North American English Research Articles

What's in a word: Sounding sarcastic in British English

Using a simulated telephone conversation task, we elicited sarcastic production in different utterance types (i.e. declaratives, tag questions andwh-exclamatives from native speakers of the southern variety of British English. Unlike previous studies which focus on static prosodic measurements at the utterance level (e.g. mean pitch, pitch span, intensity), we examined both static prosodic measurements and continuous changes in contour shape in the semantically most important words (or key words) of the sarcastic utterances and their counterparts in the sincere utterances. To this end, we adopted Functional Data Analysis to model pitch variation as contours and represent the contours as continuous function in statistical analysis. We found that sarcasm and sincerity are prosodically distinguishable in the key words alone. The key words in sarcastic utterances are realised with a longer duration and a flatter fall than their counterparts in sincere utterances regardless of utterance type and speaker gender. These results are compatible with previous reports on the use of a smaller pitch span and a slower speech rate in sarcastic utterances than in sincere utterances in North American English. We also observed notable differences in the use of minimum pitch, maximum pitch and contour shape in different utterance types and in the use of mean pitch and duration by male and female speakers. Additionally, we found that the prosody of the key words in sarcastic utterances and their counterparts in sincere utterances has yielded useful predictors for the presence (or absence) of sarcasm in an utterance. Together, our results lend direct support to a key-word–based approach. However, the prosodic predictors included in our analysis alone can achieve only an accuracy of 70.4%, suggesting a need to examine additional prosodic parameters and prosody beyond the key words.

A hierarchical linguistic information-based model of English prosody: L2 data analysis and implications for computer-assisted language learning

The paper presents a prosody model of native English (L1) continuous speech as corrective prosodic feedback for non-native learners. The model incorporates both hierarchical discourse association and information structure to (1) pinpoint the prosodic features of multi-phrase continuous speech, and (2) simulate native-like expressive speech using corpus of North American and Taiwan L2 English. The bottom-up, additive, data-driven model aims to generate L1-like expressive continuous speech with built-in phonetic and phonological specifications at the lexical level, syntactic/semantic specifications at the next higher phrase and sentence levels, and completed with patterned paragraph associations and prosodic projections of information allocation at higher levels. The hierarchical model successfully allows us to identify L1-L2 differences by prosodic modules/patterns as novel additional features “discourse structure” and “information density” reliably nail down L1-L2 prosodic differences related to phrase association as well as information placement. Our L1 prosodic model with the proposed predictors and optimized model trained from L1 speech corpus showed increase of prediction over existing methods. As a corrective feedback for L2 learners, these predicted L1 prosodic features were compared with a baseline model by objective evaluation (RMS error and correlation) then superimposed onto the L2 speech tokens. Resynthesized L2 tokens were subsequently compared with the original L2 tokens for degrees of perceived accent using subjective evaluation (native-listener perception test). We believe the proposed model can be an effective alternative for implementing computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems that helps generate L1-like prosody from text, and at the same time serves as corrective feedback for L2 learners.

Investigating the influence of listener attitudes and expectations on the intelligibility of Hindi-influenced English

Phoneme recognition and speech intelligibility can be affected by purely social factors, such as beliefs about or attitudes toward speakers of varying races and ethnicities (e.g., Babel & Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 137 [2015]). The current study examined whether implicit and explicit attitudes about people from South Asian (SA) affect the intelligibility of Hindi-influenced English (HIE). Three measures were used: an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure general associative attitudes toward SA individuals; an intelligibility task in which listeners repeated HIE and North American English (NAE) sentences in noise, accompanied by pictures of SA or white individuals; and an ethnographic interview to acquire qualitative data about stereotypes, communicative practices with nonnative speakers, and other language attitudes. Data collection is ongoing in a more ethnically diverse location (Vancouver, BC) and a more homogenous one (Minneapolis, MN). Drawing from past studies on socioindexical influences on nonnative speech, we predict that individuals who harbor negative attitudes and stereotypes about SA people will perceive HIE as less intelligible than those without such beliefs. The results of this study will inform the growing body of literature regarding the ways in which socioindexical factors influence speech recognition across individuals with diverse ethnicities and language varieties.

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: Morphosyntactic variation in North American English

AbstractThe Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English from the perspective of generative microcomparative syntax. In addition to eliciting judgments from speakers of particular varieties, we also conduct large-scale surveys, map the results of those surveys geographically, conduct statistical tests taking geography and other social variables into account, and look for theoretically significant linguistic correlations. In all cases, we do this with the primary goal of understanding variation between speakers at the individual level. While our goals and methodologies are informed by our theoretical perspective, we expect that our work and results will be of interest to linguists working in other frameworks and even to the public more generally. This article outlines the goals and methodologies of the project and describes in broad strokes some of the results obtained so far, as well as some of the ways we have shared our findings with others, inside and outside academia.

