Daniel Ezra Johnson

Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed‐Effects Variable Rule Analysis

The variable rule program is one of the predominant data analysis tools used in sociolinguistics, employed successfully for over three decades to quantitatively assess the influence of multiple factors on linguistic variables. However, its most popular current version, GoldVarb, lacks flexibility and also isolates its users from the wider community of quantitative linguists. A new version of the variable rule program, Rbrul, attempts to resolve these concerns, and with mixed-effects modelling also addresses a more serious problem whereby GoldVarb overestimates the significance of effects. Rbruls superior performance is demonstrated on both simulated and real data sets.

A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics

This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank (2003): Lobanovs (1971) z-score procedure and Neareys (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIHi4 in Adank [2003], CLIHi2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.

Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of 'be like'

This article examines change in social and linguistic effects on be like usage and acceptability. Results from two studies are presented. The first set of data comes from a trend study with samples of U.K. university undergraduates collected in 1996 and 2006. While the effect of subject person, morphological tense, and quote content is constant in the two samples, the effect of speaker sex decreases. The second study is a judgment experiment with 121 native speakers of U.S. English, examining acceptability of be like in environments biasing direct speech and reported thought readings. The analysis reveals no interaction between age and the reported thought/direct speech contrast, suggesting no support for change in this effect on be like acceptability in apparent time. The two studies therefore converge in suggesting no evidence of change in linguistic constraints on be like as it has diffused into U.K. and U.S. Englishes.

Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town

This study tests the extent of speakers’ linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward interpretation of accommodation, and findings are considered in terms of evidence required for such an account. Implications for the notion of salience in explanations of contact-induced language change are also considered, as is the significance of the “interviewer effect” in the compilation of data sets for use in quantitative studies of phonological variation and change.

Levels of Linguistic Accommodation across a National Border

The political border between England and Scotland has been claimed to coincide with the most tightly packed bundle of isoglosses in the English-speaking world. The borderland, therefore, may be seen as the site of discontinuities in linguistic features carrying socioindexical value as markers of “Scottishness” or “Englishness.” However, in an ongoing study of four border towns, the connection between inhabitants’ claimed national identities and their use of indexical features has been found to vary depending on whether the localities are at the border’s eastern or western ends, and on the speaker’s age. This article examines the accommodatory strategies of a female Scottish English-speaking field-worker in her interactions with younger and older male speakers from localities on either side of the border. The linguistic behavior of the field-worker is examined at the phonological, discoursal, and lexical levels, and variability in her speech is considered in light of (1) her interlocutors’ actual usage of the variables in question, (2) the interviewees’ perceived status as “older” versus “younger” and as “Scottish” versus “English,” and (3) the broader picture of the stability of usage of linguistic forms and of national identities in the localities in question.

How do utterance measures predict raters’ perceptions of fluency in French as a second language?

While the research literature on second language (L2) fluency is replete with descriptions of fluency and its influence with regard to English as an additional language, little is known about what fluency features influence judgments of fluency in L2 French. This study reports the results of an investigation that analyzed the relationship between utterance fluency measures and raters’ perceptions of L2 fluency in French using mixed-effects modeling. Participants were 40 adult learners of French at varying levels of proficiency, studying in a university immersion context. Speech performances were collected on three different types of narrative tasks. Four utterance fluency measures were extracted from each performance. Eleven untrained judges rated the speech performances and we examined which utterance fluency measures are the best predictors of the scores awarded by the raters. The mean length of runs and articulation rate proved to be the most influential factors in raters’ judgments, while the frequency of pauses played a less important role. The length of pauses was positively related to fluency scores, indicating a prominent cross-linguistic variation specific to French. The relative importance of the utterance measures in predicting fluency ratings, however, was found to vary across tasks.

Sociolinguistic variation on the Scottish-English border

It is regularly asserted that the interface between the dialects of southern Scotland and those of the far north of England is still a relatively sharp one, and that it persists in coinciding closely with the political border in spite of the presence of conditions which, in other contexts, have been shown to promote linguistic convergence. In this chapter, we explore some of the phonetic evidence we have gathered in order to test these claims.

Change in the syntax and semantics of be like quotatives

Be like as an introducer of quoted speech is innovative in many contemporary varieties of English. Recent corpus-based work on be like has suggested that as it has continued to spread, it has undergone syntactic and semantic change: be like predicates, originally used exclusively to describe states of individuals via reported thought as in (1a), have taken on an additional guise as descriptors of saying events as in (1b) (Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999, Buchstaller 2004). This paper reports on two judgement experiments with speakers of American English intended to further explore claims of syntactic and semantic change in be like quotatives. Our experimental results suggest that the direct speech and reported thought readings of be like are diffusing into American English at a similar rate. From the perspective of Kroch’s (1989) seminal constant rate proposal, this result is consistent with a view of these two guises of be like as different environments in a single abstract process of change. In particular, we relate the ambiguity between direct speech and reported thought be like in (1) to the availability of copula be in active contexts as in (2) and (3)(Partee 1977, Dowty 1979, Parsons 1990, Rothstein 1999).