Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T16:40:21.377Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Linking gender, sexuality, and affect: The linguistic and social patterning of phrase-final posttonic lengthening

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2020

Lewis Esposito
Lewis Esposito*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper furthers our understanding of the social forces driving prosodic variation by reporting on production and perception studies of phrase-final posttonic lengthening in American English. Building on past research showing gender-based variation in the production of phrase-final lengthening, I show that this gender effect surfaces only when comparing straight men and straight women. Gay men and straight women lengthen their phrase-final posttonic syllables equally, and both groups do so more than straight men. A matched-guise social-perception experiment shows that listeners associate increased lengthening not only with femininity and male gayness, but with expressive affect. I suggest that the link between increased lengthening and expressive affect is forged iconically and that this link underlies the gender and sexuality patterns observed in the production study. What surfaces from this work theoretically is how variability in expressions of affect may drive correlations between gender/sexuality-based categories and linguistic variants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 191 - 216
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. 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

Anttila, Arto, Dozat, Timothy, Galbraith, Daniel & Shapiro, Naomi. (2020). Sentence stress in presidential speeches. In Kentner, G & Kremers, J. (Eds.), Prosody in Syntactic Encoding, Special Issue of Linguistische Arbeiten.Google Scholar
Barron-Lutzross, Auburn L. (2018). Speech stereotypes of female sexuality. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas Martin, Maechler, Ben Bolker & Walker, Steve. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67:1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara. (2014). The social motivations of reversal: Raised BOUGHT in New York City English. Language in Society 43:395–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara. (Ed.). Forthcoming. The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and short front vowel shifts across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society (PADS).Google Scholar
Bell, Allen, Brenier, Jason M., Gregory, Michelle, Girand, Cynthia & Jurafsky, Dan. (2009). Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60:92–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besnier, Niko. (1990). Language and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:419–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. (2018). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.43, retrieved 8 September 2018 from http://www.praat.org/Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7:585–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrd, Dani & Riggs, Daylen. (2008). Locality interactions with prominence in determining the scope of phrasal lengthening. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38:187–202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Calder, Jeremy, Eckert, Penelope, Fine, Julia & Podesva, Robert J. (2013). The social conditioning of rhythm: The case of posttonic lengthening. Paper presented at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston.Google Scholar
Callier, Patrick. (2011). Social meaning in prosodic variability. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17:41–50.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. (2011). The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change 22:423–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campione, Estelle & Véronis, Jean. (2002). A large-scale multilingual study of silent pause duration. Proceedings of Speech Prosody. 199–202.Google Scholar
Carter, Phillip M. (2005). Prosodic variation in SLA: Rhythm in an urban North Carolina Hispanic community. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 11:59–71.Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. (2016). On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish. Language Variation and Change 28:357–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Matthew. (1970). Vowel length variation as a function of the voicing of the consonant environment. Phonetica 22:129–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.Google Scholar
Deterding, David. (2001). The measurement of rhythm: A comparison of Singapore and British English. Journal of Phonetics 29:217–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (1990). The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2010). Affect, sound symbolism, and variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15:70–80.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2011). Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market. American Speech 86:85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:87–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2014). The problem with binaries: Coding for gender and sexuality. Language and Linguistics Compass 8:529–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. (2013). Tastes of talk: Qulia and the moral flavor of signs. Anthropological Theory 13:31–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallup.com. (2018). In U.S., Estimate of LGBT population rises to 4.5%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population-rises.aspxGoogle Scholar
Gaudio, Rudolf P. (1984). Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69: 30–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haiman, John. (1980). The iconicity of grammar. Language 56:515–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrell, Frank. (2001). Regression Modelling Strategies. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hazenberg, Evan. (2016). Walking the straight and narrow: Linguistic choice and gendered presentation. Gender and Language 10:270–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilton, Katherine. (2018). What Does an Interruption Sound Like? PhD Dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Hilton, Katherine, & Jeong, Sunwoo. (2019). The role of context in sociolinguistic perception. Linguistics Vanguard.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, John L. (1965). A rationale and test for the number of factors in factor analysis. Psychometrika 30:179–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ipeirotis, Panagiotis G. (2010). Demographics of Mechanical Turk. CeDER Working Paper-10-01. New York University. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29585Google Scholar
Kachkovskaia, Tatiana. (2014). Phrase-final lengthening in Russian: Pre-boundary or pre-pausal? In Ronzhin, A., Potapova, R. & Delic, V. (Eds.), SPECOM 2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8773:353–9.Google Scholar
Kahn, Daniel. (1976). Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology. PhD Dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott. (2018). Masculine stances and the linguistics of affect: On masculine ease. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 3:191–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klatt, Dennis. (1976). Linguistics uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 59:1208–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroch, Anthony. (1994). Dialect and style in speech of upper class Philadelphia. In Guy, G., Feagin, C., Baugh, J., and Schiffrin, D. (Eds.), Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in Honor of William Labov. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 23–46.Google Scholar
Lehiste, Isle. (1976). Suprasegmental features in speech. In Lass, N.J. (Ed.), Contemporary Issues in Experimental Phonetics. New York: Academic Press. 225–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2006). Hearing ‘gay’: Prosody, interpretation and the affective judgment of men's speech. American Speech 81:56–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2007). Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36:533–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2014). Categories, stereotypes and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society 43:539–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez & Buchstaller, Isabelle. (2015). Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing. Language Variation and Change 27:319–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2016a). Conflicted selves: Language, religion and same-sex desire in Israel. In Levon, E. & Mendes, R., (Eds.), Language, sexuality and power: Studies in intersectional sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 215–39.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. (2016b). Gender, interaction, and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20:133–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linville, Sue Ellen. (1998). Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men's speech. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 50:35–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lyons, John. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Moulines, Eric, and Charpentier, Francis. (1990). Pitch-synchronous waveform processing techniques for text-to-speech synthesis using diphones. Speech Communication 9: 453–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, McDonald, Elizabeth C., DeBoe, Nancy L., & White, Aubrey. (2006). The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women's and men's sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34:202–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. (1992). Indexing gender. In Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 335–58.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet, Bent, Tessa, Munson, Benjamin, Bradlow, R. Ann & Bailey, Michael, J. (2004). The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116:1905–08.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Podesva, Robert J. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto voice in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11:478–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2011). The California vowel shift and gay identity. American Speech 86:32–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. & Van Hofwegen, Janneke. (2016). /s/exuality in smalltown California: Gender normativity and the acoustic realization of /s/. In Levon, E. & Mendes, R. B. (Eds.), Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 168–88.Google Scholar
Pratt, Teresa. (2018). Affective Sociolinguistic Style: An Ethnography of Embodied Linguistic Variation in an Arts High School. PhD Dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at http://www.R-project.org/. Accessed August 15, 2018.Google Scholar
Reddy, Sravana & Stanford, James. (2015). A web application for automated dialect analysis. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2015. 71–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reeser, Todd, & Lucas, Gottzén. (2018). Masculinity and affect: New possibilities, new agendas. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 3:145–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik & Carter, Phillip. (2006). Prosodic rhythm and African American English. English World-Wide 27:331–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik, & Kendall, Tyler. (2019). Prosody. In Thomas, E. (Ed.), Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect. Cambridge University Press. 215–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turk, Alice. (1999). Structural influences on boundary-related lengthening in English. In Ohala, J.J., Hasegawa, Y., Ohala, M., Granville, D. & Bailey, A. C. (Eds.), Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. San Francisco: University of California, Berkeley. 237–40.Google Scholar
Turk, Alice, & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. (2007). Multiple targets of phrase-final lengthening in American English words. Journal of Phonetics 35:445–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaissière, Jacqueline. (1983). Language independent prosodic features. In Cutler, A., & Ladd, D. R. (Eds.), Prosody: Methods and Measurements. New York: Springer. 53–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsh, Thomas, & Parker, Frank. (1983). The duration of morphemic and non-morphemic /s/ in English. Journal of Phonetics 11:201–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wassink, Alicia. (2015). Sociolinguistic patterns in Seattle English. Language Variation and Change 27:31–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wightman, Colin, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie, Ostendorf, Mari, & Price, Patti. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase-boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91:1707–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yu, Kristine. (2017). The role of time in phonetic spaces: Temporal resolution in Cantonese tone perception. Journal of Phonetics 65: 126–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimman, Lal. (2013). Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2:1–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar