Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:12:12.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aspects of change in New York City English short-a

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2021

Bill Haddican ,
Michael Newman ,
Cecelia Cutler  and
Christina Tortora
Bill Haddican*
Affiliation:
CUNY-Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center [email protected]; [email protected]
Michael Newman
Affiliation:
CUNY-Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center [email protected]; [email protected]
Cecelia Cutler
Affiliation:
CUNY-Lehman College, CUNY Graduate [email protected]
Christina Tortora
Affiliation:
CUNY-College of Staten Island, CUNY Graduate Center [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article focuses on change in the “short-a system” of New York City English (NYCE). Recent results suggest that a complex set of tensing rules traditionally described for NYCE are being replaced by several simpler systems. This article reports on a study of this change using a recently developed large audio-aligned parsed speech corpus (CoNYCE). This change is similar to the simplification reported for Philadelphia by Labov et al. (2016). Unlike in the Philadelphia case, however, our results do not show evidence of a single abstract process of change. Our findings, rather, suggest at least two separate changes in the community—one affecting short-a in prenasal contexts and a second affecting pre-oral obstruent contexts. In addition, the results suggest an additional independent process of lowering and retraction affecting short-a sounds in contexts not targeted by the process of phonological reorganization, that is, “trap-backing.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 135 - 163
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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

Baayen, Harald R. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, Catherine N. (1994). Relative pronouns in it-clefts: The last seven centuries. Language Variation and Change 6(2):179–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baranowski, Maciej & Turton, Danielle. (2018). Locating speakers in the socioeconomic hierarchy: towards the optimal indicators of social class. Talk given at NWAV 47.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara. (2009). /r/ and the construction of place identity on New York City's Lower East Side. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(5):634–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara. (2010). Regional dialect features on the Lower East Side of New York City: Sociophonetics, ethnicity, and identity. Ph.D. thesis, New York University.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara. (2014). The social motivations of reversal: Raised bought in New York City English. Language in Society 43(4):395–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara & Coggshall, Elizabeth L. (2009). The sociolinguistics of ethnicity in New York City. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(3):751–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara & Wong, Amy Wing. (2010). The short-a system of New York City English: an update. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2):3.Google Scholar
Benua, Laura. (1995). Identity effects in morphological truncation. In Beckman, J., Dickey, L. W. & Urbanczyk, S., (Eds.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18, Papers in Optimality Theory, Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc & New, Boris. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior research methods 41(4):977–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carmichael, Katie. (2020). (æ)fter the storm: An examination of the short-a system in greater New Orleans. Language Variation and Change 32(1):107–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coggshall, Elizabeth L. (2017). Short-a in the Sixth Borough: A Sociophonetic Analysis of a Complex Phonological System in Jersey City. Ph.D. thesis, New York University.Google Scholar
Coggshall, Elizabeth L. & Becker, Kara. (2009). The vowel phonologies of African American and white New York City residents. Publication of the American Dialect Society 94(1):101–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cukor-Avila, Patricia. (2002). She say, she go, she be like: Verbs of quotation over time in African American Vernacular English. American Speech 77(1):3–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Onofrio, Annette, Pratt, Teresa & Van Hofwegen, Janneke. (2019). Compression in the California vowel shift: Tracking generational sound change in California's Central Valley. Language Variation and Change 1–25.Google Scholar
Durham, Mercedes, Haddican, Bill, Zweig, Eytan, Johnson, Daniel Ezra, Baker, Zipporah, Cockeram, David, Danks, Esther & Tyler, Louise. (2011). Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of be like. Journal of English Linguistics 40(4):316–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durian, David. (2012). A new perspective on vowel variation across the 19th and 20th centuries in Columbus, OH. Ph.D. thesis, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2008). Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1–2):25–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabricius, Anne H, Watt, Dominic & Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2009). A comparison of three speaker intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 21(3):413–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fruehwald, Josef, Gress-Wright, Jonathan & Wallenberg, Joel. (2009). Phonological rule change: The constant rate effect. In Proceedings of NELS. volume 40.Google Scholar
Gorman, Kyle, Howell, Jonathan & Wagner, Michael. (2011). Prosodylab-aligner: A tool for forced alignment of laboratory speech. Canadian Acoustics 39(3):192–3.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. In Labov, W. (Ed.), Locating language in time and space. Academic Press, 1–36.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory. (2007). The scope of generalization in phonology. Talk given at Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Haddican, Bill, Newman, Michael, Johnson, Daniel Ezra & Kim, Faith. (2016). The diffusion of the low back merger in New York City. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Mohanan, Karuvannur P. (1985). Segmental phonology of modern English. Linguistic Inquiry 16(1):57–116.Google Scholar
Jacewicz, Ewa, Fox, Robert Allen & Salmons, Joseph. (2011). Cross-generational vowel change in American English. Language Variation and Change 23(1):45–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2007). Stability and change along a dialect boundary: The low vowels of Southeastern New England. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kallel, Amel. (2007). The loss of negative concord in Standard English: Internal factors. Language Variation and Change 19(01):27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan. (2012). Canadian raising, eh? In Cyran, E., Kardela, H. & Szymanek, B. (Eds.), Sound Structure and Sense: Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann, Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 321–52.Google Scholar
Kendall, Tyler & Fridland, Valerie. (2017). Regional relationships among the low vowels of US English: Evidence from production and perception. Language Variation and Change 29(2):245–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. Social dialectology: in honour of Peter Trudgill 223–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3):199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. (1994). Morphosyntactic variation. In Beals, K. (Ed.), Papers from the 30th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession on variation and linguistic theory. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 180–201.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1984). Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In Baugh, J. & Sherzer, J. (Eds.), Language in use: readings in sociolinguistics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 28–53.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Linguistic Factors, Volume II. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2):344–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. (2005). The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Fisher, Sabriya, Gylfadóttir, Duna, Henderson, Anita & Sneller, Betsy. (2016). Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology. Language Variation and Change 28(3):273–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Yaeger, Malcah & Steiner, Richard. (1972). A quantitative study of sound change in progress, volume 1. US Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Newlin-Łukowicz, Luiza. (2015). Ethnicity, L1 interference, and sound change in New York City. Ph.D. thesis, New York University.Google Scholar
Newlin-Łukowicz, Luiza. (2016). Co-occurrence of sociolinguistic variables and the construction of ethnic identities. Lingua 172:100–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, Michael. (2014). New York City English. Walter de Gruyter. Oral History Collection of the Bronx Institute Archives of Lehman College Library, CUNY (the City University of New York), 1981–1991. N.p., 1982. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, Arvilla. (1976). The Acquisition of the Phonological System of a Second Dialect. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Payne, Arvilla. (1980). Factors controlling the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by out-of-state children. In Labov, W. (Ed.), Locating language in time and space. Academic Press. 143–178.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1999). Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reddy, Sravana & Stanford, James. (2015). A web application for automated dialect analysis. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations. 71–5.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Josef, Evanini, Keelan, Seyfarth, Scott, Gorman, Kyle, Prichard, Hilary & Yuan, Jiahong. (2014). Fave (forced alignment and vowel extraction), version 1.1.3.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. (1993). The rate of phrase structure change in the history of Yiddish. Language Variation and Change 5(03):257–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapp, Allison. (2018). The short-a split in a suburban area of the New York City dialect region. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 3(63):1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapp, Allison. (2019). A Sociophonetic Analysis of New York City English in the Speech of Teenagers from Nassau County, Long Island. Ph.D. thesis, New York University.Google Scholar
Silverman, Daniel. (2002). Dynamic versus static phonotactic conditions in prosodic morphology. Linguistics 40(1):29–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sneller, Betsy. (2018). Mechanisms of Phonological Change. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Sneller, Betsy, Fruehwald, Josef & Yang, Charles. (2019). Using the Tolerance Principle to predict phonological change. Language Variation and Change 31(1):1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English. Publication of the American Dialect Society.Google Scholar
Tortora, Christina, Cutler, Cece, Haddican, William, Newman, Michael, Santorini, Beatrice & Diertani, C.E. Ariel. (in progress). Corpus of New York City English (CUNY-CoNYCE). URL https://conyce.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.Google Scholar
Trager, George L. (1930). The pronunciation of “short a” in American standard English. American Speech 5(5):396–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trager, George L. (1934). What conditions limit variants of a phoneme? American Speech 9(4):313–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trager, George L. (1940). One phonemic entity becomes two: the case of ‘short a.’ American Speech 15(3):255–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wassink, Alicia Beckford. (2015). Sociolinguistic patterns in Seattle English. Language Variation and Change 27(1):31–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watt, Dominic. (2002). ‘I don't speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent’: Contact-induced levelling in the Tyneside vowel system. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(1):44–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar