Table Of ContentA Reader in Sociophonetics
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 219
Editor
Volker Gast
Advisory Editors
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Matthias Schlesewsky
Founding Editor
Werner Winter
De Gruyter Mouton
A Reader in Sociophonetics
edited by
Dennis R. Preston
Nancy Niedzielski
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-1-934078-04-4
e-ISBN 978-1-934078-06-8
ISSN 1861-4302
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A reader in sociophonetics / edited by Dennis R. Preston, Nancy Niedzielski.
p. cm. — (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 219)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-934078-04-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-934078-06-8 (ebook)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Phonology. 2. Dialectology—
Research. 3. Sociolinguistics. I. Preston, Dennis Richard. II. Niedzielski,
Nancy A., 1964–
P217.3.R43 2010
414'.8—dc22 2010013190
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra(cid:191) e;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York
Typesetting: IBT Global, Troy, NY
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
(cid:146) Printed on acid-free paper
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Contents
Introduction: Sociophonetic Studies of Language Variety
Production and Perception. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Dennis R. Preston, Oklahoma State University and
Nancy Niedzielski, Rice University
Part I: Studies of Production
Chapter 1
The Peripatetic History of Middle English *(cid:849) (cid:2712). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Alice Faber, Haskins Laboratories; Marianna Di Paolo,
University of Utah; Catherine T. Best, University of
Western Sydney and Haskins Laboratories
Chapter 2
Social and Phonetic Conditioners on the Frequency and
Degree of ‘intrusive /r/’ in New Zealand English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Jen Hay and Margaret Maclagan, University of Canterbury
Chapter 3
Effects of Consonantal Context on the Pronunciation of /æ/
in the English of Speakers of Mexican Heritage from
South Central Michigan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Rebecca Roeder, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Chapter 4
Rhythm Types and the Speech of Working-Class Youth in a
Banlieue of Paris: The Role of Vowel Elision and Devoicing. . . . . . . . . . . 91
Zsuzsanna Fagyal, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Chapter 5
The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG in
Three Language Communities: Teasing Apart Sociolinguistic
and Phonetic In(cid:192) uences on Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Malcah Yaeger-Dror, University of Arizona; Tania Granadillo,
University of Western Ontario; Shoji Takano, Hokusei Gakuen
University; Lauren Hall-Lew, Oxford University
vi Contents
Chapter 6
An Emerging Gender Difference in Japanese Vowel Devoicing . . . . . . . 177
Terumi Imai, Wittenberg University
Part II: Studies of Perception
Chapter 7
Regional Stereotypes and the Perception of Japanese
Vowel Devoicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Midori Yonezawa Morris, University of Pennsylvania
Chapter 8
Phonetic Detail, Linguistic Experience, and the Classi(cid:191) cation
of Regional Language Varieties in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Cynthia G. Clopper, The Ohio State University
Chapter 9
Perceptions of /a/-fronting Across Two Michigan Dialects. . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Bartek Plichta, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
and Brad Rakerd, Michigan State University
Chapter 10
Belle’s Body Just Caught the Fit Gnat: The Perception of
Northern Cities Shifted Vowels by Local Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Dennis R. Preston, Oklahoma State University
Chapter 11
Linguistic Security, Ideology, and Vowel Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Nancy Niedzielski, Rice University
Chapter 12
Identi(cid:191) cation of African American Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Erik R. Thomas, North Carolina State University; Norman E. Lass,
West Virginia University; Jeannine Carpenter, Duke University
Part III: Studies of Perception and Production
Chapter 13
Phonetic Detail in the Perception of Ethnic Varieties of US English . . . . 289
Thomas Purnell, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Contents vii
Chapter 14
Sound Judgments: Perception of Indexical Features in
Children’s Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Paul Foulkes, University of York; Gerard Docherty
and Ghada Khattab, Newcastle University;
Malcah Yaeger-Dror, University of Arizona
Chapter 15
Avant-garde Dutch: A Perceptual, Acoustic,
and Evaluational Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Renée van Bezooijen, Radboud University and
Vincent J. van Heuven, Leiden University
Chapter 16
Aspects of the Acoustic Analysis of Imitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Betsy E. Evans, University of Washington
Chapter 17
The Cycle of Production, Ideology, and Perception in the
Speech of Memphis, Tennessee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
Valerie Fridland, University of Nevada–Reno
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Introduction: Sociophonetics Studies of
Language Variety Production and Perception
Dennis R. Preston, Oklahoma State University and
Nancy Niedzielski, Rice University
Introduction
In 2002 Erik Thomas suggested that the “[m]elding of sociolinguistics and
phonetics is sometimes referred to as sociophonetics . . .” (189), and it is not
at all odd that phonetics would qualify for this singling out, for the variables
treated in the history of the sociolinguistic enterprise have very often been
phonetic. In the journal Language Variation and Change, 133 articles appeared
in the ten-year period 1999–2008 (vols. 11–20); of these, 61, just under 46%,
dealt with phonetic topics exclusively, and many more included phonetic vari-
ables among others or used them as a major consideration in determining the
distribution of other variables, most notably morphological ones.
There is little doubt, then, that phonetics is particularly important to cur-
rent work in sociolinguistics, nor that it was important to the sociolinguis-
tic side of traditional dialectology, the most direct forerunner of the modern
enterprise, as evidenced, for example, in the age- and sex-related variable fea-
tures uncovered by Gauchat in Charmey, Switzerland (1905), some of which
were later con(cid:191) rmed as participants in real-time change by Hermann (1929),
or in the work of McDavid (1948) on post-vocalic /r/ in South Carolina, sub-
titled “A social analysis.” Even the allied social sciences have attended to pho-
netic variation (e.g., Fischer 1958, who found that good boys said “walking”
and not-so-good-boys said “walkin’”).
One might argue, then, that sociophonetics is has always been simply one
branch of the linguistic part of sociolinguistics, rather than the more current
melding Thomas mentions. In other words, if sociolinguistics designates the
social as well as linguistic factors that must be taken into consideration to
account for the distribution of linguistic variables, whether stable or in (cid:192) ux,
then the phonetic level is just one of those that must be included and has no
theoretical privilege over phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or prag-
matics, nor would its concerns be excluded from historical linguistics, psycho-
linguistics, neurolinguistics, applied linguistics, etc. . . . There are, however,
several reasons that phonetics has the special status Thomas suggests and,
2 Dennis R. Preston and Nancy Niedzielski
perhaps most tellingly, even a name, as the other levels do not. (“Socioprag-
matics,” however, seems to have some currency; the 2009 issue of the Journal
of Historical Pragmatics was entitled “Historical Sociopragmatics.”)
First, phonetic variation is not just long-standing in formal study, as
shown previously, but also in the public mind. From the Gileadites inabil-
ity to realize palatal sibilants (Old Testament, Judges 12: 5–6) to Johnnie L.
Cochran’s criticism during the O. J. Simpson trial of the idea that a Black
person could be identi(cid:191) ed on the basis of voice as “racist,” public attention to
so-called accents has been notable.
Second, the mechanics of instrumental or acoustic phonetics, although
important contributors to the earliest modern work on variation (e.g., Labov
1962; Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972), are now freely available to any inves-
tigator who has a computer, a considerable reduction from the thousands of
dollars one would have had to invest to carry out such work only a few decades
ago. The sound analysis program Praat (Boersma and Weenink 1992–2009)
and its add-on Akustyk (Plichta 2009) are the most widely used, along with
PLOTNIK, a vowel plotting and normalization software package developed
by William Labov (2009). Most recently, NORM (2009), a web-based vowel
normalization program, provides even further tools for analysis cost-free.
Third, there has been a reawakening of the importance of phonetics to
phonology, and, to the extent that sociolinguistics must keep up with gen-
eral theoretical advances in the (cid:191) eld, attention to such integration and depen-
dency is necessary. Variationist implications in both optimality theory (e.g.,
Boersma and Hayes 1991) and exemplar theory (Pierrehumbert 1994) have
been particularly in(cid:192) uential in sociophonetics. For some time the contribu-
tions of William Labov in particular have contributed to this interface in the
areas of vowel shifts and mergers by proposing phonetics-based generaliza-
tions that appear to be in(cid:192) uential in the development of a systematic phonol-
ogy (e.g., Labov 1994).
Fourth, the area of speech science, although long associated with sophis-
ticated phonetics research, is now better attuned to the goals and (cid:191) ndings of
general linguistics and, even more recently, to the interests of sociolinguistics
in particular. There is a review of a great deal of this work in the introductory
sections of Chapter 8.
Finally, the phonetic level is convenient, not only because even a short
interview with a respondent is likely to contain a considerable portion of
both the sounds and environments one would like to study, but also because,
except for some phonetic caricatures or stereotypes, it is also the level where
both variation and change may go undetected in the speech communities
where phonetic variation, nevertheless, plays an important role. This often
