Robin Dodsworth

Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone

In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southern U.S. city, five decades of in-migration of technology-sector workers from outside the South has resulted in large-scale contact between the local Southern dialect and non-Southern dialects. This paper investigates the speed and magnitude of the reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) with respect to the five front vowels, using Trudgills (1998) model of dialect contact as a framework. The data consist of conversational interviews with 59 white-collar Raleigh natives representing three generations, the first generation having reached adulthood before large-scale contact. Acoustic analysis shows that all vowels shift away from their Southern variants across apparent time. The leveling of SVS variants begins within the first generation to grow up after large-scale contact began, and contrary to predictions, this generation does not show wide inter- or intraspeaker variability. Previous studies of dialect contact and new dialect formation suggest that leveling of regional dialect features and the establishment of stable linguistic norms occurs more quickly when children have regular contact with one another. Dialect contact in Raleigh has occurred primarily within the middle and upper classes, the members of which are densely connected by virtue of schools and heavy economic segregation in neighborhood residence.

Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

Since Prince (1981) and Givon (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics

Modeling socioeconomic class has been a persistent challenge in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. While early stratificational models formulated on the basis of socioeconomic indicators such as income, occupation, and area of residence revealed compelling patterns of linguistic variation, they were critiqued for their lack of explanatory power at the interactional level and for their marginalization of those without paid employment. Subsequent models have employed cross-disciplinary concepts such as the linguistic market, social networks, and communities of practice, prioritizing local social distinctions that are understood to reflect or even constitute abstract structural categories such as ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’. It is argued that a full socioeconomic class paradigm for sociolinguistics would also theorize class at the aggregate level, and to this end, sociological class models may prove useful. Contemporary sociological class analysis at the level of social practice offers additional avenues for interfacing with sociology.

A consuming passion: An interview with George Ritzer

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ritzer was co‐founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture with Don Slater. In addition to his considerable work in the area of the sociology of consumption, Ritzer is especially known for Metatheorizing in sociology (1991), The McDonaldization of society (1993), The globalization of nothing (2004), and a truly scandalous number of additional publications in social theory and sociology generally. These interviews were conducted on the 2nd and 30th of May 2006.

Semantic mapping: What happens to idioms in discourse

Abstract Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987, Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors. Cognitive Science 21. 247–282) while in the experimental psycholinguistic tradition their role has been to challenge the basis of conceptual metaphor in “priming” figurative language (Glucksberg et al. 1993, Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory and Cognition 21. 711–719; McGlone 2007, What is the explanatory value of a conceptual metaphor? Language and Communication 27. 109–206). It is, moreover, broadly assumed that criteria defining grammatical properties of idioms are limited to their morphological and syntactic behavior (Nunberg et al. 1994, Idioms. Language 70. 491–538). While the pragmatic properties of idioms have been described informally (Glucksberg 2001. Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms (Oxford psychology series 36). Oxford: OUP), there are few studies which systematically contrast the behavior of nouns in literal vs. idiomatic expressions in discourse. Using a battery of criteria which has been developed to study discourse properties of subjects in spoken Arabic (Owens et al. 2013. Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic. Language Variation and Change 25. 255–285), we show that keyword nouns in Nigerian Arabic are significantly different according to whether they are idiomatic or literal. The basis of the conclusion is the statistical analysis of 1403 tokens derived from a large corpus of natural Nigerian Arabic texts. Nouns in idiomatic expressions are opaque to discourse in a way those in literal ones are not. To explain the statistical results we argue that idioms partake in a ‘semantic mapping’ which incorporates the noun and its collocate in the idiom into a word-like unit, rendering it largely invisible to subsequent discourse. Since Nigerian Arabic idiomatic nouns, as is shown, display no clause-internal syntactic constraints, exhibit no cross-clausal syntactic dependencies, and show no significant interactions with possessive pronouns which ostensibly appear to mark the discourse argument of the keyword they are suffixed to, it is concluded that the mapping is of semantic nature. Other than exemplifying basic facts obtained via elicitation, the entire argument hinges on an examination of nouns in actual spoken discourse. The article establishes that large corpora coupled with multivariate statistical treatment contribute directly to understanding semantic factors difficult to evaluate via direct elicitation or examination of individual examples, in this case the sensitivity of cross-clausal referentiality to idiomatic contextualization.

Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts

The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants ( price ) relative to voiced or word-final environments ( prize ). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermudez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two discrete allophones. We test this hypothesis via distributional analysis of offglide targets and statistical analysis of the effect of vowel duration. As predicted, we find price and prize share a continuous distribution in the Inland South, the region where the Southern Shift probably originated (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). We use Raleigh, North Carolina, outside the Inland South, as a comparison point; there, the same methodologies indicate price and prize are more discretely separated. Our results thus offer empirical support for the phonological theory that motivated the hypothesis.

Stability in Subject-Verb Word Order: From Contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic to Biblical Aramaic

This article differs from traditional treatments of subject-verb word order in Semitic in two respects. First, we take as our point of departure a detailed study of word order in contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic, which shows that the respective order of the subject and verb in that variety is determined by morpholexical and by discourse-immanent factors. From this starting point, we work backwards, applying the same analytical framework to subject-verb word order in Biblical Aramaic. Secondly, we use corpus-based quantitative methods and regression analysis to determine the degree of similarity between Arabian Peninsular Arabic and Biblical Aramaic. It emerges that, for all intents and purposes, subject-verb word order in Arabian Peninsular Arabic and Biblical Aramaic are governed by an identical set of morpholexical and discourse constraints. Historical explanations for these results are discussed; it is emphasized that, whether the patterns are due to common inheritance or to diffusion, a complex pattern of word order determination is sustained over at least 2,500 years of chronological time.

Being (George Ritzer) and nothingness: An interview

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Known for his scholarly contributions to studies of consumption, globalization, metatheory, and modern and postmodern social theory, Ritzer is also the author of The McDonaldization of Society (revised edition forthcoming, 2007), which is among the best selling monographs in the history of American sociology. His latest work is focused on the phenomenon of outsourcing.