THE IMPACT OF INTERN
AL SOCIAL CHANGE ON
LOCAL PHONOLOGY
By
Monica Nesbitt
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Linguistics
Doctor of
Philosophy
2019
ABSTRACT
THE IMPACT OF INTERNAL SOCIAL CHANGE ON LOCAL PHONOLOGY
By
Monica Nesbitt
This dissertation addresses a fundamental question about phonolog
y
, i.e. how do
we
account for the appearance of a phonological rule in a
community that had previously never
posited one? For example, how could we account for someone who posits a phonological
difference between /r/ and /l/, i.e. the two are distinct phonemes in their grammar, when no one
in their speech community distinguishe
s between the two sounds phonologically, i.e. [r] and [l]
are simply variants of the same phoneme. The general a
rgument
in the literature is that
phonological change comes about via re
-
analysis of some phonetic exaggeration
(e.g. Hyman
1975; Ohala 1990; Pierrehumbert 2001; Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007)
, but because phonological
change is rarely observed, there is a paucity of empirical evidence using production data in a
community while a change is underway
to support this theory
. Recent acoustic analyses of large
databases of naturally occurring, ongo
ing phonological changes show that the role of phonetic
variation is minor and in some cases non
-
existent when a phonological rule is innovated
(Fruehwald 2013; 2016; Berkson, Davis & Strickler 2017)
. Therefore, the available empirical
evidence for phonological change stands in contrast to what has been proposed in the theoretical
literature.
This dissertation interven
es in the debate through the analysis of a database of naturally
occurring speech in Lansing, Michigan where allophonic change is currently underway. In
Lansing, /æ/ is being re
-
organized such that at the turn of the 20
th
century, speakers in the
communit
y did not distinguish between /æ/ in any phonological environments, speakers born in
the 1990s, however, do distinguish between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/.
I utilize a combination of
analyses in this dissertation t
o account for the
initiation
and spread o
f this change throughout the
community
.
First, I conducted an acoustic analysis of /æ/ in F1/F2 space in a corpus of naturally
occurring speech by 36 Lansing natives. In particular, I tracked changes in vowel height (F1 at
nucleus), backness (F2 at nucleu
s), diphthongal quality (difference in F1 and F2 at nucleus and
offset), and relative distributions of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ token clouds for each speaker
(Pillai
-
Bartlett statistic
-
see
Hay, Warren & Drager 2006; Hall
-
Lew 2010)
. I supplemented the
acoustic
analysis
with a sub
-
phonemic judgement task administered to 107 Lan
sing natives via
an online survey. During the task, respondents were asked to identify whether the vowels in
words like
pat
and
pan
are the same.
This dissertation finds that phonological change was gradual in Lansing. The measure
of
speaker
-
level distributions with an impressionistic investigation of divergent trajectories, and the
results of the sub
-
phonemic judgement task suggest that there is i
ndeed an intermediate period
between no distinction and phonological di
fference
in Lansing whereby
the difference between
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ w
as only phonetically implemented
. An analysis of the effects of
gender and social class on these measures
finds that phonetic variation is socially conditioned
in
Lansing
, such that white
-
collar women are leading the change away from the community norm.
I
observe that
phonetic exaggeration
w
as promoted by social re
-
organization in the community
,
which eventua
lly lead to the development and spread of an allophonic rule
. In line with the
prediction of Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke
(2011)
, I find that the chance alignment of social
and phonetic variability in 20
th
century Lansing accounts for the initiation and
spread of this
phonological change.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is amazing what one can accomplish with the support of their village.
I cannot begin to describe how Suzanne Evans Wagner, my advisor, has changed my life.
She has supported me in so many ways th
ese last five years; from securing me funding, to
advocating for me when I became a student
-
parent, to holding my hand while I wrote this
dissertation. The list goes on. Never wavering in her support and always pushing me to be
better, she is an amazing
scholar and the kind of mentor I hope to be one day.
The support of my other committee members was far from inconsequential. Anne Violin
-
Wignet has diligently given me (handwritten!) feedback on this dissertation and on previous
work. Yen
-
Hwei Lin has rem
ained enthusiastic in her support of me and my research and has
been a constant source of encouragement. I went out on a limb and asked Aaron Dinkin to be on
my committee and thank the stars that I did. I am immensely grateful for all of the time that
Aar
on has put into guiding me through this process. His gentle prodding and extensive feedback
have transformed this dissertation immensely. Karthik Durvasula has been an instrumental
teacher, friend, and mentor since the very beginning of my PhD program.
Always offering sage
advice and constantly challenging me to be a better scholar. I am so happy to have learned from
and collaborated with him and I look forward to many more research projects together.
I have the pleasure of calling other scholars my men
tors. Michal Temkin Martinez saw
potential in me back when I was an undergraduate student and I am so grateful that she pushed
me to attend graduate school and continues to be an outstanding mentor and scholar. It is
amazing how the passion in someone els
e can spark your own. I knew I wanted to be a linguist
v
Jodi
Tommerdahl
and Cindy Kilpatrick
my unofficial mentors
Betsy Sneller, Sabriya Fisher, and Sharese King
they have taken me
I am truly indebted to the many Lansing natives who contributed the
ir voices and
judgements to this project, and to our undergraduate transcribers, and our interviewers,
especially Jennifer Pizzo. Her enthusiasm and social network are off the charts.
I could not have survived these last five years without my dear friend
s and colleagues at
Michigan State University. I started my program alongside Cara, Mohammed, Alex, Matt, and
ChenChen, and have enjoyed their company and scholarship. I am especially grateful to Cara for
her constant positivity and to Alex for our many
discussions about Lansing speech, linguistics,
and parenting. To the undergrads I have had the pleasure of mentoring, especially Danielle and
Jared. May you continue to be fascinated about language variation and change, as am I. I would
not have gotten
through this last year without my friend, Kaylin. She helped keep me sane and I
am a better person for knowing her.
Justin, my friend, thank you for the constant intellectual and emotional commiseration. I
continue to aspire to be half the scholar you a
re.
Special thanks to my family
Zach, Phylicia, Will, Steve, mom, Sam, dad, River and
Riley
whose ardent belief in my ability to do this has kept me moving forward. My husband,
Zach, followed me across the country for a decade in support of my dream. It h
as meant the
world to me. I am most grateful for Sophia. She has brought so much joy and purpose to my life.
Thank you, again, my village.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES
................................
................................
................................
.........................
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
................................
................................
................................
.......................
xi
CHAPTER 1
PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE
................................
................................
...............
1
1.1
Introduction
................................
................................
................................
..................
1
1.2
Phonetics vs Phonology
................................
................................
................................
4
1.3
Gradual vs Abrupt
Phonological Change
................................
................................
.....
7
11
1
1.4
Methods for Distinguishing Phonological from Phonetic Distinction
.......................
16
1.4.1
Divergent Trajectories
................................
................................
............................
17
1.4.2
Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
................................
................................
..............
19
1.4.3
Diagnostics of Phonological Change in this dissertation
................................
........
20
1.5
Social/External Aspects of Phonological Change
................................
......................
21
1.6
Goals of this Dissertation
................................
................................
...........................
26
1.6.1
Main Goals
................................
................................
................................
..............
26
1.6.2
Peripheral
Goal
................................
................................
................................
.......
26
1.7
Findings from this Dissertation
................................
................................
..................
27
1.8
Organization of this Dissertation
................................
................................
................
27
CHAPTER 2
ALLOPHONIC CHANGE IN LANSING, MICHIGAN
................................
.....
29
2.1
Introduction
................................
................................
................................
................
29
2.2
Allophonic Variation in North America
................................
................................
.....
30
2.3
Allophonic Change in the Inland North
................................
................................
.....
34
2.4
Lansing Speech Community
................................
................................
.......................
39
2.4.
1
The Speech Community
................................
................................
..........................
39
2.4.2
Preliminary Analyses of /æ/ in Lansing
................................
................................
..
48
2.5
Summary
................................
................................
................................
.....................
55
CHAPTER 3
DATA AND METHODS
................................
................................
......................
57
3.1
Introduction
................................
................................
................................
................
57
3.2
Acoustics of /æ/ in 20
th
century Lansing
................................
................................
....
57
3.2.1
Participant Selection and Recruitment
................................
................................
....
58
3.2.2
Speaker Demographic Information
................................
................................
.........
60
3.2.3
Interviewers
................................
................................
................................
.............
66
3.2.4
Interview Methods
................................
................................
................................
..
67
3.2.5
Audi
o Processing, Transcription, and FAVE suite
................................
.................
72
3.2.6
Measurements and Analysis
................................
................................
...................
75
3.3
Phonological Change
................................
................................
................................
..
78
vii
3.3.1
Divergent Trajectories
................................
................................
............................
79
3.3.
2
Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
................................
................................
..............
80
CHAPTER 4
/
æ
/ IN 20
TH
CENTURY LANSING
................................
................................
......
93
4.1
Introduction
................................
................................
................................
................
93
4.2
Results
................................
................................
................................
........................
94
4.3
F1 of Pre
-
Oral /æ/
................................
................................
................................
.......
95
4.3.1
F1, Generational Time and Gender
................................
................................
.........
97
4.3.2
Summary of F1 Results
................................
................................
...........................
99
4.4
F2 of Pre
-
Oral /æ/
................................
................................
................................
.....
100
4.4.1
F2, Generational Time and Gender
................................
................................
.......
102
4.4.2
Summary of F2 Results
................................
................................
.........................
103
4.5
Diphthongal Quality of Pre
-
Oral /æ/
................................
................................
........
103
4.5.1
Diphthongal Quality and Gender
................................
................................
..........
106
4.5.2
Summary of Diphthongal Quality Results
................................
............................
107
4.6
Nasal Allophony
................................
................................
................................
.......
108
4.6.1
Summar
y of Nasal Allophony Results
................................
................................
..
109
4.7
Summary: /æ/ in 20
th
Century Lansing
................................
................................
....
110
CHAPTER 5
PHONOLOGIZATION OF /
æ
/
NASAL ALLOPHONY IN LANSING
...........
113
5.1
Introduction
................................
................................
................................
..............
113
5.2
Results
................................
................................
................................
......................
114
5.2.1
Phonetic and Phonological Allophony
................................
................................
..
114
5.2.2
Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task: Actuation and Transition of Phonologization
..
118
5.3
Conc
lusion
................................
................................
................................
................
127
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
................................
...............................
129
6.1
Gender and Allophonic Change in Lansing
................................
.............................
132
6.2
Internally Motivated Change from Above
................................
................................
134
6.3
Contact as a Conditioning Factor
................................
................................
.............
135
6.4
Methodological Considerations
................................
................................
................
137
6.4.1
Awareness of Variable Phonologies
................................
................................
.....
137
6.4.2
Acoustic Salience vs Representation
................................
................................
....
138
6.4.3
Orthography in American English
................................
................................
........
139
6.5
Inland North
D
ialectology
................................
................................
........................
140
6.
6
Phonological Representations in the Inland North (more questions)
.......................
144
6.7
North American Dialectology
................................
................................
..................
145
6.8
Mid
-
20
th
century and Loss of Regional North American Features
..........................
146
APPENDICES
................................
................................
................................
............................
147
APPENDIX A Recruitment
Flyer for 2018/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
....................
148
APPENDIX B Consent Form for 2018/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
...........................
149
APPENDIX C Interview Questions for 2018/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
.................
150
APPENDIX D
Table 15
Speaker Demographics
Lansing Speech Corpus plus 21
Millennials from Wagner et al.
(
2016
)
................................
................................
................
153
APPENDIX E Consent Form for Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
................................
....
157
viii
APPENDIX F Social Media and Email Recruitment Script for Sub
-
phonemic Judgement
Task
................................
................................
................................
................................
.....
158
APPENDIX G
Table 16
Pairs of
Lexical Items for Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
........
159
APPENDIX H
Table 17
Pillai
-
Bartlett and Mean F1, F2, and DQ Values for Each Speake
r
in the Lansing Speech Corpus
plus 21
Millennials from Wagner et al. (2016)
..................
161
APPENDIX I
Figure 23
Per Token Diagonal Measurement
of /
æ
/ in Five Following
Phonological Contexts by Speaker Birth Year in the Lansing Speech Corpus (
p
lus
21
Millennials from Wagner et al. (2016))
................................
................................
..............
166
REFERENCES
................................
................................
................................
...........................
167
ix
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 Process of /g/
-
deletion (adapted from
Turton 2014: 57)
................................
...................
9
Table 2 Distribution of the Lansing Speech Corpus by generational cohort, social class, and
gender.
................................
................................
................................
................................
...........
60
Table 3 Number of participants from each
data
source
................................
................................
64
Table 4 Co
nditions of Lexical Pairs in the sub
-
phonemic judgement task
................................
...
82
Table 5 Distribution of experimental participants by Generational Co
hort
................................
.
89
Table 6 Distribution of experimental participants by Generational Cohort and Socio
-
Economic
Status
................................
................................
................................
................................
.............
90
Table 7 Distribution of experimental participants by Generational Cohort, Socio
-
Economic
Status, and Gender
................................
................................
................................
........................
91
Table 8 Best fit mixed
-
effects model of pre
-
oral /æ/ F1
................................
...............................
97
Table 9 Best fit mixed
-
effects
model of pre
-
oral /æ/ F2
................................
.............................
100
Table 10 Best fit mixed
-
effects model of pre
-
oral /æ/ Diphthongal Quality (DQ)
....................
104
Table 11 ANOVA results of Pillai
-
Bartlett score analysis
................................
.........................
108
Table 12 Distribution of /æ/ features across generational time in 20
th
century Lansing
............
111
Table 13 Summary of social conditions on acoustically salient NCS features in 20
th
century
Lansing
................................
................................
................................
................................
........
111
Table 14 Mixed
-
effects regression model for responses to CæC pairs.
................................
.....
120
Table 15 Speaker Demographics
Lansing Speech Corpus plus 21
Millennials from Wagner et
al. (2016)
.
3
Table 16 Pairs of Lexical Items for Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
.
59
x
Table 17 Pillai
-
Bartlett and Mean F1, F2, and DQ Values for Each Speaker in the Lansing
Speech Corpu
s plus 21 Millennials from Wagner et al. (2016)
1
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Reproduced from Fruehwald 2016:382. Trajectory of /a
/ in Philadelphia in two
phonological
contexts (before voiced and voiceless consonants) in apparent time.
.....................
18
Figure 2 Northern Cities Shift vowel chain shift configuration
. (Adapted from Wolfram &
Schilling
-
Estes 1998: 138)
................................
................................
................................
............
34
Figure 3 Population rate of change by decade from 1860 to 2010 in Lansing. [
Source: US census
1860
2010].
................................
................................
................................
................................
41
Figure 4 Percentage of Non
-
White population in Lansing. [Source: US census 1960
-
2010].
.....
43
Figure 5 Rate of change in population by decade from 1860 to 2010 in Lansing compared to two
Lansing suburbs; Delta Charter Township and
Bath Charter Township. [Source: US census 1860
2010].
................................
................................
................................
................................
.........
47
Figure 6 Three distinct /æ/ systems from Greater Lansing: Jack Down, b. 19
24, multiple college
degrees, advanced raised continuous system; Michelle Baulch, b. 1971, multiple college degrees,
common raised continuous system; Ben Langdon, b. 1994, community college student, nasal
system.
................................
................................
................................
................................
..........
50
Figure 7 Pillai
-
Bartlett scores for /æ/ by year of birth for Lansing, MI speakers (from Wagner et
al 2016:figure 5)
................................
................................
................................
............................
51
Figure 8 Trajectory of /æ/ diagonal in urban Lansing (blue = blue
-
collar; red=white collar); dots
represent means for individual speakers (n=27).
................................
................................
..........
53
Figure 9 Pillai
-
Bartlett scores in 20th century Lansing by social class (blue
-
collar = blue).
.......
54
Figure 10 Average F1(Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth in 20
th
century Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21)
for reference.
.........................
95
Figure 11 Average F1(Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and gender in 20th
century Lansing. Lansi
ng Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21) for reference.
................................
................................
................................
................................
.......................
98
Figure 12 Average F2 (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speake
r year of birth in 20th century
Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21) for reference.
........
101
Figure 13
Average F2(Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and gender in 20th
century Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21) for reference.
................................
................................
................................
................................
.....................
102
xii
Figure 14 Average Diphthongal Quality (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/, /e
/, and /
/ by speaker year
of birth in 20th century Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21)
for
reference.
................................
................................
................................
...............................
105
Figure 15 Average Diphthongal Quality (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and
gender in 20th century
Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21)
for reference.
................................
................................
................................
...............................
106
Figure 16 Per speaker Pillai
-
Bartlett scor
e of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ distribution by speaker
year of birth in 20th century Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers
(n=21) for reference.
................................
................................
................................
...................
109
Figure 17 Per token diagonal measurement of /æ/ in three following phonological contexts by
speaker year of birth in 20
th
century Lansing.
................................
................................
............
116
Figure 18 Per token diagonal measurement of /
/ (left facet) and /
/ (right facet) in three
following phonological contexts by speaker year of birth in 20th century Lansing.
..................
117
Figure 19 Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (left = condition one)
compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pai
rs (right = condition two) of /æ/ over generational time.
121
Figure 20 Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (l
eft = condition one)
compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs (right = condition two) of /æ/ over generational time and
by Social Class (White Collar respondents at the top).
................................
..............................
123
Figure 21 Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (left = condition one)
compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs (right = condition two) of /
/ and /
/ over generational
time.
................................
................................
................................
................................
............
126
Figure 22 Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs of /æ/ over generational time,
by social class (White Collar
respondents at the top), and gender (women on the left).
............
133
Figure 23 Per Token Diagonal Measurement of /æ/ in Five Following Phonological Contexts by
Speaker Birth
Year in the Lansing Speech Corpus (plus 21 Millennials from Wagner et al.
(2016))
6
1
PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE
1.1
Introduction
One of the challenges faced by phonologists is accounting for change, i.e. how do members of a
speech community begin to posit a new phonological rule that has never before existed in that
speech community? For example, how could we account for someone wh
o posits a
phonological/categorical difference between
/
r
/
and
/
l
/
, i.e. the two are distinct phonemes in their
grammar, when no one in their speech community
distinguishes between the two sounds
phonologically, i.e.
[
r
]
and
[
l
]
are
simply
variants of the
same phoneme.
Though the
mechanisms of phonological change have been the subject of many articles, dissertations, and
chapters, there is still very little that we actually know about what governs phonological change.
This is
perhaps
because as Hockett (1
958:456) surmises, phonological change is rare and occurs
suddenly
too soon for anyone to detect by direct observation. Because it is so rare, most of
what we "know" about phonological change has been deduced from the results of perception
studies, simula
tions, synchronic analysis, and historical data. For example, the Big Bang theory
developed
by Janda and Joseph
(2003)
utilizes historical and synchronic data to theorize that
phonological change is motivated in the ph
onetics for a brief amount of time before phonology
takes over. Underrepresented in the literature are studies of phonological change
in progress
using language production data. Sociophonologists have made some inroads in this endeavor
with the use of la
rge corpora spanning many generations. For example, Fruehwald (2013,2016)
investigated Canadian Raising of
/a
/
in Philadelphia through an analysis of spontaneously
produced speech in the Pennsylvania Neighborhood Corpus (PNC)
(Labov & Rosenfelder 2011)
,
which is a collection of over 300 hours of recorded interviews with
approximately
400
2
Philadelphia natives, conducted by University of Pennsylvania graduate students as part of their
course work.
In
Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change
, Weinreich, Labov & Herzog
(1968) describe 5 problems to be addressed when attempting
to answer this fundamental
question about sound change. One
,
the Constraints
P
roblem
,
asks what kinds of innovations are
possible and what are not possible. The Transition Problem (or Incrementation Problem) asks
how a change progresses in the same directi
on over multiple generations. The Maintenance
Problem concerns why a change does not revert back to its
previous
linguistic state
. The
Evaluation Problem asks how the new and old system
s
are evaluated in the community. The
Embedding Problem asks how the i
nnovation is linked to the larger linguistic system and how i
t
i
s
connected to different social groups. The Actuation Problem asks what factors can account for
the initiation of change
:
Why do changes in a structural feature take place in a particular
lan
guage at a given time, but not in other languages with the same feature, or in the same
language at other times (Weinreich et al. 1968:102)
?
Although many advances have been made
in addressing the problems identified by Weinreich et al. in 1968 regarding
language change in
general, regarding phonological change specifically, some of these problems remain.
The present investigation adds to the growing field of sociophonology and addresses
what
Weinreich et al. termed
ge change
the Actuation
Problem
by focusing on one of these rare changes, namely the development of phonological
nasal allophony for /æ/ against the backdrop of socio
-
historical changes underway in Lansing,
MI. Whereas /
æ/ was previously raised in all ph
onological environments for Lansing speakers,
e.g.
mat
and
man
were both produced with [
æ] and similar realizations, recent work has shown
that many speakers born after
1984
raise /æ/ only before nasal consonants.
3
I utilize a combination of analyses, incl
uding speaker
-
level distributions, community level
phonetic target analysis, and the results of a judgement task
,
to investigate this phonological
change. The two sources of data for this research are a collection of conversational interviews
with natives
of Lansing, MI, and responses to a sub
-
phonemic judgement task. The collection of
interviews includes oral histories and sociolinguistic interviews with 36 Lansing natives ranging
in date of birth from 1925 to 1984. The sub
-
phonemic judgement respondent
s are 107 Lansing
natives who range in date of birth from 1925 to 1999.
In addressing the actuation problem of phonological change, I take heed of the following
warning in
Empirical Foundations
:
Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the
development of
language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other
aspect, no matter how well constructed, will fail to account for the rich
body of regularities that can be observed in empirical studies of language
behavior.
Weinreich, L
abov, and Herzog (1968:188)
Therefore, this work is an investigation into both the linguistic/internal and social/external
mechanisms by which speakers in a community posit a
phonological
rule that never before
existed. To do this, I focus on
2
aspects of this change, namely:
1.
The ph
onetic changes that
/æ/
has undergone on its way towards an allophonic split
over 3 generations in Lansing, namely lowering in F1, retraction along F2, and less
diphthongal quality.
2.
The impact of gender and social class on these measures over generational
time
Lansing is an optimal locus for an investigation into phonological change. Lansing is situated
in the Inland North, a regional American English dialect area that has received a lot of attention
4
from sociolinguists over the last few decades
. Additional
ly,
the allophonic change under
investigation in this dissertation
the development of /
æ
/ nasal allophony
is fairly well
documented in the sociolinguistics literature in varieties of North American English. I discuss
suitability for the present project in Chapter 2
.
In the rest of this chapter, I will outline and expand upon the theoretical debates in the field
concerning the initiation of phonological change.
In section
1.2
, I discuss the theoretical
commitments of this dissertation regarding the
distinction between
phonetics
and
phonology.
In
section
0
, I review the existing literature on phonological change as it relates to the
A
ctuation
P
roblem described by
Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968)
.
Section
1.4
is a review of the
methodologies for discerning between phonetic vs phonological allophony
within speakers
. In
this section, I also mo
tivate
the use of another
method
: a sub
-
phonemic judgement task.
In
section
1.5
, I draw on the sociolinguistics literature to provide a framework that
will help me to
identify the possible actuators of nasal /
æ/ allophony
in Lansing.
Section
1.6
provides a summary
of the main and peripheral goals of
this dissertation.
S
ection
1.7
includes a
summar
y of
the
overall findings and section
1.8
provides a
layout
of
each of
the chapters
in this dissertation
.
1.2
Phonetics vs Phonology
In this dissertation, I adopt a modular feedforward framework that is rooted in Generative
Phonology
(Keating 1990; Pi
errehumbert 1990; Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007)
. Under this framework,
different levels of the grammar occupy different modules. The focus of this dissertation is on the
phonetics and phonology modules, which are schematized in (1), below. These modules are
a
rranged serially, as depicted in (1), so that information flows from one module to another in a
feedforward fashion. The feedforward nature of this framework is that one module only has
5
access to the information in the previous module. For example, a pho
netic rule will have access
to phonological representations but will not have access to underlying representations.
(1)
Modular feedforward architecture of the phonetics
-
phonology interface
Phonological rules
Phonetic rules
Sound change is can include any change that occur in either the phonetic or phonological
levels represented in (1). Changes in the phonetic module give rise to phonetically grad
ient rules
which operate over continuous phonetic dimensions (e.g. formant frequency or duration). Many
of the changes in the sociolinguistic literature which track change in the phonetic target of a
phoneme are examples of this type of change. Changes in
the phonology module operate over
Underlying representation
Phonological representation
Phonetic Representation
6
discrete phonological dimensions (e.g. features), which manifest phonetically as abrupt changes
between separate regions in phonetic space.
Allophonic change, which is the focus of this dissertation, is defined as the emer
gence of
an alternation between two allophones of the same phoneme where previously there had been
only one allophone. In line with the framework just described, I will refer to two types of
allophony throughout this dissertation
one that is phonetic and
one that is phonological. The
difference between the two types of allophonic grammars is one of features. Phonetic allophones
are those that are distinguished along some phonetic dimension, but in a continuous rather than
categorical fashion. Phonologica
l allophones are distinguished by features at the level of
phonological representation, the middle level in (1) above. The difference between the two types
of allophony is exemplified by examining the realization of /æ/ in different dialects of American
E
nglish
(Dinkin 2011a)
. The realization of /æ/ as part of the Northern Cities Shift dialect is an
example of phonetic allophony. Within this phoneme, tokens of /æ/ in various phonological
environments are
gradiently different in F1/F2 space, such that by regular phonetic operations,
/æ/ tokens before nasal consonants appear at the top of the token cloud while /æ/ tokens before /l/
appear at the bottom of the token cloud. For phonetic allophones, change ov
er time would result
in the same phonetic target change (e.g. backing along F2) for both the pre
-
/l/ and pre
-
nasal
allophones. In other dialects of American English, however, /æ/ before nasal codas is
phonologically distinct from /
æ
/ in other following co
da environments. In these dialects, /æ/
before nasal codas are discretely separated in F1/F2 space from the rest of the token cloud, i.e.
there is a distinguishable gap in the vowel space between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
other tokens of /æ/,
whereby the latter t
okens are more retracted along F2 than the former. The discrete nature of this
difference suggests that /æ/ before nasal consonants has assumed some feature (perhaps
7
[
peripheral]) that distinguishes it phonologically from the rest of the allophones of th
is
phoneme. Because they have different representations at the phonological level, phonological
allophones can be affected independently of each other by changes in phonetic rules and
representations. In many dialects of North America, /æ/ before non
-
nas
al consonants is moving
backwards in the vowel space, whereas that before nasal consonants appears to be unchanging.
