Malcah Yaeger-Dror

Multi-modality in girls' game disputes

This paper examines embodied procedures for producing disagreement turns in the midst of the children’s game of hopscotch. Turn shape, intonation, and body positioning are all critical to the construction of stance towards a player’s move in the game. In particular, in formulating a player’s move as ‘‘out’’ foul calls can state unambiguously, without doubt or delay that a violation has occurred. Turn initial tokens in disagreement turns include cries of ‘‘OUT!’’, negatives (‘‘No!’’), or response cries (nonlexicalized, discrete interjections such as ‘‘Ay!’’ or ‘‘Eh!’’). Players make use of pitch leaps, vowel lengthening, and dramatic contours (for example, LHL contours) to vocally highlight opposition in the turn preface. Whereas the normal pitch range of a speaker’s talk in ordinary conversation can be between 250 and 350 Hz, in opposition moves the pitch may be considerably higher, around 600 Hz. Affective stance is also displayed through gestures such as extended points towards the person who has committed the foul or the space where the foul occurred. Explanations or demonstrations (frequently embodied re-enactments of the player’s past move) constitute additional critical components of disagreement moves as they provide the grounds for the opposition. Disagreement moves and trajectories within children’s games provide demonstrations of the practices through which girls build and display themselves as agents in the constitution of their social order. Data for this study consists of videotaped interaction of working class fifth grade girls on the playground: second generation Mexican and Central Americans in Los Angeles, and African American Southern migrant children. Ethnic differences in the display

Register and prosodic variation, a cross language comparison

Abstract It is widely recognized that prosody serves as a cue for information content and for mutual agreement (or lack thereof) among dialogue participants. It is also true that different social situations require dissimilar prosodic strategies. The present paper will address the problem of prosodic prominence and contours on negatives in various interactive and noninteractive registers of Continental French, and will compare the results with those from American English negatives in similar situational contexts. Negatives were studied because they provide vital information—which should be emphasized prosodically to maximize comprehension—yet their presentation can be critical to amicable interaction, and under certain social conditions should be de-emphasized to minimize possible sources of discord. Consequently, analysis of prosody on negatives permits us to juxtapose theories of how language is produced and how it is interpreted. The study will provide evidence of three different loci of prosodic variation: language, culture, and social situation, concluding that each of the three variables influences prosodic realization.

Linguistic analysis of dialect “correction” and its interaction with cognitive salience

This article considers language variation within one “ethnic” group: Israelis of Middle Eastern origins. Earlier studies (Yaeger-Dror, 1988, 1991) found that singers from the dominant “koine” -speaking social group (Blanc, 1968) use [r] in pop songs and [R] in casual interviews. This can be defined as a register distinction. On the other hand, singers from a MidEastern ethnolinguistic background, whose underlying dialect includes [r], use [R] even in songs. Given that singers whose vernacular consonant invetory does not even include [r], and who should find it easire to use it categorically, have such a difficult time maintaing [r] consistently (and appropriately) in the song register? One of the recorded variants for these singers “merges” the [r] and [R] into coarticulated [rR]. Why does this previously unattested sound arise, and what does it tell us about the linguistic and sociolinguistic situation? Data from various registers are analyzed in order to discover the answers to these questions. This analysis is concerned with the quantifiable evidence of systematic patterns in the use of these three pronunciations for [r] and uses this evidence to demonstrate that subconscious sociolinguistic pressures on members of the minority community influence them to assimilate to the dominant social group while still retaining ethnolinguistic proof of a narrower ethnic identity. For example, the use of [rR] is found to be correlated with a wish to affiliate with both an [R]-using group and an [r]-using group, showing that sociolinguistic techniques can reveal social psychological ethinc affiliation. Like Trudgills (1986) discussions of dialects in contact, the present theoretical discussion takes advantage of proposals advanced by Giles, to explain why the data reveal both convergence (toward the dominant out-group) and divergence (toward the in-group) (Giles & Coupland, 1991). Sociolinguistic methods permit a quantitative analysis of the strength of these conflicting tendencies, both of which are subsumed under the technical term “accommodation.” Methods are proposed to determine if choice of the [R] or [rR] variant is conscious or not, and variable rule analysis reveals that for most of the singers the less cognitive salience, the greater the degree of convergence to the Koine norm [R]. The linguistic factors that are correlated with the relative degree of salience can be used in future studies when the relationship between convergence toward another dialect or language and relative cognitive salience is also at issue.

Lexical Classes in Montreal French: The Case of (ε:)

A perceptual study of the use of (εe:) in the Montreal French Vernacular (MFV) reveals that there is extreme variation in the vowel color used by different speakers for this phonological unit. Most men born before 1920 use a raised [e:] realization attested to by orthoepists for the last century, as well as by phoneticians in this century. Older working class women, however, often use a lowered [æ:] or [a:] nucleus. Speakers born after World War II use the more open pronunciation whatever their sex or social standing. Most older speakers use a high percentage of diphthongs in their realization of (ε:), especially in stressed syllables and in specific lexical classes, while younger middle class men and women eliminate diphthongization more consistently than older middle class speakers, and certainly more than their working class age mates. Thus, variation in vowel color and diphthongization are found to be related to a speakers age, sex, and social standing, as well as to specific lexical classes. The results are relevant to the analysis of Canadian French phonology, as well as to the theory of lexical phonology and to sociolinguistic theories of sound change.

The influence of changing group vitality on convergence toward a dominant linguistic norm: An Israeli example

Introduction Giles has proposed Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) to account for language usage between individuals (see e.g. Giles et al., 1977). That theory is concerned with determining what motivates an individual to de-accentuate ethnolinguistic characteristics and converge toward the dominant culture, or to accentuate his/her ethnolinguistic characteristics and diverge from the dominant patterns. Giles and other social psychologists have found that while regional dialects (or accents) connote integrity and a variety of socially attractive attributes, standard accents connote high socio-economic status and intellectual competence. They theorise that speakers will converge toward the dominant accent to the degree that they desire social approval from members of the dominant culture. While SAT primarily is concerned with accommodation of individual speakers, Giles and Johnson (1987) theorise that group patterns can be understood using elaborations of this theory. They do so partly by introducing the concept of group vitality. Giles believes that the degree of accommodation which takes place depends on group vitality.

It's not or isn't it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategies

In analyzing not -negation variation in English it becomes clear that specific strategies are used for prosodic emphasis and reduction of not in different social situations, and that contraction strategies vary independently of prosodic reduction. This article focuses on the factors influencing contraction strategies that are clearly dialect related and attempts to tease out those factors that are related to register and speaker stance. First, we review background information critical to an adequate analysis of not -negation and not -contraction. We then describe the corpora chosen for the present study, the research methods employed in the analysis, and the results of the analysis. The variable under analysis is the choice between uncontracted and not -contracted forms and between not -contracted and Aux-contracted forms in well-formed declarative sentences, for verbs which permit both. We end with some suggestions for corpus composition that will enable meaningful comparisons between social situations and between speakers, or characters, within one corpus. As researchers we can assure that future corpora will permit increasingly inclusive and interesting comparative studies; we close with some suggestions for those who wish to carry out studies.

Linguistic evidence for social psychological attitudes: Hyperaccommodation or (r)1 by singers from a Mizrahi background

Introduction Linguistic background Like some other countries which were colonized by the British or the French, Israel founded a language academy which is taken seriously by the population. The academy makes strong pronouncements, and even has radio slots to publicize them in prime time. While the radio slots are primarily used to publicize syntactic, lexical or morphological ‘rules’, all the broadcasters on the government radio and TV networks are officially required to know and use the prescriptive norm for the phonology as well. This norm prescribes five vowels, and the consonant system portrayed in Table la.

Register as a variable in prosodic analysis: the case of the English negative

The next generation of text-to-speech systems will have to be more sensitive to sociolinguistic ‘style’ variables. In order to assist in the adaptation of synthesis to a wider range of contexts, this article examines several sociolinguistic parameters which have been shown to influence the realization of negatives in actual discourse, analyzing their effects on the realization of negatives in English prose readings. Consistent with the results found in an earlier study, the analysis shows that pitch prominence on negatives is not common in read prose passages, and is even less common in read dialogue. Informational content (and consequently pitch prominence on negatives) is more important in prose addressed to children than in narrative reading for adults, while the more formal the prose for adults, the less likely prominence is to occur. The results show a surprising absence of conformity with ‘theoretical’ linguistic expectations, highlighting the necessity for consideration of register as an important variable for speech synthesis.

Situational Variation in Intonational Strategies

This paper will use data from two large corpora of spoken American English to analyze variation in prosodic strategies. In this paper the relative importance of cognitive and interactive determinants of intonational choices will be reconsidered, as well as the importance of register (Biber 1995) and stance and footing (Goffman 1981) to the choice of prominent or reduced not, especially when the speaker is doing a repair (Sacks 1992). The paper shows not only that a quantitative study of prosodic variables is possible, but that register and stance and footing influence a speaker’s prosodic choices. The study finds that if we consider Biber’s Dimension 1 (the variation from informative to interactive situations), all things being equal, negatives, which carry important information, will be prosodically prominent more consistently in informative situations. However, the paper will also show that stance and footing must be distinguished from each other: when speakers are in an interactive situation which requires a non-supportive/adversarial stance, the repair negatives -- and even the purely informative but not face threatening negatives -- will be prosodically prominent more consistently than they are when the interactive stance is not adversarial, and the repair tokens will be more consistently prominent than (even) informative tokens. In addition, the distinction between purely informative, interactively supportive, and remedial footing must also be taken into consideration. This paper provides evidence that while linguistic choices are theoretically shaped by the cognitive needs of the hearer, in interactive situations social concerns predominate over such cognitive ‘needs’.

Religion as a Sociolinguistic Variable

When considering variables that are rarely coded for in sociolinguistic studies, we discovered that general demographic studies [e.g., the census, Pew Research studies] have only recently realized that the question sets provided for demographic information rarely permit coding of religion, or when they do, provide only coarse-grained coding; yet recent studies in sociolinguistics and social anthropology have demonstrated that fine-grained distinctions in religious identification are necessary to account for sociolinguistic variation. This paper reviews the information from both sociolinguistic studies and demographic studies which should be considered when developing a protocol for analysis of speech variation. The paper also points out that the variation is often due to network effects from the ‘community of practice’, but at least some of the variation can be traced to ideological positions or choice of referee, both of which appear to influence language use.