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The social motivations of reversal: Raised bought in New York City English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2014

Kara Becker
Kara Becker*
Affiliation:
Reed College, Department of Linguistics, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article presents a variationist analysis of the bought vowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates that bought is lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raised bought gathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raised bought that comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest that bought's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. (bought, New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , September 2014 , pp. 395 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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