Therefore, the fundamental difference between phonetic and phonological allophony, is whether
the two allophones are discretely separated
by at least one feature (phonological allophony) or by
simply phonetic implementation alone (phonetic allophony).
While sound change can occur in any of the modules in (1), this dissertation is concerned
with the development of phonological allophony. T
he primary question to be addressed is
whether change in the phonetics gives rise to the development of this phonological rule or
whether the rule was developed without a phonetic precursor.
1.3
Gradual vs Abrupt Phonological Change
The prevailing sentiment s
urrounding phonological change is that it develops gradually, i.e.
some exaggerated difference between two phonetic variants is eventually re
-
analyzed (by
speakers and/or hearers) as a phonological rule (Hyman 1975; Ohala 1981
; Blevins 2004;
Bermudez
-
Otero
2007;
Moreton & Thomas 2007; Baker, Archangeli & Mielke 2011)
. Others
have argued, however, that there is no phonetic precursor to phonological change
change to the
grammar is sudden and does not require anything in the phonetics to prompt the change
(Fruehwald 2013; Janda and Joseph 2003).
In what follows, I discu
ss the two arguments in turn.
8
1.3.1
Gradual phonological change
A theory of gradual
phonological change
posits that phonological change proceeds
through the grammar incrementally
first occurring in the phonetic module and then the
phonological module
.
T
he Life
-
-
(Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007; 2015)
is one theory that supports this idea that phonological
change is gradual
.
According to the Life
-
Cycle, p
honological processes first begin as language
-
independent or mechanical ph
onetic effects (stage 1
, Table 1
). Through a process called
phonologization
, these universal phonetic effects become cognitively
-
controlled language
-
specific phonetic implementation effects (stage 2). They then become
stabilized
as a phrase
-
level catego
rical/phonological rule (stage 3). Over time, the process advances through the
grammar by domain narrowing so that it applies at the word level (stage 4), and then the stem
-
level (stage 5). In its last stage, the phonological process may then advance to t
he lexicon
through morphologization and/or lexicalization (stage 6). To illustrate the Life
-
Cycle,
Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale (2008)
make reference to the historical process of /g/
-
deletion in
Table
1
. Under the theory of the
L
ife
-
C
ycle, the process o
f /g/
-
across
all environments but perhaps unpredictably deleted in casual conversation on occasion
(stage 1). At some point in time, there was a process of gradie
nt lenition of the stop but only at
the phrase level (stage 2 in
Table
1
). At this point, the gradient nature of lenition means that it
must be subject
to social conditioning. Later, in stage 3, this gradient process develops into a
categorical rule whereby lenition at the phrase
-
level is categorical within and across speakers in
the community. This categorical rule then begins to narrow its domain comi
ng under increasing
morphological
(stage 4), and lexical control (stage 5). The sixth stage of the Life
-
Cycle is not
9
included in the table but involves the development of lexical exceptions, which for the /g/
-
deletion example include words like
young
er
an
d
long
er
(Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale 2012:
10)
.
Table
1
Process of /g/
-
deletion (adapted from
Turton 2014: 57)
finger
sing
-
er
sing it
si
n
g
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
To explain why phonological change proceeds in this fashion,
Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale
(2008)
appeal to what they call
input restructuring
. If one thinks about this from the
perspective
mostly made up of the phonology in the stage prior. Thus, the learner simply re
-
analyzes the
rule based on frequency of occurrence in the previo
higher level. For example, if a child is born to parents whose grammars resemble that in stage 3
of
Table
1
where the rule only applies at the phrase level, that child is likely to encounter /s
10
more often than /s
-
deletion as a word
-
level process, which will
result in them having a stage 4 grammar.
The transition from stage
1 to stage 2 processes forms the basis of what has been termed
the
accumulation
-
of
-
errors
hypothesis, whereby an epiphenomenal phonetic effect is re
-
an
a
lyzed
as a language
-
dependent speaker
-
controlled phonetic effect. Most ardently
supported
by Ohala
(1981; 1989; 1990; 1993)
, the
accumulation
-
of
-
errors
hypothesis posits that a listener (or
speaker) hea
rs tokens that are outside of the distribution they are used to and reinterprets the
difference in pronunciation as a new phonetic rule. This new phonetic rule can then become a
phonological rule. The classic example of this phenomenon is the hypothetical
sound change of
/ut/
-
fronting
(Ohala 1981)
. The scenario is as follows.
A sp
eaker, intending to produce /ut/,
produces [yt], with a fronted realization of /u/, as a result of coarticulation with the following [t].
Being aware of this coarticulation effect, a hearer will mentally reconstruct what they heard as an
/ut/.
Phonetic c
the coarticulation
into
account and they interpret the [+front] feature as belonging to the vowel rather than the /t/, so
they hear the /u/ as a /y/. When that listener speaks, they produce
what origin
ally was
/u/ as
[
y
]
.
Crucially, Ohala argues that there has been no phonological rule posited at this point
;
the
phonological rule
can
be posited at some later stage. This scenario is a description of the
transition
between
stages 1 and 2 in the Life
-
Cycle
:
a mechanical effect is re
-
analyzed as a
speaker
-
controlled phonetic effect, and at some later point in time, a phonological rule is posited.
Thus, the accumulation of error theory is most in line with a gradual rather th
an abrupt theory of
change.
Other research programs subscribe to the same incremental theory of change and push
the
accumulation
-
of
-
errors
scenario farther so that re
-
analysis occurs between stages 1 and 2 and
then again between stages 2 and 3, e.g.
Hyman
(1975; 2013)
,
Evolutionary Phonology
(Blevins
11
2004; 2006)
, Exemplar Theory
(Pierrehumbert 2001; Garrett & Johnson 2011)
.
Though the
specific details of each theory are different, they all consider phonetic variability
to be a
significant catalyst to phonological change.
1.3.2
Abrupt phonological change
In contrast to a theory of
gradual
phonological change, the Big Bang theory of sound
change
(Janda & Joseph 2003)
argues that phonetic factors guide sound change only very briefly
and that phonological conditioning takes over very quickly. To motivate this argument, Janda
and Joseph (2003) re
-
examine two changes,
one of which is
Swiss German
o
-
lowering.
Preconsonan
tal
o
-
lowering originally occurred only before /r/, but there many varieties that have
generalized this rule in various ways, e.g. some lower before all obstruents except /b/, others
lower before nasals and coronal obstruents but not other obstruents, oth
ers lower before
obstruents except /b/
and
nasals, and so on. Crucially, the central city of Schaffhausen
used
the
simpler rule; lowering before /r/, which while diffusing to different villages was generalized in a
variety of ways. Crucial for Janda and
Joseph (2003) is that the rule
s
in these villages
do not
phonetically
favor a lowered
o
;
therefore, though the initial state was lowering before /r/, these
villages developed a rule that was not phonetically driven. The authors argue that if phonetic
vari
ation did play a role in this change, it must have been very brief and overruled by the
phonology in an instant.
1.3.3
Disambiguating abrupt and gradual phonological change
Crucially, as
Fruehwald (2013)
points out, phonological change is rarely observed while
the change is underway. Many theories about the process of phonological change therefore
suffer from a paucity of empirical evidence
. They
rest on completed changes (as is the case with
(Garrett & Johnson 2011)
, p
erception
12
studies (Ohala 1981), observations of synchronic data, or prior theories (and see Fruehwald 2016
for an in depth discussion of these methods). Larger databases of naturally occurring, ongoing
phonological changes are required to test the theorie
s
.
Sociophonologists have been making inroads in this endeavor, compiling large spoken
corpora with enough time depth to address questions about phonological change. One such
study is
Fruehwald's (2013; 2016)
investigation into
/a
/
-
raising in Philadelphia. The results of
his study suggest that,
contrary to
popular belief, there is no intermediate (phonetic) stage in
phonological chan
ge
the rule is categorical/phonological from the outset. The literature on
change towards a phonemic merger, i.e. the merger of two or more phonemes into one, is also
robust in its use of real language data while a change is underway.
Though I will not
go over the
literature in detail here, the general consensus on phonemic mergers is that both types of changes
(abrupt and gradual) are possible. Crucially, language/dialect contact predicts which type of
that are internally motivated (are not triggered by contact with speakers of other phonological
systems) progress gradually
(see Guy 1990 and Herold 1997)
.
Studies on allophonic change,
which is the focus of this dissertation, are underrepresented in the literature. There are in fact,
only two studies that I am aware of that attempt to disa
mbiguate gradual from abrupt
phonologization of an allophonic split using natural language data. As I summarize below, these
studies show conflicting findings, and thus offer no solution to the current theoretical
conundrum. It is still unclear if alloph
onic change is abrupt, gradual, or whether like mergers, its
development depends on inter
-
dialect/language contact.
13
1.3.3.1
Fruehwald (2013, 2016)
The first investigation of an ongoing phonological split using actual production data is
(2013, 2016)
study of Canadian Rais
ing of
/a
/
in Philadelphia. In North American
English, Canadian Raising of
/a
/
is realized in a variety of ways, but the most common
realization is that the diphthong raises when it occurs before voiceless codas but remains low
before voiced codas. Therefore, raising of the nucleus is observed in words like
knife
and
write
,
but not
in words like
knives
and
ride
. Canadian Raising of
/a
/
has been labeled phonological
raising because the raising rule also applies before a flapped /t/ such that the
/a
/
in
writer
su
rfaces with the higher variant
(Halle 1962; Idsardi 2006; Berkson, Davis & Strickler 2017;
Fruehwald 2013; 2016)
. The rule must be phonological because although the flapped /t/ in
writer
is voiced on the surface, it is underlyingl
y voiceless;
this
shows that the rule applies to
underlying (phonological) representations, rather than mere surface (phonetic) representations.
In his analysis of
/a
/
-
raising in Philadelphia, Fruehwald (2013
;
2016) sought to
empirically determine wheth
er phonetics played a role in the initial process of phonological
change. He asked whether an earlier stage of phonetic variation is what prompts community
members to posit a phonological difference between the allophones (gradual phonologization), or
if t
he allophones were phonologically distinguished from the outset (abrupt phonologization). To
do this, he conducted an acoustic investigation of
/a
/
raising in the spontaneous speech of 326
Philadelphia
-
born speakers whose birthdates range from 1889 to 199
8. He compared three
measurements of
/a
/
(nucleus, offset, and duration)
over apparent time
across four contexts
;
faithful /t
/ (
write
)
,
faithful /
d/
(
ride
)
, flapped /t
/ (
writing
)
,
and flapped /d/ (
riding
).
His analysis
showed that there was no
intermediate stage whereby phonetic raising (stage 2 in the Life
-
Cycle)
, i.e. the raising of /a
/ is determined by surface voicing of the following consonant,
14
predated phonological raising (stage 3 of the Life
-
Cycle) in the community. At the community
lev
el, the phonetic separation of pre
-
voiced and pre
-
voiceless
/a
/
along F1 has been in progress
in Philadelphia since about the 1920s
(Labov 2001; Fruehwald 2013; Fruehwald 2016)
.
Fruehwald showed that the difference between pre
-
voiced and pre
-
voiceless
/a
/
was
phonological from the very outset of this change, i.e. /
a
/ began to raise
before flapped /t/ at the
same time as
before
faithful /t/, and not at some later time through re
-
analysis. Fruehwald argues
that in Philadelphia there were two phonological categories of
/a
/
that were phonetically similar
and that one of them (the pre
-
voiceless variant) underwent a phonetica
lly gradual change in
height while the other remained low. Therefore, phonological change was abrupt in this speech
community, i.e. there was no intermediate stage whereby the allophones were differentiated
purely phonetically before a phonological rule w
version of the Big Bang theory of sound change proposed by
Janda and Joseph (2003)
who argue
that this intermediate/phonetic stage, if ever observed, would be very brief.
1.3.3.2
Berkson, Davis and Strickler (2017)
In contrast,
Ber
kson, Davis and Strickler (2017)
appear to have observed this intermediate stage
of Canadian Raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Berkson
et al.
analyzed word
-
list productions of
/a
/
before faithful voiceless, faithful voiced, /t/ flap, and /d/ flap consona
nts in the speech of 27 Fort
Wayners. They visually inspected F1 trajectories of each token of
/a
/
for every speaker and for
each speaker compared the difference in F1 at the 30% mark between the four environments.
They show that speakers exhibit differ
ent patterns of
/a
/
-
raising. 15% of the speakers in this
sample do not raise in any environment, two
-
thirds of the speakers in the sample exhibit phonetic
raising, i.e. raising before faithful voiceless consonants but not before flapped /t/ or either /d/
variant, and 22% of the speakers exhibit phonological raising whereby
/a
/
raises before both
15
faithful and flapped /t/ but not before either /d/ variant. Berkson et al.
reconcile this result with
conclud
ing
that
One
unstudied aspect
in the Berkson et al. study is
change over time. The
speakers
in
this study
range in age from 19
to
78. I
t is unclear if date of birth conditions the patterning of
their sample. There are a few possible scenarios that could be borne out of the data if they were
that the individuals who have no raising are older speakers, those who exhibit phonetic raising
are middle
-
aged, and the phonological raisers are all younger speakers. This scenario would
support a gradual theory of phonologization, because it proceeds ge
neration by generation, with
an intermediate stage of phonetic
-
only conditioning.
Alternatively, perhaps those who exhibit no
raising are older speakers, middle
-
aged speakers are a mixture of those who exhibit phonetic
raising and those who exhibit phonolo
gical raising, and young speakers
are phonological raisers.
Under this scenario, phonologization would be abrupt because the phonological rule has been
posited for some speakers in the middle generation when there was no phonetic raising in the
previous g
eneration. Thus, to really tease apart whether phonological change is abrupt or
gradual in Fort Wayne, we would benefit from a discussion of how year of birth conditions the
patterns reported in their sample. Because there is no information regarding how
year of birth
conditions the patterns they observe, it is not exactly clear whether Canadian Raising in Fort
Wayne can be classified as abrupt or gradual phonological change.
1.3.4
Summary
In sum, Fruehwald (2013, 2016) provides evidence for the strong view tha
t phonological
change is abrupt, since there is no transition period between pre
-
and post
-
phonologization in his
16
Philadelphia data. Berkson et al. (2017) support a weak view that phonological change is abrupt
but there is a very brief transition period, i
.e. the period in which
allophony is conditioned
phonetically.
The Fruehwald (2013, 2016) and Berkson
et al.
(2017) studies thus provide a theoretical
conundrum for a description of how allophonic change progresses. The results in Fort Wayne
suggest that
there is indeed a phonetic precursor for phonological change. The Berkson et al.
analysis appears to show that both phonological and phonetic stages are active at the beginning
of the phonological change, but this remains to be seen as they have yet to sh
ow whether
Canadian Raising is a new phenomenon in Fort Wayne or if the patterns they observe are
distributed among speaker
s of different age groups
however, suggests that there is no stage at which allophony is phone
tically motivated
in
the
community. With this conflicting evidence, and the conflicting theoretical claims in the
literature, it is clear that the addition of more studies tracing allophonic development are needed.
As discussed previously, there appear t
o be multiple pathways by which other phonological
changes, e.g. change towards phonemic merger, are actuated. Because of this, it would not be
completely surprising if multiple pathways for allophonic splits are established. With the
analysis of allopho
nic change in more speech communities, perhaps we can develop a typology
of allophonic change.
1.4
Methods for
D
istinguishing
P
honological from
P
honetic
D
istinction
As stated earlier, methods for discerning phonologization from phonetic change are not abunda
nt
in the literature, especially since phonological change is so rarely observed. In the case of
/a
/
raising, acoustic analysis is fairly straightforward because one can readily contrast phonetic
(flapped stops) and phonological (faithful stops) raising.
Articulatory analyses have also been
17
employed, e.g. Turton (2014). A method used quite often in the literature on phonemic mergers
is a measure of bimodality. This measure is usually a calculation of the distribution of token
clouds between two vowel cla
sses. A unimodal distribution is evidence for merger, while a
bimodal distribution is taken as evidence of two vowel classes. Lately, conclusions based on
distributions have been cautioned against, as
studies have shown that while bimodality is often
an in
dication of phonological/categorical difference, the absence of a bimodal distribution does
not necessarily entail the absence of a phonological difference
(cf. Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale
2008: 696; Schilling, Watkins & Watkins 2002)
. Thus
measures of bimodality are best
interpreted by supplementing with other types of analyses. Here, I motivate the two that will be
employed in this dissertation in addition to a measure of bimodality (in this case, the Pillai
-
Bartlett measure). Further det
ails are given in Chapter 3.
1.4.1
Divergent Trajectories
Fruehwald (2013)
noted the utility of examining the rate of change of a vowel phoneme
in varying phonological environments to determine whether any of the phonetic differences have
been phonologi
zed in the community, and crucially,
when
in apparent time the two environments
began to diverge. In his analysis of the phonologization of Canadian Raising in Philadelphia,
Fruehwald showed that the difference between
/a
/
before voiceless and voiced cons
onants was
phonological from the outset of the pre
-
voiceless phonetic target change by inspecting the rate of
change of
/a
/
in the two phonological environments. He noted that because
/a
/
in these
environments followed different trajectories along F1 fr
om the 1930s onwards
,
they were two
phonological allophones rather than differentiated due solely to phonetics.
18
This is captured in
Figure
1
. In
the figure, are speaker means of F1 at the nucleus for /a
/
across speaker year of birth in the PNC. /a
/ means before voiced consonants are indicated with
dark circles and those before voiceless are indicated with open circles.
Figure
1
Reproduced from Fruehwald 2016:382. Trajectory of
/a
/
in Philadelphia in two phonological
contexts (before voiced and voiceless consonants) in apparent time.
In
F
igure
1
, we see that /a
/ in the two environments proceed along
divergent trajectories
from the 1930s; that before voiceless consonants moving up the vowel space and that before
voiced consonants remaining stable. Thus, he was able to show that phonologization of
19
Canadian Raising in Philadelphia began in the 1930s.
To support this claim, he examined the
trajectories of other vowel phonemes in different phonological contexts over time in the same
community. One such phoneme was /
/ before fricative, nasal, and other consonants. He noted
that unlike pre
-
voiced and pr
e
-
voiceless /a
/, the /
/ allophones moved in lockstep over the
course of the 20
th
century and were therefore only phonetically distinguished from one another.
1.4.2
Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
Another diagnostic utilized in the phonemic merger literature is a
p
honemic judgment
task
(DiPaolo 1988; Herold 1997; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Johnson & Nycz 2015;
Baranowski 2013)
. Herold (1997) employed this task in her investigation into whether the low
-
back merger (merger of /
/ and /
western part of the state or via an independent innovation. For this study she suppl
emented
production data with a judgement task in which participants were visually presented with pairs of
lexical items that differed in incidence of /
/ and /
caught
and
cot
) and were asked to
indicate whether the vowels in the pairs sounded the s
ame or different to them. Analysis of the
judgement data and production data revealed that the merger in eastern Pennsylvania was an
independent innovation, rather than the result of diffusion from western Pennsylvania, since
speakers in both parts of the
state developed the phon
emic distinction
at about the same time.
Though this judgement task is usually performed to test phonemic merger/distinction,
Mellesmoen (2016)
has shown that
it can be useful for testing whether
allophones differ in their
phonological representation or whether they merely represent different phonetic implementations
of the same phonological features.
In her study of
/æ/
in British Columbia,
Mellesmoen (2016)
analyzed speech production and judgement task data to investigate whether there was a
phonological distinction between /æ/ before voiced velars
(
)
and /æ/ before other
20
conso
nants. An analysis of the trajectories in phonetic space of these conditioning environments
over apparent time revealed that in BC a three
-
way allophonic differentiation for /æ/ had
developed, such that /æ/ before front nasal consonants, /m/ and /n/, were
distinct from /æ/ before
voiced velar /g/, and /æ/ before other consonants in F1 x F2 space. The acoustic results for /æ/
/æ/ before /g/ and /æ/ before other na
sal consonants. To discern which allophone pre
-
belonged to, Mellesmoen (2016) conducted a judgement task. For this, she asked participants to
indicate whether pre
-
(e.g.
rang
)
sounded more like
words with a velar coda (e.g.
rag
)
or words wit
h a front nasal coda consonant (e.g.
ran
)
. She showed that participants classified
pre
-
-
/g/ allophone rather than as part of the pre
-
front nasal allophone.
Though this is the only study to utilize the judgement task to determine t
he phonological status
of an allophonic split, the results are convincing
because they align with her analysis of
trajectory movement.
1.4.3
Diagnostics of
P
honological
C
hange in this
d
issertation
In the present study, I use the two methods described above to address the actuation and
transition problems of phonological change in Lansing. I will investigate phonetic vs
phonological allophony within the /æ/ phoneme by examining trajectories of pre
-
na
sal and pre
-
oral /æ/ in F1/F2 space over time, in conjunction with the results of the phonemic judgment task.
According to Fruehwald (2013, 2016), phonological allophones follow disparate trajectories over
time while
allophones that differ in phonetic imp
lementation proceed
in lockstep. Ultimately, we
will want to ask whether at the speaker level, the phonological change was abrupt or gradual, i.e.
whether individual speakers had a phonological distinction when the vowel in the two
environments began to as
sume different phonetic targets (abrupt) or if speakers developed the
21
phonological rule sometime after the two allophones began to move in different directions
(gradual). The trajectory diagnostic will allow me to determine
when
the phonological
allophone
s began to diverge from the
rest of the
allophones, i.e. when do the allophones begin to
move towards different phonetic targets. Whichever generation in which the relevant allophones
begin to differentiate, as determined by this trajectory analysis, is t
he generation for which the
question of abruptness will be asked. If any speakers in this generation have a phonological rule,
I will conclude that phonological change was abrupt. If, however, speakers in this generation do
not distinguish pre
-
nasal and p
re
-
oral /æ/ phonologically, then I will conclude that phonological
change was a gradual process.
To determine whether an individual in Lansing posits a
representational difference between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/, I will utilize the sub
-
phonemic
judgemen
t task described above.
1.5
Social/External
A
spects of
P
honological
C
hange
The Berkson et al. (2017) and Fruehwald (2013, 2016) studies provide fodder for debate about
the internal conditions that govern allophonic restructuring. Yet neither study provides e
nough
information about the social conditions under which these changes have occurred to make it
possible to draw conclusions about the social motivations for change towards a phonological
split. Berkson et al. (2017) do not address any aspects of contact,
awareness, or social
conditioning on
/a
/
phonologization. Fruehwald (2013,
2016)
argues that contact and social
evaluation are not crucial components of his findings.
He
argues through a statistical analysis of
his sample that
/a
/
phonologization in Ph
iladelphia is purely internally motivated
; there is no
statistical evidence of a sudden increase in speakers with different phonological systems into the
community.
However,
like many other large
metropolitan
areas,
Philadelphia has likely
witnessed some
i
n
-
migration
of non
-
locals
. Indeed,
there has been a large amount of
22
i
m
migration over the last two centuries of speakers of Irish, Italian, Spanish,
Vietnamese,
and
Yiddish
linguistic background
(Katz et al. 2010)
. I suspect
that evidence for the appearance of
speakers with
non
-
local
/a
/
pronunciations
in Philadelphia was not
s
analysis because
(1)
-
only natives of the city (
Fruehwald 2016:380
)
, and (2)
im
migration has been a constant trend
rather than a sudden
event
in the city
.
This, however remains spe
culation, as Fruehwald and
colleagues
do not have a record of population changes in mid
-
twentieth
-
century Philadelphia
(Labov, Rosenfelder & Fruehwald 2013: 61)
.
If
speakers of
/a
/
p
roductions that were different
from that in the ambient community immigrated to the city at this crucial period of phonetic
target change (1930
-
1940s), then it is possible that contact has played a role in the
development
of Canadian Raising in Philadelphi
a, though this remains to be determined. Social evaluation
,
however,
cannot account for Canadian Raising in Philadelphi
a
. T
hough
/a
/
raising
has recently
gained status as
a marker of masculinity and toughness in the city
(Conn 2005; Wagner 2007)
, it
was not a marker in the earlier half of the 20
th
century when Canadian Raising initiated
(Labov,
Rosenfelder & Fruehwald 2013)
.
Because
these are the only two studies
that I am aware of
to observe allophonic change in
an actual spe
ech community, we cannot turn to any other study for examples of the social
conditions
within
which allophonic change is actuated and then propagated throughout a speech
community.
Baker, Archangeli & Mielke (2011:351)
hypothesize that the actuation of
important because as Labov
(2001: 322)
states, echoing his previous sentiments in Empirical
to account for the initiation of change by purely internal arguments will fail to a significant
23
degree
The impact of social factors on the spread of language change has been acknowledged
by every theory of phonological change, including that of the Life
-
Cycle of Phonological
Processes and proponents of the
accumulation
-
of
-
errors
model. Here I quote Ohal
a
(2013:3)
:
social and psychological forces induce speakers to copy the pronunciation of the initiator
among the social factors that have been proposed are the prestige of the speaker who was the
initi
ator or how many other speakers s/he comes in contact with
Theorists of allophonic
restructuring are, in fact, reasonable to assume that actuation and propagation of this kind of
change is subject to the same general sociolinguistic principles that gove
rn other linguistic
changes. Studies of language change at every level of the grammar (syntactic, morphological,
phonetic, discourse
-
pragmatic etc
.
) have demonstrated the generalizability of these principles. In
this dissertation, I will likewise demonstr
ate through the analysis of 36 speakers from the
Lansing speech community that the actuation and generational incrementation of nasal /
æ/
allophony follows well
-
attested social pathways.
One relevant and crucial distinction in the sociolinguistic literatur
e is between language
numerous cases).
This dichotomy may be strongly associated with whether change towards a
phonemic merger is abrupt or gradual, as I will explain below
typically linguistic innovations that are introduced from outside of the speech community (via
contact with speakers of another variety/language). People are aware of the linguistic feature
the level of
consciousness) a
nd often assign it some social prestige. A notable example
is the adoption of post
-
vocalic /r/ in New York City (Labov 2006 [1966])
,
which was used
proportionally more frequently by speakers when reading aloud than in their spontaneous speech.
Changes from
above are often led by the highest social status group
.
In contrast,
c
24
;
they progress rather unconsciously,
i.e. the speakers are not aware of the change until late in its diachronic trajectory
;
and the change
is led by
-
working
-
and lower
-
middle class)
socio
-
economic status groups
.
Women, somewhat paradoxic
ally, lead both types of change
.
Lansing is situated in the Inland North dialect area, which is defined by a vowel chain
shift that has long operated as a change from below: The Northern Cities Shift. Indeed, speakers
in this dialect area had been
shown to perceive their variety as being identical to standard
American English
(Preston 1996; Niedzielski 1999, 2002)
. Yet I write this description in the past
tense because, a
s I describe in
Chapter 2
, the Northern Cities Shift is being replaced by what
m
ight
be an externally
-
generated change from above. A key component of
the incoming vowel
system is nasal /
æ/ allophony. Thus a question I ask in this dissertation is: Did the development
of nasal allophony enter Lansing from some external source as a change from above? Or did it
proceed as a change from below?
To answer thi
s question, ideally the researcher needs evidence
from three diagnostics: (i) awareness of the innovation, (ii) socio
-
economic patterning, and (iii)
degree of contact with speakers beyond the speech community
.
Recent studies of the regional
dialect area su
ggest that the change is one from above (see Becker fc for an overview)
.
Regarding (i) and (ii), speakers have been shown to be aware of nasal allophony, and its
incrementation within the region is being led by higher status groups. Regarding (iii), I att
empt
to address the facts about contact in Chapter 2, section
2.4
, where I argue that there is no
evidence that Lansing is a high
-
contact area.
As I
mentioned above, th
e
dichotom
y
conditions whether change towards a phonemic merger is abrupt or gradual. Phonemic mergers
from above occur abruptly, while those that are from below occur gradually
(Guy 1990; Herold
25
1997)
.
For example, a well
-
known phonemic merger in North America is the low
-
back
merger
the phonemic merger of /
(2011b)
has shown that the low
-
back
merger in upstate New York is progressing gradually, i.e. there was pho
netic movement along F2
of /
Pennsylvania, however, Herold
(1997)
showed that the low
-
back merger was
abrupt, i.e.
the
generation of speakers who identified /
/ and /
is the first in which
phonetic similarity is noted, with no gradual trend toward approximation over prior generations
.
Crucially, as
Dinkin (2011a: 341)
points out, the low
-
back merger in upstate New York is
motivated by a gradual backing of /
internally
-
motivated resu
, while that in eastern Pennsylvania is
due to i
m
migration of speakers who already had the merger. If allophonic changes are subject to
the same conditioning, then we would expect abrupt
allophonic
changes to be above sp
eaker
awareness, to be led by higher social class groups, and to be introduced via contact. Gradual
allophonic
change, then, should be below awareness, led by lower social class groups, and
generated from within the speech community.
It is unclear what t
he social facts are regarding
the change towards Canadian Raising in
Fort Wayne, but i
m
migration
to
Philadelphia
may
account for
the abrupt change noted by Fruehwald (2013,
2016)
, though this remains to be
documented.
Therefore, the
dichotomy that governs change towards
merger (and other linguistic changes)
might
also govern allophonic change.
The awareness and
social class facts regarding
allophonic change in Lansing
lead me to hypothesize that
it i
s a
change from above, and that
it will therefore have been actuated abruptly. The facts about
contact, however, seem to predict that it should be a gradual change. To resolve this apparent
conflict, this dissertation will bring to bear both acoustic and experimental analysis of a mult
i
-
26
generation, socially stratified speaker sample.
The investigation of social factors will also
elucidate who the leaders of this change are and how the rule spread throughout the community.
1.6
Goals of this
D
issertation
Because allophonic change is so rarely observed, there is a wealth of information still to be
gained about it that will benefit phonology and sociolinguistics. This dissertation will contribute
to the overall knowledge base regarding this kind of language
change. Additionally, I will show
that despite
the fact that allophonic change is rarely observed
, many of the general principles of
language change that have been established in the last fifty years apply to this linguistic
phenomenon as well. The work i
n this dissertation offers a transdisciplinary approach to age old
questions in the field. The goals of the current project are outlined in the next sections.
1.6.1
Main
G
oals
The main goals of this dissertation are two
-
fold. The first is to address the actuat
ion problem of
phonological change using data produced by speakers in a speech community while the change is
still underway. More specifically, I am interested in whether the development of nasal /
æ/
allophony was gradual, with an intermediate stage of ph
onetic variation, or if it was abrupt, with
no phonetic precursor. To do this, I must first address the embedding problem. Therefore, the
second goal of the dissertation is to determine the acoustics of /æ/ in Lansing over the course of
the 20
th
century,
and to examine whether any variants were socially conditioned, i.e.
characteristic of particular social groups.
1.6.2
Peripheral
G
oal
Although this dissertation focuses on the internal and social factors that govern phonological
innovation, I will also conside
r the Transition Problem: How does phonological change
propagate throughout the speech community? Because I analyze a speech corpus in which
27
multiple generations and four social status groups are represented, I aim to generate a hypothesis
about how the c
hange spread.
1.7
Findings from this
D
issertation
This dissertation finds evidence of gradual phonological change for nasal /
æ/ allophony in
Lansing, MI
. The measure of
bi
impressionistic investigation of div
ergent trajectories and the results of an allophonic judgement
task suggest that there is indeed an intermediate period between mechanical and categorical
phonology. With these measures, I show that there are speakers in the community who exhibit
the seco
nd stage of phonological change in The Life Cycle of Phonological Change, i
.e.
one that
is phonetically motivated. Through an apparent time investigation of these measures, I show that
the community has transitioned from a mixture of the first two stages o
f the Life
-
Cycle to a
mixture of the second and third stages of the Life
-
Cycle. Therefore, in Lansing, allophonic
phonological change has progressed gradually such that there was a point in time when speakers
did not distinguish between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
o
ral /æ/. Over time, a phonetic distinction
developed between the two allophones, which was then re
-
analyzed as a phonological
distinction. An analysis of the social conditioning of gender and social class on this
phonological change finds that it is still
spreading throughout the Lansing community, with
white
-
collar women leading the change and blue
-
collar speakers trailing behind.
1.8
Organization of this
D
issertation
This dissertation is organized as follows. The present chapter introduced the theoretical
debates
about the role of phonetics in phonological change
and reviewed the methodologies for teasing
the two apart at the speaker level
. Chapter 2 provides a socio
-
historical profile of the Lansing
28
speech community and a review of the literature on the ol
d and new vowel systems in Lansing in
particular and the dialect area in general. Chapter 3 describes the methods employed to
determine how this change actuated and spread throughout the community. Chapter 4 describes
the results of the acoustic analysis
of speech production data from 36 Lansing natives. Chapter 5
describes the development of a phonological rule utilizing an impressionistic analysis of the rate
of change to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
/æ/
in apparent time in conjunction with the results of a
sub
-
phonemic judgement task administered to 107 Lansing natives. Chapter 6 provides a summary
of the findings in this dissertation and situates them in the context of the literature on
phonological change and North American dialectology.
29
ALLOPHONIC
C
HANGE IN LANSING, MI
CHIGAN
2.1
Introduction
With respect to the Life
-
Cycle theory of phonological change described in Chapter 1, Bermúdez
-
Otero
(2015)
argues that the theory
can be supported via observations of the same phenomenon
in multiple dialects of the same language. This is because though various dialects of a language
can undergo the same change, they do so at different rates.
Turton (2014
,
2017)
provides
evidence for this argument through her investigation into /l/
-
darkening in speakers of different
regional dialects of English. Through an ultrasound analysis, she shows that
all stages of the
Life
-
Cycle are repre
sented across the speaker sample, i.e. each stage of the Life
-
Cycle describes
the /l/ grammar of one of the speakers in the sample.
Thus, the theory can account for synchronic
variability as well as diachronic change.
Fruehwald (2013,
2016), however aptly
points out that
synchronic evidence alone is not enough to support or refute the Life
-
Cycle theory. The best
evidence would come from data that show a diachronic progression through these stages of the
Life
-
ussed, diachronic data did
not
support the
Life
-
Cycle theory. Yet there has been no subsequent diachronic test of the Life
-
Cycle theory
using a dataset
of speech production
. This dissertation will fill this gap.
In what follows, I provide a description of
/æ/
systems that are characteristic of regional
dialects in North America, and show that like /l/, regional variation in
/æ/
systems provides
synchronic evidence for a gradual theory of phonological change. I then argue that the
progression of these system
s over time in the Inland North dialect area, where Lansing is located,
provides diachronic support for the Life
-
Cycle, seemingly in contradiction
to
30
finding for /a
/ in Philadelphia.
The
argument is based on measures of bimodality
which are
c
urrently being debated in the field,
therefore the facts here are offered as motivation for further
research utilizing additional techniques.
The chapter concludes with a description of the Lansing speech community. The socio
-
historical facts in Lansing ca
n perhaps put into perspective when and why the current changes
under investigation in this dissertation are underway
.
This will enhance our understanding of
why this change happened at this time
and
in this place
(Weinrei
ch, Labov & Herzog 1968)
.
2.2
Allophonic
V
ariation in North America
distinguish between regional dialects in North American English is that of /æ/
(Labov 1991;
Boberg & Strassel 2000; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Dinkin 2011; inter alia)
.
The
Atlas of
North American English
(ANAE)
(Labov
et al 2006)
is the most comprehensive analysis of
regional dialects in Canada and the United States. Using recorded telephone interviews with 762
individuals, it divides the continent into major dialect regions based on patterns of phonetic and
phonolo
gical variation in each area
.
I begin with brief descriptions of the major
/æ/
patterns
catalogued in the ANAE, before discussing the degree to which they might support the Life
-
Cycle theory.
(2)
Raised System
The raised /æ/ system is characteristic of speec
h in the Inland North dialect area, which
includes Chicago and Detroit and encompasses much of the Great Lakes region,
including Lansing, MI. This system is described by the ANAE as one in which the
/æ/
phoneme sits higher in the vowel space
than
/
raised system in the dialect area. In its more common instantiation, pre
-
nasal tokens sit
at the upper
front
of the distribution of the /æ/ cloud while pre
-
oral tokens are dispersed
to the lower end of
a single
c
loud
of /æ/ tokens
. In its more advanced realization, it is
31
described as unconditioned
,
so that
/æ/
cloud (Labov et al 20
06:177)
, suggesting that in this system /æ/
tokens before
nasals,
voiced stops, and after palatals are not distinguished from one another
. Therefore, the
difference between the
realizations
of /æ/ in the region
is the amount o
f
overlap between
pre
-
nasal
and other
tokens;
pre
-
nasal tokens are either
distributed at the top of the cloud (common) or interspersed with the rest of the
conditioning environments (advanced). Crucially, both instantiations of this system are
phoneticall
y gradual; the
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token
cloud
s
phonetic continuum from the least raised to the most raised
(Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007;
Dinkin 2011a)
.
(3)
Continuous System
The phonetically g
radual unbroken chain is also observed in continuous systems of
North America. In these systems,
unlike
the raised system, the /æ/ phoneme does not
raise above /
continuous system and t
he more common raised system are similar
; there is some
raising and/or fronting depending on phonological environment, however the /æ/ token
cloud remains an unbroken phonetic continuum in this system
(Labov, Ash & B
oberg
2006: 176)
. According to the ANAE
(Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006)
, the
continuous
system is traditionally observed in the Midland and Canadian dialect areas.
(4)
Nasal system
The most common system in North America is the
nasal system
(Labov, Ash & Boberg
2006)
. It has traditionally been observed in Eastern New England, and in parts of the
W
est and
M
idland dialect areas. In this system,
tokens of
/æ/ before nasal codas
are
abruptly separated in F1/F2 space from /
æ
/ before oral codas.
(5)
Split system
Another regional system, the split system, is found principally in Mid
-
Atlantic cities,
e.g. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City. The distribution of raised
/æ/ tokens is
sub
ject to
complex phonological (and sometimes morphological and/or lexical)
conditions that vary from city to city.
In Philadelphia
, /æ/
is divided into
two separate
phonemes; a tense vowel class made up of tokens before voiceless fricatives,
voiced
stops,
a
nd
tautosyllabic nasals, and a lax vowel class elsewhere (including function
words), and crucially, there are lexical exceptions, e.g.
sad
is lax while
glad, mad, bad
32
are tense
(
Labov 1994: 429
437)
. Like the nasal system, the tense and lax vowel
classes in the split system are clearly separated in F1/F2 space, whereby the tense class
is realized higher and more forward in the vowel space than the lax class.
The regional
/æ/
systems described in the ANAE and in many
other
studies
(e.g. Boberg
& Strassel 2000; Durian 2012; Dinkin
2009; Dinkin 2011
a
)
, resemble the stages of the Life
-
Cycle of Phonological Processes. Therefore, like /l/, these realizations provide synchronic
evidence of the Life
-
Cycle. I am not the first to suggest this;
Dinkin (2009; 2011
a
)
and
Bermúdez
-
Otero
(2007)
have both pointed out that the second and third stages of the Life
-
Cycle
can be found in some dialects of North American English. I add, though, that the
re is evidence
of more than just those two stages. A description of these systems is important for this
dissertation because it will provide a methodological jumping off point for which to investigate
diachronic evidence of the Life
-
Cycle in Lansing; i.e.
one of the goals of this dissertation is to
provide evidence of a diachronic progression from earlier stages described here to a later stage in
the community. Here, I will describe these regional systems as they have been described in the
literature and h
ighlight how they are representative of the stages in the Life
-
Cycle.
When one compares the regional North American /
æ/ systems to
descriptions of the stages
of the Life
-
Cycle, it becomes clear that these regional realizations of /æ/ are synchronic
examp
les of the Life
-
Cycle. Recall that the first stage of the Life
-
Cycle is that of a
mechanical/physiological phenomenon. This appears to be close to a description of an
unconditioned system, like the one found in more extreme cases of the raised system, whe
reby
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral differentiation is minimal. The second stage of the Life
-
Cycle is a
phonetic implementation stage whereby a phonetic rule operates in a gradient manner, involving
ce, such as the frequency of the
33
Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007). Bermúdez
-
Otero (2007) and Dinkin (2011
a
)
cite the continuous /
æ/
system as an example of this stage, in which the /æ/ cloud forms an
to most raised, influenced by numerous features of the
ne
a
:78). The third stage of the Life
-
Cycle is the
categorical/phonological rule stage, and is claimed by Bermúdez
-
Dinkin (2011) notes that this is clearly a description of the nasal system described above.
A
categorical rule then narrows its domain to the word
-
level (fourth
stage of the Life
-
Cycle
) and
then to
the stem
-
level
(fifth stage)
and by the sixth stage, lexical exceptions are apparent.
Bermúdez
-
Otero (2013)
cites the split system of the mid
-
Atlantic region as exhibiting these
last
stages on the grounds that the lax and tense classes are phonetically abrupt
in F1/F2 space, the
rule applies to a stem
-
level domain (
word
-
level affixes are ignored in determing the phonological
environment of tensing
), and there are lexical exceptions.
Therefore, synchronic variation in these regional /
æ/
systems appears to
provide support
for the theory of the Life
-
Cycle of Phonological Processes. A study that can show systematic
progression of these stages of /
æ/
in a community over time will indeed find diachronic evidence
of the Life
-
Cycle. And most crucially, evidence o
f gradual phonological change toward /
æ/
allophony
would have to show a diachronic progression from stage 2 (phonetic distinction) to
stage 3 (categorical/phonological distinction) of the Life
-
Cycle. An abrupt phonological change
would not show evidence of
stage 2 in the community. Analyses of changes to the phonetic
distribution of /
æ/
observed in Inland North cities, to be discussed below, suggest (at least at the
34
community level) that there has been a progression from stage 2 to stage 3 of the Life
-
Cycl
e of
Phonological Processes.
2.3
Allophonic
C
hange in the Inland North
As mentioned in the previous section, the Inland North dialect area is characterized by the raised
/æ/ system
. The unconditioned raising of /æ/
is one of the movements in the Northern Citi
es
Shift, a rotation of 6 short vowels in phonetic space
(Labov, Yaeger & Steiner 1972; Eckert
1988; Labov 1994; McCarthy 2011; Dinkin 2009b; Gordon & Strelluf 2017)
, displayed in
Figure
2
. The arrows display the hypothesized direction of change in phonetic space for each vowel
over time. The movement of /æ/ is argued to be the first movements in the NCS chain (although
this has been contested more recently, in studies that show /
-
fronti
ng was first
(e.g. Gordon &
Strelluf 2017)
)
.
Figure
2
Northern Cities Shift vowel chain shift configuration.
(
Adapted from
Wolfram & Schilling
-
Estes
1998: 138)
35
The
raising of /
æ/ in the Inland North has been so substantial
that many NCS speakers
have risen /æ/ to mid
-
front position in the vowel space and often articulate it as a diphthong
(Labov 1994; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006)
. This acoustic description has led Labov (1994) to
conclude that /æ/ in the Inland North behaves as a tense vowe
l
:
it is
produced with a
n offglide
and
diachronically raises along the periphery of the vowel space
. Raising and fronting are well
documented i
n the literature on the NCS (see e
.g
Ito 2001; G
ordon 2001; Dinkin 2009; Dinkin
2011
a
)
possibilities. Additionally, although it has not often been discussed in the literature on the NCS
(although see e.g.
Labov 1991
fo
r an exception), I
will include diphthongal quality
, i.e. change in
as a diagnostic of NCS /
æ/
.
The comparison point for NCS /
(Becker
fc
)
is replacing the Northern Cities Shift in the Inland North in what
appears to be a supralocal change
. As a result, the NCS
/æ/ raised system is being replaced with
the nasal system. Along with the lowering and retraction of /
/ and /
/ and the
progress towards
merger of /
-
oral /
æ
/ such that
younger generations
of LBMS speakers
almost exclusively exhibit
a nasal system. The LBMS
has been documented with ever greater frequency across North America since the 1990s. First
observed in The West and Canada (e.g.
Clarke, Elms & Youssef
(1995)
,
Hagiwara
(1997)
,
Labov (1991), Boberg (2008)
, and see
Becker
(
f
orthcoming
)
)
, it has more recently been observed
in the Midland dialect area
(see for example Boberg and Strassel (1995)
,
Bigham
(2008)
, Durian
(2012)
,
Strelluf (2014)
,
Holland (2008)
,
Kohn & Stithem (2015)
), in New England
(Stanford
2019)
and surprisingly, in the Inland North: Syracuse, NY
(Driscoll & Lape 2015)
;
O
gdensberg,
NY
(Thiel & Dinkin 2017)
;
Buffalo, NY
(Milholla
nd 2018)
;
Rochester, NY
(King 2017)
;
36
Detroit, MI
(Morgan et al. 2017)
;
Grand Rapids, MI
(Rankinen, Albin & Neuhaus 2019)
;
Chicago, IL
. Notably for the present
study, it has also been recorded in Lansing, MI
(Wagner et al. 2016; Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason
fc; Nesbitt 2018)
. Section
2.4.2
below provides more details on the Lansing findings.
Movement
towards a nasal system has been observed at the community level in each of these analyses.
Thus, as
Nesbitt & Mason (2016)
point out,
though the adoption of the nasal system and loss of
the NCS is being observed in the Inland North, they appear to be part of a larger trend of regional
dialect levelling in North America.
The social circumstances surrounding NCS decline and LBMS adoption
in Lansing are as
yet unclear. However, so
cial conditioning in
the Inland North
ern
studies cited above, combined
with preliminary analyses of social distribution in Lansing, lead to hypotheses that can be tested
in this dissertation
.
I discuss the prelimi
nary findings regarding social conditioning of /
æ/
in the
Inland North
below
.
The results of
preliminary
analyses
of Lansing speech are presented in
s
ection
2.4
. Section
2.5
provides a summary and sets up the hypotheses to be tested in Chapter
4
.
Labov (1971)
suggested a basic three
-
w
ay taxonomy for distinguishing sociolinguistic
variables according to their level of awareness in the community and the social meanings they
index. Linguistic
stereotypes
are well above the level of awareness, i.e. speakers use them
stylistically and they are often commented on overtly by members of the speech community. One
example of a stereotype is
eh
in Canad
ian English
(Gold & Tremblay 2006)
. Linguistic
markers
are one level down on the awareness continuum. These variabl
es exhibit both interspeaker
variation across social groups and style
-
shifting, but they are not mentioned in metalinguistic
discourse. The last type of variable are
indicators
they may index group affiliation at the
37
interspeaker level
but are not subject
to intraspeaker stylistic variation. The entire NCS chain
shift appeared to be a classic example of a linguistic indicator (Labov 2001:196)
operating well
below the level of awareness
(Preston 1996; Niedzielski 2002)
. Until recently, the NCS showed
no signs of
style
-
shifting or
social class stratific
ation, i.e. speakers of all social classes were
participating in this change. In fact, many studies on the dialect have utilized data from word list
speech because its features appeared to be prevalent even when speakers were talking in their
more formal
speech styles.
The distribution of raised versus nasal
/æ/
systems across social class groups in the Inland
North has not been subject to much analysis thus far
, though three studies note its potential
relevance
. In Syracuse, NY, Driscoll (2016) found a no
n
-
statistically significant association
between mean F1 and F2 of
/æ/
and speaker education and occupation. She analyzed wordlist
data from 50 Syracuse natives aged 18 to 89. In her figures, she shows a slight correlation
between
higher
paying jobs and low
er education and /æ/
-
lowering and /æ/
-
backing (as well as for
/
/
-
lowering, and /
-
backing), but these relationships were not significant in her statistical
modeling. One of the issues with the analysis is that the sample was not evenly balanced for
educa
tion and occupation, i.e. many of the younger speaker
s
were skewed towards white
-
collar
status. The other issue for this analysis was that social class was analyzed across all speakers in
the sample rather than as an interaction with date of birth.
Driscoll and Lape (2015)
in their
preliminary study, and
Driscoll (2016)
, observe that the decline of NCS participation in Syracuse
was initiated around speakers born in the 1980s, therefore I speculate that an investigation into
social class would benefit from excluding those born prior to 1980.
P
erhaps
with this
methodological revisions, the analysis
would have resulted in a significant effect of social class
on the realization of NCS features in their sample, with the loss of NCS features being led by
38
speakers with more education and more prestig
ious occupations.
Thiel and Dinkin
(2017)
find a
similar pattern in Ogdensburg, where /æ/
-
lowering appears to b
e driven by white
-
collar speakers,
although the education effect does not reach the level of statistical significance.
In a larger
-
scale
study of Chicago, there is clear evidence that social class is a factor in NCS recession. In their
acoustic analysis
of NCS features in the spontaneous speech of 50 Chicago natives born between
1875
-
1990, Durian and Cameron
(2018)
show
that NCS recession began among speakers born in
the 1970s and is thereafter always more advanced in
white
-
collar speech than in
blue
-
collar
speech. Thus, in Chicago, it appears to be predominantly white
-
collar speakers who are reversing
NCS features.
Over
Syracuse. Younger Syracusans associate raised
/æ/
with older speakers, referencing grandparents
or older school teachers as having this
nasally, harsh/hard A accent
. One res
pondent described
2016:81).
The qualitative comments in Syracuse are supported elsewhere in the Inland North by
quantitative evidence of a shift in the directio
n of style
-
shifting over apparent time. In their
analysis of /æ/
-
raising in Ogdensburg, NY, Thiel and Dinkin (2017) compared the means of 4
3
speakers while reading from a word list and during conversational speech. They showed that
older speakers (born b
efore the 19
7
0s) raised /æ/ more in their word list speech than in their
conversational speech, suggesting that for them, raised
/æ/
is the more prestigious pronunciation,
while those born after the 1980s were more likely to
lower
/æ/ while reading from a
word list
than in their conversational speech.
39
Thiel and Dinkin (2017) also administered an attitudes survey to their participants. For
this, participants listened to a male talker and rated him on Likert scales of localness and
educatedness. Crucially, t
here were multiple talkers who had similar acoustic characteristics but
who differed in whether
their sound clip
was
digitally edited to have a
raised or
unraised /æ/
.
The researchers compared ratings of the two types of voices (raised and unraised). They found
that listeners born before 1960 did not rate
raised and unraised /æ/
differently on these affective
scales. Listeners born after 1960, however, rated raised /
æ
/
as more local but less educated than
unraised /
æ
/. Thus, in Ogdensburg, raised /æ/ has apparently risen from an indicator to a marker.
In sum, based on attitudinal, style
-
shifting, and social class data in the dialect area, there is
evidence that the NCS
(or at least /æ/) has risen in markedness. As Nesbitt and Mason (2017)
argue, this has likely motivated younger, mostly white
-
collar, speakers to reverse NCS features
;
a scenario which is expected when an indicator rises to a marker
(Labov 2001)
. Therefore, the
change towards the LBMS appears to be one towards a more prestigious form. Considering this,
I hypothesize that the propagation of LBMS features throughout the Lansing community will be
led by
the middle
-
class and especially by women in that social class, as it appears to be in other
Inland North communities and in other changes from above.
2.4
Lansing Speech Community
Lansing, Michigan is a particularly appropriate site for an investigation into a
llophonic change.
Here I provide a sociohistorical description of the Lansing area. A discussion of preliminary
findings regarding Lansing speech and its social conditioning is included in section
2.4.2
2.4.1
The Speech Community
Incorporated in 1859, Lansing is the capital of Michigan. It is in the center of the lower
part of the state
, located approximately ninety minutes
drive west of Detroit, one hour
east of
40
Grand Rapids, and three hours east of Chicago, Illinois. Lansing is in Ingham County, which
together with Eaton and Clinton counties comprise the metropolitan area of Greater Lansing or
-
Although it is called
a
ansing is situated in the middle of
low
-
population
-
density farming land
(130
to
500 people per square mile)
, dotted with small
towns
rarely exceeding 8,000 inhabitants.
The closest city to Lansing with a population of more
than 50,000 is Battle
Creek (pop. 51,286: U.S. Census 2017), which is 50 miles south
-
west of
Lansing. Today, Lansing
is a mid
-
size city of 114,000
inhabitants (US Census 2010),
and like
many cities in North America, its population is more ethnically diverse
than its surrounding
neighborhoods and towns;
60% White, 24% Black and 12% Latinx.
The population of Ingham
County, which includes the college town of East Lansing, is 80% White. Consequently, the city
of Lansing, where the speakers in this dissertation were born and raised
,
is best described as a
mid
-
sized city that is surrounded by less diverse suburban towns which are in turn surrounded by
sparsely populated farmland on all four sides.
Lansing, like most other Inland North cities, is part of the
Rust Belt
(see e.g
McCle
lland
2013
), a collection of manufacturing communities in the north
and north
eastern United States
that witnessed significant economic and population increases after World War II, but whose
economies suffered as the manufacturing industry gave way to the s
ervice industry in the 1990s.
Lansing is an automotive town.
It is where R.E. Olds set up shop and established the Oldsmobile
brand, which was a staple brand in Lansing from 1901 to 2004. It is also where General Motors
,
a world leader in auto manufactu
ring at the turn of the 20
th
century,
has housed many of its
assembly plants, its headquarters from 1965
to
1998
, and its body plant
Fisher Body
(Coase
2000)
.
41
The auto industry boom in Lansing from the early to mid
-
20
th
century prompted a rapid
increase in population.
The city of Lansing was rather small at the turn of the century
(pop.
16,485: U.S. Census 1910) but reached its peak in the latter part of the century (pop. 131,403:
U.S. Census 1970) due to jobs created b
y these companies. This boom, however, was followed
by general population decline due to the dissolution of auto industry jobs in the city starting in
the 1980s.
Figure
3
Population r
ate of change by decade from 1860 to
2010 in Lansing. [
Source: US census 1860
2010].
Figure
3
displays the change in population by decade from 1860 to 2010 in Lansing as
reported by the US Census. From 1850 to 1930, the city of Lansing experienced significant
42
population growth, with an
average of 71.55% increase per decade (26.75% more than the state
average). From 1930 to 1940, population growth plateaued to .45%, reflecting the large
-
scale
economic stagnation of the national Great Depression that affected areas with prominent
manufact
uring industries with particular intensity.
Population rose during the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s by 18.26% on average until it fell by 3.18% on average in each of the following decades.
Because one of the aspects of this dissertation is to discern whether
allophonic change is
population growth and was their speech different from the existing (white) Lansing population?
There was no substantial in
-
migration from outs
ide the Great Lakes area in the 20
th
century (Fine
2004)
.
Therefore, three other groups with potentially non
-
local speech patterns must be
considered in turn: White rural Michiganders, non
-
White minorities
,
Midland
dialect speakers,
and those moving to the
area to attend the local university (Michigan State University)
.
Much of the population growth in the first half of the 20
th
century was due to the in
-
farming towns (Fin
e 2004). It is conceivable that the concomitant dialect contact between rural
and urban speakers actuated the development of the nasal system in Lansing. This, however, is
an unlikely scenario since rural and urban speakers in Michigan likely did not hav
e significantly
different accents during this time, as sociolinguistic research in Michigan rural towns has shown
that rural
Michiganders
also participate in the NCS
(Ito 2001; Gordon 2001
)
. Additionally, it is
unclear why nasal system adoption would be led by high socio
-
economic status community
members in the city, since rural speech is not usually positively socially evaluated
(Preston 1996;
Seale & Mallinson 201
8)
. Another thing to consider is that larger Inland North cities like Detroit
43
and Chicago, which saw proportionally less rural in
-
migration in the early 20
th
century than
Lansing (Fine 2004), are also exhibiting this change toward nasal /
æ/ allophony
.
A
dditionally, like many northern cities, Lansing received some minority in
-
migrants
many of whom were African Americans
.
But unlike in those other cities, the number of non
-
White residents in Lansing remained relatively low.
Figure
4
displays the percentage of non
-
White Lansingites from 1960 to 2010
, as reported by the US census
. Though there is a steady
incline from 10% to 40% over the course o
f fifty years, the non
-
white population stays below
20% up until the 1980s. And although Lansing was a less residentially and educationally
segregated city than many others in the 20
th
century (Fine 2004), it is unlikely that the minority
non
-
White popula
tion exerted significant linguistic influence over the White majority
.
Figure
4
Percentage of Non
-
White population in Lansing.
[Source: US census 1960
-
2010].
44
In
-
migration from Midland states into Lansing is also another possibility, since many
Michigan cities experienced in
-
migration from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
According to the US
census, the
percentage of
Lansing
residents born in other states rose from
around 16
to
18% at
the beginning of the 20
th
century, to 25% in 1950, before slowly declining again to early 20
th
century levels by the end of the
century.
In
-
migration into Lansing
from other states
was never
substantial, however
.
From 1950 to 2010, le
ss than 10% of Lansing residents per decade reported
that they lived in a different state in the previous decade
.
Lastly, I consider whether Michigan State University (MSU) might have
contributed to
a
scenario in which large amounts of non
-
local speakers
might
interact with the speakers living in
neighboring Lansing
and therefore provide enough variability to induce change
.
Two crucial
po
ints about the MSU student body
raise doubt
about this possibility
. First, the international
student body
constitute
s
a very small proportion of the MSU population
(
13.7%
in 2017)
(Michigan State University 2018)
.
The
se
students
often
reside in East Lansing
,
which is a
neighboring town of Lansing. They
leave the area upon finishing their degree
and
are
less likely
t
o interact with speakers born in the
actual
city of Lansing
since East Lansing is not only where
they live and where the university is, but it is
also a center for social events, shopping, etc. for its
residence
.
Another source of potential contact are non
-
local college students coming to MSU
for school. Crucially, however,
72.7% of the
domestic
students at MSU ar
e
indeed
Michigan
natives themse
lves
(Michigan State University 2018)
. Therefore, th
ough Lansing
is
just miles
away from a state
university
, the university
is not a likely locust of large amounts of contact that
are needed to promote
phonological
change.
In summary,
Lansing does not appear to have experienced a dialect contact scenario of
the type described for linguistic changes from above, whereby supralocal (or simply non
-
local)
45
sociolinguistic features are adopted from a dialect w
ith higher overt prestige than the local
dialect. Nor does dialect contact appear to have been sufficient to trigger leveling toward a non
-
prestigious majority norm (cf
. Kerswill & Williams 2000).
In the absence of a clear external model for the
/æ/
nasal
system, therefore, what
community
-
internal social motivation might there have been for its adoption? That is, if we
cannot clearly establish that White Lansing speakers were actively adopting the nasal system as
an exogenous feature, can we provide some su
pport for the idea that they were at least rejecting
the raised
/æ/
system as an endogenous feature? There are numerous examples in the
sociolinguistic literature of speech communities losing features of their dialects in response to
changes in the economy
and education system
(e.g. Schilling
-
Estes & Wolfram 1999)
. Here I
trace the major socioeconomic developments in 20
th
century Lansing, before discussing the
likelihood of those changes being motivating forces for the shift from raised to nasal
/æ/
patterns
in this speech community.
In the U
nited States
, although manufacturing industries before the 1930s offered low
-
payin
g working
-
class jobs, the development of labor unions led to relatively high
-
paying
working
-
class jobs from the 1940s to the 1970s (Knox and Pinch 2006). This is illustrated in
interviews with some of the older blue
-
collar speakers in the current
sample (
Chapte
r 3
)
who
discuss
how their salaries rose to $70,000 after the 1970s and 1980s labor strikes in Lansing.
Accounting for inflation, this equates
to $384,687.55 today
(see CPI calculator at Bureau of
Labor Statistics)
, which would place one well above
working
-
class
blue
-
collar status even today
considering the US median income in 2017 was $60,336
(U.S. Department of Commerce 2017)
.
During this period
of economic growth for factory workers
, White residents who were
now equipped with higher salaries accelerated
46
communities in America a
desire to raise families away from cities, where crime, drug use, and the in
-
migration of minority
groups was on the rise (or was perceived to be on the rise).
According to the US census,
th
e city
of Lansing was 93.51% White
in 1960 and as of
White
population is only
61.23%
.
The largest
occurred between 1970
and
1980 (i.e. during the auto manufacturing crisis in Michigan)
.
Figure
5
shows population change in the city of Lansing compared to Delta and Bath
throughout the 20
th
century.
average of 76.82%
per decade at a maximum of 127.19% from 1960 to 1970. Although Delta has become less White
over time, it is significantly more White than Lansing. In 1980, 94.9% of Delta was White
-
White populat
ion, particularly its African
American population, has steadily increased since the 1960s. The differential access to capital
allowed the White laborers to move away from the urban center when it became less desirable
whereas the non
-
White populace was lef
t to choose from whatever jobs that did not require a
college education (mostly in lower paying sectors).
47
Figure
5
Rate of change in population by decade from 1860 to 2010 in Lansing compared to two Lansing
suburbs; Delta Charter Township and Bath Charter Township.
[Source: US census 1860
2010].
Economic decline began in the 1980s when
General Motors
rgest employer
at the time,
slowly began to shift its plants and offices
to Detroit
(Coase 2000; McClelland
2013)
. The first sign of economic shift was in 1984 when General Motors moved
its decision
making to Detroit
, and
eventually mov
ed
its headquarters there in
1998
(Coase 2000)
.
In 2000,
,
Oldsmobile
,
would be phased out and that
they would
be
closing many its factories in the city.
With the dissolution of many auto
-
manufacturing plants in the city came an increase in service sector jobs.
At the time of writing,
48
the largest employers in the Lansing are the state government
and
the hospital system
(Lansing
Economic Area Partnership).
Crucially,
the jobs in the service sector require at least some
college education
(Rosen 2007)
. Therefore, working
-
class autoworkers in Lansing have either
had to choose from whatever jobs that did not require a college education (mostly in lower
paying se
ctors) or leave the city. Many of these workers
were forced to go back to their family
farms, while some stayed to navigate this new economy (Fine 2003). The economic impact of
this transformation has had many social consequences for these communities and
for the
Since 2000, the
unemployment rate
in Lansing
has increased by 8% and
as described above, the
population has
decreased by 15% (U.S. Census 2010).
The Baby Boomer generation (born 1
946
1960) was most directly affected by this
industry transition (McClelland 2013; Knox and Pinch 2006). They would have entered the
work force in the 1970s and 1980s, inheriting the traditional manufacturing lifestyle of their
parents, but they would h
ave experienced the brunt of economic decline in the 1990s and 2000s
when they were in their 40s and 50s. Generation X (born 1964
1985) would have in turn
inherited dismal socioeconomic circumstances, with less economic opportunity in the city. As I
no
te below, my preliminary analysis finds that many of the linguistic changes that occurred in
Lansing took place in this latter half of the 20
th
century. Therefore, this dissertation is especially
interested in the social conditioning of these changes in th
ese two generations.
2.4.2
Preliminary
A
nalyses of /æ/ in Lansing
Even though the White population constitutes the majority ethnic group in Greater
Lansing, there has been no substantial investigation of local White phonology. Previous studies
have reported on the speech of African American (Jones 2003) and Mexican Ameri
can speakers
49
(Roeder 2006, 2010) in Lansing. Only a small number of White speakers were included for
in collaboration
with my colleagues at
Michigan State University
and our advisor, Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagn
er,
and for this dissertation
therefore constitute the first large
-
scale sociolinguistic studies of speech in the White population
of Greater Lansing. Here I present the findings from one collaborative and one single
-
authored
analysis of conversational da
ta in Lansing. Both analyses utilize data from contemporary and
historical speech as part of the Impact of Higher Education on Local Phonology project
(henceforward IHELP), funded by US National Science Foundation grant #BCS
-
1251437. For
this project, we
trained undergraduate students who were born and raised in Greater Lansing to
conduct sociolinguistic interviews with their Lansing
-
native friends and family. Sociolinguistic
interviews with 30 Lansing natives born 1989
to
1999 were conducted. To get a
view of speech
in the past, we obtained oral histories (n=21) of Lansing
-
native auto plant workers recorded in
the late 1990s and early 2000s (G. Robert Vincent Voice Library). Speakers in this collection
1961. T
he range of subjects and birth dates
allowed us to identify changes in local speech from the NCS to the LBMS pattern over the
course of 100 years.
Our preliminary analysis found that /
/ is lowering in apparent time, cons
istent
with both
the NCS and the L
BMS, while /
Regarding /æ/, we found a progression from a
n advanced
raised
continuous system
to
a
common
raised
c
ontinuous
system
to
a
nasal system
over apparent time
.
Figure
6
shows three different
-
configurations in conversational speech (sociolingui
stic interview or oral history),
arranged left to right by year of birth. Red circles represent tokens with /æ/ realized before nasal
50
consonants; blue triangles represent tokens of /æ/ realized before oral consonants. On the left is
the token cloud for Ja
ck Down, born in 1924. He has the expected raised system (Labov, Ash
and Boberg 2006, Dinkin 2011a), which shows no phonetic tendency for raising pre
-
nasal above
pre
-
oral tokens.
As we move forward in apparent time, the more common raised continuous /æ/
s
ystem become more common, like the configuration of Michelle Baulch, born in 1971, in the
center facet of
Figure
6
. In this system, although there is sti
ll a large degree of overlap between
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral token clusters, there is a tendency for pre
-
nasal tokens to be more raised
than pre
-
oral tokens in the /æ/ cloud. Moving ahead even further in apparent time to speakers
born in the 1990s, we encou
nter the nasal system, exhibited on the right in Figure
6
by the
distribution for Ben Langdon, born in 1994. His pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral token clouds barely
overlap.
Figure
6
Three distinct
/æ/
systems
from Greater
Lansing: Jack Down, b. 1924, multiple college degrees
,
advanced
raised
continuous
system; Michelle Baulch, b. 1971, multiple college degree
s,
common raised
continuous
system; Ben Langdon, b. 1994, community college student
,
nasal
system.
51
Figure
7
shows the apparent time shift to this more nasal
-
like /æ/
-
system using Pillai
-
Bartlett scores. The Pillai statistic measures the difference between two clusters of vowels; low
scores (approach
ing zero) indicate a large degree of overlap between two clusters, while higher
scores (approaching 1) indicate a very small degree of overlap (see also Chapter 3). Using this
statistic, we measured the
overlap
between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token clouds
f
or each speaker.
Figure
7
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores for /æ/ by year of birth for Lansing, MI speakers
(from Wagner et al
2016:figure 5)
The degree of
overlap
between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token clouds
de
creases
as year of
birth increases
, indicating that Greater Lansing speakers have gradually shifted from a
n
52
advanced
raised (stage 1 of the Life
-
Cycle) to a
common raised
continuous (stage 2 of the Life
-
Cycle) to a nasal (stage 3 of the Life
-
Cycle) /æ/
system. Recall
that Jack Down (Figure 4)
showed virtually no difference between pre
-
oral and pre
-
nasal TRAP. He has an extremely low
Pillai score of 0.07. Ben Langdon, by comparison, has a high Pillai score of 0.73, indicating very
little overlap. Judging from the appare
nt time trends of these vowels and the configurations of
the /æ/ systems of white
-
collar speakers born in the Millennial generation we surmised that
Lansing was moving toward the
nasal system.
In Nesbitt (2018), I expanded upon the analysis of /æ/ in th
e Wagner et al (2016) study.
First, I wanted to focus on the speakers in the sample who were born and raised in the city of
Lansing. This was because the NCS has been found to be less advanced outside of larger cities
(see Ito 2001, Gordon 2001). Second
, because of the emerging evidence of a change in
evaluation of the NCS in other Inland North cities, I wanted to investigate whether the Lansing
speech community had begun to assign negative social meaning to NCS /æ/
-
raising and/or
fronting. My third mot
ivation was to provide a more specific time window for NCS adoption
and decline in the community. I therefore conducted an analysis of /æ/ on a subset of the
Wagner et al (2016) sample which consisted of the 27 speakers who reported that they were born
an
d raised in the city of Lansing rather than in any of the surrounding rural towns (Nesbitt in
press). This analysis identified that the change away from the NCS
-
like raising/fronting of /æ/
and the raised system in the city started with speakers born in t
he Baby Boomer generation (date
of birth 1946
1
964). Before this generation, urban Lansingites of all social class backgrounds
had /æ/ systems that were more raised than that of their rural peers
each had higher and fronter
realizations of /æ/ as compare
d to /
-
nasal and
pre
-
oral /æ/ in acoustic space. In the Baby Boomer generation, however, only blue
-
collar
53
speakers continued advancing the NCS pattern while white
-
collar speakers did not. Figure 3
displays h
ow /æ/ has moved along the front diagonal over time across social class. The front
diagonal measurement captures movement along F1 and F2 simultaneously, with a higher
number indicating a higher and more forward realization (normalized F2
2*
normalized F
1, see
Labov, Rosenfelder and Fruehwald 2013). In
Figure
8
, we see that /æ/ remains relatively stable
in the white
-
collar community (red) until it decr
eases in the Millennial generation. Though there
is no data from blue
-
collar speakers born after 1970, I observed that /æ/ raising and fronting
notably peaks
only for blue
-
collar speakers
in the Baby Boomer generation where values are
outside of the range
of any other generation in the community.
Figure
8
Trajectory of /æ/ diagonal in urban Lansing (blue = blue
-
collar; red=white collar); dots represent
means for individual speakers (n=27).
54
Phonological contrast as measured by Pillai
-
Bartlett statistic (Hay, Warren and Drager
2006; Hall
-
Lew 2010 and see Chapter 3) is displayed in
Figure
9
wi
th social class indicated by
color (red = white
-
collar, blue=blue collar). From the figure, it appears that movement toward
nasal separation in the white
-
collar sub
-
sample occurred in the middle of the 20th century, where
we find Pillai scores increase fr
om almost 0 in earlier years to 0.35. Blue
-
collar speakers,
however, appear to remain well below 0.1 over time, save one blue
-
collar speaker in the Boomer
generation who seems to pattern with the white
-
collar speakers in her generational cohort.
Without a
more robust and socially stratified sample, however, I was not able to say with
confidence whether social class conditions nasal separation in Lansing.
Figure
9
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores in 20th century Lansing by social class
(blue
-
collar = blue).
55
More evidence of social motivation comes from a quantitative analysis of style
-
shifting
within the younger white
-
collar sample of the Wagner et al (2016) participants. In collaboration
with Alexander Mason,
I
reported on a rise in dialect awareness in Mic
higan (Nesbitt & Mason
(2016) sample while they were speaking spontaneously during their interview to that when they
were reading a word list.
Since there is
no word list data from the speakers in the AutoTown oral
histories collection, t
his analysis included only a subset of 29 speakers who were all born in the
1990s. This style
-
shifting analysis showed that young speakers in Lansing were more likely to
lower
and retract pre
-
oral /æ/ but raise and front pre
-
nasal /æ/ while reading from a word list than
in their conversational speech. Though attitudinal data in Lansing is only really robust for
younger speakers, the addition of the social class analysis from Ne
sbitt (2018) suggests that in
Lansing, /æ/ has risen as a linguistic marker as it has in other Inland North communities. These
two pieces of information combined with the apparent stratification in /æ
/
-
raising/fronting
suggest that the development of nasa
l allophony will be socially constrained. There is also
supporting qualitative evidence from some of the speakers themselves, particularly those aged
20
4
0
. I
n the IHELP interviews and in additional interviews conducted for this dissertation
,
young speak
ers
she travels.
2.5
Summary
To summarize, the Wagner et al. (2016), Nesbitt and Mason (201
6), and Nesbitt (2018)
analyses allow for the generation of hypotheses about the actuation and propagation of
allophonic change in Lansing. First, the change has likely occurred gradually. Through the use
56
of the Pillai
-
Bartlett analyses, we showed that sp
eakers exhibit the first three stages in the Life
-
Cycle of Phonological Processes and crucially, there appears to be progression from stage 1 to
stage 3 in apparent time. Second, the change appears to be socially motivated, as white
-
collar
speakers almost
exclusively exhibit stages 2 and 3, while no blue
-
collar speakers in the sample
exhibit stage 3. Therefore, this dissertation will extend the analyses in these preliminary studies
and include social class and gender as conditioning factors in this change.
The Pillai
-
Bartlett score analysis was a good initial step in exploring /æ/ systems in
Lansing. Yet researchers have shown that while bimodality is often an indication of
phonological/categorical differences, the absence of a bimodal distribution does n
ot entail the
absence of a phonological difference (cf. Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale 2008: 696; Schilling,
Watkins & Watkins 2002). Therefore, for this dissertation, an analysis of Pillai
-
Bartlett scores
over time and across social groups will be supplement
ed with the impressionistic analysis of rate
of change (Chapter 4) and the results of the sub
-
phonemic judgement task (Chapter 5). The
inclusion of these analyses will allow a more definitive answer as to whether phonologization
was abrupt or gradual and
to address the broader question of
Why changes in a structural feature
take place in a particular language at a given time, but not in other languages with the same
feature, or in the same language at other times.
57
DATA AND METHODS
3.1
Introduction
The goals of this dissertation are to address the Actuation problem of allophonic change in
Lansing, i.e. why does change occur at a particular place in a particular time.
In order to do this
,
I also address the Embeddin
g and Transition Prob
lems, i.e.
what are the internal and external
conditions surrounding the chang
e and
how did the phonological change spread throughout the
community. The Embedding
P
roblem is addressed in
Chapter 4
where
I examine four
diagnostics of NCS /æ/ in the spontaneous speech of thirty
-
six Lansing natives
:
raising and
fronting in F1/F2 space,
advanced raised
system, and diphthongal quality
, again
st generational
time, social class, and gender
. I report on the methodology for this component of the dissertation
in section
3.2
of this chapter
.
Along with the Actuation and Transition problems, t
h
e
E
mbedding
P
roblem is further addresse
d
in
Chapter 5
where
I examine
phonological change via an analysis
of
acoustic trajectories of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ allophones and
the results of a
sub
-
phonemic
judgement task. I report on the methodology for this component of the dissertation in section
3.3
.
The findings from
both of these chapters
contribute to a discussion of how and why this
change may have occurred
,
and their implications
for
our theories of North Ameri
can
dialectology and phonological change will be discussed in
Chapter 6
.
3.2
Acoustics of /æ/
in 20
th
century Lansing
My previous research
in Lansing suggests that the most significant changes
to
/æ/
occurred
among individuals born
in
the middle of the 20
th
century
,
at which point
gender and
/or
social
class condition
its acoustic trajectory
(Wagner et al. 2016; Nesbitt 2018a; Nesbitt, Wagner &
58
Mason to appear)
.
In that prior work,
the paucity of speakers
in the database who were
born in
the 1970s and 1980s
,
and the imbalance of gender and social cl
ass
in the Wagner et al.
(2016)
sample
,
made it
hard to
conclude
with certainty
when and for whom NCS features have begun to
subside.
Therefore, the goal
of the
acoustic
analysis
in this
dissertation
is
to
examine the four
selected
diagnostics of NCS
/æ/ in Lansing with a
n expanded speaker
sample
that is
balanced for
gender, social class, and generational cohort
. Throughout, I will refer to this sample of thirty
-
six
speakers as the
Lansing Speech Corpus
.
Section
3.2.1
describes how I recruited
participants for
this
study
;
the demographic distribution of speakers in th
e Lansing Speech Corpus
is detailed
in
section
3.2.2
.
I
nterview methods are
described
in section
3.2.4
. T
he
procedures I followed for
processing and transcribing the interviews appear in section
3.2.5
, while those for
vowel
measurement and s
tatistical analysis are in section
3.2.6
.
3.2.1
Participant
Selection and
Recruitment
The data for the Lansing Speech Corpus comes from three sources: oral histories recorded in the
late 1990s
and
early 2000s,
sociolinguistic
interviews conducted in
2010,
and sociolinguistic
interviews conducted in
the summer of
2018
and spring of
2019
.
So
me
(N=12)
of the oral
histories data in this dissertation come from the Wagner et al. (2016) and Nesbitt (2018) studies
and
4 others
are newly added; the other sources represent new sociolinguistic information about
Lansing speech.
I first sampled from
the oral histories c
ollection
.
Any speaker in th
at
collection who met
the demographic criteria described below in section
3.2.2
was
included in
the corpus
(n=16)
. I
then filled in the gaps in
the corpus
with
twenty
sociolinguistic interviews
, for a total of thirty
-
six
speakers
.
59
The oral histories come from a collection of interviews with Lansing auto industry
workers, to be described
in more detail in section
3.2.4.1
. More information about recruitment
methods for this collection can be found
on the Michigan State University Vincen
t Voice Library
website where the collection is hosted and
in Fine (2004)
.
The two 2010 sociolinguistic interviews were conducted by an undergraduate student for
(Fraser 2010)
. One of
these interviewees was recruited at a senior coffee hour in the neighborhood. The second was a
friend (and neighbor) of the first
,
who recommended her as a participant.
For the 2017
2018 interviews, some (n=
12
) were conducted by a local
fieldworker who
is a longtime Lansing resident, and some (n=
6
) were conducted by me. Ten participants were
recruited by the fieldworker through personal
social
network
s
. The
participants a
re friends, co
-
workers, children of friends, and neighbors of th
is
i
nterviewer.
The remaining eight
interviewees
responded to
my
recruitment flyer
, which is provided in
A
ppendix
0
.
I
distributed
this flyer
at
local
businesses
and on
social media
groups
of
various
Lansing neighborhoods. Because the
neighborhood can post to other members of the group, I contacted the moderator
(s) of these
groups and asked them to post my flyer on their page. Some ignored my request but others were
happy to help. Each participant was compensated $15 for participating in an hour
-
long
sociolinguistic interview.
The demographic profiles of the th
irty
-
six speakers in the Lansing Speech Corpus are
provided below.
A complete table of speakers in the sample with their demographic information
and source of interview is provided in
appendix
0
.
60
3.2.2
Speaker Demographic Information
Speakers included in the Lansing Speech Corpus are all native
s of
Lansing. For this
dissertation, Lansing is defined as
encompassing all residences located
wit
hin a 10
-
mile radius of
the state capit
o
l
building,
if they
had
lived in Lansing from at least five years old and
had
not
left
the area for more than 3
years. Another requirement o
f native status is that at least one parent be born and raised in the
Lansing metropolitan area and the other parent
be
from another
lower
Michigan town
1
.
