Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T18:37:42.893Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Structure, Chronology, and Local Social Meaning of a Supra-Local Vowel Shift: Emergence of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in New England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2021

Monica Nesbitt  and
James N. Stanford
Monica Nesbitt*
Affiliation:
Indiana [email protected]
James N. Stanford
Affiliation:
Dartmouth [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) is a major North American vowel chain shift spreading across many disparate dialect regions. In this field-based study, we examine the speech of fifty-nine White Western Massachusetts speakers, aged 18–89. Using diagnostics in Becker (2019) and Boberg (2019b), we find the LBMS emerging at the expense of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972) and traditional New England features (Boberg, 2001; Kurath, 1939; Nagy & Roberts, 2004). In Becker's LBMS model (2019:9), the low-back merger (lot-thought) triggers front-vowel shifts. Our results suggest that local social meaning can sometimes override this chronology such that the front-vowel shifts occur before the low-back merger, even as the overall configuration comes to match Becker's predictions. Sociosymbolic meaning associated with the older New England system has led to a different temporal ordering of LBMS components, thus providing new theoretical and empirical insights into the mechanisms by which supralocal patterns are adopted.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , October 2021 , pp. 269 - 295
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

Bates, Douglas, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Walker, Steven, . 2014. “Package ‘Lme4’: Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using ‘Eigen’ and S4.” Journal of Statistical Software. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.Google Scholar
Bause, Tatjana. 2014. “Traces of the Northern Cities Shift: An Empirical Case Study in Amherst, MA.” Heidelberg University.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara, ed. 2019. The Low-Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Rotations Across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 104. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bigham, Douglas S. 2008. “Dialect Contact and Accommodation among Adults in a University Setting.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Bigham, Douglas S.. 2010. “Correlation of the Low-Back Vowel Merger and TRAP-Retraction.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 37, edited by Gorman, Kyle and MacKenzie, Laurel, 15:20–31.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2001. “The Phonological Status of Western New England.” American Speech 76 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283–76–1-3.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2005. “The Canadian Shift in Montreal.” Language Variation and Change 17: 133–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2018. “Dialects of North American English.” In The Handbook of Dialectology, edited by Boberg, Charles, Nerbonne, John, and Watt, Dominic, 450–61. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2019a. “A Closer Look at the Short Front Vowel Shift in Canada.” Journal of English Linguistics 47 (2): 91–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424219831353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2019b. “The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift: A Continental Sound Change.” In The Low-Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Rotations Across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 104, edited by Becker, Kara, 104:56–73. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8032935.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowie, David, Bushnell, Tracy, Collins, Alison, Kudenov, Peter, Meisner, Stacie, Ray, Melissa, Scotland, Noelle, Valentine, Brennan, Driscoll, Becky, Joehnk, Jessa, and Kubitskey, Katie. 2012. “A Very Northern California Shift? The Vowel System of Southcentral Alaska.” Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 41 (NWAV41). Bloomington, IL. Oct. 25–28.Google Scholar
Browne, Charlene, and Stanford, James. 2018. “Boston Dialect Features in the Black/African American Community.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Selected Papers from NWAV 46, edited by Kodner, Jordan and Wade, Lacey. Vol. 24. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol24/iss2/4.Google Scholar
Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Sandra, Elms, Ford, and Youssef, Amani. 1995. “The Third Dialect of English: Some Canadian Evidence.” Language Variation and Change 7: 209–28.Google Scholar
Dinkin, Aaron J. 2009. “Dialect Boundaries and Phonological Change in Upstate New York.” PhD dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations.Google Scholar
Dinkin, Aaron J. 2005 “Mary, Darling, Make Me Merry; Say You'll Marry Me: Tense-Lax Neutralization in the Linguistic Atlas of New England.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Selected Papers from NWAV 33, edited by Wagner, Suzanne Evans, 11:73–90. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol11/iss2/5.Google Scholar
Driscoll, Anna, and Lape, Emma. 2015. “Reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Syracuse, New York.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 43, 21:40–47.Google Scholar
Durian, David. 2012. “A New Perspective on Vowel Variation Across the 19th and 20th Centuries in Columbus, OH.” PhD dissertation. The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 1988. “Adolescent Social Structure and the Spread of Linguistic Change.” Language in Society 17: 183–207.CrossRefGoogle 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
Evanini, Keelan, Isard, Stephen, and Liberman, Mark. 2009. “Automatic Formant Extraction for Sociolinguistic Analysis of Large Corpora.” In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communications Association (INTERSPEECH), September 6–10, 1655–8. Brighton, UK.Google Scholar
Farrington, Charlie, Kendall, Tyler, and Fridland, Valerie. 2018. “Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift.” American Speech 93(2):186–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, and Kendall, Tyler. 2019. “On the Uniformity of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in the U.S. West and Beyond.” In The Low-Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Rotations Across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 104, edited by Becker, Kara, 104:100–119. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8032957.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, Kendall, Tyler, and Farrington, Charlie. 2014. “Durational and Spectral Differences in American English Vowels: Dialect Variation Within and Across Regions.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136(1):341–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gonzalez, Simon, Grama, James, and Travis, Catherine. 2019. “Comparing the Performance of Forced Aligners Used in Sociophonetic Research.” Linguistic Vanguard 6 (1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0058.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2010. “Improved Representation of Variance in Measures of Vowel Merger.” Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 9: 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3460625.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul, and Drager, Katie. 2006. “Factors Influencing Speech Perception in the Context of a Merger-in-Progress.” Journel of Phonetics 34: 458–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2005.10.001.CrossRefGoogle 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 No. 95. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra, and Durian, David. 2017. “New England.” In Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English, edited by Hickey, Raymond, 257–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapner, Julianne. 2019. “Snowy Days and Nasal A's: The Retreat of the Northern Cities Shift in Rochester, New York.” Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48 (NWAV48). Eugene, Oregon. Oct. 10–12.Google Scholar
Kim, Chaeyoon, Reddy, Sravana, Stanford, James, Wyschogrod, Ezra, and Grieve, Jack. 2019. “Bring on the Crowd! Using Online Audio Crowd-Sourcing for Large-Scale New England Dialectology and Acoustic Sociophonetics.” American Speech 94 (2): 151–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-7251252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Sharese. 2017. African American Identity and Vowel Systems in Rochester, New York. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46 (NWAV46). Madison, Wisconsin. Nov. 2–5.Google Scholar
Kohn, Mary, and Stithem, Carly. 2015. “The Third Vowel Shift in Kansas: A Supra-Regional Shift with Regional Variation.” Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46 (NWAV46). Madison, Wisconsin. Nov. 2–5.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans. 1939. Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England. Providence, R.I.: Brown Universiy.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans. 1949. Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans, Hanley, Bernard, Bloch, Julia, Lowman, Guy, and Hansen, Marcus. 1939-1943. Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) (vols. 1–3). Providence, RI: Brown University.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans, and McDavid, Raven. 1961. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1991. “Three Dialects of English.” In New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change, edited by Eckert, Penelope, 1–44. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444327496.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2010. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, and Boberg, Charles. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110206838.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Rosenfelder, Ingrid, and Fruehwald, Josef. 2013. “One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis.” Language 89 (1): 30–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Yaeger, Malcah, and Steiner, Richard. 1972. A Quantitative Survey of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Mathews, Lois Kimball. 1962. The Expansion of New England. New York: Russell and Russell.Google Scholar
McAuliffe, Michael, Socolof Michaela, Mihuc, Sarah, Wagner, Michael, , and Sonderegger, Morgan. 2017. “Montreal Forced Aligner: Trainable Text-Speech Alignment Using Kaldi.” In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH).Google Scholar
McCarthy, Corrine. 2011. “The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago.” Journal of English Linguistics 39: 166–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424210384226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laurel, MacKenzie and Danielle, Turton. 2020. “Assessing the Accuracy of Existing Forced Alignment Software on Varieties of British English.” Linguistics Vanguard 6(s1):1–14.Google Scholar
Morgan, Beau-Kevin, Deguise, Kelsey, Acton, Eric, Benson, Daniele, and Shvetsova, Alla. 2017. “Shifts toward the Supra-Regional in the Northern Cities Region: Evidence from Jewish Women in Metro Detroit.” Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46 (NWAV46). Madison, WI. Nov 2–5.Google Scholar
