Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-22T18:06:47.950Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Jaw setting and the California Vowel Shift in parodic performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2017

Teresa Pratt  and
Annette D'Onofrio
Teresa Pratt
Affiliation:
Stanford University, USA
Annette D'Onofrio*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Annette D'Onofrio, Linguistics DepartmentNorthwestern University2016 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 606298, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the intertwining semiotics of language and embodiment in performances of Californian personae. We analyze two actors’ performances of Californian characters in parodic skits, comparing them to the same actors’ performances of non-Californian characters. In portraying their Californian characters, the actors use particularized jaw settings, which we link to embodied stereotypes from earlier portrayals of the Valley Girl and Surfer Dude personae. Acoustic analysis demonstrates that both actors also produce features of the California Vowel Shift in their Californian performances, aligning their linguistic productions with sound changes documented in California. We argue that these embodied stereotypes and phonetic realizations not only co-occur in parodic styles, but are in fact semiotically and corporeally intertwined, one occasioning the other. Moreover, the performances participate in the broader process of enregisterment, packaging these semiotic resources with other linguistic and extralinguistic features to recontextualize Californian personae in the present day. (Parody, performance, California, California Vowel Shift, embodiment, embodied stereotype, enregisterment)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , June 2017 , pp. 283 - 312
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Agha, Asif (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23:231–73.Google Scholar
Araki, Gregg (Producer/Director), & Sperling, Andrea (Producer) (1997). Nowhere [Motion picture]. United States: Fine Line Features.Google Scholar
Azoff, Irving (Producer); Linson, Art (Producer), & Heckerling, Amy (Director) (1982). Fast times at Ridgemont High [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1977). Verbal art as performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Berg, Barry M. (Producer), & Heckerling, Amy (Director) (1995). Clueless [Motion picture] . United States: Paramount Productions.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David (2017). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.26. Online: http://www.praat.org/; accessed March 2, 2017.Google Scholar
Bronner, Sasha (2012). ‘The Californians’ on SNL: Steve Martin makes a cameo on daytime soap skit poking fun at people who live in the golden state. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/20/the-californians-snl-steve-martin_n_1531176.html.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2001). The whiteness of nerds: Superstandard English and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11:84–100.Google Scholar
Bulgin, James; Decker, Paul De; & Nycz, Jennifer (2010). Reliability of formant measurements from lossy compressed audio. Poster presented at The British Association of Academic Phoneticians Colloquium, University of Westminster.Google Scholar
Calder, Jeremy (2016). From sissy to sickening: The role of the body in the indexical landscape of /s/ in the SoMa drag scene. Paper presented at the 115th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, MN.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82:32–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn; Eckert, Penelope; Mendoza-Denton, Norma; & Moore, Emma, for the Half Moon Bay Style Collective (2006). The elements of style. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), Columbus, OH.Google Scholar
Carmichael, Katie (2013). The performance of Cajun English in Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. American Speech 88:377–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Wayne (Producer); Lane, Andrew (Producer); & Coolidge, Martha (Director) (1983). Valley girl [Motion picture]. United States: Atlantic Release Corp.Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine (2004). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of mock Asian. Pragmatics 14:263–89.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (2001). Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30:345–75.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Donald, Kevin; Kikusawa, Ritsuko; Gaul, Karen; & Holton, Gary (2004). Language. In Goggans, Jan & Difranco, Aaron (eds.), The Pacific region: The Greenwood encyclopedia of American regional cultures, 281. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
D'Onofrio, Annette (2015). Persona-based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley girls and California vowels. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19:241–56.Google Scholar
D'Onofrio, Annette; Eckert, Penelope; Podesva, Robert J.; Pratt, Teresa; & Van Hofwegen, Janneke (2016). The low vowels in California. Publication of the American Dialect Society (Speech in the western states, vol. 1: The coastal states) 101:11–32.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of social meaning at Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008a). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:453–76.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008b). Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism 12:25–42.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2011). Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market. American Speech 86:85–97.Google Scholar
Esling, John H., & Wong, Rita F. (1983). Voice quality settings and the teaching of pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly 17:89–95.Google Scholar
Fought, Carmen (1999). A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:5–23.Google Scholar
Fought, Carmen (2002). California students’ perceptions of, you know, regions and dialects? In Long, Daniel & Preston, Dennis R. (eds.), Handbook of perceptual dialectology, vol. 2, 117–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gick, Brian; Wilson, Ian; Koch, Karsten; & Cook, Clare (2004). Language-specific articulatory settings: Evidence from inter-utterance rest position. Phonetica 61:220–33.Google Scholar
Glass, Lillian (1982). How to deprogram your valley girl. New York: Workman Pub.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32:1489–1522.Google Scholar
Hagiwara, Robert (1997). Dialect variation and formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 102:655–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren (2009). Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Hinton, Leanne; Moonwomon, Birch; Bremner, Sue; Luthin, Herb; Van Clay, Mary; Lerner, Jean; & Corcoran, Hazel (1987). It's not just the valley girls: A study of California English. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13:117–28.Google Scholar
Honikman, Beatrice (1964). Articulatory settings. In Abercrombie, D., Fry, D. B., MacCarthy, P. A .D., Scott, N. C., & Trim, J. L. M. (eds.), In honour of Daniel Jones, 73–84. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara (2011). Dialect enregisterment in performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15:657–79.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara, & Kiesling, Scott F. (2008). Indexicality and experience: Exploring the meanings of /aw/-monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:5–33.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Robert, & Grama, James (2012). Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis. American Speech 87:39–56.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott (2004). Dude. American Speech 79:281–305.Google Scholar
Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; & Boberg, Charles (2005). The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology, and sound change. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, John (1978). The concept of articulatory settings: An historical survey. Historiographia Linguistica 5:1–14.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn, & Sundberg, Johan (1971). Acoustical consequences of lip, tongue, jaw and larynx movement. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 50:1166–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mendoza-Denton, Norma (2008). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma, & Jannedy, Stefanie (2011). Semiotic layering through gesture and intonation: A case study of complementary and supplementary multimodality in political speech. Journal of English Linguistics 39:265–99.Google Scholar
Moore, Emma (2012). The social life of style. Language and Literature 21:66–83.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11:478–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2011). California Vowel Shift and gay identity. American Speech 86:32–51.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J.; Callier, Patrick; Voigt, Rob; & Jurafsky, Dan (2015). The connection between smiling and GOAT fronting: Embodied affect in sociophonetic variation. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 18. Online: https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/ICPHS0343.pdf.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J.; D'Onofrio;, Annette; Van Hofwegen, Janneke; & Kim, Seung Kyung (2015). The California Vowel Shift and fractal recursivity in an inland, non-urban community. Language Variation and Change 27:157–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratt, Teresa (2016). The use of embodied creak by young men at an arts high school. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45, November 4–6. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis (1999). Handbook of perceptual dialectology, vol. 1. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Online: http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Ramanarayanan, Vikram; Goldstein, Louis; Byrd, Dani; & Narayanan, Shrikanth S. (2013). An investigation of articulatory setting using real-time magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134:510–19.Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie (1998). Investigating ‘self-conscious’ speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27:53–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie (2004). Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8:163–95.Google Scholar
Sclafani, Jennifer (2009). Martha Stewart behaving badly: Parody and the symbolic meaning of style. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13:613–33.Google Scholar
Streeck, Jürgen; Goodwin, Charles; & LeBaron, Curtis (2011). Embodied interaction in the material world: An introduction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Van Hofwegen, Janneke; D'Onofrio, Annette; & Pratt, Teresa (2016). Retraction in the front vowel system of California's Central Valley. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Walker, Gareth (2012). Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: ‘Trail-off’ conjunctions. Language and Speech 55:141–63.Google Scholar
Wilson, Ian, & Gick, Brian (2006). Articulatory settings of French and English monolinguals and bilinguals. Poster presented at the 4th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan.Google Scholar
Zappa, Frank, & Zappa, Moon (1982). Valley girl. Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch [Album]. North Hollywood, CA: Barking Pumpkin.Google Scholar
Zhang, Qing (2005). A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34:431–66.Google Scholar