LING 200: Lesson 8

speech styles

A linguistic variant appropriate to a particular social context -topic -setting -addressee Usually reflects level of formality ('registers') Casual/informal <---> careful/formal Different languages have different ways of marking styles -2nd person formal vs informal pronouns --Spanish: usted vs tu -honorific titles to show respect vs familiarity --Japanese: -sama vs -san vs -chan vs -kun

African American English

AAE: a continuum of speech varieties spoken primarily by and among African-Americans -not all AA speak AAE -not only AA speak AAE -stigmatized, believed to be inferior 1. Multiple negation: he don' know nothin' 2. deletion of copula 'to be': AAE - He my brother -does not apply to 1st person sg. (I a teacher) or at the end of a phrase (idk who he __) 3. Absense of 3rd person sg. -s: AAE - She eat five times a day

mutual (un)intelligibility

If speakers of one speech variety can understand speakers of another speech variety, and vice versa, we say that these varieties are mutually intelligible and therefore dialects of the same language. If speakers of two different speech varieties cannot understand each other, then the two varieties are mutually unintelligible and therefore are different languages Problems: there can be degrees of mutual intelligibility in which the level of "understandingness" is not absolute.

William Labov's NYC [r]

Labov sought to investigate the extent of this correlation between r-lessness and social class. Labov (and his assistants) visited 3 different New York City department stores associated with three distinct levels of prestige: Saks 5th Ave. = highest socioeconomic class with the highest prestige, Macy's =middle class S. Klein = lowest socioeconomic class with the lowest level of prestige. The pronunciation of [r] increased as the level of the socioeconomic class of the stores increased. Second, the numbers go up from top to bottom. That is, as the attention level that the salesclerks paid to their own speech increased (from casual to careful speech), pronunciation of [r] increased as well. -considerable intra-speaker variation -variation most prominent among lower classes (low: +10%; mid +17%; high: +1%) = overt vs covert prestige

Regional Dialects: The North

Spoken in: New England New York Massachusetts Minnesota Michigan Wisconsin North Dakota and the northern portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and South Dakota. morpho-syntactic: -do you want to *come with* -the car *needs washing* -New Eng: we waited *on line* for a ticket. Lexical: -carbonated beverage: pop (north), soda (new eng), tonic (boston) -North: roly poly, New Eng: pill bug

hypercorrection

When a speaker accidentally ends up producing a nonstandard form by way of false analogy when trying to achieve the standard phonological: intrusive r -idea(r), draring, lawr and order Grammatical: "let's keep this between you and I", "...for Michelle and I", "whom is calling"

language

a continuum of dialects

overt prestige

attached to the standard dialect by the community at large and defines how people should speak in order to gain status in that community. By speaking the standard dialect, one can gain the prestige associated with those who speak it.

style-shifting

automatically adjust from one speech style to another may be conscious and strategic (such as if a speaker decides to use more formal speech than would otherwise be dictated by the context as a means of making the addressee feel more important), but quite commonly, it also happens rather unconsciously and automatically

dialect continuum

each dialect is closely related to and mutually intelligible with its neighbor, but the dialects at opposite ends of the continuum are mutually unintelligible ex: -Dutch and German Nonlinguistic criteria (political, historical, geographic, et.) may play a role -Madarine, Cantonese = mutually *un*intelligible, but often called dialects of Chinese -Serbian and Croatian = mutually *intelligible*, but often called separate *languages*

registers

level of formality

gender variation

masculine vs feminine -women tend to raise the intonation and pitch of their voices even higher than what biology dictates (and conversely, men tend to lower their voices), especially in social situations, as this makes women sound 'more feminine' and men sound 'more masculine'. women/girls use standard forms more than men/boys (ex running vs runnin') -regardless of age, region, ethnicity, or class -a study by Peter Trudgill demonstrated that girls as young as 3-6 years old show these same tendencies of using more standard forms than boys of the same age. So these differences are ingrained in us by society at a very early age. Further, we are well aware of societal expectations in this regard. -women over-report use of standard, while men under-report it (over vs covert prestige) -women may make more of an effort to imitate the standard, and thereby gain some of the prestige that goes with it the link between social and cultural norms for linguistic behavior and gender is arbitrary. Which linguistic characteristics are considered masculine and which are considered feminine is something that is arbitrarily decided, varying from culture to culture.

inter-speaker variation

no 2 speakers of a language speak exactly the same

intra-speaker variation

no individual speaker speaks the same way all the time

ways dialects vary

phonetic/phonological = accent morphological semantic (lexical) syntactic (grammatical)

slang

referred to as a lexical marker of style because it involves the use of certain words and phrases that are much more informal than other equivalent words in-group slang: slang terms that are specific to a certain social group (particularly demarcated by age, such as among college students) -short lifespan -slang terms do occasionally see a revival -some in group slang never die -sclalar -- there are certain words that are clearly very slang-y and other words that are just as clearly not slang, but there also tend to be words that fall somewhere in the gray area between the two where it may not be clear whether a word would be considered slang or not slang (casual) <---> not slang (formal)

dialect

simply any language variety, spoken by a speech community, that is characterized by systematic linguistic features (e.g., phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc.) that distinguish it from other varieties of that same language - dialect does not equal substandard, incorrect, slang, accent - FACT: everyone speaks a dialect

variation and socioeconomic class

socioeconomic class may be associated with particular levels or types of education which can subsequently affect language use higher socioeconomic status asso. w/ standard speech lower socioeconomic = nonstandard speech

jargon

specialized (or 'technical) vocabulary of a profession or group Every job, sport, hobby, or field of study has its own jargon that is specific to that group.

Regional Dialects: The South

spoken in the Virginias, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and my home state of Texas. phonetic: -think, thing -> thank, thang -monophthongization of diphthongs: five -> fav -pin~pen merger -> [pIn] -Appalachia: --fish, push -> feesh, poosh --Stress shift: guItar, pOlice, dIrectly, cIgar, Insurance mopho-syntactic: -fixin to (=intend to) -Completive done (=already): i done told you -Double modals: might could, use'ta could -multiple negation: i ain't got no money -Applachia: --a-prefixing: go a-huntin' and a-fishin' Lexical: carbonated bev: coke (south), dope (appalachia) -roly poly or doodle bug

Regional Dialects: The Midland

spoken in the area of the country stretching from New Jersey westward, including the central parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as Missouri, Kansas, and parts of Oklahoma. Phonetic: -l-vocalization: belt [bɛwt], hill [hɪw] -monophthongization of the [au] diphthong: downtown -> dahntahn Morpho-syntactic: can use "anymore" without a preceding negative marker (a pattern sometimes referred to as "positive anymore") -"Anymore I take the bus" = "These days, I take the bus". -"The car needs washed" as opposed to "The car needs to be washed." Lexically: carb bev: pop potato bug

Regional Dialects: The West

spoken in the part of the country that lies to the west of the Rocky mountains. As mentioned earlier, it is not as distinct as the other U.S. dialects in that it does not have as many characteristics that are specific just to this dialect, since the West was the last area to be settled in the U.S. and essentially formed a hybrid of the other dialect areas' characteristics. Phonetically: the high back vowel [u] is typically pronounced farther forward in the mouth than it is in other areas around the country -"dude" ="di-ood", move =mi-oov" Morphosyntactically: -discourse markers: like, all -"So my boyfriend was like, 'I'm not going.' And I'm all, 'Uh huh.' And he was all, 'Nuh uh.' So I was like, 'Whatever.'" Lexically: soda (CA), pop (WA)

standard vs nonstandard

standard: the variety that tends to be used by political leaders, the media, the upper socioeconomic classes and is typically the one that is taught in school=prestige/power -SAE - characterized primarily by its grammatical features rather than its phonetic features -the prestige associated with the standard dialect is arbitrary, and not linguistically based nonstandard: any dialect not perceived as standard does not mean substandard, incorrect, inferior, ungrammatical

dialect leveling

the distinct dialect differences that were evident in the East where geographic isolation kept them separate, began to combine and cancel each other out.

language variation

the property that languages exhibit of having different ways of expressing the same meaning

idiolect

the speech variety of an individual speaker.

Northern Cities Vowel Shift

this dialect is characterized by a tendency for speakers in some of the Northern cities (such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and Buffalo) to pronounce the main vowels of English in a different area of the mouth than they are in other parts of the country Boston and New York City) have what is called an [r]-less dialect. That is, [r] is not pronounced at the end of a word or when it occurs before another consonant. (They got this from those British settlers, by the way, who, you may note, also speak [r]-lessly.) For example, it is often described that Bostonians say "pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd", or that New Yorkers say "doity boids on toity-toid street"

covert prestige

type of prestige that exists among nonstandard-speaking communities. It defines how people should speak in order to be considered members of that particular community or group.

isogloss

used to indicate areas on a map where a certain linguistic form or set of forms is spoken.