Nagy, Naomi. 2001. “‘Live Free or Die’ as a Linguistic Principle.” American Speech 76:30–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagy, Naomi, and Irwin, Patricia. 2010. “Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s Nea(r) and Fa(R).” Language Variation and Change 22 (2): 241–78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394510000062.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagy, Naomi, and Roberts, Julie. 2004. “New England Phonology.” In Handbook of Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, edited by Schneider, Edgar, Burridge, Kate, Kortman, Bernd, Mesthrie, Rajend, and Upton, Clive, 270–81. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nesbitt, Monica, Wagner, Suzanne E, and Mason, Alexander. 2019. “A Tale of Two Shifts: Movement toward the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan.” In The Low-Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Rotations Across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 104, edited by Becker, Kara, 144–65. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nesbitt, Monica, Watts, Akiah, and Stain, George. 2021. Eastern Massachusetts Life and Language in the COVID-19 Era. Workshop on Sociolinguistic research in the time of COVID-19: Methods, Ethics, Theory, Betsy Sneller et al. 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Virtual. January 7–10.Google Scholar
Rankinen, Wil A, Albin, Aaron, and Neuhaus, TJ. 2019. “Decline of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Western Lower Michigan: Apparent-Time Evidence of a Change in Progress.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS). New York, NY.Google Scholar
Reddy, Sravana, and Stanford, James. 2015a. “A Web Application for Automated Dialect Analysis.” In Proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics 2015 Conference (NAACL-HLT 2015), 71–5.Google Scholar
Reddy, Sravana, and Stanford, James. 2015b. “Toward Completely Automated Vowel Extraction: Introducing DARLA.” Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1): 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2015-0002.Google Scholar
Roberts, Julie. 2006. “As Old Becomes New: Glottalization in Vermont.” American Speech 81 (3): 227–49. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Julie. 2007. “Vermont Lowering? Raising Some Questions about (ay) and (aw) South of the Canadian Border.” Language Variation and Change 19:181–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Julie. 2016. “Acquisition of a Rural Variety.” Linguistic Variation 16 (1): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.02rob.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeder, Rebecca V, and Gardner, Matt H. 2013. “The Phonology of the Canadian Shift Revisited: Thunder Bay & Cape Breton.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 41, edited by Freeman, Aaron, 19:160–70.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Josef, Evanini, Keelan, Seyfarth, Scott, Gorman, Kyle, Prichard, Hilary, and Yuan, Jiahong. 2014. “FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite.” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22281.Google Scholar
Severance, Nathan A, Evanini, Keelan, and Dinkin, Aaron. 2015. “Examining the Performance of FAVE for Automated Sociophonetic Vowel Analysis.” Presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 44, University of Toronto, October 22–25.Google Scholar
Stanford, James N. 2019. New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanford, James N. 2020. “A Modern Update on New England Dialectology: Introducing the Dartmouth New England English Database (DNEED).” American Speech, Advance Publication. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8662137CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanford, James N, Leddy-Cecere, Thomas, and Baclawski, Kenneth. 2012. “Farewell to the Founders: Major Dialect Changes along the East-West New England Border.” American Speech 87: 126–69.Google Scholar
Stanford, James N, Severance, Nathan A, and Baclawski, Kenneth P. 2014. “Multiple Vectors of Unidirectional Dialect Change in Eastern New England.” Language Variation and Change 26 (1): 103–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394513000227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanley, Joseph A. 2019. “Real Time Vowel Shifts in Georgia English.” Paper presented at the 6th annual linguistics conference at UGA (LCUGA6). Athens, GA. Oct. 4–5.Google Scholar
Strassel, Stephanie M, and Boberg, Charles. 1996. “The Reversal of a Sound Change in Cincinnati.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (N)WAVES and MEANS: A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 24 3 (1): 19.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-Columbia.Google Scholar
Strelluf, Christopher. 2019. “Structural and Social Correlations with the Low-Back-Merger Shift in a U.S. Midland Community.” In The Low-Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Rotations Across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 104, edited by Becker, Kara, 104:120–43. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8032968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. 2011. Sociophonetics: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R., and Kendall, Tyler. 2007. “NORM: The Vowel Normalization and Plotting Suite.” 2007. http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/.Google Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne E, Mason, Alexander, Nesbitt, Monica, Pevan, Erin, and Savage, Matt. 2016. “Reversal and Re-Organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan.” In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 44, edited by Jeoung, Helen, 22:171–9.Google Scholar
Wells, John. 1982. Accents of English: An Introduction, vols. 1–3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar