Thomas Purnell

GERMAN SUBSTRATE EFFECTS IN WISCONSIN ENGLISH: EVIDENCE FOR FINAL FORTITION

A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin, shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English final laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language varieties and contact situation involved are all well understood, provides good evidence for structural influence from a substrate and provides a challenge to conventional views of language contact

Structured Heterogeneity and Change in Laryngeal Phonetics Upper Midwestern Final Obstruents

American sociolinguists have largely ignored obstruents as invariant, including how speakers distinguish /s, t/ from /z, d/. Upper Midwestern final obstruents provide clear evidence that the realization of such contrasts can and does vary. In a once German-speaking Wisconsin town, we have found that speakers systematically produce final laryngeal distinctions differently than reported for American English, with an apparent partial neutralization of the distinction. Here, we seek the historical antecedents of this pattern, comparing acoustic characteristics of recordings from speakers throughout the region born from 1866–1986. Analysis by date of birth shows distinct obstruent phonetics over this whole period, revealing striking changes in which acoustic cues have been exploited to maintain the distinction: The oldest speakers used primarily glottal pulsing, younger ones exhibit a “trading relation” between pulsing and preceding-vowel duration, and the youngest have reduced the acoustic cues of the distinction dramatically.

Making Linguistics Matter: Building on the Public's Interest in Language†

Linguists in the United States are acutely aware of the need to engage the public about their work in new and better ways. We describe here our effort to take up that challenge in Wisconsin by building a set of outreach projects that connect with communities throughout the state and that focus on issues of importance to particular audiences. Through these projects, we have become convinced that outreach, teaching, and research — treated separately and distinctly for academic evaluation — are inextricably linked, often to the point of being indistinguishable in practice.

PREVELAR RAISING AND PHONETIC CONDITIONING: ROLE OF LABIAL AND ANTERIOR TONGUE GESTURES

This article analyzes prevelar raising of /ae/, a restructuring present in the Upper Midwestern United States, from an articulatory perspective. Labov, Ash, and Boberg raise the question as to where this phenomenon lies within the range of uniform gestures. The present article describes lingual, mandibular, and labial movements in producing raised and unraised /ae/ in order to answer the question as to why /aeg/ is elevated in the vowel space above /aek/ even when speakers are not participating in the prevelar raising. Results of a study of speakers who raise /ae/ before /g/ compared to a cohort of nonraisers reveal that in addition to a more anterior gesture for /ae/ before /g/ than before /k/, there is statistically significant lip repositioning associated with the raising gesture. The results highlight limitations of sound change descriptions when only acoustic data is available.

Defining Dialect, Perceiving Dialect, and New Dialect Formation: Sarah Palin's Speech

Nonlinguists prove surprisingly good at recognizing dialects, even as dialects rapidly evolve. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speech was intensely discussed among linguists, the media, and laypeople. Though Palin is from Alaska, her speech was often identified with the Upper Midwest.The authors explore what this mismatch can tell us about dialects and their perception, starting from a description of Palin’s speech as commented on in the media.They review some pragmatic features and provide quantitative treatment of her “g-dropping.” Then, they undertake acoustic analysis of Palin’s vowels and final /z/ devoicing, including Western features and features that create an impression of her speech as Upper Midwestern. Regional settlement history, research on “new dialect formation,” and research on perception of variation inform the authors’ finding that a few acoustic and other characteristics trigger a specific national perception of Palin’s verbal behavior.

Convergence and Contact in Milwaukee: Evidence From Select African American and White Vowel Space Features

Past sociophonetic research on African American speakers of the Inland North dialect of American English suggests that speakers in the region do not participate in vowel changes observed among White speakers. Speaker identity to a pan—African American dialect has been often implied as militating against participation in White sound changes.Yet most of these studies analyze vowels as static and single data points, although vowels are known to be articulatorily and perceptually dynamic. It is unclear, then, whether situations involving phonetic convergence co-occur with different vowel properties than previously reported. This study investigates vowel dynamics (raising of vowel qualities and elongation of diphthongs) to test accommodation by Black speakers in southeastern Wisconsin toward White speakers. Results reveal that Black—White contact—either synchronically in an interview or diachronically from historical employment and housing discrimination—influences vowel-quality position and diphthong elongation in vowel space.

Expanding the set of acoustic features of the post‐vocalic voicing contrast in English

The literature on post‐vocalic voicing contrasts indicates that no single acoustic characteristic or perceptual cue captures the phonological distinction [e.g., Nittrouer 2004]. Previous perceptual studies examined such acoustic characteristics as vowel duration, percent and duration of closure voicing, formant, and F0 transitions. Detailed acoustic examination reveals additional variation. It is hypothesized that these understudied acoustic characteristics also play a role in the family of voicing cues. In the present study, two laryngeal characteristics are measured and modeled: glottalization (here, an abrupt drop in rate of vocal fold vibration by tensed vocal folds) and a sharp amplitude drop (due to abrupt spreading of vocal folds). Examination of American English data reveals that speakers tend to have at least one of these two characteristics in their final voiceless obstruents, but generally not both. Results suggest a process of laryngeal enhancement of final voiceless obstruents in addition to ...

Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe. Edited by Harry van der Hulst. (Empirical approaches to language typology, 20-4.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Pp. xxix, 1050. Hardcover.

Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe (WPS), edited by van der Hulst, is the fourth in a nine-volume series titled EUROTYP, which is the twentieth work of the series “Empirical Approaches to Language Typology,” the aims of which are to put to use the intellectual capital of the European Union, and to catalog the characteristics of a European Sprachbund (vi). The reader who is curious as to why word level prosody should have a thousand pages devoted to it, and why it is the only remotely phonological topic of the nine EUROTYP topics indicating a Sprachbund and representative of the intellectual capital of Europe, will find by scanning the published papers from the Workshop on Typology of Languages in Europe (Bechert et al. 1990) that only one real reference to accent/intonation/stress appears in Becherts (1990) article on nominal morphology. In short, WPS is about metrical structure. As such, WPS will be an influential resource to anyone working on prosody because metrical structure in general provides compelling empirical support to classical generative arguments in favor of an unconscious grammar and facilitates insight into other aspects of phonology (vowel length and tone placement, to note just two examples). Nespor reminds readers that although this book and topic are supposed to be limited to word level phenomena, the “word” domain has no privileged status with respect to prosody (117). That is, the principles of prosody do not begin or end with the word (although the notion of “word” holds social and pragmatic importance outside of the community of generative linguists). Thus, notions regarding word accent preclude antecedent notions about smaller and larger domains. Nevertheless, the task of metrical theory, and WPS specifically, is the elucidation of a simple notational device that can predict complex verbal behavior (Hayes 1982). This is in line with EUROTYPs purpose to “study the patterns and limits of variation” (v).