmose

Denmark is one of the most standardized countries in the world (Pedersen 2003) with a low tolerance for dialects and local varieties (Kristiansen 2009). The speech on the island of Funen where Odense and Vollsmose are situated (Figure 13.1) is no exception. Today, only a few features are recognized as Funen speech (Pedersen 1985; Køster 2000). However – as was the case for multiethnolect features – we observed use of Funen features across our different types of data, but only a few of these were used frequently enough in the interviews to be suitable for quantitative analysis. In the following, we present the results of two features associated with the Funen dialect: Funen intonation and the morphological variable (et), pronounced [əð]. In the homogenized Danish speech community, prosodic features, and especially intonation, serve as the main regional markers (e.g., Grønnum 2005; Kristiansen, Pharao, & Maegaard 2013). We therefore wanted to be able to compare the distribution of uses of Funen intonation among the participants. Knowing that this was in no way a straightforward endeavor, we used the same procedure as for staccato, namely a quantification based on impressionistic separation and categorization of stress groups. Funen intonation is characterized by the basic tone course increasing on the stressed syllables, after which they fall on the post-tonic. This is markedly different from Copenhagen intonation where the basic tone is lower on the stressed than on the post-tonic syllables (Grønnum 1998; Skovse 2018). We therefore almost always heard the same stretches of speech in the same way as either Funen or standard (or staccato). Using Praat for each interview, we gave a code to each of the sequences (defined as a ‘stress group’) that we heard as Funen. We coded ten minutes of each interview, beginning after the first five minutes. To control for reliability, we listened to each other’s coding to check whether we agreed – thus, the same procedure as for ‘staccato’. Figure 13.5 shows how use of Funen intonation is unevenly distributed among the participants. There is a large group of boys and girls who use no or very little Funen intonation in the interviews. Just like for the ‘staccato’ feature, Skovse (2018: 147) divided the speakers into quartiles. The first and second quartiles (below the median) consist of twenty-two girls and two

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Figure 13.5 Number of sequences coded as Funen intonation per speaker.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Sequences heard as 'Funen'

Nhung Bo Marley Leila Aaryan Mustafa Falisha Luong Husayn Bilal Antam Femida Mujin Yacoub Ahmed Hakim Sorena Haritha Rhea Sjamilla Sandara Zudora Hayah Bashiqa Souz Naiima Sulejma Syoma Szaza Sahara Ekin Dinah Ashanti Adiba Ihsan Rami Nyomi Susu Yahaira Salinah Nuray Inara

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boys who have between zero and five instances coded as Funen intonation. The third quartile includes three girls and six boys who had between six and ten codes for Funen intonation, and the fourth includes seven boys and two girls, all with more than ten instances of Funen intonation. Again, the overall pattern is clear – there are more boys than girls who use Funen intonation in the interviews, and vice versa, more girls than boys who use little or no Funen intonation at all. Another feature that correlated with gender in our data was the pronunciation of word-final syllable -et as [əd]. This feature is common to West-Danish dialects, that is, a nonstandard pronunciation distinct from the East Danish, standard, [əð]. The variable appears in neuter nouns in definite singular form (e.g. huset [the house]), in verbs in past participle (e.g. har hoppet [have jumped]), and in adjectives (e.g. tosset [foolish]). Coding and analysis followed the same procedure as described for (t) (Section 13.4.1), and the results are shown in Table 13.2. Although girls and boys alike use the standard form much more than the nonstandard variant, there is a significant gender difference with girls using the standard East-Danish variant [əð] more than boys, and boys using the regional variant [əd] more than girls. The use of the nonstandard [əd] alone does not make a person sound ‘Funen’ – rather just ‘West-Danish’ but, combined with Funen intonation, [əd] makes a person’s speech sound ‘Funen’. Skovse (2018: 154) thus compared the use of [əd] with Funen intonation and found that there was a positive correlation between these features: the more Funen intonation, the more [əd]. 13.4.3

Multiethnolect and Funen in the Social Landscape of Vollsmose

The four variables presented in the previous two sections – multiethnolect staccato, (t), Funen intonation and (et) – all correlate with gender: the nonstandard variants are, in general, used more by boys than girls. However, not all boys use nonstandard forms and not all girls use standard forms. If we take a closer look at the individual speakers, we find other types of correlations. In order to find out whether Funen and multiethnolect features were used separately or in combination, we compared the results of Funen intonation with

Table 13.2 The variable (et). χ2-test shows a significant gender difference, p < 0.001. Gender

[əð]

[əd]

N

Girls Boys

440 (78.3%) 199 (63.7%)

122 (21.7%) 113 (36.21%)

562 312

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multiethnolect staccato. Reflecting the quartile divisions described previously, we grouped each speaker according to whether they had ‘much’, ‘some’, or ‘no or very little’ Funen intonation and multiethnolect staccato. The result is depicted in Table 13.3. It confirms the overall tendency for more boys to use staccato prosody and Funen intonation than girls, but it also shows a group of four boys, Aayan, Mustafa, Bilal, and Luong, who stand out as using both ‘much’ staccato and ‘much’ Funen intonation. Two boys, Ihsan and Rami, are the only ones who use ‘much’ staccato but ‘no or very little’ Funen intonation, while there is a group of both boys and girls who use ‘much’ Funen intonation but ‘no or very little’ staccato. One of the boys in this group is Bo, the only speaker with an ethnically white Danish background. He was, in general, the most Funen-speaking participant with the highest scores for both Funen intonation and nonstandard [əd]. The majority of the girls, twenty altogether, used ‘no or very little’ of both features. Only two girls, Ekin and Nyomi, used ‘some’ staccato, while three girls used ‘some’ and two girls ‘much’ Funen intonation. Focusing on the boys in order to compare the findings shown in Table 13.3 with the use of palatalized (t), Figure 13.6 shows how [tj] is distributed between individuals. It shows that the frequent male users of [tj] are Mustafa, Rami, Ahmed, Husayn, and Aaryan, but not Mujin, Yacoub, or Hakim. Considering all of these results together, we have then, on the one hand, Mustafa, Rami, Ahmed, Husayn, and Aaryan who use [tj], multiethnolect staccato and Funen intonation relatively more than the other boys (and girls). On the other hand, Yacoub, Mujin, and Hakim use these variables relatively little.

Table 13.3 Staccato and Funen intonation. Names in italics indicate boys.

Much staccato prosody (S ≥ 10) Much Funen intonation (F ≥ 10) Some Funen intonation (10> F > 5) No or very little Funen intonation (F ≤ 5)

Some staccato prosody (10 > S > 5)

No or very little staccato prosody (S ≤ 5)

Aaryan, Mustafa, Bilal, Luong Ahmed

Husayn

Ihsan, Rami

Ekin, Nyomi

Much staccato prosody (S ≥ 10) Nhung, Marley, Antam, Bo, Leila, Falisha

Yacoub, Mujin, Hakim, Femida, Haritha, Sorena Sandara, Sjamilla, Rhea, Bashiqa, Sulejma, Hayah, Naiima, Souz, Zudora, Sahara, Szaza, Syoma, Adiba, Ashanti, Dinah, Inara, Nuray, Salinah, Yahaira, Susu

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Boys

Figure 13.6 The (t) variable, participant distribution.

Girls

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Percentage of [tj] (non-standard pronounciation)

Zudora Yahaira Yacoub Szaza Salinah Souz Sorena Sandara Sjamilla Nyomi Leila Inara Hakim Haritha Femida Bo Adiba Naiima Falisha Ashanti Nhung Bashiqa Susu Mujin Sulejma Ekin Marley Hayah Bilal Luong Ihsan Antam Syoma Aaryan Nuray Dinah Sahara Husayn Ahmed Rami Mustafa

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If we look again at the social landscape as illustrated in the sociograms (Figures 13.2 and 13.3), we see that in 9A Mustafa and Aaryan group together, and so do Mujin and Yacoub. In 9B, there is a clustering of the boys who use fewer nonstandard forms: Antam, Marley, and Hakim. Social divisions as illustrated in the sociograms thus mirror the differences we find in speech styles. Moreover, from the ethnography, we know that Antam, Marley, and Hakim in 9B have a markedly positive orientation toward the school; they are boys who are interested in getting good grades and they plan to pursue higher education when finishing elementary school. Their classmates also perceive them as school-orientated and they are sometimes called the ‘nerds’. ‘School orientation’ is not the primary organizational category in the Vollsmose school, as it is in Eckert’s study of Jocks and Burnouts in the USA (Eckert 1989, 2000); nonetheless, Antam, Marley, and Hakim’s performed personae bear resemblances to ‘school-oriented’ kids as described in the sociolinguistic literature (in addition to Eckert, see also, e.g., Bucholtz 2001; Maegaard 2007; Quist 2010, 2012): they do not exhibit any oppositional attitude toward the school or other authorities, and they use fewer nonstandard features in their speech compared to some classmates. In contrast, Mustafa, Aaryan, and Bilal are talked about as the ‘tough boys’ by their classmates. Besides being the ones who use the nonstandard variants most, these boys stand out with their more anti-authoritative way of dressing – they wear baggy trousers, T-shirts, and hoodies. They explicitly identify with the place of Vollsmose and talk positively about ‘their hood’ defending it against its bleak reputation in the media and the public. At the same time, however, they seem to be fascinated by an (imagined) Copenhagen urban lifestyle. In the interviews, they express a wish to leave Vollsmose when they get older so that they can pursue their dreams of a life in Copenhagen. These stylistic traits, taken together, may lead one to expect the ‘tough boys’ to perform an oppositional and anti-authoritative school attitude. But this is not the case. On the contrary, these boys generally actively participate in school activities during lessons, and they are keen on getting good grades – at least good enough to be able to engage in further education, for instance at a high school, after finishing ninth grade. The use of palatalized (t) by the ‘tough guys’ in Vollsmose matches the findings of other studies of (t) and multiethnolect in Denmark. Using matched guise techniques, Pharao and Maegaard (2017, also this volume) have studied perceptions of palatalized (t) in Copenhagen. They show that nonstandard [tj] is perceived to index stylistic qualities such as ‘immigrant’, ‘street’, ‘gangster’, ‘tough’, and ‘masculine’, and that these indexical meanings appear to operate across local (Copenhagen) communities. Despite the fact that Pharao and Maegaard base their analysis on studies of perception, and our study in Vollsmose is a study of speech production, the similarities are clear: [tj] also appears to index masculinity, toughness, and ‘street’ in Vollsmose. Pharao and

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Maegaard have not studied perceptions of [tj] outside the Copenhagen area, and it is not possible to know whether the [tj] variant and its indexical meanings in Vollsmose are directly influenced by Copenhagen speech (such that it has spread from Copenhagen to Vollsmose) or whether it has developed independently in Vollsmose. But the use of [tj] by the ‘tough boys’ in Vollsmose is surely not an isolated phenomenon. In an ethnographic study of school kids in Copenhagen, Maegaard (2007) found that [tj] was used most frequently by the boys who she categorized as the ‘tough foreign boys’ (Maegaard 2007: 191). [tj] was, in her study, as it is in Vollsmose, part of the local, stylistic landscape in which it correlated with gender, ethnicity, and school orientation, among other things. In Vollsmose, the ‘tough boys’ who use [tj] the most do not perceive Vollsmose and their lives there as unconnected with the rest of the country. They have friends and family in Copenhagen whom they visit and they envisage themselves living in Copenhagen when they get older. In light of Maegaard’s and Pharao and Maegaard’s studies, we may therefore speculate that [tj] outside Copenhagen (e.g., in Vollsmose), also indexes ‘Copenhagen’ or in more general terms ‘urbanness’. We need, however, further studies to support this. 13.5

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have shown that speakers in Vollsmose draw on a ‘feature pool’ that contains more than multiethnolect variants. The speakers in the study use features associated with multiethnolect, the regional Funen dialect, as well as the national standard language. Using quantitative measures, we compared results from analyses of linguistic variation with insights from ethnographic observations. Gender was shown to be a dominant organizing principle, with girls using more standard forms than boys. However, while boys used more Funen intonation and West Danish [əd], they also used more multiethnolect staccato prosody and palatalized [tj] than the girls. Furthermore, we found stylistic divisions among the boys with ‘tough’, urban- (Copenhagen-)oriented boys on the one hand, and school-oriented ‘nerds’ on the other. The ‘tough boys’ used more Funen intonation and more multiethnolect staccato prosody and palatalized (t) – making them sound simultaneously more locally ‘Funen’ and more urban, masculine, and ‘tough’. If we had taken a traditional ‘territorial’ approach to Funen and regarded Vollsmose as ‘a canvas onto which dialectological findings could be painted’, as Britain puts it (2010: 144), we would have searched only for multiethnolect and attributed to Vollsmose the color of ‘multiethnolect’. The local Funen dialect would have been left out of the picture and placed in the surrounding city of Odense and round the island of Funen. We would, in other words, not have been able to apprehend how Funen dialect

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integrates and interacts with multiethnolect in complex relational ways that create a range of linguistic resources available for social work in Vollsmose. Elsewhere, I have suggested that multiethnolect ought to be understood as integrated in ‘the local linguistic and social landscape’ (Quist 2008: 46). When the local landscape is a ‘new locality’ (Blommaert 2010; Skovse 2018) like Vollsmose, which is geographically and socially marginalized, it is arguably even more important to take into consideration how the local linguistic and social landscape is part of a region and society in a broader sense. From first seeing Vollsmose as an isolated place of its own, a ‘parallel society’, our attention moved to the ways in which linguistic practices link up with the surrounding region of Funen and the country in general. The fact that Funen dialect features form part of the Vollsmose speakers’ stylistic repertoire demonstrates that Vollsmose is not isolated from – but rather integrated into – the Funen speech community. We thus learned from the study of Vollsmose what Duncan (1989) states about the notion of locality: Localities in the sense of autonomous subnational social units rarely exist[..] it is also misleading to use locality as a synonym for place or spatial variation. This is because the term locality inevitably smuggles in notions of social autonomy and spatial determinism, and this smuggling in excludes examination of these assumptions. (p. 247)

As suggested by this statement, and the analysis of Vollsmose provided here, when studying ethnolects and neighborhoods (and perhaps when defining ‘community’ in sociolinguistics), we need to look at relations – between people, groups, and places, and between varieties and variables. When looking at relations instead of boundaries it becomes evident ‘how the “outsides” are articulated with the “insides” of communities, and language, along with other semiotic resources, brings the “outside” in and the “inside” out’ (Eckert 2004: 109). notes 1. Studies that fall within this approach include, among others, Kotsinas (1988), Quist (2000), Bóden (2004), Cheshire et al. (2011), and Wiese (2011, 2012). 2. The collection of data in Vollsmose was carried out as a joint effort by researchers Pia Quist, Astrid Ravn Skovse, Jann Scheuer, and Jesper Tage Wiingaard. 3. Around 465,000 people live in the island of Funen, and approximately 176,000 in the city of Odense. 4. The Danish Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing. www.trm.dk/da/publika tioner/2017/liste-over-ghettoomraader-1-dec-2017. 5. The study was a part of the Language and Place project (LaPUR) financed for four years by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (Humanities). http://nors.ku.dk/lapur/. 6. State-less Palestinians from refugee camps in Lebanon.

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7. Particularly Astrid Ravn Skovse’s work as a PhD student in the project has been indispensable. Astrid is responsible for coding the main part of the Vollsmose data as well as the statistical processing in R. Without Astrid’s efforts, the Vollsmose study – and this chapter – would not have been possible. 8. Some studies have calculated and compared ‘stress timed’ accents with ‘syllable timed’ (e.g., Torgersen & Szakay 2012), but the Vollsmose study was not designed for such a comparison. 9. We are aware of the many pitfalls connected to such an impressionistic analysis of prosody. Nonetheless, the analysis provides us with a picture of the variation of multiethnolect prosody in Vollsmose, which we can use – cautiously – to compare to variation of the segmental features, i.e. (t) and (et). For a detailed presentation and discussion of quantification of prosody in Vollsmose, see Skovse (2018) and Quist and Skovse (2020).

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Changing Language, Changing Character Types Rebecca Lurie Starr

14.1

Approaching Change from the Third Wave

Relative to the first- and second-wave traditions of variationist sociolinguistics, language change has not been a central concern of work in the third wave. Indeed, most research in the third wave has not mentioned language change at all, focusing instead on social meaning and on language’s role in the construction and performance of identities, styles, and stances. Nonetheless, research in this tradition that has addressed language change (e.g., Hall-Lew et al., this volume; Zhang, this volume) makes evident that the approach has a great deal to contribute, particularly in accounting for the social motivations underpinning change. The third wave is perhaps most distinct from other variationist approaches in its theorization of style. While the Labovian tradition has considered style primarily in terms of patterns of intra-speaker variation reflecting different situations and degrees of attention, the third wave frames style as a practice through which individuals situate themselves in a social landscape (Bucholtz 2010: 11; Eckert 2012: 93–4). Eckert conceives of this landscape as one that is populated by socially recognized figures, referred to as ‘personae’ (see Coupland 2001), and describes the process of situation via stylistic practice as ‘picking out locations in the social landscape such as Valley girls, cholos, cowboys, jocks, burnouts, Italian hoods’ (Eckert 2008: 455–6). Although the majority of scholars working in the third-wave tradition use ‘persona’ to indicate a socially recognized type or figure in a broad sense, some have sought to more explicitly distinguish between the notions of a figure that is recognized at a local level within a particular community of practice, and one that has broader, macro-social currency (see Moore & Podesva 2009). The latter category, sometimes termed a ‘character type’ (also referred to as a ‘characterological figure’ by Agha 2007: 177) is a stereotypical, reified figure 315

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such as the California ‘Valley girl’, often circulated via mass media (Podesva 2011: 9). Character types are thought to be crucial in enregisterment, the process by which a collection of linguistic features becomes socially recognized as a cohesive and distinct register (Agha 2003, 2005, 2007). Researchers have proposed that individuals make use of linguistic features associated with character types to index a range of social meanings. Podesva (2011) presents the example of a gay male Californian, who, he argues, draws upon California Vowel Shift features associated with local character types to index ‘fun’ and ‘laid-back’ meanings in the construction of a gay ‘partier’ persona. While the notion that individuals use linguistic features to index social meanings associated with preexisting character types may seem overly static, scholars have argued that individuals also draw upon these features as a resource in the construction of new styles; the male Beijing yuppies studied by Zhang (2005, 2008, this volume), for example, are found to use rhotacization, a Mandarin feature associated with the character type of the Beijing Smooth Operator, in combination with full tone, a feature associated with nonlocal varieties of Mandarin, in a process of bricolage to construct the persona of a cosmopolitan, international businessman. In addition to theorizing a role for character types in style construction, previous work has implicated these figures as triggers for language change. Becker (2014) proposes that the reversal of bought-raising in New York City is motivated by the association of raised bought with the character type of the ‘classic New Yorker’, from which younger speakers wish to distance themselves. Scholars have also described how a change in the sociolinguistic makeup of a community can lead to the enregisterment or strengthening of local character types; one example is the increasing salience of the Pittsburghese-speaking ‘Yinzer’, which Johnstone argues has been prompted by the recent influx of outsiders into Pittsburgh (Johnstone 2016). Labov’s 1963 study of Martha’s Vineyard identified a similar phenomenon, in which the figure of the ‘typical old Yankee’ became highlighted and the phonetic distinctiveness of up-island locals increased as a result of the incursion of ‘summer people’. The three examples mentioned here share a common template, in which traditional regional features become more strongly linked to a local working-class figure that draws upon long-standing stereotypes. In the case of Singapore, which I consider in this chapter, we might argue that the reverse phenomenon has occurred; in the context of dramatic societal change, the social meaning of features once associated with a local working-class character type has broadened, as the imagined traits of this figure are renegotiated and reinterpreted. The complex and rapidly evolving sociolinguistic patterns observed in the English spoken in Singapore have long posed challenges to scholars of variation and World Englishes. As I argue here, the notion of the character type has

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considerable utility in accounting for Singaporeans’ linguistic practices. In the following two sections, I briefly introduce relevant information regarding the country’s shifting social and linguistic situation to give context to the subsequent data and analysis. This is followed by further discussion of how a thirdwave approach can inform an interpretation of changes in Singapore English. 14.2

Shifting Identities in Singapore

Singapore is a multiethnic, multilingual island nation situated in the Malay Archipelago. In the decades following its independence in 1965, the country experienced rapid economic development and social change, giving rise to fears that Singaporean society was bifurcating into two distinct cultural camps with disparate values and interests. In 1999, then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong articulated these worries in an influential National Day Rally speech, introducing two local character types into the national discourse: the Heartlander and the Cosmopolitan. As Singapore becomes more international, two broad categories of people will emerge. One group I call the ‘cosmopolitans’, because their outlook is international. They speak English but are bilingual. They have skills that command good incomes – banking, IT, engineering, science and technology. They produce goods and services for the global market. Many cosmopolitans use Singapore as a base to operate in the region. They can work and be comfortable anywhere in the world. The other group, the heartlanders, make their living within the country. Their orientation and interests are local rather than international. Their skills are not marketable beyond Singapore. They speak Singlish. They include taxi-drivers, stallholders, provision shop owners, production workers and contractors. . . . Both heartlanders and cosmopolitans are important to Singapore’s well-being. Heartlanders play a major role in maintaining our core values and our social stability . . . Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are indispensable in generating wealth for Singapore. They extend our economic reach. The world is their market. Without them, Singapore cannot run as an efficient, high performance society. . . . If cosmopolitans and heartlanders cease to identify with each other, our society will fall apart. (Goh C.-T. 1999)

While Goh’s use of the word ‘Cosmopolitan’ proved to have limited currency, the term ‘Heartlander’ was subsequently widely adopted as the preferred form of reference for a working-class figure already familiar in Singapore’s national imaginary. ‘Heartlander’ is derived from the term ‘heartland’, used idiosyncratically in Singapore to refer to the approximate equivalent of a suburb in the United States, meaning a residential neighborhood outside the city center. Unlike typical suburbs in other countries, Singapore’s heartland neighborhoods are designed around public housing estates created by the Housing Development Board, popularly known as ‘HDBs’ (over 80 per cent of Singaporeans live in HDB flats (Phang & Helble 2016)). In addition to public

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housing, heartland neighborhoods are strongly associated with other spaces considered to be typically Singaporean, including coffee shops, hawker centers (food courts), and lower-end malls. As with character types such as the Valley girl noted in previous work, the figures of the Heartlander and the Cosmopolitan have been circulated via local media. Most notably, the films of Singaporean director Jack Neo from the late 1990s to the present have featured Heartlander protagonists, often presented in opposition to English-oriented Cosmopolitans with overseas education (Chong 2011: 895). The Heartlander, and spaces associated with the heartland, have also received increasing political attention as potent symbols of Singaporean identity. In response to the ruling Political Action Party’s decision to introduce candidates in heartland venues during the 2015 general election, sociologist Daniel Goh, who was running for a seat in parliament as a member of the Worker’s Party, posted a lengthy description of his Heartlander lifestyle on his public Facebook page, noting: ‘My normal reality is the heartland, the heartland is not a special event for me. My life is the heartland, the heartland is not my symbolic gesture’ (D. Goh 2015). The fact that Goh, a tenured professor with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, claims to hold authentic Heartlander identity is reflective of the more complex reality of what it means to be a Heartlander today. Since its introduction in 1999, the concept of Heartlander has extended well beyond the bounds of the working class and those who, in the words of Prime Minister Goh, have skills ‘not marketable beyond Singapore’. In the nearly two decades following the Prime Minister’s speech, Singapore has experienced even more extensive economic development: the country now boasts the seventh-highest GDP per capita in the world (CIA 2017). These changes have made formerly elite practices, such as traveling overseas and purchasing luxury brand goods, accessible to the majority of Singaporeans. Former heartland spaces are also being encroached upon and transformed by gentrification, with hipster cafés, international store brands, and high-end malls popping up well outside the traditional upscale neighborhoods. At the same time, Singapore has experienced a large influx of foreign workers across the socioeconomic spectrum (Yeoh & Lin 2012); this high rate of immigration, combined with the rapid pace of development in the country, has contributed to a strengthening of local identity among native Singaporeans and renewed nostalgia for local practices (Hong 2013; Yang 2014). Nostalgia for the local has led to hybridization in new cultural products, from French fries with salted egg yolk sauce, to YouTube videos of Coldplay songs performed in Kristang, the endangered creole of Singapore’s Portuguese Eurasian community.1 Thus, if the distinction between Cosmopolitan and Heartlander identities was ever valid, the split is certainly problematic today: most Singaporeans now engage in both Heartlander and Cosmopolitan practices, and in hybrid practices which one would be hard-

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pressed to classify as one or the other (K. Tan 2007: 34). While the notion of the Heartlander retains considerable currency, its interpretation and significance have altered, particularly among younger Singaporeans. The nature of this change, and its implications for language use, will be addressed further in the discussion section. 14.3

Change in Singapore English

Singapore’s social and economic evolution has been accompanied by dramatic shifts in community language use patterns. I will limit this discussion to outlining the major changes in the roles of English varieties and summarizing previous attempts to theoretically conceptualize the situation of English(es) in Singapore. English has been present in Singapore since its founding as a British colony in 1819; the role of the language has since expanded considerably, evolving from a language of colonials and a small local elite, to a lingua franca taught in schools during the early decades of independence, to its current status as the universal medium of education and the most commonly spoken home language in Singapore, overtaking Mandarin as of 2015 (Singapore Department of Statistics 2015). Scholars of contact languages and World Englishes have paid considerable attention to Colloquial Singapore English, commonly termed ‘Singlish’, a creoloid (or, in some views, a creole, while in others, simply an indigenized variety; see discussion in Lim 2004a) formed during the colonial period when English came into contact with languages spoken by early English learners, most prominently Hokkien and other Chinese varieties, Malay, and Malay-based contact languages (Bao 1995, 2005; Wee 2002, 2008; Lim 2004a; i.a.). Traditional descriptions of English in Singapore have generally distinguished Standard Singapore English (SSE) and Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) as two separate varieties or languages. Most analyses have focused on the unique structures of CSE, while SSE has been given more perfunctory treatment and loosely described as essentially like standard British English (e.g., Wee 2002: 266; Lim 2004b: 19). As in many postcolonial settings, however, the reality of English usage in Singapore is more gradient and hybrid than traditional diglossic descriptions would suggest. Attempts to capture this hybridity, and the social and ideological factors underlying it, have adopted a variety of approaches informed by various research traditions, ranging from the lectal continuum model (Platt & Weber 1980), to the expanding triangles model (Pakir 1991), to the cultural orientation model (Alsagoff 2010). The cultural orientation model of Alsagoff (2010), for example, emphasizes the dual roles of English in Singapore, with SSE indexing a global orientation and CSE indexing a local orientation; the model accounts for individual variation as

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a negotiation of the tension between these opposing orientations. While this approach is consistent with the third-wave conception of style as an individual negotiation of social place, the proposal of opposing global versus local orientations that correspond neatly to identifiable codes of SSE and CSE is problematic. In particular, as I will highlight in this analysis, the model fails to capture the nuances of recent developments in the English used by Singaporeans. Leimgruber (2012), pointing out the limitations of the local– global dichotomy in Alsagoff’s model, advocates an indexical, third-wave approach to variation in Singapore English; he calls for a shift in the characterization of such variation, moving away from the notion of codes, such as CSE, and focusing instead on the social meanings of variables (Leimgruber 2012: 11). The analysis presented in subsequent sections will adopt Leimgruber’s view, and provide new supporting evidence for the shortcomings of the cultural orientation model. Scholars of World Englishes have also taken up various viewpoints regarding the status and nature of Singapore English. Kachru’s Three Circles model places Singapore in the Outer Circle of English-speaking nations, meaning that English is widely used in institutions but generally orients toward an exonormative standard (nominally Standard Southern British English (SSBE)) (Kachru 2006: 242–3). This classification has come under criticism in recent years, as the role of English has expanded and more Singaporeans acquire it as a first language. Park and Wee (2009: 401) propose that, despite issues with the model, classifying Singapore as an Outer Circle nation is still useful, in the sense that this reflects ideological stances that delegitimize Singapore English as a native variety, relative to Inner Circle varieties such as Australian English. In Schneider’s dynamic model of postcolonial Englishes, Singapore is characterized as being in the phase of ‘endonormative stabilization’, as the community is in the process of shifting toward local norms (Schneider 2007: 160–1). Indeed, as Singapore’s per capita wealth has surpassed that of Inner Circle nations, and as more Singaporeans have come to see English as their native language, the notion that Inner Circle varieties are superior to Singapore English is increasingly challenged in local discourse. The rising status of English in Singapore has also applied to CSE; as a young country with few cultural products that cut across racial lines, Singlish is perceived today as one of the most prominent markers of Singaporean identity (Chng 2008). The Singapore government, which has historically campaigned against CSE, has recently shown signs of recognizing its utility as a marker of local identity and as a cultural commodity, incorporating Singlish into the 2015 National Day parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of Singapore’s independence and selling shirts featuring Singlish in national museums (see Beal 2009; Johnstone 2009, for discussion of this kind of language commodification).

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In addition to rising endonormativity in Singapore English, a parallel trend observed by sociolinguists has been an apparent shift away from British norms and toward American English norms. This shift is arguably part of a broader globalization and Americanization of English around the world (Modiano 1996; Meyerhoff & Niedzielski 2003; Gonçalves et al. 2017; cf. Trudgill 2003, 2014), but involves certain outcomes specific to Singapore. Phonologically, the change most noted by researchers has been a dramatic increase in postvocalic rhoticity among younger Singaporeans (C.H. Tan & Gupta 1992; Poedjosoedarmo 2000; Deterding 2007; Y. Tan 2012). In my own work on lexis in Singapore, I have observed a similar shift toward American English terms (Starr 2016; Starr et al. 2016). My investigation of the bath-trap distinction, however, reveals that this variable remains quite conservative (Starr 2017); it would therefore be premature to characterize the phonological changes observed in Singapore English as a wholesale move toward American norms. The analysis in the following sections seeks to shed more light on this question through examination of how postvocalic rhoticity intersects with a different phonological variable: the pronunciation of words in the cot, caught, and court lexical sets. 14.4

cot-caught-court in Singapore English

The English spoken in Singapore has traditionally been described as featuring a total merger of long and short (sometimes called ‘tense’ and ‘lax’) vowels (Deterding 2007; Wee 2008; i.a.); as this observation has been made regarding both SSE and CSE, and because this analysis will challenge the notion of a clear-cut phonological split between the two varieties, I will refer to this merger as being attributed to Singapore English (SgE) as a whole. Due to the non-rhoticity of SgE, the merger of long and short vowels results in a merger between the cot, caught, and court vowel sets. While this merged pronunciation is traditionally transcribed as [ɔ], the vowel is more appropriately rendered as [ɒ] when considered in relation to the vowels of SSBE, as it is perceptually considerably closer to the SSBE cot vowel than the SSBE caught vowel; because this analysis focuses on the variable raising of these vowels in SgE toward SSBE targets, the transcription [ɒ] will be adopted for maximum clarity. The basic pronunciations of words in these lexical classes in SSBE, General American English (GenAm), and SgE are given in Table 14.1. I will refer to the merger of these syllable nuclei in SgE as the cot-caught-court merger. While this merger is not a common topic of folk linguistic discourse in Singapore, it is nonetheless ‘available’ for discussion, in the terminology of Niedzielski and Preston (2000: 23). Moreover, the merger is consistently avoided in the context of professional media speech; as we might expect given British English’s history as an

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Table 14.1 Pronunciations of standard British, American, and Singaporean varieties of English corresponding to relevant Wells lexical classes (Roach 2004; Labov et al. 2006: 13–15). Minimal Pair Keyword cot caught court

Wells Keyword

SSBE (UK)

GenAm (US)

SgE

lot cloth thought north/force

[ɒ] [ɒ] [ɔ:] [ɔ:]

[ɑ] [ɔ]/[ɑ] [ɔ]/[ɑ] [ɔɹ]

[ɒ] [ɒ] [ɒ] [ɒ]

external norm in Singapore, media professionals such as newsreaders generally opt for the SSBE pattern, raising and lengthening caught and court. If we were to adopt a framework that distinguishes Standard from Colloquial varieties of SgE, we might assign the SSBE distribution to SSE and the SgE distribution to CSE. The reality of how English speakers in Singapore use these variants today, however, is more complex than this distinction would suggest. The previous section identified two parallel trends in SgE that we might term (i) endonormativization and (ii) Americanization. As local norms strengthen in Singapore and the meanings indexed by SgE features shift, we might expect some Singaporeans to use features such as the cot-caught-court merger in contexts where they would have previously avoided them. Similarly, as certain aspects of the community’s language use shift toward American English – most notably, postvocalic rhoticity – it is possible that, in contexts where a Singaporean speaker does wish to index the social meanings linked to an external, Inner Circle norm, they will turn to the US rather than the UK pattern for these lexical sets. Looking at this trend from a slightly different perspective, we might wonder what speakers who have adopted postvocalic rhoticity do in the case of court words; do these speakers necessarily adopt the American vowel to match their rhotic pronunciation? 14.5

Investigating the Interaction of Rhoticity and cot-caught-court

The empirical findings presented here are based on sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2016 with thirty-four female speakers born in Singapore, ranging in age from twenty-one to eighty-one. The participants are highly educated relative to their respective generation, with all speakers under sixty holding at least a tertiary diploma and the oldest group having completed secondary school. I focus on educated female Singaporeans in this analysis to identify potential changes occurring in a relatively cohesive demographic group; this is

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also the group that previous researchers have found to lead in postvocalic rhoticity (C.H. Tan & Gupta 1992; Y. Tan 2012). Participants were recorded reading a modified version of the ‘Wolf Passage’ developed by Deterding (2007), engaging in a spontaneous interview, and reading a wordlist consisting of minimal pairs. During the interview, participants were prompted to discuss local culture and issues (e.g., how Singapore has changed since they were young); participants were also asked whether they considered themselves to be a Heartlander, and how they would explain what this term meant to a newcomer to Singapore. Participants’ responses to the latter questions will be addressed further in the discussion. Postvocalic rhoticity in the data was coded auditorily with supplementary reference to the spectrogram in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2016). Vowels were segmented manually; formant data at vowel midpoints were collected via Praat script. I will first consider the patterning of postvocalic (r) among the participants. As shown in Figure 14.1, while all participant groups are using some degree of rhoticity, it is the youngest speakers, ages 21–29, who are leading in rhoticity and showing the greatest contextual variability, using rhoticity far more in the minimal pairs wordlist, at the same rate as other age groups in the reading passage, and then significantly less than the other age groups in spontaneous speech. When the data is broken down further by individual speaker, one third of the 21–29 age group consists of speakers who use postvocalic rhoticity in over 50 per cent of possible contexts; the older age groups include no speakers who use rhoticity at this high a rate.

70%

60%

% /r/

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 21–29

30–49

50–81

Age Group Wordlist

Reading

Interview

Figure 14.1 Postvocalic rhoticity by style and age group (N = 34).

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These findings for postvocalic rhoticity support the claims of previous studies that this constitutes a change in progress in SgE; they also suggest, however, that the social meaning of postvocalic rhoticity is rather different for younger speakers than it is for older speakers, and is more strongly associated with correctness. This pattern is consistent with an account that younger speakers are orienting less toward non-rhotic SSBE as the external norm for what constitutes correct pronunciation. At the same time, the fact that these highly educated young speakers are using postvocalic rhoticity less frequently than older speakers in spontaneous speech suggests that non-rhoticity is at the very least retaining and, perhaps, strengthening its position as the dominant choice for casual speech situations. Notably, Tan (2012), who found a 55.95 per cent rate of postvocalic rhoticity for university-educated speakers, elicited data using only a sentence-reading task. Looking further back, Tan and Gupta (1992) found a spontaneous speech rate of 7.16 per cent and a word list rate of 10.6 per cent for postvocalic (r) among 21–29-year-olds; while something is certainly on the move in the realm of read speech, this change has apparently not progressed in spontaneous interview speech in several decades. Figure 14.2 examines the rates of postvocalic rhoticity among only the 21–29-year-old group, breaking this group down into those who reported that they considered themselves to be Heartlanders versus those who reported that they did not. Here, we see that the distinction between younger and older speakers is reiterated within these two social identities, as non-Heartlanders

90%

80% 70%

% /r/

60% 50% 40%

30% 20%

10% 0%

wordlist

reading Heartlander

interview

Non-Heartlander

Figure 14.2 Postvocalic rhoticity by style and Heartlander identity for 21–29 age group only (N = 18).

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are leading in the use of postvocalic rhoticity in the wordlist and in the stylistic stratification of rhoticity; in fact, the non-Heartlanders used no rhoticity whatsoever in their spontaneous speech. Notably, even those young speakers who do consider themselves Heartlanders are making use of more rhoticity in the wordlist than older speakers, demonstrating that this change is not limited to speakers with a nonlocal orientation. Moving on to the vowels, Figure 14.3 gives the mean positions of the vowels in cot, caught, caw, court, core, low, and coat for the wordlist as produced by each of the three age groups; the low and coat sets have been included here to give a clearer indication of the relative position of the lowback vowels. To account for inter-speaker differences, these vowels have been

11.0

Mean vowel formant values Bark Difference normalized

LOW LOW

LOW

COAT COAT

10.0

CAW

CORE

COURT CAW CAUGHT

9.5

Z3−Z1

10.5

COAT

CAUGHT

CAW CORE

9.0

COURT COT COT CORE CAUGHT

8.5

21−29 30−49 50−81

COURT COT

5.5

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

Z3−Z2 Units: Bark

Figure 14.3 NORM (Thomas & Kendall 2007) plot of cot, caught, caw, court, core, low, and coat lexical sets, wordlist data by age group (vowels normalized using Bark Difference Metric).

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normalized via the Bark Difference Metric using the online software NORM (Thomas & Kendall 2007). Looking first at the oldest group of speakers, represented by circles, we observe that cot is clearly distinct from the higher cluster of caught, court, caw, and core; this the classic pattern described for SSBE. Further analysis of these data broken down by speech context (not shown) reveals that this pattern only holds for the wordlist; in other contexts, this older group of speakers uses the merger typical of SgE. In contrast, as shown in Figure 14.3, the younger two age groups show no such SSBE-style split, with cot and court positioned very close together for both groups. Moreover, we observe court lowering in each successive age group; for the youngest group of speakers, all means in the cot-caught-court sets are shifted downward in the vowel space, moving the system further from the SSBE norm. Mixed-effects modeling using Rbrul (Johnson 2009) confirms significant differences in normalized mean F1 for cot and normalized mean F2 for both caught and court by both age group and style (p < 0.001 for all effects). Figure 14.4 gives the mean normalized vowel positions for the 21–29 age group wordlist data, contrasting Heartlanders versus non-Heartlanders, as in the rhoticity analysis. While both groups have a low target for cot and court, the Heartlanders’ vowels are more tightly clustered together, with only caw raised above the others, much like the pattern of the 30–49 age group. The nonHeartlanders, on the other hand, have more distinct vowels, raising core, caught, and caw. Even in this careful wordlist style, however, the court vowel is quite low, not resembling the raised pronunciation we would expect to see in US English. Given the 75 per cent rate of rhoticity we observed in the wordlist style among the non-Heartlander-identified speakers, this low position for the vowel of court is noteworthy: these speakers are not pronouncing court as [kɔɹt], but rather as [kɒɹt]. In fact, there is no correlation in the data between the position of the court vowel and the realization of postvocalic rhoticity. The significance of this finding will be considered further in the following section. 14.6

Discussion

Previous accounts of sociolinguistic variation in SgE have focused on the tension between colloquial and standard forms, with the former associated with a local orientation and the latter a global orientation in Alsagoff’s (2010) model. The rise of postvocalic rhoticity in Singapore, however, throws a large, America-shaped wrench into this neat framework, and calls into question whether this global versus local view is the most appropriate model for variation in SgE. Moreover, the co-occurrence of SgE vowels with postvocalic rhoticity, along with younger speakers’ avoidance of this rhoticity in

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Mean vowel formant values Bark Difference normalized

CAUGHT

CAW

9.0

Z3−Z1

9.5

CAW

CORE CORE

8.5

CAUGHT COT

COURT

Heartlander Non-heartlander

COURT COT

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

Z3−Z2 Units: Bark

Figure 14.4 NORM plot of cot, caught, caw, court, and core lexical sets among the 21–29 age group wordlist data, by Heartlander identity (vowels normalized using Bark Difference Metric).

spontaneous speech, casts doubt on the assumption made by previous researchers that postvocalic rhoticity in SgE results from a desire to imitate American English as a result of media exposure (Tan & Gupta 1992; Poedjosoedarmo 2000; i.a.). The rise in rhoticity in SgE contrasts sharply with the conservative preservation of the bath-trap distinction (Starr 2017); if SgE speakers were seeking to adopt US English phonology, widespread shifts ought to be occurring toward multiple US English features, but no such additional shifts have been observed. Thus, models that seek to explain the behavior of SgE speakers as shifting between cohesive codes, some of which are imitations of external norms, are simply unable to capture the patterns we see here. A third-wave perspective, in contrast, can provide a more satisfying

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account of why SgE speakers are drawing upon linguistic features from a range of sources to express various social meanings. Viewing these data in terms of change in apparent time, considerable phonological shifts are evident in both the vowels and postvocalic rhoticity of these SgE speakers. Regarding the vowels, the older participants are performing just as traditional descriptions of SgE would predict; in wordlist speech, they are conforming to an SSBE norm by raising caught and court, while in other styles they are not. Older speakers were also found to use a consistent, low level of rhoticity across speech styles. Given that Tan and Gupta (1992) also found some degree of rhoticity among middle-aged speakers, it seems probable that postvocalic rhoticity has maintained a limited presence in SgE for some time, but has not been strongly associated with carefulness or correctness until recent years. This combination of features suggests that characterizing the vowels of these speakers as directly targeting SSBE is a mistake; there is no reason for these speakers to use any rhoticity at all in their wordlist speech if they are seeking to imitate standard British norms. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) point out, the social meanings of linguistic variables are constructed through local community practices. We ought to be thinking locally, not globally, to identify what meanings Singaporean speakers are trying to index when they raise their caught and court vowels. In order to understand what these older speakers are doing, and why younger speakers are no longer doing it, it may be useful to take another look back at the history of English in Singapore. As mentioned in the background section, English began its life among Singaporeans in the nineteenth century as a language of a small elite, initially comprised mainly of Straits Chinese and Eurasians. The English-educated Straits Chinese community was sometimes termed ‘the King’s Chinese’, referring to their high degree of Anglicization and positive orientation toward Singapore’s status as a territory of Britain; as Singapore’s relationship to the British empire shifted in the post–World War II period, this identity retained considerable salience (Clammer 1979: 6). For older Singaporeans, I argue, local elite character types such as the King’s Chinese embody what it means for a Singaporean to speak proper English; moreover, it is these local character types, not the persona of a British person, that older, educated Singaporeans are referencing when they raise their caught and court vowels. We can find further evidence bolstering this proposal in certain phonological features observed in the English of older educated Singaporean speakers that are inconsistent with British English, but consistent with the English spoken by local communities that received early English-medium education. One such example is the lack of aspiration for /p,t,k/ initial consonants, a feature that is found in Baba Malay, the creole spoken by the Straits Chinese community; crucially, this feature contrasts with the aspirated /p,t,k/ used by native speakers of Chinese varieties, which is more

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analogous to the aspiration of /p,t,k/ in British English. In my ongoing research with Tianxiao Wang on the speech of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, we find that unaspirated variants of /p,t,k/ appear prominently in Lee’s early English speeches (Starr & Wang 2018). Although this feature is inconsistent with British English, it nonetheless marks Lee as an English-educated elite in a local context. In light of these data, it would be a mischaracterization to describe Lee’s speech as targeting British English norms; instead, he is using features associated with local character types to index English fluency and elite education. Along similar lines, older, educated Singaporeans in the present analysis are adopting patterns of language use associated with the local English-educated elite (including Lee himself), not directly targeting SSBE norms. Younger Singaporeans, in contrast, have grown up in an era of universal English-medium education, in which English has become the most common home language; speaking English is no longer perceived as an elite practice. More importantly, SgE is no longer perceived as an illegitimate, inferior variety of English that ought to be avoided in formal situations. The fact that both Heartlander- and non-Heartlander-identifying younger speakers are merging cot and court in their wordlist speech confirms the predictions of endonormativization; for younger speakers, it is now possible to construct a ‘correct’ speaking style using SgE vowels. We may also conceive of this change in apparent time as a negative identity practice (Bucholtz 1999). Just as young New Yorkers are moving away from the character type of the classic New Yorker by lowering bought (Becker 2014), we might say that young, educated Singaporeans are moving away from the overly colonial and oldfashioned figure of the King’s Chinese, seeking new ways to sound both local and educated. As for why younger speakers are adopting postvocalic rhoticity, in light of the stylistic variation observed in the data revealing that younger speakers are not using the rhotic pronunciation in spontaneous speech contexts, this question is in need of reframing: why are young speakers increasingly associating postvocalic rhoticity with careful, correct speech? Unlike the hypothetical adoption of US English norms for cot-caught-court, the realization of postvocalic (r) increases the consistency of pronunciation with spelling. In fact, SgE contains many spelling pronunciations, such as the realization of /l/ in salmon. Postvocalic rhoticity in SgE may have begun its life as a spelling pronunciation – one that happened to match the features of US English. The combination of increased faithfulness to spelling and the prestige of US English may be what has led to the success of this particular variant as an index of correctness. Finally, linguistic variation has been observed among participants with different orientations toward Heartlander identity. What exactly do today’s

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Singaporeans mean, when they say that they do or do not consider themselves to be a Heartlander? In Prime Minister Goh’s original presentation of this persona, Heartlander status was defined primarily by having a local orientation, speaking Singlish, and performing a working-class job. The responses in Extract 14.1 from Participant 33 are illustrative of how the majority of interviewees who considered themselves to be Heartlanders described this identity.

Extract 14.1 Participant 33 (age 51, tertiary diploma) interviewer: participant 33:

interviewer: participant 33:

So, have you heard of the word Heartlander, and how would you explain to someone else – a newcomer – what it means? Um I would say that Heartlander is somebody who stays in the majority, um, the most common kind of, um, housing accommodation in Singapore. Where they stay in the HDB flat because majority of the uh, middle income Singaporeans would stay in a HDB flat. So, people who stays in a HDB flat we call that the heartland is, y’know, uh, are called Heartlanders. ... Do you consider yourself a Heartlander, and why or why not? Uh, I consider myself a Heartlander, even though I do not stay in a HDB flat, because I still enjoy the uh, amenities of what the uh, what what the uh HDB flat surrounding and the environment provides. You know like, uh, provision shops, and then you have amenities like, uh, the public swimming pool, public library, these are the uh facilities that you will find in a heartland area, and I, I grow up using these facilities and I still enjoy using them. They give you a very nice, uh, feel of being a Singaporean.

Extract 14.2 Participant 13 (age 26, postgraduate degree) interviewer: participant 13: interviewer: participant 13:

Why do you consider yourself a Heartlander? There are no right or wrong answers, just . . . Uh, because I live this place, and I belong as one of them. So, all Singaporeans are Heartlanders, to you? Or is there a distinction? I think so, they, they are all Heartlanders to us.

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Extract 14.3 Participant 9 (age 23, undergraduate degree) participant 9:

For me ‘Heartlander’ would be someone who speaks, like, more Singlish, and, um, maybe dialect, Chinese dialect. Whereas, like, for me, like, I see myself, like, a – as a native speaker of English. Uh and I use English almost 99% of my time.

While the notion of ‘local orientation’ from Prime Minister Goh’s original framing is still present here to some extent, for the majority of participants who believe themselves to be Heartlanders, the primary characteristic of a Heartlander is someone who lives in an HDB flat or simply enjoys using the amenities found in HDB estate neighborhoods. Thus, even someone like Participant 33, who does not live in public housing, can consider herself a Heartlander. Notice also that the definition of who is a Heartlander has shifted from working-class to ‘middle income’, as the wealth of the average Singaporean living in an HDB flat has risen. The notion of having a local orientation has also subtly shifted; Heartlanders in the original framing were limited to the local sphere in their interests and habits. This interviewee, in contrast, makes use of HDB amenities at times, although she does not live in an HDB, because it gives her a ‘nice’ feeling of national identity; it is a lifestyle choice. Another segment of participants, however, shows an even broader conception of what Heartlander means, as can be seen in Extract 14.2, taken from an interview with a younger participant. Like Participant 13, several participants (primarily those under age 30) indicated that Heartlander referred to anyone who was proud to be Singaporean, or even more broadly, to any Singaporean. In line with this definition, some also indicated that they interpreted the word Heartlander to indicate ‘where your heart is’. In other words, the term itself has been reanalyzed from ‘one who lives in the heartland’ to ‘one who has the land in his/her heart’. What about those participants who did not consider themselves Heartlanders? For these non-Heartlander-identifying participants, location of residence was most important, with several mentioning that Heartlanders lived further out of the city. Some also expressed the belief that Heartlanders do not interact much with non-Singaporeans, echoing Goh’s original framing. Language also came up as a distinguishing quality of Heartlanders as illustrated in Extract 14.3.

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Overall, while the study participants were uniformly well educated and on the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum in Singapore, only seven of the thirty-four reported that they did not identify as Heartlanders. Participants who reported identifying as Heartlanders included those with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, those who had spent time living abroad in the USA and UK, and those who reported frequently consuming foreign media. Evidently, for many Singaporeans, the conception of Heartlander is no longer that of an individual who is unable or unwilling to engage in elite practices, but rather someone who has a positive orientation toward local identity and practices. Indeed, in today’s wealthy Singapore, Singaporeans conceive of eliteness not as connected with a static identity of being a Cosmopolitan, but as a stance that one can adopt or a property of goods one can consume. This property is commonly termed atas (from the Malay for ‘above’), meaning posh. Like posh, atas often implies a negative evaluation, but can also be used in a positive or neutral sense. This range of connotations can be observed in these examples of online usage: ‘organic bananas??? why so atas one!!’ (Janice 2010) ‘White tablecloths, fancy china, excellent service, it’s your typical atas restaurant.’ (Jerilyn 2013) ‘I thought I look damn atas with Chignon Bun hairstyle!’ (Ali 2012)

As national identity has strengthened in Singapore, and as the notion of the Heartlander expands from a persona representing a certain segment of working-class Singaporeans to one that represents Singaporean identity more generally, even Singaporeans of high socioeconomic status are now likely to characterize themselves as Heartlanders who occasionally engage in atas practices, rather than as Cosmopolitans. This phenomenon helps to explain why, unlike the concept of Heartlander, Goh’s opposing Cosmopolitan persona has not taken root in local discourse. These shifting conceptions of Heartlander can account for the differences in postvocalic rhoticity and cot-caught-court vowels observed between the two identity groups. Heartlanders, who make up the majority of the data, are leading in the shift toward adoption of traditional SgE merged vowels in the careful wordlist reading situation. Those who identify as non-Heartlanders, on the other hand, are still resisting this change to a certain extent, retaining a distinction similar to that used by older speakers to index correctness. For postvocalic rhoticity, non-Heartlanders are leading in this shift in wordlist speech; for these speakers, not speaking Singlish and interacting with nonSingaporeans are prominent elements of their identity, which can perhaps account for why they have latched onto rhoticity as a novel index of correctness. Still, both identity groups demonstrate adoption of postvocalic rhoticity

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and a shift toward more SgE-like vowels in wordlist speech; regardless of whether they consider themselves to be Heartlanders, young Singaporeans are forging a new way of speaking that is neither an imitation of American or British English, but something uniquely Singaporean. 14.7

Conclusion

In line with the suggestions of Leimgruber (2012), the third-wave variationist framework offers a promising approach to the complex, multi-dimensional patterns of variation and change observed in the English spoken in Singapore. As SgE has gradually become associated with high-status, nativeEnglish-speaking Singaporeans, SgE features have become available as resources with which to construct careful, correct speech styles. The extent to which young, educated Singaporeans feel that SgE vowels are compatible with these styles depends, to some extent, on their conception of national identity and their own relationship to the character type of the Heartlander. At the same time, young Singaporeans, and particularly those who do not view themselves as Heartlanders, are increasingly using postvocalic rhoticity, rather than SSBE vowels, to index correctness. When combined, SgE vowels and postvocalic rhoticity form a novel style that indexes both localness and education, illustrating the process of bricolage that lies at the heart of stylistic practice (Eckert 2008). One of the challenges in accounting for sociolinguistic variation in peripheral settings such as Singapore has been defining the scope of the repertoires and landscapes from which speakers draw, and the mechanisms by which this process takes place. Meyerhoff and Niedzielski (2003: 543), in their discussion of changes in the phonology of New Zealand English, warn against leaping to the conclusion that speakers are adopting features of US English because they look down on local norms; what may appear to be the result of diffusion may in fact be independent drift. Along the same lines, I urge sociolinguists to think critically regarding models from World Englishes that refer to communities upholding an ‘exonormative standard’. While community norms for correct language use may, at a high level, orient toward a nonlocal standard, it is a mistake to assume that ordinary speakers in the community are directly imitating nonlocal language users. Moreover, not all changes in the community’s language use that correspond to an external variety are necessarily triggered by diffusion from that variety. The example of the Singaporean Heartlander offers a case of a character type that has broadened in its scope over time; as the typical Singaporean has become wealthier and more cosmopolitan, so has the image of the Heartlander. In Prime Minister Goh’s initial speech, he expressed the fear that Heartlanders and Cosmopolitans would continue to diverge, resulting in

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a fatal polarization of Singaporean society. In what is perhaps a triumph of Singapore’s nation-building efforts, the reverse has taken place; Singaporeans, regardless of their socioeconomic privilege, now predominantly see themselves as Heartlanders who engage in certain elite practices. This hybridization, as we have seen, has become embedded in their language use. The multifaceted changes underway in Singapore English illustrate the relevance of a third-wave approach, in which language change on a societal level is seen as emerging from shifts in individual identity construction, as the social circumstances and ideological alignments of community members evolve over time. notes The data on Singaporeans’ pronunciation of the COT-CAUGHT-COURT vowel sets was collected in collaboration with students at the National University of Singapore enrolled in a graduate course on sociophonetics. Special thanks to Rowland Anthony Imperial, Gerlynn Huang Xueyi, A. R. M. Mostafizar Rahman, Kevin Martens Wong, Jennifer Ong Seok Hwee, and Nicola Mah. A preliminary version of this analysis was presented in 2016 at NWAV 45 in Vancouver, Canada. 1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQOwgvE5a94; accessed 05/09/18.

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Social Meaning and the Temporal Dynamics of Sound Changes Meredith Tamminga

15.1

Introduction

In third-wave approaches to sociolinguistics, style and social meaning are intricately interlinked (Eckert 2001, 2003, 2008, 2012). Podesva (2008) outlines three sources of social meaning in linguistic styles: the combination of different linguistic features within a style, the contrast between different styles, and the use of styles in particular moments of interaction. He emphasizes that the third of these is understudied compared to the other two, beginning with the simple observation that ‘in point of fact linguistic variables exhibit temporal dynamism’ (Podesva 2008: 5). Temporal dynamism in this context refers not to community change over time, but to fluctuations in a speaker’s linguistic behavior from moment to moment. In this chapter, I raise a number of issues regarding the temporal dynamism of linguistic features and the relationship of such dynamism to social meaning. In particular, I discuss the ongoing project of developing methods to represent and quantify dynamism in which time is treated as continuous. That speakers can behave differently under different circumstances (and thus at different times) is uncontroversial, and can be modeled by binning time into putatively coherent stretches of speech and averaging over the speaker’s behavior within each stretch. Studying temporal dynamism on a continuous time scale, however, is a much taller order, and one more likely to raise doubts. In early work demonstrating that a speaker produces /th/-stopping at different rates in different elicitation contexts, Labov (1966: 77) describes the ordered sequence of variable observations from a single context by saying, ‘There seems to be no pattern or system within this sequence.’ In this characterization we might hear an echo of Hubbell’s mid-century description of /r/-vocalization in New York City English: ‘The pronunciation of a very large number of New Yorkers exhibits a pattern in these words that might most accurately be described as the complete absence of 338

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any pattern’ (Hubbell 1950: 48). Of course, it was Labov (1966) that demolished this idea: /r/-vocalization in New York City English exhibits many quitesystematic patterns, all of which were identified through the quantitative observation of probabilistic covariation. Covariation also played a role in Labov’s early work on the social meaning of sound changes: when he demonstrated that the pronunciation of /ay/ and /aw/ with centralized nuclei covaried systematically with attitudes toward island life in Martha’s Vineyard, he concluded, ‘It is apparent that the immediate meaning of this phonetic feature is “Vineyarder”’ (Labov 1963: 304). Understanding ‘how styles and their component linguistic features unfold over time’ (Podesva 2008: 6) will eventually require us to grapple with the continuity of time. This requirement is one of the motivations for posing what my coauthors and I have called the ‘dynamics of variation in individuals’ question: ‘What factors affect whether a given speaker will produce a given variant of a variable in a specific real-time instance of use?’ (Tamminga et al. 2016b: 301). In that paper, we propose to investigate the temporal-sequential properties of variation in two respects: degree of dynamism within a single linguistic feature, and microcovariation across multiple features. The current chapter deals with both of these temporalsequential properties, and additionally proposes further refinement of the notion of dynamism. I begin in Section 15.1.1, by reviewing the small number of previous quantitative studies that deal directly with the temporal dynamics of style, all of them couched in a broadly third-wave worldview. These studies are direct predecessors to my current work in this area. Then in Section 15.1.2, I turn to a quite different, but prominent, line of work in the style-shifting literature: Labov’s methodological and theoretical attention-paid-to-speech framework. I take this framework as my jumping-off point because it contains several clear predictions about style and sound change that are directly translatable into continuous micro-temporal terms. Assessing these predictions is thus a tractable first step in applying new quantitative tools for temporal dynamics. In Section 15.1.3, I undertake that assessment using Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs; Wood (2006)) of conversational speech data for six vowels that are known to be changing in white Philadelphian English. The remainder of the chapter takes a closer look at the GAMM output for two vowels in a single conversation, as an illustration of how this quantitative approach to identifying style shifting can support further inquiry into the social meaning of sound changes. 15.1.1

Style and Temporal Dynamics in the Third Wave

I begin with a survey of the small body of previous work that is most clearly engaged in the investigation of continuous temporal dynamism and

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microcovariation across variables. I think it is fair to say that all of these papers are, to a greater or lesser extent, rooted in the third-wave conceptualization of style as multifeatural and constituted in social practice, as described by Eckert (2012). The earliest such paper I am aware of is Podesva (2008), with which I opened this chapter. Podesva makes clear the link between the dynamics of style shifting and the study of social meaning: ‘examining intraspeaker variation is desirable because . . . doing so facilitates a more direct observation of how speakers deploy linguistic features to achieve social ends’ (2008: 2). In order to visually represent ‘how styles and their component linguistic features unfold over time’ Podesva (2008: 6) develops a ‘variation score’, which represents different variables and their variants on vertically stratified tiers with time represented horizontally as a temporally ordered sequence of utterances. A partial example of a specific variation score he creates is reproduced in Figure 15.1. While each variable could be read off the score in isolation, the true value of the score is in the layering of sequences of multiple variables. For example, an isolated falling declarative utterance (indicated by a filled square in the middle tier) may draw our attention more clearly when it is seen to cooccur with a string of falsetto utterances (indicated by filled circles in the bottom tier). The ‘style cluster’ identified in Figure 15.1 is based not on a single tier alone but on the combination of the three tiers. A set of tools to facilitate visual cluster identification is offered by Kendall’s (2009) Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project: the graphicalization and Henderson map capabilities can superimpose tabulations of different variables on either linear time or a 2D combination of speech time and pause time. An additional degree of abstraction is offered by Sharma and Rampton’s (2011) Lectal Focusing in Interaction (LFI) metric. This work investigates a London speech community where multiple enregistered ethnolects (Standard British English, Vernacular London English, and Indian English) coexist. Sharma and Rampton divide conversational recordings into five- to ten-word utterances, then calculate the percentage of variants belonging to each lect across all of the variable tokens within the utterance. They plot the resulting LFI score for each lect along the ordered sequence of utterances. Figure 15.2 illustrates fluctuations in the use of British English by a single speaker over the course of a conversation about foreigners. In this approach, ‘clusters’ of related

beginning

STYLE CLUSTER

Figure 15.1 A variation score, reproduced from Podesva (2008: 6).

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1 0.9

Proportion of BrE variants

0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Utterance Total BrE

Vernacular BrE

Figure 15.2 British English LFI across ordered utterances, reproduced from fig. 8 of Sharma and Rampton (2011: 18).

variables appear as peaks, making them easy to identify visually. The drawback is that the variants have to be sorted into categories in advance, which may be less desirable in cases where lects are less clearly defined. Tamminga et al. (2016a) propose the use of Generalized Additive (Mixed) Models (GA(M)M), which I will describe, to directly model fluctuations in linguistic feature use over continuous time. Van Hofwegen (2017) adopts this technique to model how a single Californian speaker, over the course of two days, uses stylized versus non-stylized forms of trap-lowering and toe-fronting. She uses the GAMM model output to guide a search for conversational interactions characterized by a particularly high concentrations of stylized forms, then ties such interactions to the speaker’s stance and the social meaning of the vowels. This approach is deeply congruent with my discussion in this chapter. 15.1.2

The Attention-to-Speech Model of Style Shifting in Sound Change

The multidimensional conceptualization of style discussed in the previous section has the practical drawback of being very complicated to tackle.

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I propose that we can get a firmer grasp on what formulating and testing quantitative predictions about continuous time might look like if we start from a unidimensional approach to style. Labov’s attention-paid-to-speech model is well suited to this goal. The classic Labovian sociolinguistic interview, as described in Labov (1984), is closely associated with the practice of manipulating the speaker’s level of linguistic self-monitoring, also known as attention paid to speech.1 Speakers might be distracted from attending to their linguistic choices through involvement in emotionally engaging stories, or encouraged to self-monitor to increasingly higher degrees when engaged in tasks requiring reading or metalinguistic knowledge. The goal of these manipulations is to elicit style-shifting, on the grounds that ‘styles can be ranged along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech’ (Labov 1984: 29). Throughout his work, Labov is careful to point out that these methods are ‘not equivalent to a naturalistic analysis of style’ (1984: 29) but rather constitute ‘heuristic devices to obtain a range of behaviors within the individual interview’ (1966: 59). We can accept these disclaimers at face value while also observing that they reflect a deeper theoretical idea: that a central component of the social content of linguistic features is prestige (whether overt or covert) and the primary mediator of our self-monitored linguistic-behavioral reactions to prestige is social evaluation. Framed as a theory of style, this pair of ideas may sound outdated to some ears, but I would argue it has quietly persisted alongside the stylistic turn of the third wave. It is rare for a sociolinguist to champion this perspective, but common for one to assume it. In this kind of prestige-driven perspective on style-shifting, absent further elaboration, multiple linguistic features should be expected to style-shift in tandem because they should all respond to contextual shifts simultaneously and in the same direction. In a study of how four Brazilian Portuguese variables covary across speakers, Guy (2013) makes this point explicit, although he does not go on to test it: ‘when varying their speech styles, speakers might be expected to synchronize their choices on all of these variables at the same time’ (p. 64). Indeed, quantitative research on style-shifting that looks at multiple variables simultaneously often finds some degree of covariation across styles. For several individual speakers in his study of the Lower East Side, Labov (1966) constructs ‘stylistic arrays’: tabulations of rates across elicited contexts for five phonological variables characteristic of New York City English. These tend to show increasing suppression of the stigmatized variant of each variable with each incremented increase in attention paid to speech. In another prominent example, Coupland (1980) finds that multiple non-standard features of Cardiff English covary across social contexts. Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) find that every one of five morphosyntactic features of African American Vernacular English is used more frequently with an African American interlocutor than a European American one. And Labov

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(2001a) finds that both the /ɪn/ variant of the /ɪŋ/ ~ /ɪn/ alternation and stopped-/ð/ are more frequent in speech classified by a decision-tree procedure as casual. Note, though, that none of these papers retain explicit temporalsequential information in the quantitative analysis of stylistic covariation, which is what differentiates them from the papers discussed in the previous section. In the prestige-driven conception of style (which, to be clear, not all of the papers just mentioned endorse), the explanation for these broad covariation patterns is that sociolinguistic variables simultaneously exhibit a decrease in stigmatized forms in careful speech and an increase in stigmatized forms in casual speech. The combination of prestige orientation and self-monitoring produces the direction of style-shifting, as well as delineating the contexts in which shifts in either direction should take place. Put in these terms, it is not difficult to reframe for a continuous time dimension: if we trace the continuous fluctuations of multiple linguistic features for a speaker, those features should exhibit peaks and dips away from the speaker’s central tendency around the same moments, with coincidence between direction of the peaks across features. Although the moments of stylistic deflection and direction of shifting should be largely shared across variants, not all variables are expected to respond equally strongly. Prestige and self-monitoring can only come into play if a feature has acquired a high enough level of social evaluation. This is where style-shifting, social evaluation, and sound change converge: in the influential proposal, spelled out here by Labov (2001b), that the usual ontogeny of a community-internal change follows a progression from indicator, to marker, to stereotype, each with an increasing degree of social evaluation, with change from above having strong evaluation (high awareness) from the start: As a rule, social awareness of a given variable corresponds to the slope of style shifting. Changes from above are normally high on this scale . . . Changes from below begin as indicators, stratified by age group, region, and social class. At this stage, they show zero degrees of social awareness, and are difficult to detect for both linguists and native speakers. As they proceed to completion, such changes usually acquire social recognition as linguistic markers, usually in the form of social stigma, which is reflected in sharp social stratification of speech production, a steep slope of style shifting, and negative responses on subjective reaction tests. Ultimately, they may become stereotypes, the subject of overt comment. (p. 196)

I am reiterating this well-trodden material in order to highlight a key idea in this paragraph: the hypothesis of a close positive association between social evaluation and the slope of style shifting. It is framed in categorical-time terms, with chunks of time producing average variant rates or values that serve as single point measures in the calculation of a style-shifting ‘slope’. It is not difficult to imagine how to translate this into a continuous time dimension, though: variables with stronger social evaluation, such as changes from above and

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stereotypes, should show more dramatic deviations away from speaker baseline, which should look like higher peaks and lower dips on a plot tracing the fluctuating tendencies of the feature in time. Conversely, new changes from below that exhibit little social evaluation should appear nearly flat over time, as expected if they are distributed randomly with little style-shifting. The attention-paid-to-speech model thus provides several straightforward microtemporal hypotheses for what we should see when we look at several different diachronically changing vowels simultaneously in a stretch of conversational speech: that fluctuations in the different vowels should coincide in their peaks, dips, and inflection points, and that vowels that have a higher level of social evaluation should veer further from the speaker’s baseline at those peaks and dips. The quantitative analysis of multivariable style-shifting remains a large and rarely tackled task in its own right, and the addition of a temporal-sequential dimension intensifies these challenges. Starting from the predictions of a unidimensional approach to style is thus a strategic decision to facilitate the case study I take up here: the temporal dynamics in conversational speech of six vowels currently undergoing change in white Philadelphia English. What I will show, though, is that the predictions are not supported by the GAMM analyses, suggesting that multifaceted theories of style will be necessary to account for style-shifting behavior at the microtemporal level. 15.1.3

Six Sound Changes in Philadelphia

The variety of English used by white Philadelphians has been a topic of a tremendous amount of quantitative sociolinguistic research (Labov 1994, 2001b, 2010). White Philadelphian English thus offers a chance to investigate newer questions about intraspeaker variation in sound change by building on what we know about the social stratification and diachronic trajectory of its ongoing changes. In the following section, I look at six changing vowel classes among young white Philadelphian women: face, price, tooth, mouth, goat, and thought.2 They exhibit different degrees of social evaluation and represent different stages of change, allowing me to investigate whether such differences are in fact associated with different degrees of temporal dynamism. Here I outline, for each change, what we know about the change’s progress as well as potential aspects of social evaluation and social meaning. face The change in face is one of raising diagonally along the front of the vowel space. It occurs only when face is followed by a consonant in the same word, but is not sensitive to morphological boundaries (Fruehwald 2013). In terms of overt social evaluation, face flies well below the radar. face-raising ‘is never mentioned by popular observers of the Philadelphia dialect in the media, nor has it ever been recognized by any Philadelphian speaker in the course of sociolinguistic interviews from 1972 to the present’ (Labov et al.

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2013: 52). Conn (2005) finds no stratification by gender or social class and Prichard and Tamminga (2012) find that young white upwardly mobile Philadelphians who appear to be minimizing other characteristically Philadelphian aspects of their accent are nonetheless very advanced in faceraising. Labov et al. (2013) call this sound change an indicator. price price-raising (and sometimes backing) occurs only with following voiceless consonants. It is identified in early work as ‘a new and vigorous change with little social recognition as well as little social differentiation in speech’ (Labov 2001b: 204). price-raising was notably male-led when first identified (Labov 2001b; Conn 2005), and its social evaluation seems to be connected to this association with male speakers. Conn (2005) uses a matchedguise task to show that raised price is judged as making a female speaker sound unsuitable for employment but a male speaker sound tougher and more masculine. Wagner (2008) proposes that raised price can be adopted by young women not only to index toughness and masculinity, but also to distinguish Irish from Italian ethnicity – a linguistic rejection of the social signifiers of femininity favored by Italian teenage girls in South Philadelphia. tooth The fronting of tooth after coronal onsets must be distinguished from fronting of the same phoneme after non-coronal onsets (goose-fronting), which is retreating in Philadelphia; here I consider only the post-coronal fronting change. Unlike the changes in face and price, which are quite limited in their geographic distributions, tooth-fronting is found across North America (Labov et al. 2006). It is identified as a mid-range change by Labov (2001b), but has otherwise been the subject of little focused inquiry in Philadelphia, perhaps precisely because it is not seen as characteristically ‘Philadelphian’. mouth In Labov’s early studies of Philadelphia, the change in mouth was one of raising along the front diagonal (Labov 2001b) and was considered a paradigmatic example of change from below led by women from the interior social classes. In recent decades, however, this change has reversed direction, so that mouth now appears to be lowering among the youngest generation. Both Conn (2005) and Labov et al. (2013) agree that its reversal is female led; Conn’s data further indicates the reversal is led by upper-middle-class women. Labov et al. describe mouth as having a ‘moderate degree of social awareness’ (2013: 52), but to the best of my knowledge, no particular indexical meaning has been proposed for mouth. mouth is an ‘unconditioned change’ (Labov et al. 2013: 44), meaning it occurs in all phonological environments that the vowel is found in. goat Parallel to mouth, the change in goat originally consisted of raising along the front diagonal (Labov 2001b) but has since reversed course (Labov et al. 2013). Both the original change and the reversal are female led. While there is allophonic differentiation between open and closed syllables for this

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vowel class, the allophony appears to be independent of the phoneme’s diachronic trajectory. I thus include both allophones together, with the difference controlled by inclusion of the following segment as a model predictor. goat is described as having ‘moderate social evaluation’ (Labov et al. 2013: 52). Labov (2001b: 211) observes that ‘in general, Philadelphians react to a fronted nucleus in (ow) as local and not suitable for public formal speech’. thought A high, tense thought vowel is a characteristic feature of the prototypical white working-class Philadelphia accent. thought was stable in early studies but is now lowering in what Labov et al. (2013: 52) label ‘withdrawal from stereotype’. The shibboleth water, which is crossdialectally notable for containing thought rather than lot, is enregistered as in written representations of the Philly accent, but is acoustically no different from the other thought vowels. Labov et al. describe the high thought realization as ‘considerably more salient’ than the other vowels whose trajectories they trace (2013: 52). The change toward lowering is sensitive to speakers’ educational attainment (Prichard & Tamminga 2012) and is taking place more rapidly among women, although both genders are involved (Labov et al. 2013). The phonetics of the traditional high thought are similar in white New York City speakers, and thought turns out to be undergoing a similar lowering process in New York (Becker 2014). While the social meaning of thought in Philadelphia has not been probed directly, we might reasonably expect that it shares some indexical content with the persona Becker finds is associated with high thought pronunciations in New York: ‘an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof’ (2014: 396). 15.2

Data and Methods

15.2.1

Data Collection

The data for this chapter come from the pilot phase for a larger project on the Cognitive Characteristics of the Leaders of Language Change. This project is aimed at understanding the role of individual differences in sound change, and as such it strives to recruit a relatively homogeneous sample: the pilot data here comes from thirty young women (aged eighteen to thirty-five) who selfidentified as white and who grew up in Philadelphia. These participants were recruited in friendship pairs and recorded conversing freely for thirty minutes per pair. Participants were provided with a list of conversational prompts but also told that they were free to talk about whatever topics they chose. Dyads varied in how long they had known each other, how well they knew each other, and the degree to which they ignored or engaged with (often in the form of mocking) the conversational prompts. Overall, though, the conversations

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recorded were consistently much more lively, interactive, and emotionally intimate than a comparable collection of sociolinguistic interviews would typically be (Wolfson 1976). Each participant was recorded on her own Zoom H4n digital recorder with a lavalier microphone. The two recordings for each dyad were then combined and orthographically transcribed by undergraduate research assistants. The transcripts were forced-aligned using the FAVE suite (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). The FAVE suite was also used to extract F1 and F2 vowel nucleus measurements for all primary-stressed vowels with duration greater than fifty milliseconds at a point determined by the default ‘faav’ setting. The vowel measurements were then z-score normalized within speaker (equivalent to Lobanov normalization, which performed best in a comparison of normalization techniques (Adank et al. 2004)). For vowels where the sound change of interest is along the front diagonal of the vowel space, I adopt Fruehwald’s (2013) diag measure of F2-F1 (after normalization). A higher diag value indicates that a vowel is closer to the high front corner of the vowel space. Negative F1 is used in place of F1 for price and thought so that when we look at model outputs and time smooths in the following sections, all of the changes will be visually oriented with the ‘traditional’ or ‘Philadelphian’ end of the continuum higher on the y-axis. For the ongoing changes in price, face, and tooth, up is the direction of the ongoing change; for the reversing changes in mouth and goat, up is the direction of the original change (and mouth represents participation in the reversal); and for the ‘withdrawal from stereotype’ of thought, up represents the stereotyped high back value. The total number of observations per vowel and the dependent measure used for each are given in Table 15.1. 15.2.2

Data Modeling

There are three quantitative tasks demanded by the questions I pose in this chapter. The first is to control for known linguistic predictors to avoid Table 15.1 Dependent variable measures, Ns, and visual orientation of the six vowel changes. Vowel

Measure

Total N

Up indicates . . .

face price tooth mouth goat thought

diag −F1 F2 diag F2 −F1

1,577 4,539 843 1,102 2,799 904

higher/fronter higher fronter higher/fronter fronter higher

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mistaking vowel realizations attributable to factors like coarticulation and frequency for stylistically extreme realizations. The second is to capture temporal fluctuations within vowel, within speaker, and the third is to capture cross-vowel correspondence between those temporal fluctuations both within and across speakers. Of these, I will make no quantitative headway on the third. To handle the first two tasks, though, I build on earlier work (Tamminga et al. 2016a) by adopting Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs; Wood 2006). Intuitively, a GAMM is a mixed effects regression that is extended to allow the fitting of ‘smooth’ terms over some continuous predictor, such as time. GAMMs have recently been put to use to capture temporal fluctuations in sociolinguistic data by Tamminga et al. (2016a), Van Hofwegen (2017), and Sonderegger et al. (2017). I will interpret the time smooths fit by the models as reflecting the kind of temporal irregularity that we would expect to appear as the result of stylistic practice in interaction (Eckert 2001; Podesva 2008).3 I fit a separate GAMM for each of the six vowel classes, with the dependent variable in each model as given in Table 15.1. As control predictors, each model included the fixed effects of log-transformed vowel duration taken from the FAVE-aligned output, log-transformed whole-word lexical frequency taken from SUBTLEX (Brysbaert & New 2009),4 and phonological context (preceding and following segment). Each model then additionally contained random by-speaker smooths over time elapsed in the interview, with random byspeaker intercepts, in the conversation (a measure of temporal dynamism). GAMMs were fit using the bam() function in the R package mgcv (Wood 2011), and plotted using data from the plot.gam() function. 15.3

Dimensions of Temporal Dynamism

In Tamminga et al. (2016b) my coauthors and I proposed attending to two aspects of sequences of variable observations: degree of dynamism and microcovariation. By degree of dynamism we referred to the observation that ‘even two speakers with an identical mean for a given variable might arrive at that mean through a wide or narrow distribution of tendencies and choices over time’ (Tamminga et al. 2016b: 314). In this section I return to this question of degree of dynamism. Specifically, I propose that we may wish to measure degree of dynamism along multiple dimensions. In Section 15.1.2, I reviewed Labov’s claim that ‘as a rule, social awareness of a given variable corresponds to the slope of style shifting’ (Labov 2001b: 196) and translated it into a prediction that higher-awareness changes (that is, those that attract stronger social evaluation) should be more dynamic. What would make a vowel more dynamic, though? My first step is simply visual inspection of the time smooths extracted from the GAMMs. These are presented in Figure 15.3. In these graphs, the x-axis represents time (in seconds)

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elapsing over the course of the thirty-minute dyadic conversation and each dark gray line is a single speaker’s time smooth, centered around that speaker’s random intercept value. How can we quantify dynamism to describe how these vowels differ in Figure 15.3? I propose that we ask three questions. First, for any given vowel, how many speakers exhibit non-negligible temporal dynamism? Second, for the speakers who do exhibit temporal dynamism, how rapidly does the smooth change trajectory? Third, again only for speakers who do exhibit temporal dynamism, how far from their central tendency do they stray? If we think of the time smooth as being like a wave function, we might recognize that the second question is asking about the frequency of the wave and the third question is asking about the amplitude of the wave. But adopting that terminology is a recipe for confusion in a field that already has cause to refer to the frequency and amplitude of sound waves (not to mention lexical frequency and variant frequency). I instead use the term sensitivity to refer to how quickly the smooth tends to reverse direction, and the term extremity to refer to the vertical offset in either direction from the speaker’s baseline. Sensitivity and extremity are illustrated schematically in Figure 15.4, which shows that they are in principle independent, although they may well turn out to be linked in sociolinguistic

FACE

PRICE

TOOTH

MOUTH

GOAT

THOUGHT

1.0

Random smooth by speaker (centered)

0.5 0.0 −0.5 −1.0 1.0 0.5 0.0 −0.5 −1.0 0

500

1000

1500

2000 0

500

1000

1500

2000 0

500

1000

Time

Figure 15.3 Speaker random smooths by vowel.

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2000

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Meredith Tamminga Lower extremity

Higher extremity Lower sensitivity Higher sensitivity

Time Figure 15.4 Schematic illustration of temporal sensitivity and temporal extremity.

behavior. I also use the term prevalence to refer to how many speakers exhibit dynamism at all. One of the values that can be extracted from the GAMMs is the estimated degrees of freedom (EDF) for each speaker’s random smooth. Informally, the EDF can be thought of as a measure of how many turning points the smooth has. Each speaker has a single EDF that characterizes their smooth for a particular vowel. I use EDF here first to identify speakers who exhibit nonnegligible dynamism for a vowel based on an arbitrary cutoff of 0.5 EDF. Then I characterize a vowel’s sensitivity among speakers who do exceed the cutoff by calculating the mean speaker EDF only for speakers with EDF > 0.5. Finally, also only among speakers with EDF > 0.5, I use 100 evenly spaced smooth value predictions (per speaker per vowel) from the model to calculate each speaker’s mean absolute value of smooth value for a vowel (the vertical distance from the speaker’s baseline), then calculate the mean of the speaker means for that vowel. To summarize: • Prevalence: number of speakers (out of 30) with EDF > 0.5 • Sensitivity: mean EDF for speakers with EDF > 0.5 • Extremity: mean absolute value of smooth height, mean of speaker means for speakers with EDF > 0.5 I emphasize here that this is a very early attempt at making some generalizations about how speaker temporal dynamics are distributed in different ongoing

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PREVALENCE: Number of speakers with non-zero EDF 17.5 15.0 12.5 10.0 FACE

PRICE TOOTH MOUTH GOAT THOUGHT SENSITIVITY: Mean EDF among speakers with non-zero EDF

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

FACE PRICE TOOTH MOUTH GOAT THOUGHT EXTREMITY: Mean smooth height among speakers with non-zero EDF

0.16 0.12 0.08 0.04 FACE

PRICE

TOOTH

MOUTH

GOAT

THOUGHT

vowel Figure 15.5 Dimensions of dynamism in six Philadelphia vowel changes.

sound changes, and is intended to be primarily descriptive. The values of these three metrics for each of the six vowels are plotted in Figure 15.5. Some first observations follow: Prevalence: The vowel with the most speakers who exhibit dynamism is price, and the vowels with the fewest speakers who exhibit dynamism are mouth and thought. Sensitivity: price also leads in mean sensitivity among dynamic speakers, followed closely by goat. face has the lowest mean sensitivity among dynamic speakers.

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Extremity: In terms of extremity, tooth has the highest mean extremity among dynamic speakers, followed closely by thought. mouth has substantially lower extremity among dynamic speakers. Many of the relationships in Figure 15.5 are unexpected. mouth lacks dynamism on all three measures, which is surprising given its diachronic reversal: if speakers find it meaningful or salient enough to retreat from its extreme realizations as a generation, why would it be microtemporally inert? price has both the highest prevalence and highest sensitivity, and while its extremity is in the middle of the pack it is clearly higher in extremity than mouth. thought is low in prevalence and sensitivity but high in extremity: few speakers use it and then only rarely, but when they do they really move. tooth is similar, although more prevalent. In this way we might think of price as the inverse of thought and tooth: price is prevalent and sensitive but less extreme; thought and tooth are extreme but not especially prevalent or sensitive. face and goat also have a partly inverse relation: while both show moderate prevalence and moderate extremity, face has very low sensitivity while goat has very high sensitivity. What properties of these vowels, at least for these particular speakers in these particular conversations, would give rise to temporal dynamic differentiation along these lines? One line of explanation we can clearly rule out is social evaluation: the data do not bear out any expected relationship between evaluation or stage of change and temporal dynamism on these measures. If we contrast thought and face as two endpoints of a social evaluation scale as Labov describes, we notice that the high-evaluation thought exhibits dynamism in only a third of the speakers while zero-evaluation face is dynamic for half of the speakers. Or we might contrast mouth and goat, which have similar levels of social evaluation and parallel diachronic trajectories, and observe that goat is more dynamic than mouth on each of the three measures. At the moment I can offer no explanation for why this should be, but I do believe we should try to find one. A property of the prevalence, sensitivity, and reactivity measures is that they are not inherent to the vowel changes per se, but rather are intimately tied to both the socio-interactional and topical content of the dyadic conversations from which the data here is drawn. A vowel might appear low in sensitivity for some specific stretch of speech because of sustained attention to particular conversational topics or stability in the stances of the interlocutors, or that vowel change may be relatively insensitive to topic-shifting. While we could treat this as a problem in that it seemingly conflates different sources for the dimensions of dynamism, I suggest that it may instead present an opportunity to observe what happens when these sources are played off against one another. Disentangling them will be difficult

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work, but by operationalizing some aspects of the temporal dynamics of variation in individuals, we have an extra tool for approaching this difficult problem. It is also important to note that the context-dependence of dynamism cannot be used to discount the empirical surprises of the previous paragraph: yes, the temporal dynamics we observe here are properties of specific conversational interactions, but the data for all six vowels is taken from the same set of conversational interactions. 15.4

Microcovariation as a Clue to Social Meaning

In Tamminga et al. (2016b: 315), my coauthors and I referred to ‘the different temporal co-occurrence patterns of variant instances across variables, independent of their dynamism profiles’ under the label microcovariation. This is essentially the phenomenon that Podesva’s (2008) style clusters capture, but it remains far from being supported by viable, scalable quantitative methods in sociolinguistics. Here, I simply proceed by visual inspection of the plotted time smooths for all six vowels on a speaker-by-speaker basis (a graphical display too large to present here in its entirety). The first point to note is that apparent microcovariation is very much the exception rather than the norm in the data at hand. There are two cases where two vowels seem to trade values mid-way through the conversation. For speaker 17B, the first half of the conversation features more-raised price and less-fronted tooth, while the second half of the conversation features lessraised price and more-fronted tooth. Speaker 8B exhibits a more-raised thought until about a third of the way through the conversation, then lowers thought for the remainder, while price is raised and lowers for the remainder around the same time as thought. These are fairly wide-grained patterns of microcovariation, but the difference between when they are coincident versus when they are divergent is yet another point we might wish to be able to explain. There is only one particularly dynamic case of consistent intraspeaker microcovariation throughout a conversation, in Speaker 13A’s use of price and goat. I will return to this case momentarily. These three cases effectively exhaust the obvious microcovariation in the full dataset of six vowels across 30 speakers, offering 450 pairwise opportunities for microcovariation between two vowels. In no case do I observe anything that could be called microcovariation of three vowels within a single speaker. Although I will not elaborate on the point here, I note that this widespread failure of microcovariation (matched, incidentally, by almost no interspeaker covariation in random intercepts) is bad news for attempts to give a generalized theory of sound change without making room for the particularities of specific sound changes. I now turn to the single clear case of microcovariation, price and goat in speaker 13A. Recall that as Philadelphia sound changes, price and goat have

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met quite opposite diachronic fates: goat-fronting has been reversed, while price-raising proceeds unabated. Nevertheless, their microtemporal parallels for 13A are readily apparent in Figure 15.6; we might suspect that she has not gotten the memo about goat-reversal. The multiple peaks and dips in their time smooths show remarkably close temporal alignment, indicating that for Speaker 13A the sensitivity of price and goat are equivalent. There is some vertical offset between those inflection points, though, with greater extremity for goat through most of the conversation. We can also compare the temporal dynamics of price and goat for 13A with those for her friend and interlocutor, speaker 13B. In 13B’s data, the time smooth for goat lacks dynamicity entirely, but price is also quite dynamic. If we look at the price smooths for these two friends simultaneously, as in Figure 15.7, we can see that there is in fact some coincidence between them. I thus trace the conversation between both of them to understand what is happening when their price values covary and diverge. The beginning of the conversation mostly features three topics interspersed with one another: a relatively emotionally neutral discussion of how utility bills should be split between roommates, logistical planning for upcoming friend visits and associated partying, and outfit planning for those visits and parties. The discussion is lively and filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. During this part of the conversation, 13A’s price vowel is quite low and her goat vowel is not especially high or front. In fact, her time smooths sit below the center line, but by looking at the superimposed data points5 we can see that there is a robust mix of positive and negative points throughout this time period. Around second 650, though, the discussion shifts from crop tops to recollecting

Speaker 13A

1

vowel GOAT 0

PRICE

−1

0

125

250

375

500

625

750

875 1000 1125 1250 1375 1500 1625 1750 1875 2000

Time

Figure 15.6 price and goat in speaker 13A.

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Figure 15.7 price in speakers 13A (solid lines/arrows) and 13B (dashed lines/arrows).

a previous party, and when 13B says, ‘I remember I brought out the champagne’ at 764 both friends exclaim ‘Oh my god’ in rapid succession. This reminder of what 13B cryptically calls ‘the whole thing about the champagne’ at 800 seconds kicks off shared recounting of a night that neither friend recalls fondly. From 841 to 888, 13A recounts the story of how some of their guests prevented her from sleeping in her own bed by claiming it for themselves; a particularly raised price vowel in this stretch occurs in the phrase, ‘Whatever, like, I don’t care.’ Her night takes a turn for the worse as she tries to go to bed in a different room and is interrupted by a male friend: ‘And he was like “Get on me” and I was like “You know I have a boyfriend.”’ At this point 13B takes over the conversation to tell two stories: from 939 to 988, the story of get-on-me guy saying casually cruel things about a mutual female friend on another occasion, then from 1014 to 1074, the story of another male friend popping her air mattress and refusing to take responsibility for it. They then rehash some social tensions and competing loyalties that arose during a visit from friends the previous weekend, with 13A producing her highest price of the whole conversation at 1094 when she says, ‘I didn’t want to hang out with them. It’s like, you’re annoying and boring, you smell like smoke.’ Speaker 13A here labels her feelings clearly: she is annoyed! And indeed, the entire stretch of conversation I’ve just outlined is a litany of moments of annoyance verging on indignation, from the annoyance of not getting to sleep in her own bed, to the annoyance of being clumsily hit on by a friend, to the annoyance of having to hang out with people she doesn’t like. 13B shares this annoyance, and in fact in her shift to the air mattress story it

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seems that her feelings of righteous indignation are the only thing linking the air mattress to the previous story. For both speakers, this stretch of conversation from approximately 800–1100 seconds is marked socio-interactionally by a piling on and mutual reinforcing of grievances, and linguistically by consistently raised price (and for Speaker 13A, fronted goat). While the conversation cools off in the annoyance dimension briefly at this point, annoyance returns around 1340 when they return to the roommate dispute. 13B voices a number of complaints about failures of chore sharing and inadequate cleaning. While 13A goes along with the venting briefly, particularly to reiterate her own complaint about bill splitting, at 1561 she makes a surprising conversational move in proposing: ‘Like, I think we should have a chore chart. Like, just for like basic stuff.’ Here the two friends briefly part ways both affectively and linguistically: 13A continues to vent about how much the other roommates’ laziness annoys her and exhibits her final, in fact highest, price-raising peak of the conversation, while 13B tries to shift to a constructive problem-solving approach while using much less raised price. These conversational events are annotated in Figure 15.7. There is a striking parallel here to another case study of how young female speakers use the price vowel. Eckert (2010) compares two speech episodes from an adolescent girl named Colette. In an episode where Colette ‘is focused on her struggle with the negative forces of preadolescence’ (Eckert 2010: 74), she uses many more raised and backed tokens of the price6 vowel than in an earlier episode where she presents herself as ‘a “nice” girl . . . a happy, lively tomboy’ (Eckert 2010: 74). Eckert even points out that parts of the negative episode ‘exuded annoyance’ (2010: 75). I will return to Eckert’s interpretation of this difference in the following section. 15.4.1

The Social Meaning of Raised price

It has been proposed previously that price in Philadelphia has a cluster of social meanings around toughness and masculinity (Conn 2005; Wagner 2008). The evidence here, though, is pointing us toward the use of raised price to index annoyance. I offer two additional observations that are consistent with this proposal. First, I extracted the highest price tokens across all speakers from the dataset. While most were scattered across speakers and times, I identified another temporally clustered set of extremely raised price tokens from speaker 4A. That cluster turned out to correspond to her complaints about a high school acquaintance I will call Katie Mae, who is known to both her and 4B. At second 772, 4A says: ‘Everyone loved Katie Mae and I was always like “She doesn’t even dress well.”’ At second 866: ‘Everyone was like so obsessed with her in high school and I was like, “She’s fine.”’ At second 888: ‘But I’ve also heard her be like incredibly mean.’ Here again is a spate of annoyance, not

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with Katie Mae but with Katie Mae’s admirers: ‘I just don’t think she’s like this ethereal wonderful fairy that everyone else makes her out to be’ (second 827). An additional hint that raised price is related to annoyance is an observation from a mini pseudo-matched-guise task that is not only exploratory in design but also has been run on only twelve participants (also young white Philadelphian women). I nevertheless mention it because when participants have their attention explicitly drawn to a particularly low instance of price in the phrase ‘The hotel was so nice’, seven out of twelve respondents checked off the box describing this young female speaker as ‘annoying’, and six as ‘condescending’. Both of these descriptors are rarely selected for clips highlighting other vowels, or for a clip featuring raised price. Although this observation is as preliminary as an observation could be and thus should be treated with great skepticism, it is intriguing to consider that if raised price indexes annoyance, its converse low price might be perceived as indexing not just the opposite of annoyance (perhaps patience) but the source of the annoyance: someone who is annoying. I include both these possibilities in the (partial) indexical field for price-raising that I propose in Figure 15.8. The indexical field in Figure 15.8 uncontroversially links masculinity with toughness (a specific ‘element of character’ that Eckert 2008: 465 notes is a ‘component of many styles’), but also with the affective stance of annoyance. One possibility suggested by this indexical field is that annoyance may be derived from toughness as a milder, more universal version of the agita suggested by tough masculinity. Another, not necessarily incompatible, possibility to consider is the interpretation put forward by Eckert (2010) that affectlinked variation may recruit sound-symbolic associations. She links the conventionalized sound-symbolic association between low F2 and larger size to

FEMININE

MASCULINE

ANNOYED

ANNOYING

/ PATIENT

TOUGH

WEAK

Figure 15.8 Hypothesized partial indexical field for price-raising; the social/ affective meanings in bold text in the center are those associated with raised price.

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Ohala’s more general notion of the frequency code, which ‘appears to move into the social arena through salient social differences associated with size’ (Eckert 2010: 70). In Eckert’s proposal, the adolescent girls in her study draw upon the symbolic meaning of low F2 (backed vowels) and low F1 (high vowels) to express the difficulties of growing up. They ‘clearly back /o/ and /ay/ to show a broad range of negative feelings including fear, sadness, annoyance, victimization and so on’ (Eckert 2010: 78). This account offers an appealing explanation for why, in its more extreme forms, raised price in Philadelphia also develops rounding and backing. However, it does not obviously help connect price to goat. Recall that price and goat exhibit striking microcovariation for speaker 13A. The direction of this effect is that raised price (low F1) correlates with fronted goat (high F2). I don’t know why that is, but I would suggest that the strong microcovariation should drive us to keep looking for some overlap between the social meaning of raised price and the social meaning of fronted goat – perhaps one that characterizes 13A’s, but not 13B’s, stylistic contribution to the socio-emotional ebb and flow of their dyadic conversation. 15.5

Quantitative Frontiers for Social Meaning

Podesva (2008) identifies the clustering of linguistic features in particular interactional moments as an important source of social meaning. To identify this kind of temporal clustering, or microcovariation, across multiple variables, we also need to be able to talk about the temporal dynamic profiles of single linguistic features. To this end, in Section 15.3, I proposed that instead of measuring a single ‘degree’ of dynamism, we should think about multiple dimensions along which we might characterize temporal dynamism for a single feature. The dimensions I proposed for preliminary investigation are the prevalence of temporal dynamism for a feature across speakers, the sensitivity of the feature in terms of how rapidly it fluctuates, and the extremity of its fluctuations in terms of distance from a speaker’s baseline. Building on an earlier proposal to use GAMMs to fit smoothed time splines (Tamminga et al. 2016a), I suggested that predicted values and estimated degrees of freedom from these models can be used in simple operationalizations of prevalence, sensitivity, and extremity. I showed that when we compare these measures across six ongoing vowel changes in white Philadelphia English, the changes do not differ systematically by their associated levels of social evaluation. The questions I raised about how different vowels in these conversations diverge on these measures in sometimessurprising ways illustrate that there is an entire domain of empirical questions we are not yet even asking, let alone answering. I hope that this case study has made it clear, though, that these are questions we can approach in a hypothesis-driven manner if we are willing to adopt new quantitative tools.

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Our ability to detect microcovariation has made less quantitative progress; here, as in Podesva (2008), it remains entirely dependent on our powers of visual inspection. Superimposing the GAMM-derived time smooths of different vowels is certainly very helpful in identifying microcovariation patterns. Being able to see clear intraspeaker microcovariation of goat and price in Section 15.4 served the useful analytical purpose of drawing our attention to the temporal dynamics of price for a particular speaker, and then in turn to the interspeaker microcovariation of price across two friends in conversation. By following the time smooths, I was able to look more closely at the conversational interactions characterized by raised price and subsequently suggest that, at least in this variety of English, it can index a speaker’s annoyance. This suggestion offers a clear next step: it should be possible to flip the direction of the analysis by identifying sites of annoyance in speech and asking whether those stretches of speech tend to have higher price. While the temporal dynamic approach proposed here is a far cry from a systematic quantitative method for handling microcovariation, but I hope it illustrates just how useful such a toolset would be. Eckert points to ‘the needs of regression analysis’ as a methodological constraint that has contributed to the subordination of social meaning in variationist sociolinguistic theory (2008: 453). While in practice this is undoubtedly the case, in principle it need not be: third-wave sociolinguistics does not need to cede the territory of quantitative analysis to standard variationist practice. Temporal dynamism and microcovariation are two areas in which we stand to make great gains by pressing forward with novel quantitative methods; Van Hofwegen’s (2017) use of cluster analysis to capture stylization provides another fine example. Although the steps I have taken in this chapter have been small, it is my hope that they help illustrate how the expansion of the quantitative techniques available to sociolinguists can subserve the study of social meaning that is at the heart of Eckert’s influence on the field. notes I extend a special thanks to Chris Ahern for his role in writing and publishing the code that I adapted for the analysis in this paper (https://github.com/christopherahern/GAMDH), as well as for many hours of discussion about the analysis of microtemporal dynamism. This paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1627972, ‘Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change’. 1. The terms attention and awareness in this literature are not necessarily congruent with the use of those terms in psychology. 2. I adopt a modified version of Wells’ (1982) lexical sets as vowel class labels. The modification is that I use tooth instead of goose to reflect the fact that the change I am discussing is limited to post-coronal context; tooth is intended as a shorthand

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3.

4.

5.

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for the post-coronal allophone, not the entire goose class. Similarly, I use face as shorthand for only the pre-consonantal allophone of face and price as shorthand for only the pre-voiceless allophone of price. I do not attempt to factor out priming in this analysis as we did in Tamminga et al. (2016a), mostly because it’s less clear what priming means for gradient measures like vowel quality. I use whole word frequency because the evidence on more complex frequency measures is sparse and equivocal, making it unclear how those measures might compare across words of different morphological complexity. These are predicted values from a GLMM that is identical in specification to the GAMM except for the exclusion of the time smooth; I include them to give an idea of how the observations are distributed and where particular outliers may be. In this case, not limited to the pre-voiceless allophone.

References Adank, Patti, Roel Smits, and Roeland van Hout. 2004. A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116(5), 3099–107. Becker, Kara. 2014. The social motivations of reversal: Raised BOUGHT in New York City English. Language in Society 43(4), 395–420. Brysbaert, Marc, and Boris New. 2009. Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavioral Research Methods 41(4), 977–90. Conn, Jeff. 2005. Of ‘moice’ and men: The evolution of male-led sound change. Ph.D. dissertation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Coupland, Nikolas. 1980. Style-shifting in a Cardiff work-setting. Language in Society 9(1), 1–12. Eckert, Penelope. 2001. Style and social meaning. In P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 119–26. Eckert, Penelope. 2003. The meaning of style. Texas Linguistic Forum 47: Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin, 41–53. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (4), 453–76. Eckert, Penelope. 2010. Affect, sound symbolism, and variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2), Article 9. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 87–100. Fruehwald, Josef. 2013. The phonological influence on phonetic change. Ph.D. dissertation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Guy, Gregory R. 2013. The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52, 63–71. Hubbell, Allan Forbes. 1950. The Pronunciation of English in New York City. New York: King’s Crown Press.

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Kendall, Tyler. 2009. Speech rate, pause, and linguistic variation: An examination through the sociolinguistic archive and analysis project. Ph.D. dissertation. Durham, NC: Duke University. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19(3), 273–309. Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In J. Baugh and J. Sherzer (eds.), Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 28–53. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Labov, William. 2001a. The anatomy of style-shifting. In P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 85–108. Labov, William. 2001b. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Labov, William. 2006 [1966]. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William. 2010. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin, DE: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald. 2013. One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89(1), 30–65. Podesva, Robert J. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. Texas Linguistic Forum 51: Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin 15, 134–43. Prichard, Hilary, and Meredith Tamminga. 2012. The impact of higher education on local phonology. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18(2), Article 11. Rickford, John R., and Faye McNair-Knox. 1994. Addressee- and topic-influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. In D. Biber and E. Finegan (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 235–76. Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE Program Suite [Forced alignment and vowel extraction]. Sharma, Devyani, and Ben Rampton. 2011. Lectal focusing in interaction: A new methodology for the study of superdiverse speech. Queen Mary’s Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics 2, 1–22. Sonderegger, Morgan, Max Bane, and Peter Graff. 2017. The medium-term dynamics of accents on reality television. Language 93(3), 598–640. Tamminga, Meredith, Christopher Ahern, and Aaron Ecay. 2016a. Generalized additive mixed models for intraspeaker variation. Linguistics Vanguard, 2(s1). Tamminga, Meredith, Laurel MacKenzie, and David Embick. 2016b. The dynamics of variation in individuals. Linguistic Variation 16(2), 300–36. Van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2017. The systematicity of style: Investigating the full range of variation in everyday speech. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

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Wagner, Suzanne Evans. 2008. Linguistic change and stabilization in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Ph.D. dissertation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wolfson, Nessa. 1976. Speech events and natural speech: Some implications for sociolinguistic methodology. Language in Society 5(2), 189–209. Wood, Simon N. 2006. Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Wood, Simon N. 2011. Fast stable restricted maximum likelihood and marginal likelihood estimation of semiparametric generalized linear models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 73(1), 3–36.

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16

The Role of the Body in Language Change Robert J. Podesva

16.1

Introduction

Sociolinguistic research has established that bodies carry stylistic meaning (Bucholtz & Hall 2016: 179–81). For example, Eckert (2000) has shown that the realization of the Northern Cities vowel shift among adolescents in suburban Detroit is semiotically inseparable from their choice of jeans (Eckert 2000). Similarly, the California vowel shift, as produced by preadolescents in Northern California, is inseparable from how kids adorn and move their bodies by trying out ‘nail polish, lip gloss, hair style, clothing, and new walks’ (Eckert 2006 [1996]: 195). Non-vocalic resources also enter into stylistic dialogue with embodied practices. Calder (2017) demonstrates that drag queens in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood systematically alter the spectral properties of /s/ as they get into drag by adorning themselves with make-up, wigs, and nails. Pratt (2016, 2017) additionally argues that it is not only how the body is adorned, but the way that speakers carry their bodies, that styles their speech. In her study of students at a Bay Area high school of the performing arts, she found that students’ posture and speed of walking down the hall, as well as how they carry toughness on their bodies more generally, correlate with linguistic practices like creaky voice (Pratt 2016), the placement of the merged lot and thought vowel, and /l/ velarization (Pratt 2017). In spite of these findings, and the generally accepted view that the body plays an important stylistic role, relatively few scholars have embarked on multimodal investigations of variation, perhaps because stylistic agency has been characterized as incoherent (Guy & Hinskens 2016), unconstrained (Bell 2016), or even outside the purview of variation proper. In this chapter, I argue that bodily practices carry social meaning, and that embodied meaning is not merely stylistic, but central to variation analysis, as it can influence change. My focus is variation in the realization of goat, which is fronting across the state of California (Luthin 1987; Hall-Lew 2009; Eckert 2011; Podesva 2011; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Podesva, D’Onofrio, Van Hofwegen, & Kim 2015; D’Onofrio, Pratt, & Van Hofwegen 2019; Hall-Lew, Cardoso, & 363

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Davies, this volume). I pay particular attention to the connection between the realization of this vowel and two forms of embodiment – smiling and the adoption of an open-jaw articulatory setting. By the term embodiment, I am referring to the semiotically meaningful use of the body. Though this definition is meant to emphasize agency, individuals are constrained by a number of factors, including the form that their bodies take (though people do of course have some degree of agency regarding their bodily forms), how their bodies are socially interpreted, the physical environments in which they act, and the discourse in which they participate. Embodiment encompasses a wide range of phenomena, including gesture (pointing), hexis (curved shoulders), posture (slouching), physical stance (orientation of body toward a game), gaze (looking up), actions (taking a sip of water), and adornment (painting fingernails). My discussion here will be limited to a single part of the body: the mouth. The mouth is one of few body parts that linguists have investigated significantly, as it plays a central role in the production of spoken language. But of course, the mouth serves a variety of functions apart from speech organ. We use it to chew food; some of us breathe through our mouths (an embodied practice which has taken on additional indexicalities through terms like ‘mouthbreather’); the mouth can be used to show affection, romantic or otherwise (through kisses or sexual activity); and it can be used to express affect (through smiling or opening one’s mouth in exasperation). Although we sometimes engage in these nonspeech activities in the absence of language, we also often do them while talking. Is it possible that these nonspeech activities might imbue speech with additional meaning not conveyed by the speech in the absence of such embodied practices? It is certainly the case that smiling has acoustic consequences for the realization of vowels, which enable listeners to perceive when speakers are smiling (Drahota, Costall, & Reddy 2008). I will argue in this chapter that smiling, as an expression of affect, is tightly intertwined with the realization of the goat vowel. But importantly, embodiment operates on a variety of timescales, not only through ephemeral practices like smiling, but also through perduring activities. In principle, any ephemeral embodied practice could be made duratively, even smiling (in the case of a smiley person, for whom smiling is viewed more as a characteristic of the individual than as an indication of their affective positioning toward a stance object in a specific interaction). To show that more durative articulatory postures may also imbue vocalic variation with meaning, I will consider the possible effects of an open-jaw articulatory setting on vocalic variation, as first discussed by Pratt and D’Onofrio (2017). Although open jaws can function duratively, so too can they be used as momentary resources for doing affective work like expressing exasperation. While I discuss the effects of both smiling and a fixed open jaw in this chapter, I do not intend to suggest any connection

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between the two. For the purposes of this study, I am treating them as independent embodied phenomena. My focus on goat is motivated by its distinctive geographic and social patterning in the United States. As Hall-Lew, Cardoso, and Davies (this volume) note, even though fronting of goose is observed across the United States, fronting of its mid vowel counterpart goat is more limited, having been observed primarily in the South (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006), the West (HallLew 2005) and in California in particular. It is firmly established that this vowel is undergoing fronting, as substantiated by an abundance of apparent time data (Luthin 1987; Hall-Lew 2009; Eckert 2011; Podesva 2011; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Podesva et al. 2015; D’Onofrio, Pratt, & Van Hofwegen 2019). In addition to strongly correlating with age, goat fronting has been found to correlate with gender (Hall-Lew 2009; Hall-Lew et al., this volume; Podesva et al. 2015), ethnicity (Hall-Lew 2009; Hall-Lew et al., this volume), and urban vs rural orientation (Podesva et al. 2015). It also patterns stylistically. Boyd, Elliott, Fruehwald, Hall-Lew, and Lawrence (2015), for example, show that speakers use fronter variants of goat in self-recordings and reading tasks than in interview speech. And Van Hofwegen (2017) additionally shows that fronter goat tokens are produced in moments of stylization, when they are realized with longer glide trajectories, longer durations, wider pitch ranges, and increased intensities. Stylistic patterning like this surfaces because speakers draw on the range of social meanings indexed by front variants of the vowel, meanings that are recruited to do things like engage in preadolescent drama (Eckert 2011), to construct fun personas (Podesva 2011), and to lay claims to their authenticity as users of their local variety (Hall-Lew et al., this volume). This chapter aims to further past efforts to connect goat fronting to the expression of affect. I additionally attend to another dimension in vowel quality – vowel height. As I will show, the fronting of goat is not independent of its lowering. 16.2

Study 1: Fronting and Smiling

In this first study, I will delve into the relation between goat fronting and the ephemeral embodied practice of smiling. Before discussing the connection between the realization of goat and smiling in particular, a word about the more general relation between vowel quality and affect is required. A handful of variationists have analyzed the situated use of specific vowel qualities to show that higher formant frequencies, especially F2, correlates with expressions of positive affect (Johnson 2006; Eckert 2010, 2011; Wong 2014). Eckert (2010) examines the speech of Collette, a preadolescent in Northern California, and compares her use of price in what Eckert glosses as ‘nice’ and ‘negative’ styles. Relative to negative tokens, the quality of the nucleus for nice tokens is fronter on the whole. Eckert argues that higher formant frequencies are sound symbolically indexing

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positive affect (or, on the flip side of the coin, that lower resonant frequencies are indexing negative affect). Wong (2014) zooms even further into the specific discourse contexts in which fronted goose is used by a young Chinese American, Irene. While some of Irene’s goose vowels are backed and some fronted, one particular token of the word ‘poop’ is fronted to a much greater extent, even entering the front of the vowel space. Wong argues that this token, uttered in the phrase, ‘Shit means poop’, is fronted to offset the social offense of uttering a taboo word. 16.2.1

Smiling

While the social meaning of higher F2 is almost certainly rooted in acoustics, it could also be rooted in articulation and dimensions of articulation influenced by the expression of affect, like smiling. Smiling serves many social functions, but one of its most basic functions is to convey happiness, whether genuine or not. Ekman, Friesman, and Ancoli (1980) asked subjects to watch a video and then report on their emotional states, after which their facial expressions were measured. They found that people who smiled more were more likely to have reported being happy, and also that the magnitude of the smile correlated with the intensity of the happiness. While smiling conveys affective meaning even when speakers watch interactions as passive observers, as in Ekman et al.’s (1980) study, it also serves as a dynamic resource for affectively positioning oneself from one moment of interaction to the next. Smiling is relevant to the discussion of vowel fronting because it represents an alternative path to a higher F2. In the case of actual fronting, whereby the tongue body is advanced, the more anterior tongue position shortens the front resonating cavity of the vocal tract, yielding a higher F2. In contrast, during a smile, the lips are retracted, which shortens the front cavity from the front rather than back of the cavity. This has similar acoustic consequences to tongue fronting, at least with respect to F2. Thus, we need to ask the question, whether fronter vowels index positive affect because of their acoustic properties or because speakers produce fronter-sounding vowels because they are smiling. Of course, these analyses are not at odds with one another, but it would be instructive to know what role smiling might play in structuring fronting practices. 16.2.2

Methods

To investigate the connection between fronting and smiling, an audiovisual corpus of native speakers of American English engaging in unscripted dyadic conversation was collected. Recordings took place in an Interactional Sociophonetics Laboratory. The lab has the acoustical specifications of a sound recording booth but is staged like a living room to encourage speakers

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to produce relatively more vernacular speech. Each participant was separately recorded with a wireless lavalier microphone and by an inconspicuous video camera. Speakers’ images were captured head-on to enable an automated computer vision analysis of video recordings. An example of a screenshot appears in Figure 16.1. The living room corpus currently has data for approximately 150 speakers. This chapter reports on the speech of forty-two speakers from the Western United States, mostly from California. Of these forty-two speakers, twenty-six are female and sixteen male. The sample skews toward the young end – twentyfive are undergraduates aged eighteen to twenty-two, while seventeen are older adults, mostly in their twenties and early thirties. Given the distribution of the sample, gender and age were the only group-level social factors considered in the analysis. Nevertheless, the sample is reasonably diverse in terms of other dimensions of identity: half of the speakers are people of color, and ten speakers do not identify as straight. The data for this chapter comprise about twenty-one hours of speech. Recordings were transcribed in ELAN (Lausberg & Sloetjes 2009) and aligned using the University of Pennsylvania forced aligner (Rosenfelder et al. 2011), and a number of acoustic measurements were collected every 10 ms via Praat (Boersma 2001) script. These included various measures of vowel quality, pitch, phonation, and voice quality. Each acoustic measure was then reduced to the median value per vowel token. We excluded a number of phonological environments that obscure accurate segment boundary detection: preceding vowels, glides, /r/, and following vowels, glides, liquids. All remaining stressed vowels lasting at least 75 ms (N = 23,311) were included in the dataset and normalized according to Lobanov’s (1971) method. Of these, 1,702 exemplified the goat vowel.

Figure 16.1 Screenshot from dyadic recording illustrating capture of head-on images for each participant.

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For the visual analysis, we were specifically interested in the embodied practice of smiling. Manual smiling annotation can be subject to human error, not to mention extremely time-consuming (Barthel & Quené 2015), so we used a classifier to automate smile detection. The classifier, also used for the analysis in Podesva, Callier, Voigt, and Jurafsky (2015), was trained on a corpus of head-on photographs hand-annotated for whether or not speakers were smiling. Each video frame from our recordings, all of which captured the speaker head-on, was run through the classifier to determine the incidence of smiling during each vowel. About 45 per cent of these tokens occurred in phrases with some amount of smiling. Regarding statistical methods, a mixed-effects linear regression model was constructed on the Lobanov-normalized F2 of goat. Speaker, word, and preceding and following segment were included as random factors. In addition to treating linguistic environment as random effects, the model attends to the allophonic vowel class in which goat occurs: tote represents the class of words in which the vowel follows a coronal sound, whereas goat refers to all other environments, except when it occurs before laterals. Other linguistic factors considered were segment duration, phrase position, and the (Lobanov-normalized) frequency of F1. The latter was included in order to investigate whether fronting and lowering covary. The social predictors were gender and age, as well as the incidence of smiling, which was considered at both the segmental and phrase levels. That is, I examined whether there was an effect of speakers smiling during the target vowel in question, as well as during the phrase that contained the target vowel. 16.2.3

Results and Discussion

Table 16.1 summarizes the mixed-effects linear regression model on the F2 of goat. The realization of the vowel is conditioned by a number of linguistic factors, such as duration of goat and the place of articulation of adjacent consonants. Duration negatively correlates with F2, such that longer vowels have a lower F2. In other words, longer duration enables speakers to more fully achieve a posterior articulatory target. There was also an effect of phonological environment, such that tote had a higher F2 than goat, as expected. F2 was also found to correlate with F1, such that higher F2 was predicted by a higher F1. In other words, speakers who front goat are also lowering it. I will return to the significance of this pattern. We also observed an effect of speaker gender, according to which male speakers produced higher F2 (or fronter goat) than female speakers. This runs counter to what is typically observed for changes in progress, which are usually led by female speakers. But it is worth noting that Podesva, D’Onofrio, Van Hofwegen, and Kim (2015) observe the same pattern in their study of Redding, at the northern end of California’s Central Valley.

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Table 16.1 Summary of mixed-effects linear regression model of goat f2 Term

Estimate

Std Error

DFDen

t Ratio

Prob > |t|

Intercept duration (log) vowel [goat] vs tote F1 (normalized) gender [female] smiles during vowel [TRUE] smiles during phrase [TRUE]

−1.404 −0.277 −0.144 0.377 −0.117 0.074 −0.04

0.130 0.05 0.053 0.033 0.037 0.038 0.023

265.8 1,652.7 13 1,683.2 37.7 1,661.1 1,323.9

−10.79 −5.56 −2.71 11.57 −3.16 1.96 −1.75

< .0001* < .0001* 0.0179* < .0001* 0.0031* 0.05* 0.0805

TOTE

GOAT

–0.4

–0.6

–0.8

–1

–1.2

Lobanov-Normalized F2

Figure 16.2 Effect of smiling on goat f2.

Finally, an effect of smiling is evident, with smiled goat tokens being realized with a higher F2 than non-smiled ones. Figure 16.2 depicts the mean normalized F2 as a function of smiling for both goat and tote. F2 is plotted with the axes reversed, so that values closer to the left represent fronter vowels, as in a traditional vowel space representation. For both allophonic environments, smiled vowels exhibit higher F2 than vowels that are not smiled. tote and goat are plotted separately in order to provide a sense of the magnitude of the effect of smiling; there was no observed statistical interaction between allophonic class and smiling. 16.2.4

Interim Conclusions

To summarize this first study on the connection between smiling and goat fronting, we have observed that both goat and tote exhibit higher F2 when they are smiled. But this connection between more strongly California-shifted

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vowels and smiling is not just a consequence of speech articulation. In an investigation of the same dataset, Podesva (2016) reports that the front lax vowels (kit, dress, and trap) are lower, and thus more advanced with respect to the California vowel shift, when they occur in phrases in which speakers are smiling. Of course, this pattern cannot be viewed as an articulatory consequence of smiling, which should not have a lowering effect on vowels.1 Taken together, these findings suggest that some sound changes – like the California Vowel Shift, which includes the fronting of goat – may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. I want to end this section by drawing attention to the finding that fronting was predicted by lowering. In other words, even though we typically characterize the goat vowel as undergoing fronting, fronting coincides with lowering, or higher F1 – an acoustic quality produced not by smiling, but through an altogether different articulatory configuration. 16.3

Study 2: Lowering and Open-Jaw Setting

16.3.1

Open-Jaw Setting

This second study examines patterns of goat lowering and its relation to the durative embodied practice of the open-jaw setting. My proposal builds on Pratt and D’Onofrio’s (2017) work on mass-mediated portrayals of stereotypical Californians. They find that parodic performances of Californian types often include similar embodied practices, with one recurring above all others: the open mouth. They show that an open-jaw setting is evident in a number of instantiations of the Valley Girl type, but also in representations of male types, such as the surfer dude. In addition to appearing in film, these open-mouth representations of Californians appear in more overtly commoditized contexts, such as advertisements for a ‘surfer dude hair wig’ (Pratt & D’Onofrio 2017: 10), which illustrate both how strongly ingrained such images are, as well as their wide circulation. Pratt and D’Onofrio illustrate that the open-jaw setting is not wholly separable from linguistic practice. They examined the actress, Kristen Wiig’s portrayal of a contemporary Valley Girl type in the series of Saturday Night Live skits, The Californians. As shown in Figure 16.3, Wiig employs the open-jaw setting not only when not speaking, as in the screenshot on the right, but also during speech, as in the image capture on the left, taken while Wiig’s character is uttering the name, ‘Trey’.2 Remarkably, Wiig adopts the open-jaw setting even more when her character is talking (84 per cent of her total talking time) than when she’s not talking (60 per cent of the time when not speaking). The open-jaw setting for this character is not only an embodied style, but part of a linguistic style. Pratt and D’Onofrio (2017) compared Wiig’s vocalic

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Figure 16.3 Open-jaw setting during speech (left) and when not speaking (right) (Pratt & D’Onofrio 2017: 19).

performance of the Californians character to a different, but equally stylized, non-Californian character on SNL and found that the Californian exhibited many of the hallmarks of the California Vowel Shift. This raises the question, are Californians using the open-jaw setting in real-life, non-parodic language? 16.3.2

Consequences for Vowel System

If Californians are adopting the articulatory setting of the open jaw, presumably for nonlinguistic purposes (as Pratt & D’Onofrio 2017 argue), there should be observable consequences for the vowel system, namely lowering. It is well known that the front lax vowels are lowering (and backing) (Hinton et al. 1987; Eckert 2008; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Boyd et al. 2015; Podesva et al. 2015; Podesva 2016). But if speakers are adopting the open-jaw setting for purely social or stylistic reasons, lowering should not be confined to the very specific phonological category of the front lax vowels. In other words, the open-jaw setting should be blind to linguistic structure. In the rest of this section, I will show that lowering has reflexes for the vowel system as a whole and is not confined to the front lax vowels. I draw on two lines of evidence: changes in the overall shape of the vowel space, and lowering patterns among vowels that are not expected to lower: fleece, which is reported to be stable, and goat, which is generally characterized as undergoing fronting. First, the shape of the overall vowel space has changed over four generations in California in ways that are consistent with the adoption of an open-jaw setting (D’Onofrio, Pratt, & Van Hofwegen 2019). D’Onofrio et al. examine the vowel systems of seventy-two speakers from four communities in the Central Valley and show that the vowel space has changed from the traditional

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trapezoidal shape (in the case of the oldest generation of speakers, the Silent Generation) to a narrower parallelogram (in the case of the youngest generation, Millennials). They argue that the vowel space changes evident from one generation to the next are not so much the result of a chain shift (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006), as is traditionally accepted, since the movements of particular vowels do not seem to have transpired in an ordered way; instead they seem to be motivated by a drive to achieve a more compressed vowel space. Millennials are backing the front vowels, fronting the back vowels, and also lowering. The result of these movements is a more compressed vowel space that utilizes the height dimension more than the front-back dimension. Of course, this is precisely the vowel space that we would expect among speakers adopting a relatively more open-jaw setting. If this open-jaw setting is more durative than other embodied practices like smiling, maintaining it should mean that other vowels in the system would be affected, not just the vowels that are characterized as undergoing lowering in the California Vowel Shift. D’Onofrio, Pratt, and Van Hofwegen (2019) report that fleece is one of these vowels. As a tense vowel, it should be stable, but in fact, it has been lowering in apparent time. So even the highest vowels are lowering in California. It should be noted that face does not show evidence of lowering, but I would suggest that movements at the top and bottom of the vowel space, which define a speaker’s articulatory limits, are most crucial to the proposal. We therefore see evidence that among the front vowels, both the highest vowel class (fleece) and the lowest vowel class (trap) are lowering. But what about the back vowels? In Study 1, we saw that speakers were lowering goat at the same time that they were fronting it. But that sample was not diverse in terms of speaker age, so it is unclear whether lowering patterns have changed over time, a question taken up in Study 2. 16.3.3

Methods

To investigate this question, I considered the same speakers included in Pratt et al.’s (2017) study. This includes seventy-two white speakers from four communities in the Central Valley: Redding, Sacramento, Merced, and Bakersfield. From each community, we analyzed sociolinguistic interviews with eighteen speakers, nine men and nine women. Each group of nine consisted of people spanning the adult life-course, from eighteen to over ninety years old. Interviews were orthographically transcribed and aligned with the University of Pennsylvania forced aligner (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). For each speaker, we extracted twenty-five tokens for each vowel class, including no more than three tokens per lemma, and all alignments were adjusted manually. As was the case for Study 1, only stressed vowels lasting at least 75 ms were considered, and a number of phonological environments were excluded to

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ensure more accurate boundary detection: preceding vowels, glides, and /r/, and following vowels, glides, and liquids. Measurements of the first three formants were taken at vowel midpoint, along with vowel duration, via Praat (Boersma 2001). All vowel measurements were hand-corrected, after which the entire dataset (N = 16,145, of which 4,058 represent the goat or tote classes) was normalized according to Lobanov’s (1971) method. To identify potential patterns in formant dynamism, measurements were also taken at fifty equidistant points over the course of each token. A mixed-effects linear regression model on the Lobanov-normalized F2 of goat was fitted to the data. Speaker, word, and preceding and following segment were included as random factors. The linguistic factors included as potential predictors were allophonic class, segment duration, and (Lobanovnormalized) frequency of F1. The social factors under consideration were age, gender, field site, and all potential interactions. 16.3.4

Results and Discussion

Table 16.2 summarizes the mixed-effects linear regression model on the F2 of goat. Patterns are nearly the same as those found in Study 1. Longer tokens of goat have lower F2 (are backer), and tote has higher F2 (is fronter) than goat, as expected. Importantly, we also replicate the lowering finding from Study 1: vowels that undergo fronting also undergo lowering. The only difference between Study 2 and Study 1 is that speaker gender did not emerge as a significant predictor in the larger, more diverse dataset of Study 2. Recall that the primary reason for examining a larger dataset with greater age variation was to examine whether lowering patterns were undergoing change. The data reveal no evidence that goat is lowering in apparent time (a mixedeffects regression model on F1 reveals that it is fact raising). Nevertheless, and importantly, we find strong evidence that the connection between fronting and lowering has changed over time. I therefore consider lowering in the context of

Table 16.2 Summary of mixed-effects linear regression model on F2 of goat. Term

Estimate

Std Error

DFDen

t Ratio

Prob > |t|

Intercept duration (log) vowel [goat] vs tote F1 (normalized) age age * F1 (normalized) age * vowel [goat]

0.4302 −0.2048 −0.1165 0.2876 −0.0046 0.0028 0.0007

0.1015 0.0164 0.0324 0.0127 0.0010 0.0006 0.0003

514.4 4,013.0 15.8 4,015.9 68.9 3,985.6 3,973.8

4.24 −12.48 −3.59 22.71 −4.76 4.73 2.56

< .0001* < .0001* 0.0025* < .0001* < .0001* < .0001* 0.0104*

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fronting, the primary direction of goat movement, in the remainder of this section. We see that speaker age has a significant effect on goat fronting, both on its own and in interaction with other factors. First of all, a main effect of age reveals that older speakers produce goat with lower F2; in other words, younger speakers are fronting goat. Age interacts with the phonological environment, such that the age effect on fronting is slightly stronger for goat than it is for tote. Finally, there is a significant interaction between age and lowering, as illustrated in Figure 16.4. F1 and F2 are plotted with reversed axes in the figure, as in a traditional vowel chart. Each successive panel from left to right shows the next younger generation, from the Silent Generation to Generation Z (which I use to refer to speakers born after 1995). Regardless of generation, we see a positive correlation between F2 (fronting) and F1 (lowering). That is, fronter tokens of goat tend to be lower. But the interaction between age and F1 reveals that the strength of this effect varies by generation, and in a systematic way. The correlation between fronting and lowering is strongest among the oldest speakers, and the magnitude of the effect weakens with each successive generation. In other words, when older speakers fronted goat, it was also lowered, while younger speakers’ goat was more likely to be fronted even when it was not lowered. It should be noted that even though Figure 16.4 bins speakers into one of five discrete generations, the statistical model treats age as a continuous rather than categorical variable. I suggest that, at time T, when goat fronting was first introduced by older speakers (when they were young), its social meaning was (of course) not yet established. While truly fronted tokens of goat are absent in the Silent Generation, Figure 16.4 shows that incipient fronting can be observed among the Baby Boomers. For them, the meaning of fronted goat was only legible in its association with the visible, and more transparently meaningful, open-jaw setting. But in subsequent generations, at time T+1, fronted goat had been cooccurring with the open jaw setting for decades. Its social meaning is consequently more fully conventionalized among Millennials and Generation Z. Fronting is less reliant on the open-jaw setting for speakers to make sense of it. In other words, fronted goat has become legible as an acoustic quality unto itself, having progressed from a multimodal sign to a linguistic sign. This is not to say that fronted goat does not still often co-occur with an open-jaw – the data show that there is a significant correlation even among the youngest speakers. But fronting and lowering no longer need to correlate to be interpretable, which is why the strength of the association has diminished. The foregoing discussion has treated fronting and lowering as two separate phenomena, even though they occur over the course of a single vowel segment. Formant trajectories for goat offer independent support for conceptualizing fronting and lowering as distinct phenomena. A number of speakers exhibit

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Lobanov-Normalized F1

1.2

1.0

0.8

0.6

0.4

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0.0

–0.2

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0.5

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Lobanov-Normalized F2

–0.5 –1.0 –1.5

Baby boomers

Figure 16.4 Interaction between F1 (lowering) and age (generation).

0.5

Silent Gen

0.5

0.0

–0.5 –1.0 –1.5

Gen Z

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V-shaped trajectories for goat, whereby the vowel is fronted at the outset, then lowers considerably, before raising to a high back offglide. Three such examples appear in Figure 16.5, which shows formant trajectories for the words ‘ago’, ‘noticed’, and ‘knows’, uttered by younger women in three different communities. In each panel, the mean values for the vowels occupying the corners of the vowel space (fleece, trap, lot, and pool, which represents the goose vowel when followed by /l/, an environment in which the otherwise fronting vowel is held back) are provided for reference. The lowering evident in each of these examples takes the tongue ‘off course’ from the higher nucleus and offglide, suggesting that there is a low articulatory target. The examples illustrate not only the excursion of the tongue, but also the fact that the tongue remains in a low position for a relatively long period of time, as indicated by the density of dots at the lowest point in the vowels’ trajectories. Realizations of the sort appearing in Figure 16.5 could be captured in an Articulatory Phonology approach (Browman & Goldstein 1992), where fronting is achieved by a tongue body gesture, and lowering is achieved by a separate jaw lowering gesture. V-shaped trajectories like these would then be the result of phasing the jaw lowering gesture slightly after the tongue body gesture. While I have emphasized extensive patterns of lowering across vowel classes in California, one (sub-)class of vowels resists lowering: the trap vowel preceding nasals (Eckert 2008). This vowel class, variously called (ae)N, ban, and tram(p), exhibits robust raising, at least in the speech of white speakers. It appears, then, that there are two classes of articulatory targets. Targets like those responsible for the lowering of goat in Figure 16.5, are an indirect consequence of adopting articulatory settings (like an open jaw posture). As such, they apply indiscriminately to all vowels in the system. Other targets, like those responsible for the raising of tram, apply to specific vowel classes or allophonic environments (e.g., trap before nasals, goose before laterals). It appears that targets of the latter type are given priority in the phonetic implementation of speech. 16.3.5

Interim Conclusions

We have seen evidence that the more durative embodied practice of the openjaw setting has had consequences for the vowel system in California. First of all, speakers are utilizing the height dimension more than the front-back dimension in California. Second, it is not only the front lax vowels that are undergoing lowering, and lowering is at play even in cases of fronting, as we saw for goat. Crucially, I argued that lowering has played a stylistic role and that it has been motivated by social, rather than linguistic, pressures. By characterizing the role of the body as stylistic, I do not mean to undercut its

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500

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noticed 2000 f2

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Bakersfield, female, 22

Figure 16.5 V-shaped trajectories for goat indicating extensive lowering.

ago

Merced, female, 37 500 600 f1 700 800 900

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importance. On the contrary, my claim is that stylistic, embodied practice has fundamentally influenced the trajectory of goat fronting. 16.4

Conclusion

To conclude, the body offers one modality through which speakers convey meaning both from moment to moment (through expressions of affect like smiling) and duratively (through facial postures like an open jaw). These bodily practices occur alongside, and indeed can influence, linguistic behavior. Variationists need to bear such bodily practices in mind when seeking explanations for orderly heterogeneity, rather than relegating them to issues of stylistic agency. Regarding the issue of change, forms of embodiment like the ones examined here, should be considered as potential sources of variation. Both adopting an open-jaw setting and smiling are forms of embodiment that have acoustic consequences. Engaging in these embodied practices, especially in unexpected linguistic environments introduces new kinds of variation. For example, an open-jaw posture during a non-low vowel yields lower vowels (higher F1) than listeners are typically accustomed to hearing. Similarly, smiling during the pronunciation of a back vowel introduces higher F2 frequencies than listeners are accustomed to hearing, thus opening up new acoustic possibilities and moving the exemplar space into new territory. Thus, forms of embodiment should be considered as a potential source of sound change. Embodied practices like these can also work to maintain changes that are already underway. It is unclear whether goat fronting originated in moments when people were smiling or expressing positive affect. But even if goat fronting preceded the feature’s connection to fronting, the act of smiling gives rise to an even higher F2. The act of smiling serves to maintain fronter variants of goat. Both forms of embodiment examined in this chapter are produced with a part of the body – the mouth – that is part of the speech apparatus, so engaging in such practices has acoustic consequences. However, I am not claiming that the meaningful use of other parts of the body could not also influence trajectories of change. Consider the case of a manual gesture that is indexically associated with femininity. Suppose such a gesture typically occurs alongside a particular linguistic variant, phonetic or otherwise. It is likely that the embodied feature’s gendered meaning would influence the trajectory of who adopts the linguistic feature. Whether this hypothetical case represents an actual dimension along which change transpires is a question for future investigation. But if the line of reasoning is on the right track, one would expect to find systematic embodied practices during the earlier stages of linguistic innovation.

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The proposal advanced in this chapter assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful, and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derives from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change. notes The collection of audiovisual data was supported by a grant from the Roberta Bowman Denning Initiative in the Digital Humanities. Data collection for the Voices of California Project was supported by Stanford University and the Richard A. Karp Foundation. Many thanks to audiences at Cornell University, Sheffield University, University of Nevada, Reno, University of California, Merced, Brown University, the Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and the University of California, Berkeley for feedback on segments of the work presented here. Thanks also to participants in a seminar on Language and Embodiment (Rebecca Baglini, Meg Cychosz, Chantal Gratton, Aurora Kane, Judy Kroo, Emily Lake, Daisy Leigh, Matthew Palmer), and Annette D’Onofrio, Penny Eckert, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katherine Hilton, Sunwoo Jeong, Emma Moore, Teresa Pratt, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Rob Voigt, Rob Xu, and Lal Zimman for discussions of segments of this material. 1. An astute reviewer points out that the global shortening of the vocal tract, were it to have consequences for F1, would result in a higher F1 (i.e., lower-sounding articulation) – precisely the observed result. The analysis advanced here assumes that smiling, which occurs at the very front of the vocal tract, will primarily influence F2 (the front cavity resonance) and have minimal effects on F1 (the back cavity resonance). F1 should be influenced mainly by tongue position and larynx height, neither of which is necessarily disturbed by smiling. 2. A reviewer observes that Wiig’s lips are somewhat retracted in this open mouth posture, which may have similar acoustic consequences to those observed in Study 1. Yet the affective valence of Wiig’s expression differs from that underlying most smiles. More work is needed to investigate the prevalence of different embodied expressions of affect and their acoustic consequences.

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Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: The University of Glasgow: paper 800. Browman, Catherine P., and Louis Goldstein. 1992. Articulatory Phonology: An overview. Phonetica 49, 155–80. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2016. Embodied sociolinguistics. In Nick Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 173–97. Calder, Jeremy. 2017. Handsome women: A semiotics of non-normative gender in SoMa, San Francisco. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. D’Onofrio, Annette, Teresa Pratt, and Janneke Van Hofwegen. 2019. Compression in the California Vowel Shift: Tracking generational sound change in California’s Central Valley. Language Variation and Change 31, 193–217. Drahota, Amy, Alan Costall, and Vasuvedi Reddy. 2008. The vocal communication of different kinds of smile. Speech Communication 50, 278–87. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope. 2006 [1996]. Vowels and nailpolish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. In Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick (eds.), The Language and Sexuality Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 189–95. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism 12, 25–42. Eckert, Penelope. 2010. Affect, sound symbolism, and variation. The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2), 70–80. Eckert, Penelope. 2011. Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market. American Speech 86, 85–97. Ekman, Paul, Wallace V. Friesman, and Sonia Ancoli. 1980. Facial signs of emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, 1125–34. Guy, Gregory, and Frans Hinskens. 2016. Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and speech communities. Lingua 172–3, 1–9. Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2005. One shift, two groups: When fronting alone is not enough. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 10(2). Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2009. Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Hinton, Leanne, Birch Moonwomon, Sue Bremner et al. 1987. It’s not just the valley girls: A study of California English. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 117–28. Johnson, Steve. 2006. Shift happens: Effects of personality on the Northern Cities Shift. Colloquium presented in the Department of Linguistics, Michigan State University. Kennedy, Robert, and James Grama. 2012. Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis. American Speech 87, 39–56. Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. Atlas of North American English. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lausberg, H., and H. Sloetjes. 2009. Coding gestural behavior with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. Behavior Research Methods 41, 841–9.

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Lobanov, Boris M. 1971. Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49, 606–8. Luthin, Herbert. 1987. The story of California /ow/: The coming-of-age of English in California. In K. Denning et al. (eds.), Variation in Language: NWAV-XV at Stanford. Stanford, CA: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, 312–24. Podesva, Robert J. 2011. The California Vowel Shift and gay identity. American Speech 86, 32–51. Podesva, Robert J. 2016. Affect structures variation in vowel quality: The influence of smiling on the front lax vowels in California. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Vancouver, BC. Podesva, Robert J., Annette D’Onofrio, Janneke Van Hofwegen, and Seung Kyung Kim. 2015. Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift. Language Variation and Change 27, 157–86. Podesva, Robert J., Patrick Callier, Rob Voigt, and Dan Jurafsky. 2015. The connection between smiling and GOAT fronting: Embodied affect in sociophonetic variation. In the Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: The University of Glasgow. Pratt, Teresa. 2016. The use of embodied creak by young men at an arts high school. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Vancouver, BC. Pratt, Teresa. 2017. LOT-raising and toughness in a California high school. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Madison, WI. Pratt, Teresa, and Annette D’Onofrio. 2017. Jaw setting and the California vowel shift in parodic performance. Language in Society 30, 1–30. Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Joe Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) program suite. Van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2017. The systematicity of style: Investigating the full range of variation in everyday speech. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Wong, Amy. 2014. goose-fronting among Chinese Americans in New York City. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2), 209–18.

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Afterword Penelope Eckert

This amazing volume is the long-term consequence of something I learned from Bill Labov: never tell your students what to do. Each of the people in this volume has taken the study of the social meaning of variation down a different and creative road. Many of them were my students, several were students elsewhere who came to spend time at Stanford, and others are just smart people who might not even think of themselves as ‘third-wave’. In fact, work in the third wave is diverse, but it always involves a focus on style and social meaning. The idea of the third wave has created some controversy, most of which is directed at me. I take that as a good thing, and I guess I can use this postscript to clarify a few things that I think need clarifying. What I called the third wave in 2005 is a continuation, not a contradiction, of what I called the first and second waves. Each of these waves focuses on aspects of the social meaning of variation, progressing from the highest socialstructural level to the lowest. The first wave (e.g., Labov 1966; Wolfram 1969; Trudgill 1974), focusing on demographic categories, showed that variation indexes speakers’ place in enduring stratificational schemes that are fundamental to social structure – class, gender, age, ethnicity – and to the general social evaluation of linguistic variants with respect to those schemes. The second wave (e.g., Labov 1972; Milroy 1980; Rickford 1986; Eckert 2000) traced macro-structure to its manifestations in local categories and networks. At this local level style took on a new significance, as it became apparent that variables combined into styles that articulated social differences among and within categories. The link between style and the social order is persona (Coupland 2007), which is not an individual but an individual’s expression of connection to the social landscape – an embodied relation to the dramatis personae that inhabit and constitute places in the social order. To my mind, the third wave is a continuation of a focus on social meaning introduced in Labov’s (1963) Martha’s Vineyard study – which I have often said was the first third-wave study. Labov was clearly thinking in terms of persona in this study, as he meditated on the role of a close-mouthed articulatory style in the centralization of (ay) and (aw): 382

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We can reasonably assume that this ‘close-mouthed’ articulatory style is the object of social affect. It may well be that social evaluation interacts with linguistic structures at this point, through the constriction of several dimensions of phonological space. Particular linguistic variables would then be variously affected by the overall tendency towards a favored articulatory posture, under the influence of the social forces which we have been studying. Evidence for such an hypothesis must come from the study of many comparable developments, in a variety of English dialects and other languages. It is enough to note here that it is a plausible mechanism for socio-linguistic interaction which is compatible with the evidence which has been gathered in this investigation. (Labov 1963: 307–8)

It was Labov’s turn to the larger picture of sound change and social stratification that gave rise to the field of variation studies, and while he himself has always recognized the importance of social meaning in variation, some have turned the findings of the first wave into a kind of orthodoxy. The challenge from my perspective is to establish solid empirical links between the macrosocial structure of variation and the meaningful use of variation in discursive practice. And as we discover variables that do not directly correlate with macrosocial categories, the challenge is to uncover the larger social patterns that give them meaning. Perhaps the fundamental departure from first-wave studies is in the view of the larger context in which stylistic activity takes place. Since my early work on Gascon in the context of the Romance dialect continuum, I have never considered taking a bounded dialect, speech community, or sociolect as a primitive. But this does not make them nonexistent or irrelevant. First-wave studies posited a speech community in order to define a population of speakers, and within which to identify systems of social stratification. Labov (1966) took the Lower East Side as representing the speech patterns of the larger New York speech community, but did not try to draw a boundary around that larger community. Indeed, the notion of a New York City speech community plays an important role in linguistic practice but, as Irvine and Gal (2000) argue, such constructs are as much the product as the source of ideology. The insistence that Brooklyn has a dialect distinct from the rest of New York City has more to do with local ideology than with linguistic distinctiveness, and the linguistic boundary between New York City and Jersey City is unclear at best. Where one puts the boundary between dialects depends on what range of variability one chooses to study. The Stanford sociolinguists took mild offense at the occasional inclusion of California in the Canadian shift, and more recently, there has been some banter with sociolinguists in Washington, Oregon, and Nevada about the ‘California shift’, vs the ‘Western shift’, etc. The interesting question is not whether people speak the same in San Francisco and Seattle, but how linguistic differences are arrayed across continuous geography and what kinds of ideologies they coincide with – what kinds of social distinctions

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people are making where, and what semiotic resources they are using to make them. Guy and Hinskens (2016: 2) ask, ‘Are the varieties that linguists and laymen give names to (languages, dialects, speech styles, standard and nonstandard varieties, ethnolects, etc.) coherent objects, or diffuse abstractions?’ I would say both and neither. Lects, and the speech communities they are taken to voice, are essential constructs in a dialectic between stasis and change. They presuppose the categories or communities of speakers to whom they are attributed, and in the process define the authentic members of those categories, against which social change must push. Sharese King’s (e.g. 2020) work on African American English provides a powerful example of this dialectic. The very existence of a widespread African American Vernacular is the product of solidarity and community building in the face of racism and segregation. The racial binary that defines our society is thus captured in a linguistic binary, with the result that an African American who diverges from AAVE is at risk of ‘talking White’. And while ‘White’ can be many things, AAVE calls up a homogeneous inner-city stereotype, leaving little room for the diversity of African American personae. King (2016) considers an African American Goth in Bakersfield lowering her trap vowel, and outwardly mobile professionals in Rochester (King 2020) adopting the nasal pattern, and asks what legitimate resources do these people have to engage in stylistic practice in keeping with their personae? The tension between the ethnolect and ‘General American English’ assumes that African American speakers are not participants in the wider speech community, and the question is not is a lowered trap vowel White, but how else would one construct a Black goth or a young Black mobile professional persona? In other words, the status of AAVE as an ethnolect creates an opposition between retaining Black authenticity and constructing a nuanced Black persona. This is real, and in the real world. And when sociolinguists ask whether or not African American or Latinx speakers adopt regional dialect features, they are engaging in this same discourse (Fought 1999). Guy (2013) introduced the notion of coherence – the degree of co-variance across speakers – as a defining property of a lect. Guy and Hinskens (2016: 1) went on to oppose coherence to bricolage, in which ‘speakers actively and idiosyncratically select from a palette of variants available in their communities of practice to construct identities, stances, and styles’. It would appear that there is no limit to the number, localness, and triviality of variables that make up that imaginary palette. The basic problem with this picture is that it imagines the community of practice as an isolated entity within which people construct styles for the hell of it. But communities of practice emerge in response to shared conditions imposed by the social order, and in relation to other communities of practice that may represent different

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conditions or a different response. The social meanings they deal with are constructed in that larger order, and the signs they use must be legible both within and beyond the community of practice. I don’t know of a single variable treated or envisioned in third-wave research that is not clearly related to a widespread issue. And while the community of practice is an important locus of stylistic practice, it is not the only one. Even iconicity plays an important role in variation (D’Onofrio & Eckert 2019; Acton, this volume) triggering orders of indexicality based in affect on the one hand (Eckert 2010; Podesva, this volume; Sharma, this volume) and ideologies of power, gender and sexuality on the other (e.g., Levon, Maegaard, & Pharao 2017; Calder 2019; Campbell-Kibler, this volume; Drager et al., this volume; Maegaard and Pharao, this volume). These are as ‘social’ as (and probably less ‘conscious’ than) patterns that correlate directly with region or ethnicity. I would say that the coherence that Guy and Hinskens seek is itself a product of bricolage on the part of speakers who are striving, however consciously or unconsciously, for the same ‘authentic’ persona. The issue of agency has figured in objections to third-wave thinking almost from the beginning. Guy and Hinskens (2016: 3) say ‘Bricolage . . . is linguistically a superficial mechanism: it can’t go beyond phenomena which are subject to conscious manipulation.’ Agency is commonly confused with consciousness and intentionality, the absence of which is central to the vernacular construct and the regularity of sound change. But like the speech community, the boundary of consciousness has been taken as a primitive, when in fact it is badly in need of empirical investigation. Work in cognitive science (e.g., Smith & Kosslyn 2007) is making it quite clear that most of what we do we do unconsciously, including when we speak (Jackendoff 2012; Babel 2016). And indeed, the same linguistic moves may be made sometimes quite consciously, other times not consciously. The line between above and below the level of consciousness, in other words, is not a given. And this raises the question of levels of structure. Since we all tend to analyze one or a few variables at a time, we think about whether, for example, an occurrence of postvocalic (r) in the speech of a New Yorker is due to conscious agency. But perhaps conscious agency can reside at a higher level – a speaker may consciously decide to sound more formal or fancy, but is that agency exercised variable by variable or do the variants unfold automatically from a structured style? In fact, speakers no doubt have a range of variability within which they produce a range of formality or any other central quality or stance quite unconsciously. There is no question in my mind that the regularity of sound change is due to completely unconscious processes well beyond the control or will of any speaker. But the minute a change spreads sufficiently to pattern in some way, it has the potential to become a sign, at which point it becomes increasingly subject to both conscious and unconscious manipulation.

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It occurs to me that some resistance to the third wave emerges from a concern with the limitations of structure, of human cognitive ability. Are all these meanings too much to keep track of? Have we stretched the tolerances of structure? The orders of indexicality that yield the plethora of meanings in an indexical field reflect the layering of interpretation that is a fundamental cognitive process – the pattern-seeking activity that is central to human life. This thing called the third wave is not the same thing that I named in 2005. The work represented in this volume goes way beyond those beginnings: it has blown my mind, and I am eternally grateful that the authors should think I had anything to do with it. References Babel, Anna M. (ed.). 2016. Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Calder, Jeremy. 2019. The fierceness of fronted /s/: Linguistic rhematization through visual transformation. Language in Society 48, 31–64. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Onofrio, Annette, and Penelope Eckert. 2021 Affect and iconicity in phonological variation. Language in Society 50, 1–23. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope. 2010. Affect, sound symbolism, and variation. The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2), 70–80. Fought, Carmen. 1999. A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(1), 5–23. Guy, Gregory. 2013. The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52, 63–71. Guy, Gregory, and Frans Hinskens. 2016. Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and speech communities. Lingua 172(3), 1–9. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 35–83. Jackendoff, Ray. 2012. A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Sharese. 2016. On the negotiation of racial and regional identities: Vocalic variation in African Americans from Bakersfield. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22(1), 100–10. King, Sharese. 2020. From African American Vernacular English to African American Language: Rethinking the study of race and language in African Americans’ speech. Annual Review of Linguistics 6, 285–300. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 18, 273–309. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. The linguistic consequences of being a lame. In Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 255–92.

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Levon, Erez, Marie Maegaard & Nicolai Pharao. 2017. Introduction: Tracing the origin of /s/ variation. Linguistics 55(5), 979–92. Milroy, Lesley. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Rickford, John R. 1986. The need for new approaches to social class analysis in sociolinguistics. Language & Communication 6(3), 215–21. Smith, Edward E., and Stephen M. Kosslyn. 2007. Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain. London: Pearson. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfram, Walt. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

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Index

(aw), 339, 382 (ay), 120, 339, 382 (dh)-stopping, 343 (h)-dropping, 62–63, 69–72, 254 (ing), (ING), 62–63, 69–72, 122, 254, 343 (th)-fronting, 56, 62–63, 69–72, 74, 246 (th)-stopping, 338 /l/ velarization, 363 /r/, postvocalic, 323–325, 338, 385 /s/ and gender, 132–134, 363 and prosody, 204–206, 216 indexical field of, 213–214 prosody, 12 /t/ flapping, 254 glottalization, 254, 255 intervocalic, 246 palatalized, 206–207, 300 word-final, 62–63, 69–72, 121, 213

bricolage, 12, 109, 114, 268, 272, 316, 333, 384–385 Burnouts, 1, 5, 38, 99, 307 California Vowel Shift, 316, 363, 369–372 Californian English, 27–29 Canadian Vowel Shift, 383 Canadian-raising, 156 Cardiff English, 342 character type. See characterological figure characterological figure, 4, 270–273, 315 Cheshire, Jenny, 18, 55, 57, 74 cognition, 19, 127, 130, 155, 260, 385–386 cognitive load, 249, 260 commodification, 320 community of practice, 61, 64, 294, 315, 384 confirmation bias, 170 contextualization. See bricolage cot, 246, 321–322, 325–326 cot-caught-court merger. See cot creak, 85

accommodation, 251–252, 258 acquisition, 260 adolescence, 45, 60–61, 98, 180, 297–299 affect, 58, 172, 357, 365, 370, 385 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 13, 84, 260, 342, 384 age, 323, 325, 326, 374 agency, 17, 84, 89, 106, 107–109, 111–112, 250, 363, 378, 385 Agha, Asif, 13, 130, 268, 315 Arabic, Palestinian, 233–237 audience design, 258 automaticity, 249

Danish dialects Funen, 295 Modern Copenhagen, 131, 204 Street Copenhagen, 12, 204 Vollsmose, 13 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 5, 153 demonstratives, 3, 85, 86, 97, 115–117, 118 determiners, 85, 86, 117–120 discourse analysis, 17, 203 distinctiveness systems of, 7 divergence, 251, 258

bath, 246, 321, 327 Beijing alley saunterer, 271 Beijing smooth operator, 270, 316 Beijing yuppies, 270, 316 bought, 316 Brazilian Portuguese, 342

embodiment, 363–365, 382 and language change, 378–379 smiling, 366 emotion. See affect enregisterment, 13, 226, 246, 269, 280–285, 299, 316 erasure, 170

388

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Index er-hua, 270 -et, word-final, 304 ethnicity, 384 and age, 36–38 and style, 45 and topic, 40–42 British Asian, 255 in Hawai‘i, 180 in Israel, 225 in San Francisco, 29–30, 42–43 in Vollsmose, Denmark, 294–299 Māori/Pākehā, 178 ethnography, 14, 60–61, 297–299, 307 exemplar models, 156 experimental methods eye-tracking, 16 false memory, 16 forced word choice, 135 Male Role Attitudes Scale (MRAS), 136 matched guise, 15, 155, 181, 203 old-new recognition task, 158 speaker evaluation, 15, 134, 136 speech perception, 15 verbal guise, 204, 206–207 extenders, 98 f0, fundamental frequency, 177–178 and perceived body size, 196 and perceived ethnicity, 188 and perceived gender, 184 and perceived sexuality, 184–185 face, 246, 255, 344–353, 372 femininity, 137, 217, 218 First Wave, definition of, 14, 382 fleece, 372 formality, 56–57 fractal recursivity, 284 frequency code, 358 Gal, Susan, 6, 97, 153, 170 gender, 6, 28, 58, 139, 144, 184, 204–205, 209–213, 217–218, 368 and ethnicity, 36, 43, 304–308 and social class, 43, 57, 63 and sound change, 46 Generalized Additive (Mixed) Models (GA(M)M), 30–31, 341 get-passives, 58, 59 goat, 16, 27–29, 246, 255, 341, 344–358, 365 and smiling, 369 goose, 16, 27–29, 344–353, 366 Greater Manchester, viii, 60 Gricean pragmatics, 105, 108 Hawai‘i, 179

389 Hebrew, 225–227 heterosexual market, 28 human geography, 292 urban/suburban orientation, 273, 307 iconicity, 6, 97, 120–121, 385 identity, 14, 29, 45–46, 131–132, 195, 225, 235–237, 243, 293–294 ideology, 109–110, 171, 178, 227, 254, 268, 287, 383, 385 implicature, 108 indexicality, 5, 19, 110, 120–121, 127, 154, 203, 260 and language processing, 127 and markedness, 88–89, 96 biographical, 243–245 indexical field, viii, 11, 15, 18, 44, 72, 145, 178, 203, 213–214, 218–219, 222, 237–239, 260, 356–358, 386 indexical links, 130, 206–207, 216–217, 232–233 indexical order, 5, 15, 44, 68, 218, 268, 385 indexical shift, 13, 40, 44–47 Indian English, 246 indicators, 6, 343 intensifiers, 68, 81–83, 118 lexical, 82 non-lexical, 82 Interface Principle, 56 intonation, 84, 302–304 intraspeaker variation, 16, 38–42 Irvine, Judith, 6, 7, 97, 170 jaw-setting, 370–373 Jocks. See Burnouts Johnstone, Barbara, 6, 252, 297, 316 Kiesling, Scott, 6, 97 Labov, William, 14, 44, 56, 83, 120, 127, 223, 228, 256, 315, 316, 338, 342, 382 Lectal Focusing in Interaction (LFI), 16, 246, 340 lenition, 270 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 10 linguistic variable, 18, 54–55 locality. See place lot, 160, 363 Mandarin Cosmopolitan, 12 full tone, 271 varieties of, 269–270 markedness, 8–9, 44–47, 84–86, 96, 114, 116–117, 120–121

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390

Index

markers, 6 Martha’s Vineyard, 14, 44, 120, 316, 339, 382 masculinity, 46, 128–130, 131, 133, 136–137, 139–145, 177, 218, 260, 293, 307, 356, 357 McCain, John microcovariation, 13, 339, 353–356 Milroy, Lesley, 229 modal verbs, 118 mouth, 344–353 Multicultural London English, 256 multiethnolects, 292–294 multimodality, 363 near-square merger, 156 negative concord, 61–62, 99 and community of practice, 63–64 and social class, 63 and topic, 64–67 New York City English, 223, 316, 342, 383 Northern Cities Shift, 160 Northern Subject Rule, 56 Norwegian, 256 Ochs, Elinor, 5, 58, 97, 127, 154 Peirce, C.S., 5, 110, 153–155 persona, 4, 28, 46, 67, 97, 155, 156, 172, 176, 178, 237, 267, 273, 280, 315, 382, 384, 385 pharyngeals, Hebrew, 225–227 Philadelphia English, 344–353 place, 45–46, 179, 292, 309 politeness, 105, 108 politics Barack Obama, 115–117 George Osborne, 254 John McCain, 115–117 US House of Representatives, 119 prestige, 57–58, 71, 228–231, 258–259, 342–343 price, 344–358, 365 principle of accountability, 83 prosody, 299–300 Punjabi, 255

San Francisco, 29–30 Scottish English, 56, 57 Second Wave, definition of, 382 semantic meaning, definition of, 7, 81 sexuality, 137, 204–205, 216, 218 signs, 5, 19, 153–154, 171, 178 interpretant, 153, 171–172 Silverstein, Michael, 5, 8, 110, 130, 153, 203, 229 Singapore Cosmopolitan, Heartlander identities, 317–319, 333 English, 319–321 Singlish. See Singapore, English smiling. See embodiment social meaning, definition of, 3 social type, 4 sociolinguistic monitor, 56, 127, 130 Soukup, Barbara, 19, 252 sound symbolism, 59, 214, 357, 365 stance, 4, 6, 38, 81, 97, 172, 245–254 standardization, 56, 270 stereotypes, 6 stigma, 57–58, 73, 228–231, 258–259, 342–343 style, 2, 54–55, 176, 178, 215–216, 231–237, 245–254, 268–269, 315, 339–341, 382 and perceived body size, 191–194 and perceived sexuality, 189–191 attention to speech, 35, 38–40, 228–231, 253, 341–344 clusters, 12, 157, 340, 353 compositional, 12 constructional, 13 reinterpretation, 256–257 tag questions, 3, 59, 97 temporal dynamism, 338–341 thought, 344–353, 363 toe. See goat tooth. See goose topic, 40–42, 64–67, 181, 189, 353 trap, 157–158, 321, 327, 341, 372 underspecification, 3, 11, 42, 87, 109

qualia, 7 quotatives, 98

verb, nonstandard, 62–63, 69–72, 254 voice quality, 178, 217, 367

recontextualization. See bricolage rhotacization. See er-hua right dislocation, 3, 59

wh-clauses, 57 World Englishes, 320, 333

salience. See markedness

zero copula, 84

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