Acoustically quantifying /ai/ monophthongization in four southern dialect regions

The Atlas of North American English describes four southern U.S. dialect areas: Inland South (IS; interior Appalachia), Texas South (TS; around Dallas), Florida (FL), and South (S; remainder of Southern US). These areas are distinguished by degree of /ai/ monophthongization, the Southern Vowel Shift’s (SVS) triggering feature (Labov et al., 2006). IS is argued to be most advanced in the SVS, and /ai/ weakens in all phonetic environments. While not as advanced generally, TS also features all-environment weakening. In S, /ai/ weakens only in syllable-final and pre-voiced conditions, and in FL it remains diphthongal. This study uses the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to acoustically measure /ai/ weakening in each region. Speech was force-aligned and F1 and F2 values collected at five time points. Related work on F2 formant angle in DASS speech has suggested /ai/ weakens most in IS (Renwick and Stanley, 2017). Here, trajectory length (TL) measurement (Fox and Jacewicz, 2009) corroborates evidence f...

A comparison of acoustic and articulatory methods for analyzing vowel differences across dialects: Data from American and Australian English.

In studies of dialect variation, the articulatory nature of vowels is sometimes inferred from formant values using the following heuristic: F1 is inversely correlated with tongue height and F2 is inversely correlated with tongue backness. This study compared vowel formants and corresponding lingual articulation in two dialects of English, standard North American English, and Australian English. Five speakers of North American English and four speakers of Australian English were recorded producing multiple repetitions of ten monophthongs embedded in the /sVd/ context. Simultaneous articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography. Results show that there are significant correlations between tongue position and formants in the direction predicted by the heuristic but also that the relations implied by the heuristic break down under specific conditions. Articulatory vowel spaces, based on tongue dorsum position, and acoustic vowel spaces, based on formants, show systematic misalignment due in part to the influence of other articulatory factors, including lip rounding and tongue curvature on formant values. Incorporating these dimensions into dialect comparison yields a richer description and a more robust understanding of how vowel formant patterns are reproduced within and across dialects.

The articulatory dynamics of pre-velar and pre-nasal /æ/-raising in English: An ultrasound study.

Most dialects of North American English exhibit /æ/-raising in some phonological contexts. Both the conditioning environments and the temporal dynamics of the raising vary from region to region. To explore the articulatory basis of /æ/-raising across North American English dialects, acoustic and articulatory data were collected from a regionally diverse group of 24 English speakers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A method for examining the temporal dynamics of speech directly from ultrasound video using EigenTongues decomposition [Hueber, Aversano, Chollet, Denby, Dreyfus, Oussar, Roussel, and Stone (2007). in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Cascadilla, Honolulu, HI)] was applied to extract principal components of filtered images and linear regression to relate articulatory variation to its acoustic consequences. This technique was used to investigate the tongue movements involved in /æ/ production, in order to compare the tongue gestures involved in the various /æ/-raising patterns, and to relate them to their apparent phonetic motivations (nasalization, voicing, and tongue position).

Cross-Cultural Telephone Call Closings in English between a Korean and an American Interactants

After pointing out both the paucity of research on cross-cultural telephone call closings between interactants whose dominant languages differ and the lopsided attention to telephone call openings, the present study first illustrates the reciprocal duplication of the identical terminal elements between the conversationalists across the American telephone closing turns and the progressive unilaterality by one interactant, and in response, the repetition of yey ‘yes’ by the other interactant in the Korean telephone closing turns. Then, it turns to an English telephone call closing between a North-American English speaker and a proficient speaker of English whose native language is Korean and whose total length of stay in English-speaking countries is limited to between one year and two years. The data illustrate that the Korean caller’s telephone closing sequence in English resembles that of Korean more than that of North-American English in light of the absence of lexical duplication, minimal reciprocity, and the terminal silence in response to bye in English. The source of the Korean-like behaviors in the English telephone call closing is traced to the influence of the telephone call closing sequence in the speaker’s dominant language (i.e., Korean in this case). The present study identifies it as conversational transfer in order to put more weight on the sequential interdependence and reciprocity of cross-cultural telephone conversation closings without limiting the participants to second language learners. Suggestions for future studies based on the limitations of the present study are also offered along with some pedagogical implications.

Canadian Raising in Chicagoland: The production and perception of a marginal contrast

In some North American English varieties the diphthong /aɪ/ has developed a distinctively higher nucleus before voiceless consonants and also before a flapped /t/. The phenomenon is known as Canadian Raising, as it was first described for Canadian English. We report on variation in the production and perception of this distinction in a group of female and male speakers from the Chicago area. We focus on the context before flapped /t/ and /d/. The production results show that there is a significant difference in the quality of both the nucleus and the offglide between these two contexts, albeit of a smaller magnitude than the difference observed before word-final voiceless and voiced consonants. In addition, we find a small difference in duration between diphthongs in the two pre-flap contexts. In perception, our subjects were only moderately successful in recognizing words in minimal pairs containing the target diphthong preceding a flap (as in writer vs rider), although with much higher than chance accuracy. A Quadratic Discriminant Analysis model classified the stimuli with substantially greater accuracy than our subjects. We conclude that in this English variety there is a contrast between a higher diphthong [ʌi] and a lower diphthong [aɪ], but this contrast is only marginal. This study contributes to our understanding of marginal contrasts in production and perception. The understanding of these contrasts has both theoretical and practical relevance.

The changingfuture: competition, specialization and reorganization in the contemporary English future temporal reference system

The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (willandbe going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time,be going tohas been gradually increasing in frequency relative towillover the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towardsbe going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.

Things Fall Apart and Dadi Budha: Portrayal of indigenous community and their disintegration

In Gopinath Mohanty’s Dadi budha (1944) which was translated in the name “The Ancestor” and in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (1958), both the authors recreate in fictional modes, the indigenous life of the people of two primitive cultures, living on the hills of Koraput, India and in the forests of Nigeria, respectively. This comparison was first drawn by the son of the author Gopinath Mohanty, Arun Kumar Mohanty, who translated Dadi Budha in English. In the afterward of his translation he made this observation and also countered a very important problem of comparison – the problem of language. While “Things Fall Apart” is written in English by an African author, for whom English is just a medium of expression and not a vernacular language; Dadi Budha has been translated into English. Arun Kumar Mohanty vindicates this problem of language by arguing that most original works in English by non-English writers can be viewed as works of self-translation. To back his decision up, he referred to Joanne Akai’s paper on West Indian writing as translation: “Constantly writing in and for another culture, WI writers operate in a space between cultural and linguistic traditions: between Caribbean Creole culture and British or North American English culture, between the Creole language and the English language, between an oral genre (storytelling) and a written genre (novel or short story). WI writers are therefore faced with a number of challenges: as Translators, they must master the language they write-translate to from, as well as the language they write-translate into; as ambassadors, they must accurately represent Carribean experience and reality, as writers, they must communicate in a language that is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.”

Adaptações fonológicas na pronúncia de nomes de estabelecimentos comerciais brasileiros com elementos do inglês

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar as adaptações fonológicas que ocorrem nos nomes comerciais formados por elementos do inglês em contexto de Português Brasileiro, especificamente o processo de epêntese. Para realizar este estudo, primeiramente, coletamos nomes comerciais com elementos do inglês no interior do estado de São Paulo (Brasil) e, em seguida, submetemos uma amostra desses nomes comerciais que mantêm sua grafia inglesa à leitura por falantes do Português Brasileiro, com a intenção de comparar as realizações desses sujeitos com a pronúncia dessas palavras em Inglês Norte-Americano. Com este estudo, notamos que as adaptações na pronúncia dos anglicismos observados ocorreram para adequar as sílabas inglesas ao padrão silábico do português.

Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English. Ed. by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn.

This is a review of the book Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English , edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn (Yale University). 2014. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foreign accentedness revisited: Canadian and Singaporean raters’ perception of Japanese-accented English

ABSTRACTThe current study examined how two groups of native speakers – monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans – differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient accent scores than the Canadian raters, who used North American English as their primary language of communication. Both of them used a similar processing strategy to make such accentedness judgements – drawing exclusively on the phonological aspects of L2 speech without taking into account the appropriate/complex use of L2 lexicogrammar.

The Atlas of North American English and its impacts on approaches to dialect geography

The Atlas of North American English (ANAE) is a survey of vocalic variation in North American English and the culmination of Labov's years of work on vowel shifting. It covers the entire continent and employs modern acoustic analysis to reveal shifting patterns. As such, it represents a significant step forward for dialectology. Importantly, its focus is more current than historical. It has some weaknesses, such as poor coverage of minorities and diphthongization and an outdated notation. However, its perspective will drive future approaches to geographical variation and vowel shifting. Sound changes, both for English and for other languages, must now be viewed as components of integrated systems. Geographical surveys should henceforth take the extent of these systems into account.

Afterword: Where are we now?

Labov recapitulates his view of linguistics when he entered the field in 1961, and what he hoped to achieve. He acknowledges Meyerhoff's stress on the convergence of methods and Coupland's view of the vernacular as an ‘overdetermined’ concept which is simultaneously undervalued. The value of new methods for the study of variation has been tested by their application to other cultures (Gal), to African American Vernacular English (Rickford), and to indigenous and endangered languages (Stanford). Thomas indicates how the Atlas of North American English builds on traditional methods of American dialect geography. Johnstone's account of Labov's approach to narrative links sociolinguistic work to broader areas in the humanities. Cornips and Gregersen see Labov's contribution to general linguistic theory as a joint enterprise in which intuitions and observations form a harmonious database.

The phonetic origins of /s/-retraction: Acoustic and perceptual evidence from Australian English

In contemporary spoken English, /s/ can resemble a post-alveolar fricative when it occurs in /str/ clusters e.g. street. /s/-retraction in /str/ is known to be widespread in North American English, but the question of how this sound change comes about has attracted only a very small amount of empirical research. This paper investigates the phonetic pre-conditions for /s/-retraction based on the results of two experiments conducted with Australian English. Study 1 shows that the first spectral moment (M1) for /s/ is lower in /spr, str, skr/ and slightly lower in /sp, st, sk/ than in pre-vocalic position. Temporal variation in first spectral moment trajectories suggests that the articulatory movements associated with the rhotic are timed relatively earlier in /str/ vs. /spr, skr/ clusters. Study 2 tested native listener categorization of sibilants produced by multiple talkers. Results show that sibilants originally produced in stream and steam elicit /ʃ/ responses when spliced into pre-vocalic contexts. There was an interaction with talker gender, with male voices eliciting more /ʃ/ responses. Thus, the conditions for sound change to occur by which /s/ becomes /ʃ/ originate in a synchronic bias for /s/ produced in /sC(r)/ clusters to show increased auditory similarity to /ʃ/. Australian English shows the pre-conditions for /s/-retraction but is not currently undergoing this sound change.

Deriving gradient measures of child speech from crowdsourced ratings

Recent research has demonstrated that perceptual ratings aggregated across multiple non-expert listeners can reveal gradient degrees of contrast between sounds that listeners might transcribe identically. Aggregated ratings have been found to correlate strongly with acoustic gold standard measures both when individual raters use a continuous rating scale such as visual analog scaling (Munson et al., 2012) and when individual raters provide binary ratings (McAllister Byun, Halpin, & Szeredi, 2015). In light of evidence that inexperienced listeners use continuous scales less consistently than experienced listeners, this study investigated the relative merits of binary versus continuous rating scales when aggregating responses over large numbers of naive listeners recruited through online crowdsourcing. Stimuli were words produced by children in treatment for misarticulation of North American English /r/. Each listener rated the same 40 tokens two times: once using Visual Analog Scaling (VAS) and once using a binary rating scale. The gradient rhoticity of each item was then estimated using (a) VAS click location, averaged across raters; (b) the proportion of raters who assigned the “correct /r/” label to each item in the binary rating task (pˆ). First, we validate these two measures of rhoticity against each other and against an acoustic gold standard. Second, we explore the range of variability in individual response patterns that underlie these group-level data. Third, we integrate statistical, theoretical, and practical considerations to offer guidelines for determining which measure to use in a given situation.

In This Issue

In This Issue

REFLEXES OF THE TRANSITIVE BE PERFECT IN CANADA AND IN THE US: A COMPARATIVE CORPUS STUDY

The present paper examines the geographical distribution of three reflexes of a transitive be perfect in North America: done, finished, started (e.g. I’m done my dinner). This paper is a corpus study of Canadian Newsstand Complete and Newspaper Source Plus — commercial databases of regional and national mass media in Canada and the United States, respectively. A total of 1217 tokens have been found in Canadian sources, and none in the US ones. Constructional tokens in Canada have been found to be proportionately distributed across provinces and municipalities. Based on these findings, it is argued that the done my dinner construction is a feature that sets Canadian English (as a theoretical abstraction) apart from American English. It is emphasized, though, that the construction has been attested in some dialectal pockets in the US such as Vermont. The geographical restriction of the construction to Canada and selected dialectal areas in the US is hypothesized to have arisen from a Scottish founder effect; evidence from fictional literature and migration studies is presented as support. It is further argued that the construction is a retention in North American English rather than innovation because its earliest occurrence dates back to the middle of the 19th century.