Table
2
provides a summary of the distribution of the social parameters in the Lansing Speech Corpus.
A description of how the levels for each demographic category
were
determined is provided
thereaf
ter
.
Table
2
Distribution of the Lansing Speech Corpus by generational cohort, social class, and gender.
Generational cohort
Blue
C
ollar
White Collar
Silent (birth years 1925
1945)
3f
3m
3f
3m
Baby Boomer (birth years 1946
1964)
3f
3m
3f
3m
Generation X (birth years 1965
1984)
3f
3m
3f
3m
1
I would have ideally liked to limit the pool of speakers to those
for whom both
parents were born and raised in
Lansing
. This was impossible because of (1)
the limited demographic information provided by oral history
interviewees
, and (2)
the
fluctuation i
n residency due to the in
-
migration
of Michiganders into Lansing in the first
half of the 20
th
century followed by mass exodus in the latter half
(Fine 2004)
.
I do not think the absence of two
Lansing native parents is an issue for my current analysis because recent analyse
s in lower Michigan show similar
trends of NCS participation (followed by recession) to that in Lansing
(Morgan et al. 2017; Rankinen, Albin &
Neuhaus 2019)
. Therefore, the parents of my interviewees would probably have had similar /æ/ productions.
61
.
For this
dissertation, I use cultural generations
rather than birth year or decade of birth, as is common in
socio
linguistics research,
so as to capture how cultural change
in
the US
(
which as discussed in
Chapter 2
also applies to
Lansing
)
has impacted language use. Though this is a less common
technique, many sociolinguists have used cultural generations to
divide
their sample (cf.
Dubois
& Horvath 2000;
Durian
2012
;
Dodsworth & Kohn 2012; Dodsworth & Forrest 2016)
.
There is
no consensus in social science research or in public discourse about the precise limits on popular
generational labels, however
(indeed, generational gro
(Pew Research Center)
).
I
have employed the date range for Baby Boomers in Knox and
Pinch (2006) and made the generations on either side uniform 20
-
year
periods.
The three
generational cohorts in this dissertation are the Silent generation (born 1925
1945), the Baby
Boomer genera
tion (born 1946
1964), and Generation X (born 1965
1985). In this dissertation,
I also use
data from
the
21
Millennial generation speakers (born 1985
199
9
)
in
Wagner et al
(2016) as a temporal reference.
I do not include them in the statistical analyses
below because,
as discussed in
Chapter 2
, this g
roup
is not balanced for social class or gender. The majority of
Millennial speakers here are women
(N=
18
), and they are all middle
-
class. I include them in the
figures below to provide a trajectory of (female) white
-
collar speech after generation X
and as a
comparison point to the white
-
collar female women who participated in the sub
-
phonemic
judgement
task
.
Working
-
and middle
-
class Lansingites
were targeted for this dissertation. I made the
decision to focus on these two groups because (1) Lansing does not have a traditional
old
money
upper class
(cf Kroch 1996 for the speech of the Philadelphia upper class)
and (2)
the
se
groups,
a
s opposed
to the upper and under class,
are often the innovators of linguistic change
in
62
urban areas
(Labov 2001; Baranow
ski 2013)
.
Classification of soci
al class
has been and still is
highly debated in sociolinguistics and sociology more generally.
Because there is no unifying
methodology,
studies using social class as a variable have utilized metrics that include some
combination of median income of a neighborhood, occupation, education level, income, median
occupation and/or education level, or job
-
economic status
.
O
ccupation
appears to be the most
-
economic status in more recent work
(Labov 2001;
Forrest & Dodsworth 2016; Baranowski & Turton
2018)
. Furthermore,
Holley, Dodsworth &
Wagner
(
to appear)
argue that occupation is predictive because of
the way it tends to capture
social prestige
and
Lastly, occupation seems to be the most salient
indicator
of social class in
the Lansing
community
, as sociolinguistic intervi
ew
ees
were more likely to discuss occupation than
education or material wealth when topics of social class came up. As such, I use occupation as
my measure of social class for this dissertation.
Speakers
in manual labor occupations (e.g. car
body assembl
y, construction worker, machine operator), or in low
-
level service and care jobs
(e.g. wait staff, daycare worker, receptionist) that require less than 2 years of training after high
school were classified as
blue
-
collar
.
Those in
managerial positions and
in occupations that
require at least 2 years of technical training outside of high school (e.g. chemical engineer,
financial manager, information technology supervisor, plant manager) were classified as
white
-
collar
. Two speakers in the sample were stay
-
a
t
-
home parents, so I classified them according to
for both
was white
-
collar. It is worth mentioning here that the
social
class status of
most of
the participants in this study matched that of their parents, i.e. those
63
who
grew up blue
-
collar were themselves blue
-
collar. The one exception is
a
female Generation
X speaker
whose parents were blue
-
collar
but who is themselves
white
-
collar
.
Participants were classified as either male or female. Though I recognize that gender is a
gradient variable rather than dichotomous,
I classified
gender
here as
binary in line with how
participants referred to themselves in the demographic part of the in
terview. Speakers in the
sample were often interviewed by a stranger, so it may very well be the case that some did not
feel comfortable enough to disclose intimate details of their identity. So, I cannot say
definitively that there was indeed a binary sp
lit of gender in the sample, but the categories reflect
what participants reported during their interview.
The choice to limit the corpus to just thirty
-
six speakers is the result of various
methodological limitations related to recruitment and speaker cl
assification. First,
the
oral
histories speakers in general provided very little demographic information during their
interviews. The only consistent information gathered by the interviewers was hiring date,
ethnicity, marital status, current address, ed
ucation level, and job title. Because other
demographic information was not readily reported for each speaker, I did my best to gain this
information from the interview
recording
; oftentimes doing some calculation, e.g. discerning
year of birth from report
ed year of high school graduation and age at graduation. So, eliminated
from the sample were speakers for
whom
age, education, gender, residency background of their
parents, and their own residency
status
were not readily available in the interview. Also
excluded from the pool of speakers were those who reported that they were born and/or raised in
a n
eighboring
rural
town outside of the Lansing metropolitan area. A third major complication
in sampling was a very common issue in linguistics research
th
e recruitment of men.
The
fieldworker and I
recruit
ed
all eleven female participants
and conduct
ed
sociolinguistic
64
interviews with
them
in less than two months. By contrast, it took nine months to recruit and
interview
the
seven
men. While this disserta
tion would benefit from the inclusion of more
speakers in each demographic group, time constraints did not permit a larger demographically
balanced sample.
Future
researchers working
on Lansing speech
are
encouraged to
increase the
size of the corpus.
Table
3
Number of participants from each
data
source
Year
Recorded
Silent
Boomer
Gen X
Total
Oral History
90s/00s
10
6
0
16
Sociolinguistic
Interview
2010
2
0
0
2
Sociolinguistic Interview
2018/9
0
6
12
18
Total
12
12
12
36
The second thing to consider is
how
change over time
can be interpreted
, since the
speakers were
recorded during three different time periods of data collection.
Table
3
displays
the distribution of speakers in the Lansing Speech Corpus by the interview collection method
(sociolinguistic interview or oral history). Recall that the sixteen oral histories inter
views were
recorded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the two ethnographic interviews were conducted in
2010, and the eighteen sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in 2018 and 2019. All of the
oral histories speakers are in the Silent and Baby Boome
r generations, while the sociolinguistic
interview speakers are in the Baby Boomer and Generation X cohorts. Crucially, the oral
65
histories interviews were conducted almost 20 years before the sociolinguistic interviews were
conducted in 2018 and 2019.
T
here are two avenues for exploring language change in this sample, and any
sample in
which speakers differ in both year of birth and year of recording
. An Apparent Time analysis
compares data by
date of birth to show change over
generational
time
.
A
Real T
ime
analysis
would compare data by date of recording and thus display
change
.
In th
e Lansing Speech Corpus
, a real time analysis would compare
data from
the speakers
interviewed in the early 2000s to those interviewed in 2018/2
019 to show change over the last 20
years.
I
t could very well be the case that most of the changes explored in this chapter have taken
place
in the last 20 years rather than over the course of multiple generations
.
I use the apparent
time construct in thi
s dissertation because
while there is
some evidence that
speakers exhibit
slight variations in their speech
after adolescence
(cf Labov 2001;
20
09)
,
c
hanges in
(phonological)
representation have not been established as changes that occur
in adulthood
(Labov 1994: 102
107)
2
.
3
2
If we look at
Table
3
, it appears that I can investigate real versus apparent time change in this sample. There is
indeed an even split in the Baby Boomer generation between the sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2018 and
2019 and the oral
histories conducted almost twenty years prior. I will not do this, however, because much of the
social conditioning on these changes occurs in this Baby Boomer generation. Though the interview sources are
evenly distributed in this generation, social cla
ss and gender are unevenly distributed within these two groups.
Therefore, I would not be able to conclude whether any differences between the groups is indeed evidence of real
time change or simply an imbalance in the social makeup of these groups. I re
cognize that I have not convincingly
ruled out a real time conflation in this analysis and I leave it for future research to consider how recent these changes
are.
3
Fruehwald
(
2017)
offers a solution for disambiguating between apparent and real time in a sample using
Generalized Additive Models a
nd Tensor Product Smooths to model the data. I do not use these methods here
because the Lansing Speech Corpus is relatively small. However, any analysis with a potential real and apparent
time confound and a good amount of speakers would benefit from us
ing this technique.
66
3.2.3
Interviewers
Most of the sociolinguistic interviews
(n =
13
)
utilized in this dissertation were conducted by a
Lansing community member
.
I conducted five of them. This interviewer, who I will refer to
throughout this dissertation as the
Lansing interviewer,
was born and raised 4 hours north of
Lansing and has resid
ed in Lansing since they were 20 years old. They identify as white, female,
and are in their mid
-
40s.
I selected this interviewer because they were a longtime Lansing
resident and
they have
a
socioeconomically
diverse social network.
I recruited
this in
terviewe
r
through the social networks of a Michigan State University professor. They were tasked with
recruiting, scheduling, and interviewing
the participants that they recruited
. They were paid $20
per speaker that they interviewed
, and
I trained them
for two hours
before they carried out any
interviews
. During this
training
session, I introduced them to the study and my objectives
regarding speaker demographics. I also trained them to use the recording equipment
and
introduced them to
best practices f
or conducting a sociolinguistic intervie
w (to be described in
3.2.4
)
. I provided this interviewer with all the materials necessary to conduct the int
erview,
including
consent forms,
the script for introducing the formal tasks, the
list of
interview
questions, an interview flow
-
chart, the recording equipment, and the
money for
participant
pay
ment
. After the interviewer conducted three interviews in the
field, I listened to the
interviews and had a second thirty
-
minute session where I provided feedback and offered some
suggestions for answering/deflecting questions that were aimed at learning more about the
initial
intervi
ews, the
participant had
inquired about the purpose of
the
study
and the interviewer
had
revealed that we were interested in
the way that people
pronounce vowels in Michigan
. Disclosure of this information would almost certainly
guarantee that
a participant
would monitor their speech and likely
produce
more
careful
speech,
which is not the objective of these interviews
. This was not an issue
in this particular case
, since
67
th
is
exchange
occurred
towards the end of the interview.
Neither this part of the conversation
nor any following parts
were included in the current analysis, in any case. For subsequent
interviews, I trained the interviewer to deflect conversations about t
he purpose of the study until
after the formal tasks were administered.
The Lansing interviewer conducted all their interviews between July and September of
2018. After their interviews were over,
she and I had
a three
-
hour debriefing session during
which
I gathered some valuable information not readily apparent in the interviews themselves.
From this discussion, I was able to get a better sense of interviewees
socio
-
economic
background by asking more questions about the occupations of family members and
the
neighborhoods that they grew up in.
The two
sociolinguistic
interviews
from 2010
were conducted
separately
by
a Michigan
State University
undergraduate
student
for a senior capstone ethnographic
project on the NCS in
the speech of older women (aged
65+) in the Eastside neighborhood of Lansing
.
Th
is
interviewer
w
as
white
,
female
and aged between 19 and 21 at the time of the project
. She
was from Florida,
and
did not have a distinctive regional accent of any kind
(as indicated by an interviewee and
impressionistically determined by me)
.
3.2.4
Interview Methods
Because the goals of the
oral histories
projects
,
senior capstone project
,
and
the new
sociolinguistic interview
projects
were different, the
procedures for conducting interviews
were
also
somewhat different.
The most important difference is that the aim of the oral histories
project was to
discuss
factory life
with
former auto
plant employ
ees
in Lansing, whereas the goal
of the sociolinguistic interviews was to obtain speech for acoustic analysis.
Thus, the topics of
conversation were a bit different. While the oral histories interviewers focused much of their
68
time on topics related to fac
tory life with little time spent on topics outside of that, the other
there is some discussion about work
-
life in the sociolinguistic interviews, topics in thes
e
interview are broad
er
and cover the entire lifespan, including childhood and adulthood.
I do not
think this is a problem for the current analysis
as
the interviewers of all types of interviews
tended to let the interviewee discuss whatever topic they wa
nted to
.
For transparency,
I describe
the methods used for each of the
three sources of data
in what follows
.
3.2.4.1
Oral Histories
The sixteen oral histories recordings
analyzed for this dissertation were gathered from a
collection of audio recordings housed at the Michigan State University library. This collection,
G. Robert Vincent Voice Library
4
includes spoken word recordings dating back to 1888.
I
utilized recordi
ngs from the
Lansing Auto Town Gallery,
which features audio
-
recorded oral
B
o
dy and Diamond REO automobile assembly plants. The
o
ral histories
with REO workers
wer
e recorded in the late 1990s
by
Dr. Lisa Fine, Professor of History at Michigan State
University
(Fine 2004)
, and the Fisher Body oral histories were recored
in the early 2000s by
historians of the United Auto Workers Local 602
.
Though these interviews took place in a variety of locations, the interviews analyzed for
this dissertation were
restricted to those
union conference room.
Likewise, t
hough some plant workers were
interviewed in groups,
interviews analyzed for this dissertation include only those in which a single person was
4
The archive of G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection is available to the public through the Michigan State
University library (https://vvl.lib.msu.edu/).
69
interviewed.
Some interviewees were interviewed by
a panel of
UAW
historians
(
usually 2
3
)
and others were interviewed one
-
on
-
one by a Lansing
area native
.
Each interview lasted about 1 hour. Topics ranged from tensions between laborers and
managers in the plants
to
racism, sexism, community building, and union activism. Though the
purpose of these interviews was to talk about life in the pl
ant, many interviews included lengthy
in painting the picture of Lansing in the middle of the 20
th
century that I included in my
description of the speech communi
ty in
Chapter 2
. Though oral histories do not follow the
pattern of sociolinguistic interviews, and oral historians are not concerned with the
preocc
upations of sociolinguists, e.g.
whether a speaker is monitoring their speech
, these
interviewers did a good job of asking questions that would prompt the interviewee to speak for at
least a few minutes at a time, so that much of the interview was the inte
rviewee speaking freely
about a topic that interested them. This provided a good amount of natural language data from
each participant in the sample for which to conduct an acoustic analysis.
3.2.4.2
Sociolinguistic Interviews
The 2017
2018
s
ociolinguistic interviews were recorded using a Zoom H4N Handy
Recorder. They were recorded as uncompressed WAV files at a 44.10 Hz sampling rate in 16
-
bit
resolution. We used a Sony ECM
-
CS10 Tie
-
Clip Omnidirectional Business microphone rather
than the mi
crophone on the recorder. The microphone was clipped to the lapel or the upper
neckline of
the
the interview. The recorder often sat on a surface (usually a table) next to th
e interviewee
,
whenever possible out of their line of vision
. During the interviews that I conducted, I had my
computer opened with a map of Michigan showing. Whenever the interviewee talked about
70
geography or geographical mobility, I would
indicate
the
map on the computer and have them
identify various places throughout the interview, e.g. where their neighborhood was, where the
good and bad parts of town were, where people vacationed in the summer, etc. My main
motivation for including the computer as
a prop
under the guise of assisting in showing a non
-
native Michigander the lay of the land
was
to help the interviewee be more comfortable around
geography as
a result.
goals (Lansing and Michigan life, local practices) rather than on its linguistic goals, thus
reducing the likelihood of highly self
-
monitored speech.
Other materials
employed
during
interview sessions were the consent form, word list and sub
-
phonemic judgement task items,
which we kept out of view until they were needed.
Interviews were conducted in various places throughout the Lansing area: most were
conducted in an
a Lansing community center, in the Michigan State University Sociolinguistics Lab, or in my
home. Though none of the interviews were conducted in a sound attenuated space, inter
views
were conducted in quiet rooms and there was no discernable background noise in any of the
resulting
audio files. Two interviews were interrupted by a child or spouse who briefly asked for
something. Another interviewee answered their phone in the mi
ddle of an interview. These
interruptions only lasted a few minutes after which the interview resumed. Other than these
minor interruptions, each interview ran continuously in one sitting.
Each conversation began with the participant reading the consen
t form, consenting to be
recorded, choosing a pseudonym, and attaching the microphone to their clothing. The recording
device was then switched on. No
ne of the recruited individuals
declined
to
consent
to a recorded
71
interview
.
The recording began
with the
interviewer asking the participant to say their
pseudonym
.
The interviewer then proceeded to ask the interviewee questions about themselves.
The full list of possible questions
is
included in the
A
ppendix
0
. Following the usual practice in
sociolinguistic interviews
(Labov 1984)
, the interview questions in this list were a guide rather
than a fixed list, and interview t
opics were mostly determined by the participant. They were
encouraged to discuss in detail any topic that was of interest to them. So, while not every
question in the list was asked during each interview, the interviewers made it a point to ask at
least
one question within a given topic in the list. Topics ranged from family
history to
formative school years, work history, current and past neighborhood demographics, Lansing, and
winter in Michigan. This portion of the interview lasted between 30 and 45
minutes.
After the c
onversational
portion of the interview, interviewees participated in two formal
tasks which were aimed at testing two
phonological
phenomen
a
related to NCS re
cession in
Michigan
. The first was not analyzed for this dissertation but re
quired participants to judge
syllable boundaries
(Nesbitt 2018b)
. The second formal task was the phonological judgement
task which will be described in detail i
n
Chapter 5
.
After these tasks, participants were asked to
read aloud from a list of 100
words
adapted from
Evans, Ito, Jones, and Preston (2000), Ito
(2001); Jones (2003), Roeder (2006)
, inter alia
.
For all words, the nucleus of the primary stres
sed
syllable was one of the six Northern Cities Shift vowels in various phonetic environments.
Following these three
formal
tasks, the interview concluded with a discussion of attitudes
toward Lansing as a place compared to other metropolitan areas
,
and
attitudes
t
o the local
dialect. Because I am interested in speech
that is as close to unmonitored as possible to provide
a description of everyday speech in Lansing
, only the speech produced during the casual
conversation portion of each interview was
included in the quantitative analysis for
this
72
dissertation
.
The qualitative content of the post
-
task discussion of Lansing and local speech is
discussed where relevan
t. S
peech produced during the word
-
list reading, the syllable
boundary
task
and sub
-
phonemic judgement tasks, and the discussion of attitudes is not included in the
analysis for this dissertation, though I intend to include it in future work.
The two
2010
sociolinguistic
interviews were conducted in the same manner as
described
above
for the conversational portion of the sociolinguistic interview
.
Participants were audio
-
recorded in their homes in quiet rooms while wearing a lavalier microphone.
Though the
specific
interview question
s
were
a little different, they covered the same range of topics.
Because these
interviews were conducted as part of a different project, they
did not include the formal tasks
mentioned above
.
3.2.5
Audio Processing, Transcription,
and FAVE suite
Twelve
of the
oral history
recordings
were obtained from the Michigan State University
library in
.wav format. The remaining 4 were obtained from the library website in
.mp3 format
and
converted to .wav in Praat
(Boersma 2001)
.
Three of these recordings
5
were con
ducted in a
room with considerable low frequency noise
perhaps produced by a fan or because of the
recording equipment. These
three
recordings were passed through a high
-
pass filter in Praat
to
reduce the low
-
frequency noise. Frequencies above 2000 Hz
were removed from the audio.
The entirety of each recording
was transcribed in ELAN
(Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics 2018)
, a linguistic annotation software provided by the Max Planck Institute.
Four annotation tiers were included in the transcription; one for the interviewee, one for the
interviewer, one to indicate interview tasks, and the final tier for background noise.
Speech was
5
These speakers were
Mabel McQueen, Marvin Grinstern, and Vernon Cook
in
Appendices
0
and
0
.
73
transcribed in breath groups
,
so that segments were about four seconds each and roughly
corresponded to when a speaker took a breath or paused. All sounds produced were transcribed
using
US
English orthography and special symbols for non
-
lingu
istic sounds (e.g. coughs)
were
employed
according to
the transcription
guidelines
put forth by the Linguistic Data Consortium
at the University of Pennsylvania
(Linguistic Data Consortium 20
13)
.
After transcription, each interview was passed through the Forced Alignment and Vowel
Extraction (FAVE) suite
(Rosenfelder et al. 2014)
for forced alignment and vowel measurement.
FAVE is available as downloadable scripts which can be run locally.
6
I will provide a brief
description of the two s
tages of FAVE below but see
Evanini (2009) and
Fru
ehwald
(
2013
)
for a
more thorough description of the mechanics of FAVE.
FAVE uses the Carnegie
-
Mellon (CMU) pronouncing dictionary to align orthographic
transcriptions with sound files
at the level of the phoneme
. The CMU dictionary is an open
-
access dictionary of over 134,000 North American English words and their pronunciations. To
do the alignment, FAVE must first
review
a transcription to ensure that every word in it is an
actual word in the CMU dictionary.
-
in a given file is not found in the CMU dictionary, FAVE requires the user to provide an
ARPA
b
et transcription
pronunciation symbols utilized by the CMU dictionary
of
that word
and temporarily
add it to the dictionary. Once a file has been dictionary checked, FAVE aligns
the orthographic transcription with the acoustic signal in the corresponding sound file.
6
The
FAVE
scripts are currently being maintained by Jo
sef Fruehwald on
G
it
H
ub
(
https://github.com/JoFrhwld/FAVE
)
74
The FAVE
-
extract stage measures and normalizes all the vowel phonemes in the
recording.
FAVE measures vowel phonemes according to the parameters set by the user. I used
the
default settings
specified by the FAVE creators, which are based on best practices established
by the ANAE
(Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006)
.
The first default set
ting was to set the maximum
formant measurements for each gender at 5000 Hz for males and 5500 Hz for females. The
second was
to
model formant predictions
after
those from
the ANAE.
With this setting, when
FAVE
encounters a phoneme, it
will generate a few possible measurements by changing some
parameters (e.g. the number of formants it identifies)
and compare this pool of measurements to
the distribution of measurements of that phoneme in the ANAE. Based on the
ANAE
distribution of that phoneme, FAVE will determine which measurement is most likely valid and
discard all other measurements for that phoneme. After going through the entire file, FAVE then
eliminates outliers. For this, FAVE looks at each measuremen
overall distribution of that vowel class. If a given token is
found to be
extreme for that speaker,
i.e. sits outside of the distribution of that vowel class, the token is discarded.
The resulting measurements
in the ou
tput
are vowel duration, and formant measurements
(F1, F2, F3) at
the 20%, 50%, and 80% time
points along the vowel for every vowel in the file.
Other valuable information provided by FAVE includes stress (stressed or unstressed) and
phonetic environment
of each phoneme (following manner, following place, following voicing,
preceding segment, and number of syllables occurring after the vowel).
FAVE outputs a raw data file and a file with normalized data. This dissertation analyzes
the normalized data. Nor
malization is meant to eliminate differences in measurements that arise
due to physiological factors (e.g. age) while maintaining differences that are the result of
sociolinguistic variation
(Adank, Smits & van Hout 2004; Labov, Ash & Bobe
rg 2006; Thomas
75
2011)
.
Though there are various normalization methods, the
Lobanov
(
1971)
normalization
method i
s
preferred by sociophoneticians
(
for a discussion,
see
Thomas & Kendall 2007
and
Adank, Smits & van Hout 2004
)
over
the other methods
and
it
is
the one
FAVE utilizes.
T
he
Lobanov method is a vowel
-
extrinsic method of normaliza
tion, meaning that it uses
measurements of multiple vowels spoken by an individual to calculate a grand mean by which
each vowel may be normalized.
FAVE then rescales the Lobanov normalized values back to
H
ertz (Hz).
3.2.6
Measurements and Analysis
The thirty
-
si
x interviews in the Lansing Speech Corpus produced 76,723 FAVE
-
measured vowels.
I report in this dissertation on the /æ/ tokens alone.
7
To avoid measuring
vowels that are commonly reduced in casual speech, I eliminated any
token that did not occur in
with /æ/
excluded from the analysis were the following:
a, am, an, an, and, as, at, had, has, have, than,
.
Tokens of /æ/ pre
ceding /r/ were excluded from the analysis, as /æ/ is merged with
American English dialects, including the NCS
(see Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:56)
. Finally, I
omitted tokens that were not produced in the casual speech portion of the interview, i.e. any
tokens that were produced during the formal tasks or the subsequent attitudes portion of the
sociolinguisti
c interview. The final token count for /æ/ analyzed in this dissertation is 4,158.
Throughout this dissertation I will refer to two allophonic environments;
pre
-
nasal
and
pre
-
oral
.
Pre
-
nasal /æ/ tokens are those that precede the three nasal consonants
in American English; /m/,
7
76
Those that precede a non
-
nasal consonant are pre
-
oral. Of the token count, 1,590
tokens are pre
-
nasal and 2,568 are in pre
-
oral position.
The ggplot2 (Wickham 2009), dplyr (Wickham and Francois 2016), gridExtra (Wi
ckham
2017), and tidyr (Augie 2016) packages in R (R core team) were used for all data manipulation
and visualizations.
To
employ the four diagnostics of
NCS /æ/
mentioned in section
3.2
at the start of this
chapter, four acoustic measures of /æ/ were used: F1, F2, and diphthongal quality of pre
-
oral /æ/,
and Pillai
-
Bartlett score. The first (F1) and second (F2) vowel formant
measures were taken at
the mid
-
point of the vowel in Hertz (Hz), as supplied in the FAVE output. F1 measurements
correspond to tongue height during the articulation of the vowel; a higher F1 value indicates a
lowered tongue position and a lower F1 value i
ndicates a higher tongue position. F2
measurements correspond to tongue back
-
ness; a higher number indicates a further forward
articulation and a lower number indicates a farther back articulation. Diphthongal quality (DQ)
is
assessed
by a measurement of
trajectory length
(Fox & Jacewicz 2009; Jacewicz, Fox &
Salmons 2011)
As noted in previous studies on /æ/, the two points fo
r diphthongal quality
of this phoneme
are
at
50% and 80% of the vowel
(Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Mielke, Carignan & Thomas 2017)
.
DQ is operationa
lized
(see below)
as the square root of the sum of the
squares of the
difference
s
in F1 and F2 of the
relevant
t
ime
points in the vowel
.
A
higher DQ
value indicates
more
of a
difference in F1/F2 space
(80%)
.
(6)
DQ
=
77
Separation between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral tokens was measured using the Pillai
-
Bartlett
statistic
(Hay, Warren & Drager 2006; Hall
-
Lew 2010)
.
In measuring separation, the statistic
utilizes MANOVA to evaluate the distance between two distributions and their variance. Pillai
-
Bartlett scores range from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates no difference be
tween distributions and 1
indicates complete separation of the distributions.
Thus, in the discussion of /æ/ systems in
section
4.6
, speakers with an NCS unconditioned system should have a Pillai
-
Bartlett score
closer to 0, those with a
normal raised
continuous system would have a score closer to .5, and
those with a nasal system should have Pillai
-
Bartlett scores closer to 1.
Linear
mixed
-
effects regression models were utilized to determine the effects of social
class, gender, and generational cohort on
the
four dependent acoustic measures (Pillai
-
Bartlett
score, F1, F2, duration, and DQ). The fixed effects were operationalized as fol
lows: Social Class
(blue collar, white collar), Gender (female, male), and Generation (Silent, Boomer, Gen X). The
linear models
included random intercepts for
speaker
and
word
to account for any variability
caused by any individual speaker producing a lar
ge amount of speech or
a
lexical item occurring
disproportionately more often than others in the corpus. An ANOVA analysis was performed on
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores, as each speaker in the sample only had one score. This analysis
included a
random intercept
of
speaker
as a random effect.
For all four analyses,
all possible
i
nteractions
between the fixed effects were included
with the fixed effects in a full model.
Fixed effects and
any interactions that were not significant in the full model were removed.
Throughout the
discussion
of results,
I will indicate when an effect or interaction was not included in the
resulting model.
Results of the models are provided for reference in each section, below. I
conducted all linear mixed
-
effects regression modeling
with the lme4 package in R
(Bates et al.
2015)
.
W
elch two
-
sample f
ollow
-
up t
-
tests were performed whenever there was a significant
78
three
-
way
interaction and whenever an effect with more than two levels came out as significant.
These statistical analyses will test the hypothesis that generational cohort,
gender, and social
class condition movement in F1
and
F2, diphthongization, and nasal allophony in 20
th
century
Lansing.
3.3
Phonolog
ical Change
As briefly summarized at the start of this chapter (section
3.1
),
the goals
of this dissertation
are
to
address the
A
ctuation
,
E
mbedding, and
T
ransition
P
roblems of phon
ological change
, i.e.
how
did
it
begin
, what are the internal and external conditions surrounding the change, and
how did it
spread throughout the community
?
The
E
mbedding problem
is first addressed in
Chapter 4
where I
investigate the acoustic changes to /æ/ and the social factors that condition
them.
To
further address th
e
E
mbedding
problem and
to address
the
A
ctuation and
T
ransition problems
, I
will
investigate
in
Chapter 5
the temporal and
social mechanisms by which /æ/
nasal allophony
developed
and spread
in Lansing. I ask when speakers in Lansing developed an
allophonic
distinction between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
and who the leaders
and laggar
d
s
of th
is
change
are. To do this, I utilize two techniques; (1) an impressionistic examination of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral trajectories
in the vowel space
over
time
,
a
la Fruehwald (2013,
2016),
and (2)
a sub
-
phonemic
judgement task
, a la
Mellesmoen (2016)
.
The trajectories analysis includes the
conversational speech data from the Lansing Speech Cor
pus described above
and the results are
provided in
Chapter 5
(section
5.2.1
)
. The judgement task includes participants of the 2017
2018 sociolinguistic interviews in the Lansing Speech Corpus, and other Lansing natives who
completed the task online
. Those results are
presented in
Chapter 5
(section
5.2.2
)
.
I
n what
follows, I describe the methods for
conducting both analyses.
79
3.3.1
Divergent Trajectories
According to Fruehwald (2013,
2016), phonological allophones follow disparate trajectories over
time while
allophones
that differ only in phonetic realization, not phonological representation,
proceed in lockstep with one another.
Therefore,
I will investigate phonetic vs phonological
allophony within the /æ/ phoneme
by examining trajectories of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ in
F1/F2 space over
apparent
time.
As a point of comparison with /æ/, I include a visual inspection of phonetic trajectories
for two other short
-
front vowel
classes in the same phonological environments
:
/
/ and /
/. Here I
will determine whether the phonological profile of these classes is similar to that of /æ/. The
hypothesis is that they are different, as the analysis in Nesbitt (2018) suggests that no a
llophones
within these classes are
phonologically
distinct from the others. Therefore, the allophones within
these phonemes must only be phonetically distinguished
and should move in lockstep over time
.
If the allophones within these phonemes are indeed
phonetically distinguished th
e
n I would
expect participants to
be more likely to
judge them as the same during the judgement task
because acoustic difference may not be enough to prompt a
different
response.
If this hypothesis
is correct, I can leverage t
his difference between
/æ/
and these other classes
to ascertain whether
respondents are making judgements based on acoustic (dis)similarity or on differences in
representation. I discuss this in further detail in
5.2.1
.
The second purpose of the trajectory diagnostic is to determine when the phonological
allophone
(
s
) of /æ/
began to diverge from the rest of the allophones. This latter question is
impo
rtant for the subsequent analysis of the actuation
(initiation)
and propagation
(spread)
of
phonological change.
For t
he actuation question
, w
e will want to ask whether at the speaker
level, the phonological change was abrupt or gradual, i.e. whether
indi
vidual speakers posited a
80
representational difference between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
a
t the time
the vowel in the two
environments began to assume different phonetic targets (abrupt) or if speakers developed the
phonological rule sometime after the two allophones began to move in different directions
(gradual). To determine this, I must
first discern
when the relevant allophones began to move
towards different targets.
Whichever generation in which the relevant allophones begin to
differentiate, as determined by this trajectory analysis, is the generation for which
the question of
abrupt phonologizati
on will be relevant.
If
any
speaker
s
in this generation
posits a
phonological
rule, I will conclude that phonologization was abrupt. If, however,
no
speakers in this generation
posit a phonological difference between
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
but speakers
in subsequent
generations do
then I will conclude that phonologization was a gradual process
, occurring only
after
a
phonetic
ally
implement
ed distinction
.
3.3.2
Sub
-
P
honemic
J
udgement
T
ask
Though the investigation into trajectories of conditioning environment
s can tell us
whether and when phonologization has occurred at the community level, it cannot tell us whether
individual speakers exhibit phonological or phonetic allophony. Likewise, Pillai
-
Bartlett scores
are not useful for teasing the two apart on thei
r own, as studies have shown that while bimodality
is often an indication of phonological/categorical differences, the absence of a bimodal
distribution does not entail the absence of a phonological difference
(cf.
Schilling, Watkins &
Watkins 2002;
Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale 2008: 696)
. Therefore, I supplement the Pillai
-
Bartlett analysis with a s
ub
-
phonemic judgement task
(Mellesmoen 2016)
to discern whether for
each respondent,
phonetics alone is what distinguishes
pre
-
nasal
from
pre
-
oral /æ/ or if the
two
allophones are
phonological
ly distinct
.
A comparison of responses between generations will
address
an aspect of the
A
ctuation
P
roblem of phonological change
:
was phonologization
81
gradual or abrupt in Lansing, i.e. at the beginning of the acoustic change, are there any speakers
that consider pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
to have different phonological representations
? An
investigation into
the interaction of
change over time against social class will address the
T
ransition
Problem
of phonological change; how has nasal allophony spread throughout th
e
community, i.e. who
are the leaders and laggards of the change?
3.3.2.1
Experimental Stimuli
The judgement task for this dissertation required participants to judge whether the vowels
in thirty pairs of CVC lexical items were the same or different. The complete
list of lexical pairs
is included in
A
ppendix
0
. These pairs were grouped into six conditions of five pairs. The
differences between the condition
s
are
illustrated in
Table 4 and described in detail below.
Pairs in Condition 1, which I will refer to throughout this chapter as the
target condition
,
were CVC lexical items in American English that had the same onset and vowel /æ/ but differed
in whether their coda consonant was nasal or oral.
One of the target pairs in this study was
fan
and
fat
; these words share the same onset /f/ and nucleus /æ/
but differ in whether their coda
consonant is nasal /n/ or oral /t/. CVC pairs in Condition 2 shared the same onset and vowel /æ/
but had different oral coda consonants. An example of this type of pair is
pass
and
pack
; they
both have an onset /p/ follow
ed by an /æ/ but they differ in that one has a coda stop /k/ and the
other a fricative /s/.
I included this type of pair to be able to test whether phonetically
implemented differences might prompt an individual to judge these pairs to be different, thus
making this methodology unsuitable for drawing conclusions about phonologization
82
Table
4
Conditions of Lexical Pairs in the sub
-
phonemic judgement task
CONDITION
Vowel Phoneme
Final Consonant Nasality
Example Pair
1
/æ/
nasal
-
oral
FAN
-
FAT
2
/æ/
oral
-
oral
PASS
-
PAT
3
/
/
nasal
-
oral
PEN
-
PET
4
/
/
oral
-
oral
PET
-
PECK
5
/
nasal
-
nasal or oral
-
oral
BOT
-
BOUGHT
6
mix
Mix
BIT
-
BOMB
. As is the case in other studies on /æ/ in the dialect area, speakers in Lansing show clear
conditioning within the pre
-
oral
token
cloud such that there is a gradient difference in vowel
space. For example, many speakers produced /æ/ before fricatives l
ower than the rest of the pre
-
oral
tokens
, others produced /æ/ before affricates higher than the rest of the conditioning
environments in the pre
-
oral cloud, and often /æ/ before /l/ was produced lower than the rest of
the pre
-
oral
tokens
. Crucially,
in
t
he
analysis of
trajectory
,
the difference between /æ/ before
these various consonant types is the result of low
-
level co
-
articulation rather than any
phonological difference, i.e. they moved in lockstep with each other towards a separate phonetic
target th
an pre
-
nasal /æ/. Thus, in the present judgement task, if phonologization is what is
driving
different
responses, respondents should judge pairs of different pre
-
oral tokens as the
same
whether they produce them with different acoustics or not. Take for
example one of the
83
C
ondition 2 pairs
pa
ck
and
pa
ss
. Although
/æ/
before /k/ is gradiently different than /æ/ before
/s/
in the vowel space, this difference is not expected to be meaningful to respondents and thus
the expectation is that they will be le
ss likely to judge /æ/ in these two words to be different.
This is the expectation for responses to all lexical pairs in this condition. If a respondent judges
the pairs in this condition to be different, then this is an indication that phonetic implemen
tation
differences are what the respondent is relying on. In this case, a claim that
C
ondition
1
(target
pairs) judgements are an indication of phonological representations would be unsubstantiated. If
a respondent judges
Condition 1
pairs (target pairs) to be different but
C
ondition
2
pairs to be the
same, it is more likely that their judgements about
C
ondition
1
pairs are representative of a
perceived phonological difference rather than phonetic differences. If a respondent were to
judge both condition one and two pairs to be the same then this might suggest that they are
relying on some other cue, i.e. orthography.
Two more conditions,
Condition 3 and Condition 4
, were included in this experiment to
(1) determine whether speakers
are making judgements based on phonological representation
rather than acoustic differences, and (2) to distract the participant from focusing on /æ/.
Condition 3
CVC pairs were like the target pairs but had a vowel other than /æ/
-
either /
/ or /
/.
An
example of this type of pair is
pen
and
pet
; they share the same
onset
/p/ and vowel /
/ but
differ in whether the final consonant is nasal /n/ or oral /t/. Aside from distracting the respondent
from the focus of the study (/æ/), the primary reason for ad
ding these pairs was to determine
whether judgements for the target pairs
those with /æ/ in oral and nasal contexts
are indeed
based on phonological representation and not just acoustic difference. The logic here is the same
as that for condition two
pairs (e.g.
pass
-
pat
); because the difference between /
/ and /
/ in pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral environments in Lansing is not due to a phonological representation difference
84
but rather a low
-
level co
-
articulatory effect, respondents are not expected to judge
pre
-
nasal and
pre
-
oral pairs as different. Participants are also not expected to judge various combinations of
pre
-
oral /
/ as different because as is the case with pairs of pre
-
oral /æ/, the difference between
them are only the result of phonetic implemen
tation rather than an inherent difference in
phonological representation. The same is true for /
/. Thus, I balanced the pool of stimuli to
include a fourth condition
, Condition 4,
similar to
Condition 2
pairs. These pairs had the same
onset
, and
nucleus
/
/ or /
/ and differed in their following oral consonant. An example
Condition 3
pair is
pet
and
pe
n
, and Condition 4 pair is
pet
and
pe
ck
.
A fifth condition of CVC pairs was included as filler pairs in the experiment. These
Condition 5
pairs tested
another on
-
going change in Lansing
the merger of /
/ and /
pairs in this condition shared the same
onset
and
coda
consonant but di
ffered in whether the
vowel was /
/ or /
th
condition is
bot
and
bought
.
Judgements for these pairs were not included in the analysis for this dissertation.
The final condition
, Condition 6,
was composed of f
iller CVC pairs.
Some of these pairs
had
vowels and final consonants
that
did not match orthographically or phonemically and should
have been judged to be different by every participant in the study. An example pair is
bit
and
bomb
, where
/
/ and /
different phonemes and are represented with different orthographic
symbols, as are /t/ and /m/.
The vowels and consonants of other pairs matched orthographically
but differed in phonemic representation, .e.g.
make
and
mack.
A subset of the pairs in this
condition had different vowel phonemes that were represented with the same grapheme, , e.g.
make
and
mack
. While the vowels in these words are represented with the same orthographic
symbol they map onto different phonemes, /e
/ and /æ/, respectively. These were included to
ensure that participants were not making judgements based on orthography alone.
One of the
85
purposes of including this condition was to further distract the participant from focusing on /æ/
pairs by including
lexical items with other vowel phonemes in them. The other motivation for
including these pairs was to eliminate participants who were not paying attention to the task or
who were making judgements based on orthography alone.
If a participant judged
mak
e
and
mack
to be the same then it is likely that they were making judgements based on orthography
alone. If, however, a participant judged the pairs in Conditions 1 through 4 (pan
-
pass, pass
-
pack,
pen
-
pet, pet
-
peck) to be the same but those in Condition 6
to be different, it is more likely the
case that they are taking into consideration their own pronunciation of these phonemes rather
than relying on orthography alone.
3.3.2.2
Experimental Task
This experiment was presented via two methods; an online survey and on a piece of paper. The
online survey was disseminated via Qualtrics
(Qualtrics 2005)
.
Fourteen of the 2017/8
sociol
inguistic interview participants did the task on a piece of paper, while four completed the
survey online.
Because of technical difficulties during some of the sociolinguistic interviews,
ten participants completed a paper version of this survey. The pap
er version was identical to that
of the Qualtrics survey.
Upon entering the survey on Qualtrics, participants read a consent form, which is
provided in
Appendix
0
. Consent to having their data used for analysis was granted by clicking a
button at the bottom of the screen which took the participant to the first block of questions. For
those who did the paper version, consent was given at the beginning
of the sociolinguistic
interview. The first block of questions in the survey was a set of demographic questions. These
questions
were
used to ensure that respondents fit the demographic criteria of this project.
Sociolinguistic Interview participants di
d not have to respond to this block of questions, as their
86
demographic information was already provided.
A discussion of participant demographics is
provided below in section
3.3.2.4
. A second block of questions in the survey
was
part of an
experiment for another study
(Nesbitt 201
8b)
. For this task, participants were presented with
CVCVC American English words and asked to indicate which syllable the medial consonant
belonged to
the second or first. Analysis of the data from this block is not included in this
dissertation.
The third block of questions made up the judgement task, which is the focus of this
dissertation
. In this block, participants were visually presented with pairs of words and were
instructed to judge whether the vowels in the pairs sounded the same or di
fferent to them. The
following instructions were positioned at the top of their screen/paper throughout this block of
the experiment, so that every time a pair of words was presented on the screen
/paper
, so too were
the instructions.
For each pair of wor
ds, read aloud each word and indicate whether the vowels
in those two words sound the same or different to you. Try not to think too hard
about your response.
Provide the first response that comes to mind.
There are
no right or wrong answers.
Participan
ts indicated whether the vowels in a given pair sounded the same or different
by clicking (or circling on their piece of paper)
same
or
different
. After judging one pair of
words, they went on to the next pair of words, and so on. About five pairs appeared on the same
page before a participant had to press a button to navigate to the next page. Pairs were presented
87
in random order for each parti
cipant. To ensure more statistical power, each pair of words was
presented twice. In total, participants judged whether the vowels in sixty pairs (6 conditions x 5
pairs x 2 trials) of CVC lexical items were the same or different to them.
Upon completi
ng the survey, participants were asked if they were taking the survey for
for participating and notified them that they were finished with the survey. Those who
nickname
in order to receive the class credit
. Upon entering their name, they were informed that
they could receive more credit for forwarding the survey to an o
lder family member. They were
then thanked for participating and notified that they were finished with the survey.
3.3.2.3
Participant Recruitment and Selection
This experiment was disseminated on Qualtrics at various times between April 2018 and
February 2019.
The first group of participants were undergraduate students at Michigan State
University who agreed to participate in exchange for class credit, along with any family
members to whom they forwarded the survey. Other participants were those who did the
so
ciolinguistic interview discussed in the previous chapter. I also disseminated the survey via
social media and email. From these various recruitment methods, 252 people participated in this
experiment.
Many participants were eliminated from the study bec
ause they did not meet the
demographic criteria for this dissertation; they either were not a native of Lansing, MI, did not
identify as white/Caucasian,
answered
stay
-
at
-
home parent
,
or had considerable experience speaki
ng a language other than English. For the latter criteri
on
, I
88
language other than English. Native Lansing status was defined as: (1) having been born and
lived in t
to enter the zip code of the place they were raised. I identified t
hem as native if this zip code was
within 10 miles of the Lansing city center (the capit
o
l).
Participants in this study were required to
have been born in Lansing
, which is a different criterion than
that defined
for the Lansing Speech
Corpus
.
R
ecall that
r
ather than requiring that the Lansing Speech Corpus speakers be born in
Lansing,
I set the cutoff at
age
5
.
This
was merely a methodological decision
because many of
the oral histories speakers did not explicitly state that they were born in Lansing but
did make
reference to living there since before age 5.
I also eliminated anyone who did not respond to the
questions about education, occupation, and/or year of birth, and anyone who reported that they
were not 18 or older because I was not approved to t
est minors.
Sixty
-
five participants were excluded from the analysis due to various performance
related issues. First, participants were eliminated if they did not answer at least 90% of the
experimental questions. Participants were also eliminated from t
he analysis if they provided the
same response (either
same
or
different
) to 75% or more of the pairs in the survey. Participants
were also excluded from the analysis if they judged
more than one of
the
make/mack
or
bit/bomb
type
pairs in
Condition
6
to be the same.
In theory, every participant should have judged
C
ondition
6
pairs to be different but because I know that the survey is repetitive and perhaps
some participants could have misread one of these pairs, I was more conservative with this
elim
ination criteri
on
. Rather than eliminating everyone who responded
same
for any
Condition
6
pairs, I eliminated anyone who responded
same
to more than one of t
hese pairs
.
89
3.3.2.4
Demographic distribution
After the above demographic and performance eliminations,
the resulting pool of participants for
this experiment was 107 white monolingual English
-
speaking Lansing natives. The
demographic distribution of these participants is
given
below.
The distribution of participants according to generational cohort is prov
ided below in
Table
5
Participants were given the following age rang
es to choose from: 17 or younger, 18
34, 35
54,
55
74, and 75 and older. Those who responded
17 or younger
were eliminated from the analysis
because they are considered minors.
Table
5
Distribution of experimental participants by Generational Cohort
Silent
Baby Boomer
Generation X
Millennial
Total
16
35
28
28
107
The remaining respondents were classified according to the generational cohorts
employed for the Lansing Speech Corpus construction: the Millennial generation is made up of
those who responded 18
34 , those who responded 35
54 are Generation X, those who
r
esponded 55
74 made up the Baby Boomer generation, and those 75 and older are the Silent
generation respondents.
As with the sociolinguistic interview participants, socio
-
economic status
for this experiment was determined by occupation and education level
. In the survey, participants
W
hat level of education is necessary to do your type of job?
and were given five
90
choices;
some high school, high s
or
post
. I followed the same procedure for classifying these participants as I did for
the sociolinguistic interview participants. Those in manual labor, low
-
level service, and care jobs
that require less than 2 years of training after high
-
school were classified as
blue
-
collar
. Those
in managerial and professional positions whose occupations required at least 2 years of technical
training outside of high
-
school
were classified as
white
-
c
ollar
. For participants who indicated
that they were a student or retired, I classified them according to their response to the question
about education; those who chose
some college/vocational
or above were classified as
white
-
collar.
The distribution of
participants according to generational cohort and social class is
provided below in Table
6
.
Table
6
Distribution of experimental participants by Generational Cohort and Socio
-
Economic Status
Generation
Blue
-
Collar
White
-
Collar
Total
Silent
9
7
16
Boomer
17
18
35
Gen X
14
14
28
Millennial
13
15
28
Total
53
54
107
The effect of gender on this change in progress was not explored in this
analysis
. Though
it would have been ideal to consider this social factor, especially because many of the acoustic
changes to /æ/ in Lansing are conditioned by gender
(
Chapter 4
)
, gender was not evenly
91
distributed across generational cohorts and social class groups. In
Table
7
, I display the
distribution of gender in this sample for transparency and because, as I note in
Chapter 4
, gender
might be an important factor for t
h
e
propagation
of this change.
Table
7
Distribution
of
experimental participants by Generational Cohort, Socio
-
Economic Status, and
Gender
Blue Collar
White Collar
Silent
6f
3m
5f
2m
Baby Boomer
14f
3m
10f
8m
Gen X
11f
3m
11f
3m
Millennial
10f
3m
9f
6m
3.3.2.5
Statistical
Analysis
For this task, phonological allophony between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ will be
identified
if
Condition 1
pairs elicit significantly more
different
responses than
Condition 2
pairs,
e.g.
if
participants judge pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ to be different but pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs to be
the same. The primary goal of this experiment was to ascertain whether phonologization was
abrupt or gradual in Lansing, i.e. is it the case that the g
eneration of speakers in which pre
-
nasal
and pre
-
oral /æ/ begin to diverge in phonetic space are the same generation of participants to
judge /æ/ to be different allophones? As such, abruptness will be investigated by comparing
responses between
C
ondition
s
1
and
2
in
whichever generation pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ diverge
from one another in F1/F2 space, as determined by the trajectories analysis
. Phonologization
92
will be
interpreted
as abrupt if
this generation of
participants judge /æ/ before nasal conso
nants
to be different from /æ/ before oral consonants but pre
-
oral /æ/ pairs to be the same.
Phonologization, however, will be identified as gradual in Lansing if only subsequent
generations judge /æ/ before nasal consonants to be different from /æ/ before
oral consonants.
As with the production data, I will examine social class as it conditions same/different
judgements in each condition. This analysis will be utilized to continue the discussion regarding
who the linguistic innovators are and who are the
likely retainers of the old mechanical/co
-
articulatory allophonic system.
Responses to this task were analyzed using a binomial mixed
-
effects logistic regression
model in R
(R Core Team 2013)
.
Response was entered as the dependent variable,
while
Condition, Generational Cohort, Social Class, and their interactions were entered as
predictor/independent variables, and Participant and Pair as random
intercepts
.
Response had
two levels (same, different), Condition had two levels (one, two), Gene
rational Cohort had four
levels (Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial), and Social Class had two levels (Blue
-
collar, White
-
collar).
To conclude, this dissertation will examine the phonetics and phonology of /æ/ over
generational time in 20
th
century Lansing.
Chapter 4
will
address the embedding problem of
phonological change by
examin
ing
the NCS diagnostics: fronting, raising, diphthong
al quality,
and /æ/ system
as they are related to generational time, social class, and gender
in the
community.
Chapter 5
will examine the actuation
,
social embedding, and
propagation of nasal
allophony through the apparent time analysis of allophone trajectory and sub
-
phonemic
judgement task res
ponses
.
93
/
æ
/
IN 20
TH
CENTURY LANSING
4.1
Introduction
This
chapter is concerned with the influence of generational time, gender, and social class on the
realization of /æ/ in 20
th
century Lansing. I will examine these factors with respect to 4
of
the
5
NCS diagnostics
which were preliminarily examined in Wagner
e
t al.
(2016) and Nesbitt (2018),
and described in
Chapter 2
.
that have been described in the literature. These diagnostics include
(i)
movement alon
g F1
of pre
-
oral /æ/
,
(ii)
movement along F2
of pre
-
oral /æ/
,
(iii)
diphthongal
quality of pre
-
oral /æ/
,
and
(iv)
the separation of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral allophones in F1/F2
space. The diagnostic being left out of the analysis is the position of /æ/
relative to /
/ in the
vowel space. Because /
/ lowers as part of both the NCS and LBMS, the relative position of
these phonemes is less informative of NCS participation (or rejection) in the current sample.
By examining how these diagnostics change over
time, we can get a more thorough view
of the time window for the adoption and rejection of the NCS in Lansing. The inclusion of
social class and gender will allow for a more nuanced picture of which community members are
on the leading end of the change,
which can in turn allow us to
determine
whether the
movements of /æ/ are changes from above or below in the community. The
analysis of Pillai
-
Bartlett scores will
either confirm or deny the preliminary findings in Wagner et al
.
(2016) and
Nesbitt (2018)
that there is a diachronic progression from
systems that are advanced
rais
ed
to
those that are
common raised (or less advanced)
to nasal systems
.
This will contribute to the
discussion in
Cha
pter 5
about whether
phonologization of the nasal split occurred gradually or
94
abruptly
in the community
. I investigate these measures against the hypothesis that the
emergence of non
-
NCS features is driven by social
aspiration.
4.2
Results
The
methods for creating the Lansing Speech Corpus (selecting speakers from existing corpora,
and interviewing additional speakers to fill demographic gaps) are provided in
Chapter 3
(section
3.2
), along with details of the coding and statistical analysis procedures.
The following is an
analysis of the four diagnostics with respect to generational time, social class, and gender in the
Lansing Speech Corpus.
Below, results of the
mixed effects
regression and ANOVA analyses of
the social patterning of /æ/ in Lansing acr
oss the 20
th
century are presented for each of the four
dependent diagnostic
variables (see
3.2.6
for full details of statistical methods). Section
4.3
reports on the height of the nucleus (measured by F1 at the midpoint); section
4.4
reports on the
backness
of the nucleus (measured by F2 at the midpoint); diphthongal quality (trajectory length
measurement) is examined in section
4.5
; and in section
4.6
, the relative conditioning of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral allophones (measured by Pillai
-
Bartlett score) is modeled.
Section
4.7
language change, chain shifting, the NCS, and North American dialectology are p
rovided in
Chapter 6
.
For consistency across sections, I report the generational change (or lack thereof) for the
dependent
variable, followed by an analysis of other main effects and interactions that came out
as significant in the analyses. In all of the figures below, dots represent speaker means
accompanied by a loess
curve
with a 95% confidence interval.
For ease of refer
ence, the
generational cohort groups used for the present study are as follows: Silent generation (born
1925
1945), the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946
1964), and Generation X (born 1965
95
1985). I also note that data from the Millennial generation speaker
s (born 1985
199
9
) in Wagner
et al
.
(2016) are utilized in the figures as a temporal reference but are excluded from the
statistical analyses and general discussion of the changes described.
4.3
F1 of
P
re
-
O
ral /æ/
Figure
10
displays average F1 values across generational time in the sample.
Looking
at
the trend line, it appears that F1 values remain stable from speakers born in the 1920s to the
1960s that this is followed by a
n increase (decline in the vowel space)
in the 1990s
.
Figure
10
Average F1(Hz) values of pre
-
ora
l /æ/ by speaker year of birth in 20
th
century Lansing.
Lansing
Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=
21
) for reference.
This visual interpretation is supported by follow
-
up t
-
tests where there is no significant
effect of generational time in
the transition from Silent (
M
= 781 Hz,
SD
= 37 Hz) to Baby
96
Boomer generation speakers (
M
= 793.7 Hz,
SD
= 43.56 Hz),
t
(20.8) =
-
0.47, p > 0.05, nor in the
transition into Generation X (
M
= 777.4 Hz,
SD
= 26.8 Hz),
t
(18) =
-
0.08, p > 0.05.
Looking
at
the distribution of mean values over time
in
Figure
10
, however, there is a clearer apparent time
picture
:
F
rom the
Si
lent to Baby Boomer generation
,
the
range o
f F1 values
increases
such that
some
Baby Boomer speakers have higher mean
s
in the vowel space
than Silent generation
speakers and others have much lower
means
.
In Generation X
,
mean
F1
values converge
at the
midpoint of the Baby Boomer range and
subsequently increase (lower in the vowel space as
shown in
Figure
10
).
So, although the trend line
and follo
w
-
up t
-
tests
appear to show stability in
the first half of the 20
th
century,
there is
movement along F1 in the Baby Boomer generation
,
albeit in different directions for
different
speaker
s
. This is confirmed by the regression analysis
.
Table
8
displays the results of the mixed effects regression analysis
on F1 of pre
-
oral /æ/
.
According to the mixed effects regression analysis (
Table
8
), the apparent time picture of
-
oral /æ/ in the height dimension is one of raising in the vowel space (decreasing
F1) from Silent t
o Baby Boomer generation, followed by lowering (increasing F1) into
Generation X. Below, I show that raising from Silent to Baby Boomer generation is conditioned
by gender. The main effect of gender is significant in the model (see
Table
8
). There is also a
significant interaction of gender with generational cohort, such that the direction of the
difference depends on generational cohort. I will expl
ore this change via follow
-
up Welch two
sample t
-
tests in
4.3.1
. Though social class is not significant in the model, it does contribute to a
signific
ant three
-
way interaction with generational cohort and gender such that social class is
only significant for men. The results of the follow
-
up t
-
tests for this interaction are investigated
in
0
.
97
Table
8
Best fit m
ixed
-
e
ffects
m
odel of
pre
-
oral /æ
/
F1
Predictor
Value(s)
Estimate
Std.
Error
df
t
-
value
Significance
747.46
13.5
45.12
55.369
***
GEN
GenX
46.69
18.94
41.46
2.465
**
GEN
Silent
45.78
18.86
39.72
2.428
**
GENDER
male
78.41
17.46
31.48
4.491
***
SES
WhiteCollar
30.59
17.5
31.86
1.748
[0.090]
GEN
GENDER
GenX
male
-
90.69
25.08
32.69
-
3.616
***
GEN
GENDER
Silent
male
-
96.57
25.14
32.42
-
3.841
***
GEN
GENDER
SES
Boomer
female
WhiteCollar
-
27.74
25.83
37.18
-
1.074
[0.290]
GEN: GENDER:SES
GenX
female
WhiteCollar
-
38.82
25.3
33.65
-
1.534
[0.134]
GEN
GENDER
SES
Silent
female
WhiteCollar
-
45.72
25.61
35.23
-
1.785
[0.083]
GEN
GENDER
SES
Boomer
male
WhiteCollar
-
64.84
23.45
25.83
-
2.765
**
GEN
GENDER
SES
GenX
male
WhiteCollar
-
52.1
24.75
31.14
-
2.105
*
Si
gnificant
difference
(p < 0.001) is reported as ***
;
significant
difference
(p < 0.01) is reported as **
;
significant
difference
(p < 0.05) is reported as *, and
non
-
significant
appears as []
.
4.3.1
F1, Generational Time and Gender
Fi
gure
11
displays the interacting effect of generational cohort and gender on F1 values. As can
be seen from the different trajectories for female speakers (red line) and male speakers (blue
line), the
F1 target is different for each gender group. This
gender difference is especially evident
for speakers born in the Boomer generation, 1940s
1960s
.
The wide range of F1 values
exhibited in
Figure
10
is due to a gender split in this generation, whereby women have lower F1
values (higher in the vowel space) and men have higher F1 values (lower in the vowel space)
than any other speakers in the sample.
98
Fi
gure
11
Average F1(Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and gender in 20th century
Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (
n=21
) for reference.
Let us examine women and men separately first.
Fi
gure
11
shows and follow
-
up Welch
two sample t
-
tests confirm that within the female group, there are on
average higher realizations
(lower F1 values) of pre
-
oral /æ/ in the Baby Boomer generation (
M
= 741.3 Hz,
SD
= 30 Hz)
compared to the Silent generation (
M
= 777.2 Hz,
SD
= 38.3 Hz),
t
(
9.5
)
=
2.22
,
p<0.0
5
. This is
followed by a significant
decrease
in realizations (higher F1 values) in
Generation X
(
M
= 786
Hz,
SD
= 23.1 Hz) compared with Baby Boomer women,
t
(
9.5
) =
3.3
, p<0.0
1
. Thus, for
women in Lansing, the nucleus of pre
-
oral /æ/ rose in the first half of the 20
th
century, and fell in
99
Generatio
n X
. Recall from
Table
8
that social class did not have a significant effect on F1 for
women.
In the male group, however, there is a different temporal
pattern, as well as an effect of
social class. Overall, as shown in
Fi
gure
11
æ/ falls from the Silent
(
M =
785.2 Hz
, SD =
3
9.4)
to the Boomer generation
(
M =
808 Hz
, SD =
24.5)
(higher F1
values), before rising in
Generation X
(
M =
760.8 Hz
, SD =
25.7)
(lower F1 values).
This is the
opposite of the pattern for women, as illustrated previously in
Fi
gure
11
, whose mean /
æ/
nucleus rose and then fell.
These different traj
ectories have led to the following effect of gender across generational
time: No significant effect of gender in the Silent generation; women (
M
= 777 Hz,
SD
= 38.3
Hz) and men (
M
= 785.2 Hz,
SD
= 39 Hz) exhibit similar F1 values, t(
9.99
) =
0.11
, p
> 0.05
. In
the Baby Boomer generation, there is a significant effect of gender such that women (
M
= 741.3
Hz,
SD
= 30 Hz) exhibit higher realizations of
/æ/
(lower F1) than men (
M
= 808 Hz,
SD
= 24.5
Hz),
t
(
9.74
) =
4.61
, p<0.001. Finally, in
Generation X
, men (
M
= 760.8 Hz,
SD
= 25.7 Hz)
exhibit higher realizations of
/æ/
(lower F1) than women (
M
= 786 Hz,
SD
= 23.1 Hz),
t(
9.87
)=
1.83
, p<0.0
5
. In sum, there was no gender effect at the turn of the 20
th
century
on raisin
g
,
women then
had higher realizations in the
middle of the 20
th
century, which was followed by
male speakers exhibiting higher realizations later.
4.3.2
Summary of F1
R
esults
At the community level
there was stability of the nucleus of pre
-
oral /æ/
in the F1
dim
ension
in the beginning
and middle of
the 20
th
century
, which was followed by a rise in F1
values in the 1990s
.
This is m
itig
ated by the
fact that change was gender
-
conditioned, i.e. each
gender
exhibited opposite changes over time
. In the Silent to Baby Boomer generational
100
transition, women raised /æ/
while men lowered
.
In
Generation X
,
wo
men
lowered
/æ/
and men
raised /æ/. In the subsequent Millennial generation, women continued to lower /æ/ and men
proceeded to do so also.
Th
erefore, while at the community level there appeared to be stability
in the first half of the twentieth century, change over time is evident when gender is taken into
account.
4.4
F2 of
P
re
-
O
ral /æ/
Table
9
displays the results of the mixed effects regression analysis for F2. The
reference/intercept group
are
Baby Boomer
s
, as before
. As shown in the table, there is a main
effect of generational cohort, with
Generation X
speakers having significantly more backed
/æ/
(lower F2 values) than the cohort reference group, Baby Boomers.
Table
9
Best fit m
ixed
-
e
ffec
ts
m
odel of pre
-
oral /æ/ F2
Predictor
Value(s)
Estimate
Std. Error
df
t
-
value
Significance
1979.902
38.966
37.454
50.812
***
GEN
GenX
-
236.107
54.828
36.567
-
4.306
***
GEN
Silent
-
12.144
54.893
36.727
-
0.221
[0.826]
GENDER
male
-
88.613
53.633
33.645
-
1.652
[0.108]
GEN
GENDER
GenX
male
198.338
76.378
34.509
2.597
*
GEN
GENDER
Silent
male
6.431
76.521
34.737
0.084
[0.934]
Significant difference (p < 0.001) is reported as ***; significant difference (p < 0.01) is reported as **; significant
difference (p < 0.05) is reported as *, and
non
-
significant
appears as [].
Unlike for F1, there is no significant difference in F2 realization between Boomers and
Generation X in the regression, and there is no main effect of gender.
There is, however, a
significant interaction between generation and gender. Social class and its
interaction with the
101
other main effects did not come out as significant in the model and will not be explored in what
follows
Figure
12
displays average F2 values across
apparent
time in the sample. This, along
with the regression output in
Table
9
,
show
s
that in Lansing, the general pi
cture is one of
stability in the transition from Silent to Baby Boomer generation, which is followed by
significant backing (lower F2 values) in Generation X. This is the same trend
that was observed
for F1 values in the follow
-
up t
-
tests.
Figure
12
Average F2 (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth in 20th century Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (
n=21
) for reference.
102
Since neither the main effect of social class or its interaction with other social variables
was significant in the model, I will not explore the effects of social class on F2 values in what
follows. Gender was not a significant main effect on F2, but as w
e saw for F1, its interaction
with generational cohort was significant, whereby the effect of gender changes over generational
time.
4.4.1
F2, Generational Time and Gender
Figure
13
displays the interacting effect of generational cohort and gender (red = female) on F2
values in the corpus.
Figure
13
Average F2(Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and gender in 20th
century
Lansing. Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (n=21) for reference.
103
As shown in the figure (and see
Table
1
), for women, stability in F2 between the Silent
(
M
=
1977 Hz,
SD
= 131.5)
and Boomer generations
(
M
= 1996.5 Hz,
SD
= 127.5),
t
(9.99) = 0.285, p
> 0.05) is followed by a significant decrease i
n F2 values into Generation X (
M
= 1753.4 Hz,
SD
= 70.9), who exhibit lower F2 values than their predecessors,
t
(8.07) = 4.23, p<0.01.
In
Figure
13
, F2
values remain stable for men. There are no significant differences in F2 values in the male
group from Silent
(
M
= 1900 Hz,
SD
= 61.3)
to Boomer generation
(
M
= 189.3 Hz,
SD
= 87),
t
(9.38) =
0.09, p > 0.05 nor in the transition to Generation X (
M
= 1874.2 Hz,
SD
= 130.6),
t
(8.66) = 0.27, p > 0.05).
4.4.2
Summary of F2
R
esults
In sum, I observe that pre
-
oral /æ/ has moved farther back in the vowel space from the
beginning to the end of the 20
th
century, with the significant change occurring in the tran
sition
from Baby Boomer to
Generation X
speakers, at least for women. In the Silent and Baby
Boomer generations, women exhibited fronter realizations than men. With the retraction of pre
-
oral /æ/ exhibited by women in the middle of the 20
th
century, the
pattern switched such that men
exhibit fronter realizations than women.
4.5
Diphthongal Quality of
P
re
-
O
ral /æ/
In this section,
I
examine diphthongal quality of pre
-
oral /æ/ by measuring the change in F1/F2
from the midpoint of the vowel to its offset. Diphth
ongal quality
(DQ)
is
third
diagnostic of NCS /æ/.
As discussed earlier in
Chapter 2
,
p
re
-
oral /æ/ is more diphthongal in the
Inland North than it is in other regions of North America
,
which have more monophthongal
realizations of pre
-
oral /æ/
(Boberg & Strassel 2000; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006)
. In what
follows,
I
test whether diphthongal quality of pre
-
oral /æ/ has changed over ti
me for Lansing
104
speakers.
The results of a mixed effects regression analysis are in
Ta
ble
10
; a visual plot of DQ
over apparent time is in Figure
14
.
Ta
ble
10
Best fit m
ixed
-
e
ffects
m
odel of pre
-
oral /æ/ Diphthongal Quality (DQ)
Predictor
Value(s)
Estimate
Std. Error
df
t
-
value
Significance
(Intercept: boomer female)
253.42
17.83
37.95
14.217
***
GEN
GenX
-
62.01
25.12
36.76
-
2.469
**
GEN
Silent
-
12.46
25.17
37.06
-
0.495
[0.624]
GENDER
male
-
63.14
23.9
30.78
-
2.642
**
GEN
GENDER
GenX
male
65.64
34.4
32.58
1.908
[0.065]
GEN
GENDER
Silent
male
-
22.99
34.37
32.59
-
0.669
[0.508]
Significant difference (p < 0.001) is reported as ***; significant difference (p < 0.01) is reported as **; significant
difference (p < 0.05) is reported as *, and
non
-
significant
appears as [].
Figure
14
, below, traces the diphthongal quality of pre
-
oral /æ/ (in red) across year of birth in the
Lansing sample. For comparison, I have included
mean DQ values of
/
/ (in
blue
) as a reference
for
a
front
monophthong. Higher diphthongal quality values
on the y
-
axis
indicates more
values higher than 300 represent a large amount of transition between the vow
its offset, whereas values around 150 represent
a difference commensurate with that of a
monophthongal realization
.
105
Figure
14
Average Diphthongal Quality (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/, /e
/, and /
/ by speaker y
ear of birth
in 20th century Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (
n=21
) for reference.
As displayed in
Ta
ble
10
and visible in
Figure
14
, there is a main effect of generational
cohort but only in the t
ransition from Baby Boomer to Generation X speakers, where
diphthongal quality values fall, i.e. pre
-
oral /æ/ becomes more monophthongal. Neither social
class nor its interaction with the other fixed effects come out as significant and they were thus
excl
uded from the final model. There is a significant main effect of gender in the model, but this
effect disappears in Generation X, and the interaction is not significant in the model.
106
4.5.1
Diphthongal Quality and Gender
Figure
15
displays DQ measure over time partitioned by gender. In this figure (and follow
-
up t
-
tests confirm it), there is an effect of gender in the first two generations, where women have
hi
gher DQ values than men.
Figure
15
Average Diphthongal Quality (Hz) values of pre
-
oral /æ/ by speaker year of birth and gender in
20th century Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (
n=21
) for reference.
In the Silent generation, women exhibit larger DQ values (
M
= 234.28 Hz,
SD
= 81.5)
than men (
M
= 152.39 Hz,
SD
= 25.1),
t
(5.85) = 2.44, p<0.05; and in the Baby Boomer
generat
ion, women (
M
= 253.28 Hz,
SD
= 57.64) exhibit larger DQ values than men (
M
= 183.1
107
Hz,
SD
= 25.2),
t
(7.22) = 2.77, p<0.05. This gender effect disappears in Generation X, however,
where women (women
M
= 186.93) and men (
M
= 187.44) have similar DQ values,
t
(9.38)
=
0.05,p > 0.05.
In other words,
men
and women
/æ/
seems to
move in opposite directions over time until converging in
Generation X
. Within the female
group, there is no statistically significant effect of
generational cohort on DQ values between
silent generation (
M
= 234.28 Hz,
SD
= 81.5) and
B
aby
B
oomer generation speakers (
M
=
253.28 Hz,
SD
= 57.64),
t
(
8.53
)
=
0.34
,
p > 0.05
. There is an effect in the subsequent
generational transition whereby
Generatio
n X
women (
M
= 186.93,
SD
= 31.3) have lower DQ
values than their predecessors,
t
(
8.32
)
=
2.48
,
p<0.0
5
. Within the male group there is a
statistically significant effect of generational cohort in the first half of the 20
th
century. Silent
generation men
(
M
= 152.39 Hz,
SD
= 25.1) exhibit smaller DQ values than
B
aby
B
oomer
generation men (
M
= 183.1 Hz,
SD
= 25.2),
t
(9.96
)
=
2.27
,
p<0.0
5
. Subsequently, there is
non
-
significant
of generational cohort on DQ values;
Generation X
men exhibit similar DQ values
(
M
= 187.44,
SD
=
41.8
) as their predecessors
t
(
8.21
)
=
0.22
,
p > 0.05
. Thus, for women, there
was stability and then a decrease in diphthongal quality from the baby boomer to
Generation X
speakers. This is in contrast to
the male group where DQ values rose and then remain stable.
The interaction between generational cohort and gender
was likely
in
significant in the regression
model because
though there was an interaction of
gender
and generational cohort
in the
transition
from Silent to Baby Boomer generation, the gender effect disappeared in Generation X
.
4.5.2
Summary of Diphthongal Quality Results
In sum, diphthongal quality of pre
-
oral /æ/
in Lansing
has
have
shift
ed
toward
monophthongization
.
Diphthongal quality
peaked for women in the 1
920s
1940s
and then
declined, while that for men peaked in
the 1960s
and then declined.
The transition from a female
108
lead in previous generations to no gender difference in
Generation X
is reminiscent of the social
change we have
previously seen for the F1 and F2 of
/æ/
in sections
4.3
and
4.4
. Clearly, the
post
-
Boomer period is a critical one for /æ/ in the Lansing speech community.
4.6
Nasal
A
llophony
The last diagnostic of NCS participation
to be considered in
this dissertation is that of
pre
-
nasal
and pre
-
oral
token
distribution
at the level of the speaker. We know from previous studies
that
Inland Northern speech is characterized by
unconditioned and continuous
/æ/ systems, though
more recent studies have noted the appearance of the supra
-
local n
asal system
(Chapter 2)
.
In
what follows, I examine the effect of
generational time
on the
se systems
as measured by Pillai
-
Bartlett score in twentieth century Lansing
(see 2.2.2.6 for details on Pillai
-
Bartlett)
.
Table
11
displays the output of
an
ANOVA analysis
on
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores
in Lansing
.
The only
significant effect
on these scores
is of
speaker year of birth
; gender and social class ha
d
non
-
significant
on Pillai
-
Bartlett scores.
Table
11
ANOVA results
of
Pillai
-
Bartlett
score
analysis
Df
Sum Sq
Mean Sq
F value
Pr(>F)
YOB
1
25.13
25.13
21.85
4.53
**
*
Residuals
3
4
39.11
1.
15
Figure
16
displays the Pillai
-
Bartlett scores for each speaker in the sample across year of
birth. The higher the Pillai
-
Bartlett measurement (from 0 t
o 1), the greater the separation
between pre
-
oral and pre
-
nasal token clouds for that speaker.
109
Figure
16
Per speaker Pillai
-
Bartlett score of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ distribution by speaker year of
birth in 20th century
Lansing.
Lansing Speech Corpus (n=36), plus Millennial speakers (
n=21
) for
reference.
In the figure, we see that the proportion of speakers with Pillai
-
Bartlett scores close to 1
continuously increases from the earliest birth dates onward. This is confir
med by the ANOVA
analysis (
Table 11
). Social class, gender, and their interactions with year of birth were not
significant in the model.
The general picture of the relationship between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token cloud overlap in Lansing is one of incre
asing separation over the 20
th
century.
4.6.1
Summary of Nasal Allophony Results
In sum, there has been a change in the relationship
between
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral allophones of
/æ/ in 20
th
century Lansing.
The community has
increased the distance between /æ/ in these two
environments over time.
Many speakers born in the 1920s had Pillai
-
Bartlett scores close to 0
indicating
an advanced raised /æ/ system. Speakers born in the 1950s and 1960s have larger
110
Pillai
-
Bartlett score
s indicating nasal conditioning, where their /æ/ systems resembled that of a
more common (less advanced) raised /æ/ system. Speakers born in the 1990s have Pillai
-
Bartlett
scores ever closer to zero. The general trend, then, is that t
he
advanced raised
sy
stem
is
gradually
giving way to
a nasal system.
I note that this change is ongoing, however. Though speakers
born in the 1990s have higher Pillai
-
Bartlett scores than their predecessors, none of them have
scores of 1, which would indicate a true gap in p
honetic space between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token clouds.
4.7
Summary: /æ/ in 20
th
C
entury Lansing
The above analysis of the impact of external and internal factors on the realization of /æ/ in 20
th
century Lansing has shown linguistic and social reorganizat
ion, as summarized in
Table
12
and
Table
13
.
Linguistically,
the community has moved from an unconditioned /æ/ system to a nasal
system. In opposition to pre
-
nasal /æ/, the pre
-
oral allophone has lowered and retracted in the
vowel space and has decreased in diphthongal quality. This general trend i
s mediated by the fact
that there was
relative
stability
between the
S
ilent and
B
aby
B
oomer generations that was
followed by a
significant
d
ownward trajectory
in
each of
these measures in the transition to
Generation X
.
I also note that
what looks like
sta
bility between Silent and Baby Boomer
generation
means
is
actually the result of gender conditioning such
women advanced NCS
features during this period while men did not participate in the change.
In short
,
all four of the
diagnostic measures of NCS /æ/
collectively demonstrate that the Lansing speech community has
shifted away from the NCS toward a higher mean
F1
(lower in the vowel space)
,
lower mean
F2
(farther back in the vowel space)
,
lower mean
DQ
(more monophthongal)
,
and higher
Pillai
-
Bartlett sco
re
s
(more separation between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral allophones)
.
111
Table
12
Distribution of /æ/ features across generational time in 20
th
century Lansing
Silent
to
Boomer
Boomer
to
Generation X
F1
Gender conditioned change
Stability
F2
Stability
Retraction
Diphthongal Quality
Stability
Less diphthongal
Nasal conditioning
More nasal conditioning
More nasal conditioning
With regard to the social re
-
organization of NCS
/æ/
characteristics in Lansing,
Table
13
summarizes
which gender group was most advanced for
three of the
four acoustic measures
explored in this dissertation
across each generation;
in the table,
the NCS version of the feature is
more indicative of the specified gender group in that generation
.
Nasal conditioning
, as
measured by Pillai
-
Bartlett score is not included, as the
only social dimension relevant for
t
his
measure
is generational cohort
.
I observe that social conditioning with respect to the
other three
features has changed in the community.
Table
13
Summary of social conditions on acoustically salient NCS features in
20
th
century
Lansing
Silent
Baby Boomer
Generation X
NCS Raising
(F1)
Female
Male
NCS Fronting
(F2)
Female
Female
Male
Diphthongization
Female
Female
112
From the Silent and Baby Boomer generations, women were most advanced in NCS /æ/
raising, fronting and diphthongization. In Generation X, however, as women reversed course
and retreated from the NCS, it was men who exhibited more NCS features.
In
Lansing,
women
led men in advancing NCS features (unconditioned raising, fronting, diphthongization)
in the
beginning of the 20
th
century
.
In Generation X, men advanced NCS features while women began
to
diverge from the range
of these measures in prior generation
s
thus leading the community
change towards NCS reversal/rejection.
These findings are unsurprising, given the fact that
w
omen
are often the leaders of
community change
(Labov 1990).
The
large amount of
inter
-
speaker
variation in the Baby Boomer genera
tion followed by a switch
in social conditioning in
Generation X further support the claims in
Nesbitt (2018)
and
Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason
(
in
press)
which argue that NCS features
were at their height
for speakers born in the
middle of the
20
th
century
and
that they
began to decline thereafter.
In Chapter 5, I
explore
the development
and spread
of nasal allophony for /æ/ at the level of the speaker.
In
Chapter 6
, I discuss the
implications of the results of th
e
phonetic and
phonological analys
es
in this di
ssertation
with a
view to some future potential lines of investigation.
