Fall 2011 Seminar Series

We'll kick off the new semester with a double-header on September 9, 4pm in SN 3060, featuring the doctoral research projects of our own Jennifer Thorburn and visiting student, Matthias Hoffman.

Matthias Hofmann

PhD Candidate, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

Title: "Mainland Canadian English Phonology in Newfoundland: Linguistic Change reflecting Economic Change?"

Abstract

Recent discovery of offshore oil has fundamentally changed the province of Newfoundland, Canada, from a poor cousin of the Canadian mainland to that of a ‘have’ province in terms of economy and education among others (Clarke 2010a: 132). As a consequence, the creation of new jobs and the need for developing Newfoundland’s infrastructure are accompanied by a dramatic change of the linguistic system. Investigating and contributing to knowledge of rapid linguistic changes as they occur is rare and hence important to analyze in the sociolinguistic tradition. This paper presents an investigation of a linguistic variable that has been identified as relevant to change in a North American context (particularly Canadian Shift) and for being innovative in Newfoundland English: the vowel in the DRESS lexical set.

Audio recordings from earlier research constitute the pilot study data, stratified by age, gender, and religion. The data set consists of 4 informants interviewed in Pouch Cove, NL, by members of the community. Pouch Cove has been a traditional outport community, which is currently changing towards a bedroom community of St. John’s, similarly to Petty Harbour (Van Herk, Childs & Thorburn, 2007).

As for the variable investigated, /ɛ/ is raised in areas settled by conservative speakers of southeast Irish origin such as St. John’s (Clarke 2010b). The NL instantiation of the Canadian Shift (Boberg, 2010, Clarke et al. 1995, Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006), on the other hand, results in a change in vowel quality in the opposite direction.

Results from the current study suggest a tendency for especially younger females to use a low mid /ɛ/ in the DRESS lexical set most frequently in careful speech.

References

Boberg, Charles (2010). The English language in Canada : status, history, and comparative analysis. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bucholtz, M., Bermuda, N., Fung, V., Edwards, L. & Vargas, R. (2007). "Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal?: The Preceptual Dialectology of California. Journal of English Linguistics 35(3): 325-352.

Clarke, Sandra (2010a). Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Clarke, Sandra (2010b). Newfoundland and Labrador English. In Schreier, D. (Ed.), The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. 72-91.

Clarke, Sandra, Elms, Ford & Youssef, Amani (1995). The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change 7(2): 209-228.

Labov, William, Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles (2006). The atlas of North American English : phonetics, phonology, and sound change : a multimedia reference tool. Berlin ; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Preston, Dennis Richard & Long, Daniel (1999). Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

Van Herk, Gerard, Childs, Becky & Thorburn, Jennifer (2007). Identity Marking and Affiliation in an Urbanizing Newfoundland Community. In Cichocki, W. (Ed.), 31st Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association/31e Colloque annuel de l'Association de linguistique des provinces atlantiques. Fredericton NB, Canada. 85-94.

Jennifer Thorburn

PhD Candidate, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Testing speaker consistency across sociolinguistic variables

Abstract

Although sociolinguists often examine multiple variables in a particular community, correlations between variables are not often examined statistically. Following Guy's (2009) work on stable co-variables in Brazilian Portuguese and Tagliamonte and Waters' (2010) analysis of changes in progress in Toronto English, this paper investigates the notion of saliency and co-variability, to determine if salient covariables correlate with one another and/or show negative correlations with their nonsalient counterparts. To do so, I examine four sociolinguistic variables in data from Nain, an Inuit community in Labrador: verbal -s (I loves it), interdental stopping in voiced (them pronounced as dem) and voiceless (thing as ting) contexts, and adjectival intensification (right, very, really, so, etc.). The nonstandard variants of verbal -s and interdental stopping are often employed in identity work in Newfoundland (Van Herk et al. 2007, 2008) and are considered enregistered features of the dialect (Clarke and Hiscock 2009); adjectival intensification, in contrast, has received less attention in these discussions, though Clarke (2010) notes that the variant right is one of the trademark intensifiers of Newfoundland and Labrador English. (The other intensifier associated with the province, some, appears only twice in the Nain data and is consequently excluded from this study.)

Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for an age- and sex-stratified sample of 25 residents for all pairs of variables, based on each speaker’s factor weight for the variants most associated with the regional dialect. While there are no significant correlations for the community as a whole, the data suggest that some salient variables correlate, at least for certain speaker groups.