Erez Levon

Hearing 'gay': Prosody, interpretation and the affective judgments of men’s speech

This article describes a controlled experiment designed to determine what people listen to specifically when judging a speaker’s sexuality. Four experimental stimuli were produced by digitally shortening the syllable duration and narrowing the pitch of one male speaker reading a passage. listeners rated various combinations of the four stimuli on 10 affective scales, including straight/gay and effeminate/ masculine. Altering the two variables was insufficient to alter listeners’ perceptions of the speaker’s sexuality to a level of significance. However, significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales illustrated that perceptions of sexuality are ideologically linked to other perceptions of personality and personhood. in this article, I examine whether two prosodic variables, pitch range and sibilant duration, affect the perceptual identification of the sexuality of a male speaker. Both of these variables have been widely discussed in the literature on language and sexuality and have been correlated, to varying degrees of success, with the perception of gayness in men. Because of the popular perception that gay men’s speech is characterized by high levels of pitch variability, numerous studies have attempted to identify wide pitch range as an index of gayness (e.g., Gaudio 1994; rogers and Smyth 2003). None of these, however, have been able to demonstrate a direct and unqualified correlation between a speaker’s pitch range and his perceived sexuality. research into sibilant duration has been somewhat more successful in this regard. Associated with the popular stereotype of a “gay man’s lisp,” several studies have been able to link a speaker’s sibilant durations and perceptions of that speaker’s sexuality (e.g., linville 1998; rogers, Smyth, and Jacobs 2000). In addition to realizing, at best, mixed results, previous research has recently been subjected to a critical analysis of its underlying methodologies. This critique, developed primarily in Kulick (2000) and Cameron and Kulick (2003), asserts that much of this research relies upon static concep-

Picking the right cherries? A comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculinity

As a way of comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches to critical discourse analysis (CDA), two analysts independently examined similar datasets of newspaper articles in order to address the research question ‘How are different types of men represented in the British press?’. One analyst used a 41.5 million word corpus of articles, while the other focused on a down-sampled set of 51 articles from the same corpus. The two ensuing research reports were then critically compared in order to elicit shared and unique findings and to highlight strengths and weaknesses between the two approaches. This article concludes that an effective form of CDA would be one where different forms of researcher expertise are carried out as separate components of a larger project, then combined as a way of triangulation.

Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor A Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed.

Integrating Intersectionality in Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research

In this paper, I argue for the need to integrate intersectionality theory more fully in language, gender, and sexuality research. I outline the basic principles of what an intersectional approach to identity and identity-linked speech entails, focusing particularly on the belief that an adequate description of lived experience, and hence social practice, requires us to consider the ways in which multiple systems of social categorization (e.g., gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, social class, and place) intersect with one another in dynamic and mutually constitutive ways. I review research on the linguistic perception and production of gender and sexuality that has adopted an intersectional perspective to date and argue that while certain aspects of the theory have long had a foothold in work in this area, the fields engagement with the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework has been partial. I conclude with suggestions about how to anchor a more comprehensive approach to intersectionality in sociolinguistic research.

The voice of others: Identity, alterity and gender normativity among gay men in Israel

This article presents an analysis of a slang variety, called oxtsit , as it is described and used by a cohort of gay men in Israel. Unlike many previous analyses of gay slang, I argue that the men described do not use the variety to help construct and affirm an alternative gay identity, but rather that they use it as a form of in-group mockery through which normative and nonnormative articulations of Israeli gay male sexuality are delineated. It is suggested that this discussion has implications for sociolinguistic understandings of “groupness” more broadly, and particularly the relationship between macro-level social categories (like “gay”) and individual lived experience. (Gay slang, Israel, vari-directional voicing, identity/alterity) *

The substance of style: Gender, social class and interactional stance in /s/-fronting in southeast England

Abstract This paper proposes an empirical method for the quantitative analysis of stance-taking in interaction. Building on recent conceptualizations of stance as the primary building-block of variation in language style, we describe how to implement an analysis of stance within a variationist framework via an examination of the particular speech activities within which stances are embedded combined with a consideration of the specific interactional goals these activities achieve. We illustrate our proposals with an investigation of variation in /s/-quality in the speech of cast members from two British reality television programs. Examining nearly 2000 tokens of /s/ in over 6 hours of recorded speech, we demonstrate how different acoustic realizations of /s/ in the sample correlate with the level of “threat” of a given speech activity, and we argue that this interactionally based analysis provides a better explanatory account of the patterns in our data than an analysis based on large social categories would. Through this paper, we therefore hope to contribute not only to the development of a more robust method for examining stance in quantitative sociolinguistic research, but also to help clarify the relationship between stances, speech activities and speaker identities more broadly.

Introduction: Tracing the origin of /s/ variation

Abstract This paper provides an introduction to the papers in this special issue on the sociophonetics of /s/. We begin by reviewing some of the principal findings on variation in the production and perception of /s/, summarizing studies in sociolinguistics, experimental phonetics, and laboratory phonology. We go on to identify similarities in the meanings associated with /s/ variation cross-linguistically, and briefly describe how theories of sound symbolism may help us to account for these patterns. We conclude this introductory article with a summary of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how together these articles help us to better understand that origin and trajectory of socially meaningful sociophonetic variation.

The topography of masculine normativities in South Africa

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine representations of masculinity in the English-language South African print media. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to interrogate a large corpus (18 million words) of English-language newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, we investigate the ways in which different South African masculine types are positioned with respect to one another in the media and examine how these positionings draw on broader tropes of gender, race and social class that circulate in South African society. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a more nuanced picture of gender/sexual hegemony in South Africa that goes beyond a simple opposition between dominant versus subordinate forms of masculinity to explore the range of competing normativities in the region. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to debates about the role of norms and normativities in the theorizing of masculinity more broadly.

‘Black diamonds’, ‘clever blacks’ and other metaphors: Constructing the black middle class in contemporary South African print media

South Africa (SA) has been undergoing a process of transformation since the end of White minority rule (apartheid) in 1994. During this period, various employment and lifestyle opportunities have given rise to a growing Black middle class (BMC). Against this backdrop, the article draws upon an intersectional approach to corpus-assisted discourse studies in order to examine the construction of the BMC in a 1.4 million-word corpus composed of 20 mainstream Anglophone South African newspaper titles published between 2008 and 2014. With the help of the corpus tool AntConc, the article investigates the collocates of ‘black middle class’, ‘black diamonds’, ‘clever blacks’ and ‘coconuts’, classifying results according to semantic categories in order to provide an idea of the multiple but nuanced representations of the BMC in contemporary SA. The analysis finds several lexically rich moralizing and paternalistic discourses that, in accordance with an intersectional perspective, enact a complex pattern of strategies that are simultaneously exclusionary and inclusionary.

The embedded indexical value of /s/-fronting in Afrikaans and South African English

Abstract This paper examines the indexical value of /s/-fronting in White Afrikaans and in White South African English (WSAfE). Prior research on this feature has shown that fronted articulations of /s/ in WSAfE serve as a regional and social indicator of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the feature carries a similar meaning in White Afrikaans. This study therefore aims to examine whether the variable carries similar meanings across the two languages. Data are based on the evaluative reactions toward different experimental stimuli that were presented to 214 Afrikaans-English bilinguals in South Africa during a modified matched-guise task. The results indicate that /s/-fronting in a man’s voice is perceived in similar terms in White Afrikaans and WSAfE though it carries somewhat different meanings across the two languages when it occurs in a woman’s voice, a difference related in turn to different approaches to gender across the two speech communities. The results of this research, and the indexical value of /s/-fronting in the two languages, are therefore only understandable in terms of certain sociohistorical and sociological differences between the two speech communities. The article ends with some discussion relating to the possible source of the relevant similarities and differences, i.e., parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer.