Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:34:49.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Overlap among back vowels before /l/ in Kansas City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2016

Christopher Strelluf
Christopher Strelluf*
Affiliation:
Northwest Missouri State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This research examines pre-/l/ allophones of vowels in five lexical sets—GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT, STRUT, and THOUGHT—in Kansas City. It builds an acoustic profile from 5507 tokens drawn from interviews with 67 Kansas Citians born between 1955 and 1999. Results reveal a variety of overlap patterns among all five vowels, with the most widespread being overlap between the pre-/l/ allophones of FOOT, STRUT, and GOAT. Acoustically, overlap patterns generally do not show a trend of change in apparent time. However, responses to minimal pairs reveal substantial apparent-time increases in judgments of “close” or “same.” Speakers appear to adjust their productions of vowels to match their minimal pair judgments. The interaction of these productions and judgments indicates a different profile for these five vowels than has been observed in other communities and suggests that some of these vowels have become phonemically ambiguous in Kansas City.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 379 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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

Arnold, Lacey. (2015). Multiple mergers: Production and perception of three pre-/l/ mergers in Youngstown, Ohio. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21:1–10. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol21/iss2/2. Accessed September 13, 2016.Google Scholar
Ash, Sharon. (2006). The North American Midland as a dialect area. In Murray, T. E. & Simon, B. L. (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Guy, Wilke, Tom, & Sand, Lori. (1991). The focus of linguistic innovation in Texas. English World-Wide 12:195–214.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben, & Walker, Steve. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67:1–48.Google Scholar
Bhattacharyya, Anil Kumar. (1943). On a measure of divergence between two statistical populations defined by their probability distributions. Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society 35:99–109.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David. (2013). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.84. Available at: http://www.praat.org/. Accessed September 4, 2014.Google Scholar
Bowie, David. (2000). The effect of geographic mobility on the retention of local dialect. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Calenge, Clement. (2006). The package adehabitat for the R software: A tool for the analysis of space and habitat use by animals. Ecological Modelling 197:516–519.Google Scholar
De Decker, Paul, & Nycz, Jennifer. (2013). The technology of conducting sociolinguistic interviews. In Mallinson, C., Childs, B., & Van Herk, G. (eds.), Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications. New York: Routledge. 119–126.Google Scholar
Di Paolo, Marianna. (1992). Hypercorrection in response to the apparent merger of (ɔ) and (ɑ) in Utah English. Language and Communication 12:267–292.Google Scholar
Di Paolo, Marianna, & Faber, Alice. (1990). Phonation differences in Utah English. Language Variation and Change 2:155–204.Google Scholar
Dickey, Laura Walsh. (1997). The phonology of liquids. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Evanini, Keelan. (2009). The permeability of dialect boundaries: A case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Faber, Alice, & Di Paolo, Marianna. (1995). The discriminability of nearly merged sounds. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research 115/116:81–112.Google Scholar
Faries, Rachel B., & Lance, Donald M. (1991). Regional variation in Missouri. In Frazer, T. C. (ed.), “Heartland” English: Variation and transition in the American Midwest. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 245–256.Google Scholar
Fruehwald, Joseph. (2013). The phonological influence on phonetic change. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew J. (2006). Tracking the low back merger in Missouri. In Murray, T. E. & Simon, B. L. (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 57–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guenter, Joshua. (2000). Vowels of California English before /r/, /l/, and /ŋ/. PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.Google Scholar
Habick, Timothy. (1980). Sound change in Farmer City: A sociolinguistic study based on acoustic data. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2010). Improved representation of variance in measures of vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 9. Available at: http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/poma/9/1/10.1121/1.3460625. Accessed September 13, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul, & Drager, Katie. (2006). Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34:458–484.Google Scholar
Herold, Ruth. (1990). Mechanisms of merger: The implementation and distribution of the low back merger in eastern Pennsylvania. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Herold, Ruth. (1997). Solving the actuation problem: Merger and immigration in eastern Pennsylvania. Language Variation and Change 9:165–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herzog, Marvin I. (1965). The Yiddish language in Northern Poland: Its geography and history. Bloomington: Mouton.Google Scholar
Johnson, Bruce Lee. (1971). The Western Pennsylvania Dialect of American English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1:69–73.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:359–383.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2010). Stability and change along a dialect boundary: The low vowels of southeastern New England. Publication of the American Dialect Society 95. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2015). Quantifying overlap with Bhattacharyya's affinity. Paper presented at NWAV 44, Toronto, Ontario, October 25. Available at: https://danielezrajohnson.shinyapps.io/nwav_44. Accessed September 13, 2016.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara, Bhasin, Neeta, & Wittkofski, Denise. (2002). “Dahntahn” Pittsburgh: Monophthongal /aw/ and representations of localness in southwestern Pennsylvania. American Speech 77:148–166.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1994). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2010). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 3: Cognitive and cultural factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, & Boberg, Charles. (2006). Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology, and sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Rosenfelder, Ingrid, & Fruehwald, Josef. (2013). One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89:30–65.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Yaeger, Malcah, & Steiner, Richard. (1972). A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Lobanov, B. M. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49:606–608.Google Scholar
Lusk, Melanie M. (1976). Phonological variation in Kansas City: A sociolinguistic analysis of three-generation families. PhD dissertation, University of Kansas.Google Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie. (1999). More on the Third Dialect of English: Linguistic constraints on the use of three phonological variables in Pittsburgh. Language Variation and Change 11:171–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. (1980). A falsely reported merger in eighteenth century English: A study in diachronic variation. In Labov, W. (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic Press. 221–250.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: https://www.R-project.org/. Accessed May 3, 2016.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Joseph, Evanini, Keelan, & Yuan, Jiahong. (2011). FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. Available at: http://fave.ling.upenn.edu. Accessed September 13, 2016.Google Scholar
Shores, David L. (1985). Vowels before /l/ and /r/ in the Tangier dialect. Journal of English Linguistics 18:124–126.Google Scholar
Strelluf, Christopher. (2014). “We have such a normal, non-accented voice”: A sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (1989/1993). Vowel changes in Columbus, Ohio. Journal of English Linguistics 22:205–215.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (1996). A comparison of variation patterns of variables among sixth-graders in an Ohio community. In Schneider, E. W. (ed.), Focus on the USA. Varieties of English around the World 16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 149–168.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English. Publication of the American Dialect Society 85. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (2011). Sociophonetics: An introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. (1982). The Accents of English. Vol. 1: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, & Schilling-Estes, Natalie. (2016). American English. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Yuan, Jiahong, & Liberman, Mark. (2008). Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus. Proceedings of Acoustics ’08. Available at: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/. Accessed September 13, 2016.Google Scholar