Robert J. Podesva

Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions

This article illustrates how the notions of style and indexicality can illuminate understanding of the social meaning of a specific linguistic variable, the tag question. Drawing on conversational speech and ethnographic data from a community of high school girls in northwest England, it quantitatively and qualitatively examines the discourse, grammatical, and phonological design of tag questions in this community. Members of four social groups are shown to use tag questions to similar effect, as a means of conducing particular points of view. However, these groups also exhibit striking differences in the stylistic composition of tags, distinctions that indexically construct stances and personas, which may in turn come to represent group identity. These data suggest that the social meaning of tag questions can be best ascertained by examining their internal composition and by situating them in their broader discursive and social stylistic contexts. (Adolescents, ethnography, indexicality, interactional context, quantitative discourse analysis, social meaning, style, tag questions)

Salience and the Social Meaning of Declarative Contours: Three Case Studies of Gay Professionals

Most studies exploring the social meaning of variation have focused on phonological variables at the segmental level. This article investigates the social meaning of intonational variation in the speech of three gay professionals. To examine how intonational meanings can be exploited as symbolic resources, this study takes an intraspeaker approach, inspecting declarative intonation patterns across three situations per speaker. The analysis reveals that speakers exhibit systematic patterns of variation on either of two levels—the frequency with which variants are employed or their phonetic manifestations—depending on the salience of variants. The social significance of these patterns is inferred by situating them in their discourse and ethnographic contexts. Importantly, intonational meaning surfaces in both the choice of a variant and its phonetic rendering. The categorical choice of a variant conveys pragmatic meaning, while the variant’s phonetic realization reflects the strength of its social meaning.

Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift

Addressing the dearth of variation research in nonurban, noncoastal regions of California, this study examines the extent to which speakers in Redding, an inland community just north of the Central Valley, participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). We acoustically analyze the fronting of the back vowels boot and boat , the raising of ban and backing of bat , and the merger of bot and bought, in sociolinguistic interviews with 30 white lifelong residents. Results reveal a change in apparent time for all analyzed variables, indicating the CVSs progression through the community, though not as robust as in urban, coastal areas. Additionally, we provide evidence that shifting patterns for different vowels are structured by the ideological divide between town and country. Thus, as the CVS spreads through Redding, speakers utilize particular features of the shift differently, negotiating identities relevant in Californias nonurban locales.

Constraints on the social meaning of released /t/: A production and perception study of U.S. politicians

Previous studies on released /t/ collectively suggest that the linguistic feature is associated with intelligence and education, social meanings that can be recruited in constructing articulate personas. This study examines the production of released /t/ by six prominent U.S. political figures, as well as the social meanings listeners attribute to the variant. Employing a matched guise technique facilitated by digital stimulus manipulation, we find that the social meanings associated with released /t/ are constrained by linguistic and social factors. Regarding the former, word-medial /t/ releases carry stronger social meanings than those appearing word-finally. With respect to social factors, listener interpretations vary according to the identity of the speaker and knowledge of how frequently particular speakers produce /t/ releases. Thus, even though conventionalized associations between linguistic forms and meanings can be drawn upon to construct articulate personas, not all speakers can do so with equal effectiveness.

Sociophonetics and Sexuality: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology

In recent years, interest in variation has grown well beyond sociolinguistics, with benefits on all sides. the field of sociophonetics now brings together communities of people asking quite different questions about phonetic and phonological variation, as laboratory phoneticians and sociolinguists bring distinct theoretical and methodological expertise and concerns to the table. this special issue is based on a panel on sociolinguistic variation and sexuality organized by the Committee on the Status of Women in linguistics at the 2010 annual meeting of the linguistics Society of American (lSA). the purpose of the panel was to speed up the emerging collaboration among researchers from phonetics and from sociolinguistics who are working on issues of sexuality, as well as to inform the lSA membership of important issues raised in the study of sexuality. particularly important in this enterprise is bringing together the more complex models of social variation that have been developed in recent years in the study of sociolinguistic variation with the phonetic and experimental advances of laboratory phonetics. to the extent that researchers are squarely planted in their own subdisciplines, each tends to use fairly two-dimensional representations of the other. the ubiquitous F1-F2 vowel plot that dominates work in sociolinguistics gets at a very small dimension of the phonetic signals that even individual vowels bring to the stylistic table. Similarly, two-dimensional categories such as male or female, gay or straight, offer very blunt social-analytical instruments. this may caricature the work done in this field, but we do so in order to emphasize the importance of bringing together the richness of phonetic and social analysis in any sociophonetic study. experimental studies of speech perception and field studies of production provide important complementary methods and can be most productively done iteratively and in close consultation. As a long-term goal, we seek to bring together theoretical developments in social constructionist approaches to sexuality; advances in the development of cognitive models that incorporate both linguistic and social information; and methodologi-

Voice Quality and Identity

ABSTRACT Variation in voice quality has long been recognized to have functions beyond the grammatically distinctive or phonetically useful roles it plays in many languages, indexing information about the speaker, participating in the construction of stance in interaction, or serving to identify the speaker as a unique individual. Though the links between voice quality and identity have been studied in phonetics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, forensic linguistics, and speech technology, considerable work remains to be done to problematize the ways in which the voice is taken as covering privileged, immediate meanings about the speakers body and to break apart the ideologies that construct it as an inalienable, unitary, and invariant facet of a speakers identity. We point out promising directions in recent research on the voice and bring up ideas for where this important area of research should be taken.

Gender differences in the acoustic realization of creaky voice: Evidence from conversational data collected in Northern California

Although several sociophonetic studies report greater breathiness among female speakers, a pattern often attributed to sexual dimorphism in vocal fold physiology (Sodersten and Lindestad, 1990), recent studies in North America report that young women use more creaky voice than men (Yuasa, 2011; Podesva, 2013). While these recent studies examine conversational data, they rely on auditory techniques to identify creaky phonation, leaving its acoustic realization in conversational speech largely unexplored. The present study investigates the acoustic properties of creaky voice in hour-long sociolinguistic interviews with 30 speakers (15 females, 15 males; age 18–86) from Northern California. Measures of spectral tilt were taken at the midpoint of all vowels in the corpus (N = 362,429), and data were fitted to a mixed effects linear regression model. As expected, several linguistic factors influence H1-H2 values (previous and following segment, intensity, F0, F1, vowel duration, stress, phrase position, phrase...

Linguistic and social effects on perceptions of voice onset time in Korean stops

This paper investigates effects of linguistic and social factors on phoneme categorization of Seoul Korean stops. In an investigation of VOT in aspirated versus lenis stops of Korean, Oh (2011) reports VOT length in aspirated stops to be conditioned both linguistically and socially: bilabial stops exhibit shorter VOT than velars, following /a/ conditions shorter VOT than /i/, and female speakers exhibit shorter VOT than males. 10 native speakers of Seoul Korean (5 men, 5 women) were recorded producing bilabial and velar stops in the frame /CVn/. Recordings were manipulated to create a 10-step continuum of VOT length for each speaker, from 25ms to 115ms. 30 native speakers of Seoul Korean listened to each of these manipulated stimuli for every speaker and categorized them as containing either aspirated or lenis stops. Listeners were more likely to categorize a given VOT as aspirated when it occurred in a bilabial stop as opposed to a velar stop, when it preceded /a/ as opposed to /i/, and when it was produ...