Suzanne Evans Wagner

Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory

Distinguishing linguistic change at the community level (‘generational change’) from linguistic change at the individual level (‘age grading’) is ‘‘one of the major issues in contemporary sociolinguistics’’ (Tagliamonte 2012:247). This article gives a brief history of the study of language change in the community, before turning to the types of linguistic behavior that have been observed across individuals’ lifespans. The article also discusses the meanings that have been attributed to the term ‘age grading’, arguing that consensus cannot be reached without more longitudinal work to determine the limits of lifespan linguistic change. 1. The Study of Language Change

Age grading in the Montréal French inflected future

The rise of the periphrastic future (PF) at the expense of the inflected future (IF) is an established historical trend in Quebecois French over at least the past 150 years. Previous research has also found higher rates of PF among younger speakers, many displaying categorical use in affirmative contexts. Because an apparent time interpretation of the synchronic data fits the historical record, we expected concomitant speaker stability across the lifespan. On the contrary, our panel study of 60 Montreal speakers (1971–1984) reveals age grading in a retrograde direction. As they aged, two-thirds of the speakers we studied increased their frequency of IF, an effect heightened for members of higher socioprofessional groups. Though not sufficiently robust to stem the historical tide, increased IF use by older speakers may retard the change somewhat, providing continuing IF input to child L1 acquisition. Rather than vitiating an apparent time interpretation, these results indicate that the rate of change may be slightly overestimated if age grading acts in a retrograde direction.

Real-time evidence for age grad(ing) in late adolescence

This study provides real-time support for the hypothesis, previously inferred from apparent time studies, that stable sociolinguistic variables are age-graded. Stable variables have been shown to exhibit a curvilinear pattern with age in which adolescents use nonstandard variants at a higher rate than adults do. An analysis of the morphophonological variable (ing) was carried out using recordings and ethnographic observations of 13 young American women during and after their final years of high school. Offering a detailed look at the late adolescent life stage, the study also explores speakers’ motivations for retaining or retreating from nonstandard variants as they prepare to enter adulthood. These are examined at both the group and the individual level. The results indicate that the degree of retreat from nonstandard variants is socially differentiated, in line with apparent time findings. Future enrollment in a locally oriented college, and alignment to a local ethnic network (Irish or Italian)—not social class—were the predictors of retention in high school.

Individual Sensitivity to the Frequency of Socially Meaningful Linguistic Cues Affects Language Attitudes

In forming an impression of a speaker, listeners are attentive to the frequency of nonstandard language features, using it to calibrate their judgments. We show that the ability to track and socially evaluate nonstandard variant frequency is subject to individual differences. Listeners judged an aspiring newscaster on the standardness of her speech in a series of read-aloud passages that had been manipulated for proportional frequency of a nonstandard pronunciation. Judgments of conditions at the poles of the frequency continuum were predicted by listener sociodemographic factors. For conditions in the middle of the frequency continuum, listener judgments were predicted by Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire scores for communication skills. Language attitudes may therefore be affected by both social and cognitive listener attributes, where cognitive attributes are most relevant for ambiguous inputs.

“We act like girls and we don't act like men”: Ethnicity and local language change in a Philadelphia high school

How is ethnicity indexed linguistically in a speech community in which immigrant L2s have typically not been spoken for three or more generations? Drawing on recordings and ethnographic observations of eighteen white high school girls in south Philadelphia, speakers of Irish descent are shown to differentiate themselves from speakers of Italian descent through their use of (ay0), that is, Canadian Raising. (ay0) is an ongoing sound change in Philadelphia and is remarkable for being a rare example of a male-led change. Irish girls exploit more male-like, backed, and raised variants as a resource for indexing their ethnic identity, which is associated locally with stereotypically masculine characteristics such as toughness. The symbolic reflection of ethnic affiliation through this subtle linguistic device makes use of both local and supralocal social meanings. (Ethnicity, adolescence, Philadelphia, Irish, Canadian Raising, gender, sound change, language, and identity)* I N T R O D U C T I O N The ethnic distribution of English sociolinguistic variables has been studied in large American cities since the 1960s (see e.g. Labov 1966/2006; Labov, Cohen, Robins, & Lewis 1968; Shuy, Wolfram, & Riley 1968; Laferriere 1979). Relatively few such studies, however, have made white, European-Americans their primary focus. Using sociophonetic and ethnographic data collected in Philadelphia, this study contributes to an understanding of why sociolinguistic differences may sometimes be detected between long-established European-American immigrant groups. Irishand Italian-American adolescents are shown to exhibit a difference in their realization of a local sound change: the centralization of the nucleus of /aɪ/ before voiceless consonants, henceforth (ay0).1 Following the approach of Benor (2010) and others working within Eckert’s (2005) “third wave” sociolinguistic framework, the article demonstrates that the (ay0) variable is an indexically rich resource for signaling not only speaker ethnicity, but multiple social meanings, especially within the adolescent lifestage. Although the study focuses only on

Acoustic cues to linguistic profiling? Machine learning of phonetic features of African American English

Listeners can readily differentiate words spoken in an African American English (AAE) dialect from a Standard American English (SAE) dialect, even in absence of distinctive morphosyntactic features. However, it is still unclear what acoustic-phonetic cues listeners utilize to rapidly distinguish AAE from SAE. This study investigates the informativeness of various acoustic-phonetic cues to the characterization of AAE dialect. V and VC sequences (with C = /n/, /m/, /l/, /r/) from speech of 7 female speakers (4 SAE and 3 AAE), recorded during sociolinguistic interviews, were randomly selected and acoustically analyzed, controlling for coarticulatory context. Acoustic cues of F1, F2, F3, F4 formant trajectories, formant bandwidth, pitch variation, duration, intensity, and voice quality measures (e.g., harmonic-to-noise ratio, jitter, shimmer, and spectral slope) were measured in these segments to identify the extent of their contribution to separating AAE and SAE. The results from machine learning modeling of...