Mexican American English is a collection of dialects that are spoken by Mexican Americans and exhibit substrate features from Spanish. It developed in various parts of the United States and was shaped both by the discrimination and exploitation that Mexican Americans faced and by changing educational practices. However, it represents a model case of how an immigrant group develops their own dialects of the matrix language. Numerous vocalic and consonantal variants and a few prosodic variants are well documented as stable aspects of Mexican American English. Morphosyntactic forms that endure well beyond the first generation of English‐speaking Mexican Americans have proved harder to isolate. Mexican American English is not simply Spanish interference features, but represents a winnowing of interference features across generations of Mexican Americans.

This project presents a new approach to analyzing geographical patterning in vowel variation that combines discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) with cluster analysis. It offers a means of reducing bias from analyses of geographical patterning in vowel variation. DCT0 and DCT1 capture the overall position of vowels in the vowel envelope and DCT2 adds information about curvature. To mitigate anomalies, these metrics are based on numerous tokens and measurement points. Cluster analysis can then be applied to the DCT data to indicate which speakers are most similar without predetermined groupings. The procedure suggests how vowel realizations are correlated with geographical divisions, if at all, within the area covered by a dialect survey. Here, we apply DCTs and hierarchical clustering to a corpus of speakers born 1970 or later and covering eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and western North Carolina. The results align only partially with isophones from earlier dialect surveys. Analyses of individual vowel phonemes typically exhibit considerable intermixture of forms; clearer geographic patterns emerge primarily when multiple vowels in named chain shifts are considered together. Recent dialect leveling appears to play a role in the paucity of distinguishable regional patterns.

Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances, has also been shown to reduce the role of social factors once it has been accounted for, leaving unclear the relationship between social factors and speech production in conditioning speech rate. Through modelling of speech rate across 13 English speech corpora, it is found that utterance length has the largest effect on speech rate, though this effect itself varies little across corpora and speakers. While age and gender also modulate speech rate, their effects are much smaller in magnitude. These findings suggest utterance length effects may be conditioned by articulatory and perceptual constraints, and that social influences on speech rate should be interpreted in the broader context of how speech rate variation is structured.

Aspirated obstruents are rare in Austronesian languages, one exception being the southern Philippine language Maranao, as reported by Lobel and Riwarung [Oceanic Linguist. 48, 403–438 (2009)]. In Maranao, aspirated consonants occur as a reflex of a cluster of a former voiced stop and a homorganic obstruent (*bp > p’, *dt > t’, *ds > s’, *gk> k ’). The most obvious correlate to non-Maranao speakers is a dramatic raising of the following vowel, which also occurs after voiced obstruents, but not after historic single voiceless obstruents—e.g., /təkaw/ [təkaw] ‘startled’ (earlier *təkaw) vs. /tək’aw/ [təkʰɣw] ‘thief’ (earlier *təɡkaw) However, native Maranao speakers regard the raising as a property of the consonants, not the vowels. We examined the correlates of the apparent aspiration. The vowel raising is realized robustly and consistently, with some overlap in F1/F2 space among contrastive vowels. However, aspirated and unaspirated stops also show differences in VOT and in measures of breathiness of the following vowel, albeit with somewhat less consistency. Differences between /s/ and /s’/ were not evident except for realizations of following vowels. We explore the role of pharyngeal expansion due to voicing in the development of these Maranao segmental realizations.

A number of influential linguistic analyses hold that African American English (AAE) has no verbal–s, the–s that, for example, turns drink into drinks in more mainstream English varieties.On such accounts, sentences like Mary drinks coffee are ungrammatical in AAE. Previous behavioral studies suggest that in addition to being ungrammatical, AAE speaking children find these sentences cognitively demanding, and that their presence in mathematical reasoning tests can depress scores. Until now, however, no online sentence processing study nor investigation of neurophysiological markers has been done to support these findings. Aimed at addressing this gap in the literature, the auditory ERP experiment described herein revealed two different processes associated with AAE speaking 2nd graders listening to this type of sentence: a morphosyntactic structure building problem, reflected in a bilateral early anterior-central negativity; and an increase in working memory load, indicated by a bilateral late long-lasting anterior-central negativity. Study participants also took an orally administered test of math word problems. Consistent with previous findings, results showed they answered fewer questions correctly when those questions contained verbal–s than when they did not.

This squib describes three theoretically challenging phonological processes found in the Manide, Inagta Alabat, and Umiray Dumaget languages spoken on the large northern Philippine island of Luzon. These three well-documented processes do not conform to current theoretical expectations about what is a likely or even a possible diachronic process, although each is part of a larger, complex context of sound change which does conform to theoretical expectation. A brief background survey of vocalic changes triggered by voiced stops is given, followed by the puzzling changes that depart from this more general pattern.

Research Article| December 01 2021 3. The Phonetic Development of American Raising in Eastern Ohio Erik R. Thomas; Erik R. Thomas erik r. thomas is a professor at North Carolina State University. His research examines phonetic variation in regional and ethnic dialects. He is an author or editor of two previous volumes of Publication of the American Dialect Society. Most recently, he edited Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Email: erthomas@ncsu.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jeff Mielke Jeff Mielke jeff mielke is a professor at North Carolina State University. His research is concerned with the phonetic basis of phonological patterns. He is the author of The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Oxford University Press, 2008), and he is currently an associate editor for Journal of Phonetics and Linguistic Typology. Email: jimielke@ncsu.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2021) 106 (1): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9551319 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Erik R. Thomas, Jeff Mielke; 3. The Phonetic Development of American Raising in Eastern Ohio. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2021; 106 (1): 45–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9551319 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 American Dialect Society2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Labov: A guide for the perplexed by Matthew J. Gordon Erik R. Thomas Labov: A guide for the perplexed. By Matthew J. Gordon. (Guides for the perplexed.) London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Pp. xii, 252. ISBN 9781441192509. $24.95. William Labov has held a prominent position in linguistics, and in particular a preeminent position in variationist sociolinguistics, since he burst onto the academic scene just over fifty years ago. His remarkable research productivity has resulted in a steady stream of articles, books, and research reports over that period. This continuing dominance of a field that he, in large part, created makes it remarkable that no book-length overview of his work and impact had appeared until Matthew Gordon compiled this engaging and thorough guide. The book is organized into nine chapters: two chapters that provide background, six chapters covering various aspects of Labov’s research, and a concluding chapter on directions in which variationist sociolinguistics is now moving. Ch. 1 (1–20) provides a rather spare biography of Labov, followed by discussion of how sociolinguistics rejects Noam Chomsky’s circumscription of linguistics to an idealization, how sociolinguistics developed, and then how the variationist (Labovian) approach materialized. G leads the reader from William Dwight Whitney through other scholars who placed importance on linguistic variation and the social functions of language to the [End Page 723] emergence of the sociology of language and anthropological linguistics. The culmination was the 1964 conference on sociolinguistics at Lake Arrowhead, California, at which Labov gained a forum together with such other figures as Dell Hymes, Charles Ferguson, and John Gumperz. This conference provided Labov with the publicity he needed to launch his rise to prominence. Ch. 2 (21–44) delves into how pre-Labovian movements treated variation in language. Leonard Bloomfield’s definition of the ‘speech community’ is mentioned, and then instructions by both Bloomfield and Zellig Harris on how to exclude variation from linguistic consideration are discussed. There is a good deal of attention to the one pre-sociolinguistic field that focused on language variation—dialect geography—and of the sclerosis that had beset dialectology by the time Labov appeared on the scene. The chapter examines only American movements, both in mainstream linguistics and in dialectology. Some mention, for example, of J. R. Firth and his London School, which attempted to incorporate social uses of language (Ferdinand de Saussure’s parole) into linguistic theory, might have been included. In Ch. 3 (45–75), G brings readers to Labov’s own work. The discussion revolves around Labov’s two earliest studies, of Martha’s Vineyard and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the methodological innovations that he introduced. Labov realized that the methods of dialect geography were inadequate for studying language in its social context. The enterprise was ripe for a new approach, and he was the right person at the right time. In Martha’s Vineyard, he introduced the use of a large sample and of open-ended interviews. Dialectologists had tentatively adopted some audio recording, but Labov embraced it wholeheartedly. His use of ‘apparent time’, in which different generations are compared, demonstrated that linguistic change could indeed be observed. In the Lower East Side study, he introduced the use of random sampling, examination of stylistic variation, and special tasks to elicit attitudes about linguistic variables. Finally, G notes that Labov invented the ‘rapid and anonymous survey’ in his survey of the S. Klein, Macy’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. These techniques allowed Labov to demolish the notion of ‘free variation’, that is, that variation is random and unconstrained. Ch. 4 (77–102) examines the theories behind Labov’s early work. Labov rejected the ‘axiom of categoricity’, that language had to be abstracted away from actual use to an idealized grammar, which was held by Bloomfield, Harris, and Chomsky. He stressed ‘orderly heterogeneity’, the idea that all linguistic variation follows rules and forms patterns. As G notes, this phrase came from Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog 1968. Labov and Herzog note in their preface to that article that Weinreich wrote the section that discussed the phrase, although G seems to downplay Weinreich’s primacy in the concept. Labov developed a new definition...

Although the U.S. South was usually avoided for phonetic studies in earlier years, phonetic analyses of Southern U.S. English have expanded in numerous directions in recent years. Studies of vocalic variation have dominated the enterprise, with a broad range of studies that have examined the phonetic peculiarities and distribution of variants within the region, the characteristics of particular communities, and the phonetic attributes of African American and Latino groups. However, other phonetic phenomena are finally seeing more study. Several consonantal variables have attracted acoustic analysis. Other studies have focused on intonation and certain timing-related phenomena. Numerous experimental studies have tested the abilities of listeners to identify dialects and a few other perceptual issues. These developments are outlined here, including advancements in segmental, prosodic, and perceptual analyses.

To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction of diachronic change, we compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation in F1 and F2 for vowel phonemes in several corpora of North American and Scottish English. These vowels were measured automatically with a scheme (tested on hand-measured vowels) that considers the frequency, bandwidth, and amplitude of the first three formants in reference to a prototype. In the corpus data, we find that the axis of intraspeaker variation is typically aligned vertically, presumably corresponding to the degree of jaw opening for individual tokens, but for the North American GOOSE vowel, the axis of intraspeaker variation is aligned with the (horizontal) axis of diachronic change for this vowel across North America. This may help to explain why fronting and unrounding of high back vowels are common shifts across languages.

Sociophonetics has grown rapidly in recent years, although to some extent the field lacks a consolidated aim. Sociolinguists use its name for any language variation project that involves modern phonetic techniques, while phoneticians have largely used the name for descriptive phonetic analyses involving dialectal variation. A survey of segmental and suprasegmental studies shows that projects under the rubric of sociophonetics have revealed a great deal about the breadth of dialectal variation and change in fine phonetic details. The more sophisticated studies of social indexicality have seldom adopted advanced phonetic methods, however, creating a gulf between socio-indexical and sociophonetic approaches. Socio-perceptual studies are beginning to bridge that gulf, showing how metalinguistic information is cognitively tied to linguistic forms. These studies provide sociophonetics with a needed focus by addressing critical questions about the cognition of language.

Research Article| December 01 2019 9. A Retrospective on the Low-Back-Merger Shift Erik R. Thomas Erik R. Thomas ERIK R. THOMAS is a professor at North Carolina State University, specializing in sociophonetics. He is author of An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English (PADS 85) and coeditor (with Malcah Yaeger-Dror) of African American English Speakers and their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study (PADS 94). He has also written Sociophonetics: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2011) and edited Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect (Cambridge, 2019). Email: erthomas@ncsu.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2019) 104 (1): 180–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8033001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erik R. Thomas; 9. A Retrospective on the Low-Back-Merger Shift. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2019; 104 (1): 180–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8033001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 American Dialect Society2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.