Scott F. Kiesling

The Buckeye corpus of conversational speech: labeling conventions and a test of transcriber reliability

This paper describes the Buckeye corpus of spontaneous American English speech, a 307,000-word corpus containing the speech of 40 talkers from central Ohio, USA. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described, followed by a description of the protocol that was developed to phonemically label what talkers said. The results of a test of labeling consistency are then presented. The corpus will be made available to the scientific community when labeling is completed.

Men’s Identities and Sociolinguistic Variation: The Case of Fraternity Men

The variation patterns of the variable (ING) in an American college fraternity are explained by analyzing individual men’s contextualized discourse. While most of the fraternity men predictably use a lower rate of the ‘vernacular’ variant in weekly meetings, several men use a higher rate. I argue that all of the men index alignment roles associated with power, but that these alignment roles are powerful in different, specifiable ways. Qualitative discourse analysis shows that the men with high rates of the vernacular variant use (ING) to index working-class cultural models and confrontational stances, as part of identity displays based on physical, rather than structural, power. Thus, the variable has several potential abstract social meanings, but specific interactional meanings can only be constructed in contextualized practice.

Homosocial desire in men's talk: Balancing and re-creating cultural discourses of masculinity

This article is an exploration of how a group of men in the United States create homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire through language. In a society in which dominant discourses of masculinity provide competing scripts of male solidarity and heterosexuality, the achievement of closeness among men is not straightforward but must be negotiated through “indirect” means. It is shown how men actively negotiate dominant cultural discourses in their everyday interactions. In addition, a broadened view of indirectness, based on social function as much as denotation, is argued for. (Masculinity, men, language and gender, indirectness, desire, homosociality, fraternities.)*

Men, Masculinities, and Language

How do men use language to express masculinity? How is language masculine, and how does it become so? These are the issues that I address in this article. I first discuss why men and masculinities should be a focus in sociolinguistics, and why they generally have not been. I then explore what is meant by masculinities and the sociolinguistic processes that connect language with masculinities. Finally, I discuss some of the ways researchers have claimed men tend to speak, and why, and the problems with generalizing to all men from these data. The Problem With Men and Masculinities In the last three decades of the twentieth century, linguists began to study how language is used by speakers to do social things like expressing power, solidarity, and identity. Within that research, one of the most fruitful and contentious areas has been the investigation of how people use language to express gender, how a person’s gender affects the choices they make in how they speak, and how their talk is received. Almost every area of language has been shown to be connected with gender, from the smallest segments of sound to broadly characterized discourse strategies. We have learned much from these studies, but from the outset there has been a striking asymmetry in them: women are the object of study overwhelmingly more than men. The founding of the field of language and gender studies is often traced to Lakoff ’s (1975) Language and Woman’s Place, which focuses on how women are expected to use language and how their linguistic usages perpetuate their subordinate position in society. Since then there has been much empirical and comparative work, often testing Lakoff ’s claims, but even in these comparative studies the men are generally not the gender that is focused on in explanation; rather it is the women whose behavior is explained, or whose perspective is taken. Men, in short, are relatively invisible, and when discussed are generally treated as a homogeneous group. In fairness, the political goals of this early (and continuing) work in language and gender necessitated a focus on women, who had been stereotyped as weak and sometimes verbally deficient

A Multidimensional Lexicon for Interpersonal Stancetaking.

The sociolinguistic construct of stancetaking describes the activities through which discourse participants create and signal relationships to their interlocutors, to the topic of discussion, and to the talk itself. Stancetaking underlies a wide range of interactional phenomena, relating to formality, politeness, affect, and subjectivity. We present a computational approach to stancetaking, in which we build a theoretically-motivated lexicon of stance markers, and then use multidimensional analysis to identify a set of underlying stance dimensions. We validate these dimensions intrinscially and extrinsically, showing that they are internally coherent, match pre-registered hypotheses, and correlate with social phenomena.

Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese

Linguists have sporadically noted peculiarities of pronunciation, lexis and morphosyntax in the speech of European Americans in the Pittsburgh area, and Pittsburgh speech, locally known as “Pittsburghese”, has been a topic of discussion in the Pittsburgh area for decades. This variety has never before been systematically documented, however. The first and only scholarly book to describe Pittsburgh-area varieties of English, Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese is an essential reference tool for anyone studying the dialect of the Pittsburgh area and the only textbook choice for anyone teaching about it.

Men talk: Stories in the making of masculinities

Jennifer Coates , Men talk: Stories in the making of masculinities . Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xi, 219. Hb

Cues to gender in children’s speech

59.95 Pb

Masculine stances and the linguistics of affect: on masculine ease

29.95. It is pleasing to see the publication of a book-length study of language and masculinity, a focus of research that literally did not exist ten years ago. But although this book is rich in its presentation of data and its description of narrative, I was disappointed. The book falls short of its goal of explicating and understanding mens talk; rather, it reifies stereotypes of men without challenging or questioning why these stereotypes exist.

Interactional Stancetaking in Online Forums

Awareness of one’s own gender emerges around 3 years and awareness that gender stays stable throughout life is evident by 4 years (Bee, 1998). This suggests that by 4 years of age, noticeable gender differences may emerge along a number of dimensions. The hypothesis tested here is that adults are able to identify the gender of 4‐year‐olds by voice quality alone. Sixteen four‐year‐olds were recorded saying the alphabet. Small portions of each recording were excised, and played to 40 adults. Adults were asked to identify the gender of the speaker. Subjects were able to correctly identify the gender of the child more often than chance. However, in the cases where a child’s gender was incorrectly identified, pitch did not play a significant role. Rather, it appears that formant structure is the best predictor (although not perfect), of how a child’s gender will be judged by voice (Perry, 2001). These results have important implications for our understanding of the linguistic cues that listeners use to identif...