113
PHONOLOGIZATION
OF
/
æ
/
N
ASAL
A
LLOPHONY IN LANSING
5.1
Introduction
I now return to the main research question of this dissertation: What has been the impact of these
changes
in
phonetic targe
t
and social
conditioning
of
/æ/
on the phonological systems of Lansing
speakers?
This chapter addresses two questions regarding th
e
development of a phonological
distinction between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
/æ/
in
Lansing, MI. The first
concerns the Actuation
Problem which asks
why
the change
was initiated. For this, we will ask whether
phonological
/æ/
-
nasal allophony
develop
ed
gradu
ally from a phonetic precursor or wa
s
abruptly posited in the
community
?
The second concerns the
T
ransition
P
roblem
:
how did the change
spread
throughout the community?
I
utilize a combination of methods to answer these questions in this chapter, includi
ng
impressionistic visualizations of phonetic differentiation between allophones of /æ/ and the
analysis of a sub
-
phonemic judgement task. The methodology for both has been provided in
Chapter 3
(section
3.3
).
As a reminder, the data for the trajectory visualizations come from the
Lansing Speech Corpus plus the Millennial speakers in Wagner et al (2016) and Nesbitt (2018),
while the data for the
judgement task come from Lansing Speech Corpus speakers plus others
recruited through supplemental methods.
As I will show, the results of these analyses suggest that phonologization
is
gradual in
Lansing. The trajectory analysis finds that the pre
-
nasal
allophone is phonologically distinct
from the rest of the allophones and that it began to distinguish itself in F1/F2 space among
speakers born in the 1930s. Subsequently, the sub
-
phonemic judgement task shows that no
114
speakers born at that time (or even a
decade later) posit a phonological
distinction
between the
allophones.
This finding that phonologization was gradual supports the
analysis
in
Chapter 2
of
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores
in Lansing
over time
,
which
showed the progression of systems from NCS
raised to continuous to nasal.
The analysis of social factors
in this chapter
suggests that white
-
collar
(women)
respondents are
the
leaders of
this change
and that blue
-
collar respondents are on
the trailing end
.
In what follows,
I present the results of the trajectory analysis (sectio
n
5.2.1
). I analyze the
responses to the sub
-
phonemic judgement task in section
5.2.2
. Section
5.3
concludes this
chapter with a discussion of the methodological implications of the sub
-
phonemic judgement
task.
I consider the implications of these results for our theories of
allophonic phonologization
specifically and phonological change more generally.
As a reminder, this dissertation
distinguishes between allophones that are phonologically distinct and those that are distinguished
only phonetically. Phonological allophones
are distinguished from one another by means of a
phonological rule acting on abstract phonological representations and thus have different
phonological features. Phonetic allophones have the same phonological features and differ only
in phonetic realizat
ion.
5.2
Results
5.2.1
Phonetic and
P
honological
A
llophony
To determine whether any allophone of /æ/
has
become phonologically distinguished from the
rest of the allophones,
I begin with a discussion of trajectories over time for each allophone
.
To
determine whethe
r sub
-
phonemic
conditioning
of /æ/ in Lansing is
phonological, I
compare th
e
analysis
of /æ/
with the same for two other short
-
front vowels; /
/
and /
/
. I follow this analysis
with
a determination of
when
in
the
apparent time trajectory divergence is evi
dent
for /æ/
.
For
115
these comparisons, I utilize the production data from the Lansing Speech Corpus plus that from
Millennials in the Wagner et al (2016) study.
For reference,
birth years in the sample are as
follows: 1925
1945
=
Silent
generation, 1946
1964
=
Baby
Boomer, 1965
1984 = Generation
X, 1985
1999 = Millennial.
In
Figure
17
, I show the trajectory of /æ/ in three following phon
ological environments;
before fricatives (in red), nasals (in green), and stops (in blue).
Each
dot
on the plot represents a
token.
I set aside the trajectories of the pre
-
/
l
/
and pre
-
affricate allophones because of their low
token counts in the sample,
N
=174 and N=166, respectively. These two allophones are produced
on average only 3 times per speaker, which makes any conclusions about conditioning less
robust.
For transparency, I have included a figure of the trajectories of all five phonological
envir
onments in appendi
x
0
.
For now, I focus on a comparison of the trajectories for the pre
-
nasal (in green), pre
-
fricative (in red), and pre
-
stop (in blue) allophones because token counts for these are robust in
the sample, N=2235, N=1382, and N=2332, respectively. In
Figure
17
, we see a clear distinction
between the trajectories of the pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral allophones. The pre
-
fricative (in red) and
pre
-
stop (in blue) allophones f
luctuate in diagonal measurement into Generation X and then
decline into the Millennial generation; they move down and backwards in the vowel space over
time. This is in contrast to the pre
-
nasal allophone (in green) which remains relatively stable
from t
he 1920s onward.
116
Figure
17
Per token diagonal measurement of /æ/ in three following phonological contexts by speaker
year of birth in 20
th
century Lansing.
We can compare the allophonic trajectories of /æ/ with those of /
/ and /
/.
In
Figure
18
, I
show the trajectory of /
/ (left facet) and /
/ (right) in the same three following phonological
environments; before fricatives (in red), nasals (in green), and stops (in blue). We again
ignore
the other following environments, as token counts for them are relatively low.
117
Figure
18
Per token diagonal measurement of /
/ (left facet) and /
/ (right facet) in three following
phonological contexts by speaker year of
birth in 20th century Lansing.
For both of these vowel classes, we find that the pre
-
nasal allophone moves in lockstep
with the pre
-
stop and pre
-
fricative allophones. Therefore, I argue that unlike for /æ/, the pre
-
nasal allophones of /
/ and /
/ are p
honetically rather than phonologically distinguished from the
rest of the allophones. These vowel classes have a different phonological make
-
up than /æ/ in
terms of nasal conditioning; the latter moving towards a phonological distinction and the former
118
on
ly phonetically distinct. I will utilize this distinction (phonetic vs phonological allophony) in
the analysis of the judgement data to follow. If the sub
-
phonemic judgement task is indeed
capturing the difference between phonological and phonetic allop
hony, respondents should react
differently when presented with /
/ and /
/ words than when they are presented with /æ/ words.
As for a more precise estimation of when in apparent time the pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
allophones
of /æ/
beg
a
n to diverge, we focus
on the trend lines in the 1920 to 1940 birth year
range
in
Figure
17
(approximately the Silent generation)
.
Focusing on the period between 1920
and
1930, the pre
-
nasal (green line) and pre
-
fricative allophone (in red) already show distinct
trajectories; pre
-
nas
al increasing and pre
-
fricative slightly decreasing. In this same time window,
the pre
-
nasal (green line) and pre
-
stop allophone (blue line) are moving in lockstep; both
upward. In the 1930s, the pre
-
stop allophone diverges from that upward trajectory. F
rom the
1940s onward, the pre
-
stop and pre
-
fricative allophones move in lockstep.
In conclusion, visual inspection of the F1/F2 diagonal trajectory of
/æ/
in multiple
following phonological environments
indicates
that at the community level,
pre
-
nasal /æ
/
and
pre
-
oral /æ/ have distinct phonological features, whereas
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
/
/ and /
/
are
distinguished via phonetic implementation rules.
Additionally, we have seen that the nasal
allophone diverged from the rest
close to 1930 which is in
th
e Silent generation, (birth year
1925
1945). Therefore, in the analysis of whether phonologization of allophonic splits occur
abruptly or gradually in a community, I will focus on Silent generation speakers.
5.2.2
Sub
-
P
honemic
J
udgement
T
ask: Actuation and
Tran
sition
of
P
honologization
In the previous section, I showed that pre
-
nasal /æ/ began to move along
a
different trajector
y
from the rest of the allophones
in
F1/F2
space
in the
Silent generation (1925
1945
). As such,
the actuation question will be addressed by examining phonologization in this generation. If
119
phonologization was abrupt in Lansing, the difference between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ should
be phonological for at least some Silent generation r
espondents. If, however, phonologization
was gradual in Lansing, the difference between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ should not be
phonological for any of the Silent generation respondents but should appear in subsequent
generations. Under the gradual
hypot
hesis
, Silent generation respondents will only distinguish
the two allophones phonetically.
A complete description of the methodology for this task is provided in
Chapter 3
(section
3.3
)
, which includes
a description of
the statistical analyses employed below. I include a brief
description of the
methods here as a reminder to the reader.
D
uring the
sub
-
phonemic judgement
task, participants were presented with two CVC lexical items and were asked to indicate whether
the vowels in the two words sound the same or different to them.
Responses from 107 white
monolingual English
-
speaking Lansing natives are analyzed here
. In this task,
Condition 1 was
composed of 5 pairs of CVC words that had the same
onset
and nucleus /æ/
but differed in
whether the coda consonant was nasal or oral,
e.g.
pat
and
pan.
Condition 2 was composed of 5
pairs of CVC words that had the same
onset
and nucleus /æ/ but had different oral coda
consonants, e.g.
pat
and
pass.
The hypothesis for this experiment is that participants who
distinguish pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ phonologically will be more likely to respond
DIFFERENT
to Condition 1 pairs than they are to Condition 2 pairs
because the latter compare /æ/ tokens that
differ only phonetically
while the former compare /æ/ tokens that
have different phonologica
l
representations
. Those
who
do not have a phonological distinction between
pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/, however,
should
respond
DIFFERENT
to Condition 1 and Condition 2 pairs at the same
rate. To determine
when the phonological change
occurred
, I
ask
in
which gener
ation do we
observe that
Condition 1 pairs garner more
DIFFERENT
responses
than
Condition 2
pairs
.
120
Additionally, the trajectory analysis
in section
5.2.1
showed that the two allophones began to
differentiate in the
ir
acoustics in the Silent Generation (date of birth 1920
1945)
. T
herefore, if
this change occurred abruptly, responses between
Con
dition 1 and Condition 2
must be different
in this generation. If difference is
not
noted in
this
generation
but observed in subsequent
generations
, allophonic reorganization must have occurred gradually in Lansing. In addition to
generation, this analys
is includes social class as a factor, as the spread of phonological change
appears to be conditioned by social class.
Gender was not included as an external factor due to
the small number of males across generations in the sample.
The binomial mixed
-
effe
cts
logistic regression model included Response (same, different) as the dependent variable, and
Condition (1,2), Generational Cohort (Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial), and Social Class
(Blue
-
collar, White
-
collar) as predictor variables, and Participant
and Pair as random intercepts.
Table
14
Mixed
-
effects regression model for responses to CæC pairs.
Predictor
Values
Estimate
Std. Error
df
t
-
value
(Intercept: BlueCollar, Cond 1, Boomer)
-
2.783
0.37604
-
7.401
***
Cond
Cond2
0.232
0.55423
0.419
[0.675]
GEN
GenX
1.079
0.36434
2.961
**
GEN
Millennial
2.075
0.35692
5.812
***
GEN
Silent
0.096
0.89294
0.107
[0.914]
SocialClass
WhiteCollar
1.039
0.19922
5.216
***
Cond
GEN
Cond2
GenX
-
0.862
0.68858
-
1.253
[0.210]
Cond
GEN
Cond2
Millennial
-
2.358
0.72244
-
3.264
**
Cond
GEN
Cond2
Silent
NA
NA
NA
NA
Significant change (p < 0.001) is reported as ***, significant change (p < 0.01) is reported as **, slightly significant
change (p < 0.05) is reported as *, and
non
-
significant
appears as [].
121
The best fit model for the data is provided below in
Table
14
. Blue
-
collar, Condition 1,
and the Baby Boomer generation are set as the reference level.
This model included the
significant two
-
way interaction between Generational Cohort and Condition, and significant
main effects of Generational Cohort and Social Class. In what follows, I will report on the
interaction results and then the social class
effect.
F
igure
19
displays the distribution of the
percentage of responses to lexical pairs
over time
.
In the figure, generational cohort appears on
the
x
-
axis and response percentage appears on the y
-
axis. Condition 1 responses appear on the
left and Condition 2 responses are on the right.
Different
responses are
shown
in yellow and
same
responses are in blue.
F
igure
19
Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (left = condition one) compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs (right = condition two) of /æ/ over generational time.
122
The first observation
to be made about the
figure i
s that respondents judge pairs in
Condition 2
to be different at least 95% of the time no matter their age. We compare this to the
general increase in the amount of
different
(indicated in blue) over
apparent
time. The regression
analysis did not
compare
the two
conditions in the Silent generation because no Silent generation
participants
responded
different
to
Condition 1
pairs
and the dependent variable (response)
required two levels (same, different)
. Since
different
responses for
C
ondition
1
are at z
ero for
this group and those for
C
ondition
2
are at 2%, we would not expect to find a significant effect of
condition on responses in this generation
this group behaves the same under each condition.
In
the Baby Boomer generation, though
different
respon
ses to
Condition 1
increase to 3%, this is
not significant in the model.
Although
in Generation X,
different
responses increase to 20.7%,
this is also not significant in the model. The
only combination of condition and generation that is
significantly different from the baseline
is found in the Millennial generation. Millennial
respondents are significantly more likely to judge pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
as different from one
another
t
han pre
-
oral pairs.
Different
responses in the Millennial
group
reach 44%
under
Condition 1 in
this experiment. Thus, while respondents do not judge pre
-
oral /æ/ pairs to be
different, the community is moving towards distinguishing between pre
-
nasal and
pre
-
oral /æ/.
The initiation of this move appears to have occurred in Generation X with the significant
increase occurring in the subsequent Millennial generation.
To provide a clearer view of the social/external conditions on this change, I turn to an
in
vestigation into the impact of social class in each generation on responses in this task, which is
displayed in
Figure
20
. In the figure, as above, gen
erational cohort appears on the x
-
axis and
response percentage appears on the y
-
axis. Condition 1 responses appear on the left and
Condition 2 responses are on the right.
Different
responses are shown in yellow and
same
123
responses are in blue.
W
hite
-
collar
respondents are at the top and blue
-
collar respondents are on
the bottom facet.
Figure
20
Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (left = condition one) compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs (right = condition two) of /æ/ over generational time and by Social Class (White
Collar respondents at the top).
In what follows,
I will only report on responses to
Condition 1
pairs
(left facet)
,
since
as
we can observe in
Figure
20
,
different
responses
to
Condition 2
pairs
remain below 10% across
all
generations and social class groups. In the Silent generation, no respondent indicated that
Condition 1
pairs were different
, regardless
of their social class. In the Baby Boomer blue
-
collar
sample,
different
responses
remain at 1%. White
-
collar Baby Boomer respondents judge
124
Condition 1
pairs to be different 6% of the time. This suggests an increase
in perception of a
difference
, but I note that these respondents also judge
Condition
2
pairs to be different 4% of
the ti
me. In Generation X, blue
-
collar respondents judge
Condition 1
pairs to be different 10.7%
of the time while white
-
collar respondents judge them to be different 30.7% of the time. And
finally
,
in the Millennial generation, blue
-
collar respondents increase
in the amount of different
responses to
Condition 1
pairs to 25.4%. White
-
collar Millennials also increase the amount o
f
different responses to
Condition 1
pairs to 60.4%.
In sum, I note that while
different
responses to
Condition 2
pairs remain at 1% i
n each
generation and across social groups, there is a general increase in the amount of
different
responses to
Condition 1
pairs across time in both social class groups. In the Silent and Baby
Boomer generations, respondents consider all tokens of /æ/ to
be the same, no matter the
conditioning environment. There is an increase in perceived difference between pre
-
nasal and
pre
-
oral tokens in
G
eneration X
. This increase is
really only
evident
in the white
-
collar sample
and
the difference between conditions
is not statistically significant
for them at any rate
.
There
is a larger increase in distinction between the two conditions in
the Millennial generation
. In this
Millennial generation, respondents
are
significantly more
likely to consider pre
-
nasal and p
re
-
oral pairs to be different than in any other generation.
Another c
rucial
finding is that the aforementioned
pattern
is more prominent in the white
-
collar as compared to the blue
-
collar
M
illennial sample.
Significance in the Millennial
generation is only observed in the
white
-
collar group,
as opposed to the blue
-
collar group.
Therefore,
white
-
collar respondents a
ppear
to be
leading
in the development of a
phonological
distinction between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/
; they are
not only
the first to judge /æ/ as different
in the two phonetic environments,
but
younger white
-
collar
Lansingites
are
significantly
more
125
likely
th
an blue
-
collar Lansingites to judge the two allophones as different during this task
.
Th
ese findings
indicate that while nasal allophony is phonological for some speakers in the
Millennial generation, the
spread
of this change is a more recent development
.
5.2.2.1
Phonetic Conditioning
One tool for distinguishing phonetic from phonological allophony in this chapter was to
compare responses to
Condition 1
versus
Condition 2
pairs. If a participant judged pre
-
oral pairs
(Condition
2
) alone
to be different in this task, then it must be the case that co
-
articulatory/acoustic coupling is what is being captured by this experiment rather than any
representational difference. The
results above indicate that this is not the case
respondents do
not judge
allophones
that are
not
differentiated
p
honologically
to be distinguishable enough to
prompt a
different
response. Another tool utilized here is an analysis of responses of pairs whose
conditioning environments are not differentiated due to a phonological rule
/
/
and /
/ in
various environments. For this, I consider responses to lexical pairs in
Conditio
ns 3
(
pen
-
pet
)
and
4
(
pet
-
peck
).
Figure
21
displays the distribution of responses to the lexical pairs with /
/ or
/
/ as their relevant vowel across gene
rational time. Condition
3
pairs are in the left
-
hand facet
and
C
ondition
4
pairs are on the right.
Different
responses are represented in yellow and
same
responses are represented in blue.
The results for these conditions are unsurprising, given the
tr
ajectory analysis in section
5.2.1
. Respondents in every generation judge /
/ and /
/ phonemes
before oral and nasal consonants to be the same
almost categorically; 2% of respondents in the
Millennial generation judge them to be different.
126
Figure
21
Distribu
tion of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs (left = condition one) compared to pre
-
oral and pre
-
oral pairs (right = condition two) of
/
/ and /
/
over generational time.
As with the judgements for pre
-
oral pairs of /æ/, respondents in Lansing do
not
distinguish between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /
/ phonologically. The same is true of
C
ondition
4
participants do not consider /
/ and /
/ before various oral consonants to be different from one
another. Thus, the difference between /
/ in any of the
se environments is merely phonetic rather
than part of the phonological make
-
up of the vowel. The comparison of the results for these
vowel classes to those for /æ/ suggests that performance on this task can capture sub
-
phonemic
representation at the leve
l of the individual.
127
5.3
Conclusion
The results of th
ese analyses
suggest that /æ/
nasal allophony in Lansing developed
gradually. Respondents at the beginning of the separation of pre
-
oral from pre
-
nasal /æ/ in
phonetic space
Silent generation respondent
s
do
not judge this vowel to be different in the
two environments. It is
one generation later
, in
the Baby Boomer generation
, that we observe
some participants in the community judging /æ/ in these two environments to be dif
ferent, and
three generations
later
,
in the
Millennial
generation
,
that these judgements are statistically
different from judgements to pre
-
oral pairs. Thus, the phonological rule was not already present
in the community before/as the two allophones began
to diverge in acoustic space
,
in opposition
to the prediction of
the Big Bang Theory
(Janda & Joseph 2003)
and
Baker, Archangeli &
Mielke (2011), and
as
exemplified by Fruehwald
(2016)
. The findings in this dissertation
suggest that the allophonic rule in Lansing developed only after pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ were
assuming different phonetic targets, in line with theories of gradual phonologization supported
by The Life
-
Cycle
of Phonological Processes
(Bermúdez
-
Otero 2003
,
2013; Bermúdez
-
Otero &
Trousdale 2008; Ramsammy 2015)
, Hyman
(1975; 2013)
, Evolutionary Phonology
(Blevins
2004, 2006)
, and Exemplar Theory
(Pierrehumbert 2001; Garrett & Johnson 2011)
.
The analysis of social factors provides a picture of how this change
spr
ead
t
hroughout the
community. The results suggest that the spread of nasal allophony is being led by white
-
collar
community members. While there is a general increase in
different
responses over
apparent
time
in both the blue
-
and white
-
collar community,
these judgements first appear in the white
-
collar
G
eneration X group, and it is only in the white
-
collar group
in
the Millennial generation
that
different
judgements are statistically significant between the two conditions.
I
n line with the
sociolinguisti
c literature on supra
-
local change,
phonologization appears to have
actuated
in the
128
white
-
collar community
first and then spread to t
he blue
-
collar community.
Th
ough the
impact
of participant gender on responses
was not investigated in this chapter
,
I
will offer some
insights
about gender based on impressionistic observations
in section
6.1
.
129
CONCLUSIONS AND DISC
USSION
The goals of this disserta
tion
were
to address the Actuation problem of allophonic change in
Lansing, i.e. why does change occur at a particular place in a particular time. In order to do this,
I also address
ed
the Embedding
and Transition Problems
what are the internal and extern
al
conditions surrounding the chang
e and
how did the change spread throughout the community.
To address these problems, I utilized a combination of analyses. First, using a corpus of natural
language data from 36 Lansing natives, I conducted an acoustic a
nalysis of /æ/ in F1/F2 space. In
particular, I measured changes in F1, F2, diphthongal quality, and relative distributions of pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ within each speaker in the sample. I supplemented this with the results of
a sub
-
phonemic judgement t
ask administered to 107 Lansing natives via an online survey.
Below, I summarize my findings.
The results of this dissertation provide some evidence for
previous claims in the literature that address these problems but run counter to others.
Additionally, these results offer some important new avenues for investigation. Below, I discuss
each of these in turn.
First,
the results of this dissertation confirm that both social/external and
linguistic/internal factors are involved in phonological change. Commonplace in the
phonological change literature is to assert that phonologization of coarticulation occurs when a
mec
hanical effect is so strong that it is interpreted by a hearer as a distinct phonetic target. Baker
et al. (2011) argue that this is too simple and in fact overpredicts the occurrence of this type of
sound change because mis
-
articulations are so common.
They claim that inter
-
speaker
variability in the degree of the phonetic effect is what promotes this change, i.e. the range of
the
effect
must be so great
for some speakers
that
those
speakers produce a sound that
others
130
perceive
as a distinct target. The
y also argue that the likelihood of the hearer adopting the novel
target in their speech depends on social factors. These two points have allowed
them
to update
coart
iculation to lead to sound change depends on the chance alignment of extreme
provide clear support for this hypothesis. In
Chapter 4
(
Figure
7
)
, I showed that at the turn of the
20
th
century, there was minimal inter
-
speaker variation with respect to conditioning of pre
-
nasal
/æ/
, such that all
speakers exhibited very low Pillai
-
Bartlett scores. In the Baby Boomer
generation, however, there is considerable inter
-
speaker variation
so
me speakers show no
conditioning of the pre
-
nasal environment while others do, and crucially, there is considerable
variation with respect to pre
-
oral productions which can be accounted for by gender
-
women
exhibit much higher and more forward realization
s in this generation than men. Respondents
born one generation later then
begin
to distinguish between the allophones in the sub
-
phonemic
judgement task. It appears that these circumstances are what have driven this phonological
change; considerable vari
ability in conditioning combined with considerable social conditioning.
Thus, the chance alignment of inter
-
speaker variation and social influence is what appears to
have motivated allophonic change in Lansing.
Second,
through the analysis of Pillai
-
Bart
lett scores, and judgement task results,
I have
shown that there are t
hree
types of allophony operating in the Lansing speech community with
respect to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral conditioning environments. The first is phonetically motivated
but not controlled
,
the second is a speaker controlled phonetic effect, and
the third
is the result of
a phonological rule. In the vowel space, speakers who exhibit phonetically implemented
but not
controlled
allophony
have overlapping pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral token clouds,
and they do not judge
131
/æ/ in these environments to be different. Those who exhibit controlled phonetic allophony
exhibit
some
conditioning of the pre
-
nasal environment but no clear distinction from the pre
-
oral
cloud. They also do not report that the vowe
ls in these two environments sound different from
one another
.
Speakers with a phonological rule, on the contrary, have discretely separated pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral
token
clouds and are more likely to report that /æ/ is different in these
environments. Th
is type of allophony is characteristic of speakers in Lansing born in the latter
half of the 20
th
century
,
who had a clear distinction between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/.
I
therefore provide evidence of the first three stages of the Life
-
Cycle of Phonolog
ical Processes
operating in Lansing: epiphenomenal/absence of conditioning,
controlled
phonetic
implementation, and phonological distinction.
Crucially, I show that there is a diachronic progression through these stages in the
Lansing community. In th
e Silent generation (birth dates 1925
1945) there is a mixture of the
first two types of allophony in the community. In the Baby Boomer generation (birth dates
1946
1964),
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores increase
, suggesting a shift towards more pre
-
nasal
conditio
ning
. In Generation X (birth date 1965
1985), the first type decreases even more
as
Pillai
-
Bartlett scores rise
. By the Millennial generation (birth date 1985
1999),
no speaker
exhibits the first type,
though
there is an increase in pre
-
nasal conditionin
g
. This generational
progression reflects exactly what is predicted in the Life
-
Cycle of Phonological Processes
(Bermúdez
-
Otero 2007; Bermúdez
-
Otero & Trousdale 2012)
the
diachronic progression
from
phonetically
motivated but not controlled allophony (stage 1 of the Life
-
Cycle), to a speaker
controlled phonetic effect (stage 2 of the Life
-
Cycle), to a phonological rule (stage 3 of the Life
-
Cycle)
but runs counter to the theory of abrupt phonological change
(Fruehwald 2013
,
2016;
Janda & Joseph 2003)
.
132
With regard to
the
Embedding problem,
the results of
the acoustic
analyses
in
Chapter 4
show that
Lansing participated in the NCS in the earlier half of the 20
th
century but began to
adopt features characteristic of the supralocal Low Back Merger Shift after the 1960s. During
this time, pre
-
oral /æ/ begins to lower and retract in the vowel space and
show less diphthongal
movement from the nucleus to the offset of the vowel. I also show that women led both the
advancement of the NCS and the adoption of the LBMS. Social class was not significant in
these analyses, though it has been in other analyses
in the dialect area. I suspect that this is
because of the small sample size combined with the change in trajectory in the middle of the 20
th
century for all of these measures. The sub
-
phonemic judgement experiment
(
Chapter 5
)
did
reveal a social class effect, though
as I note below,
this sample was imbalanced for gender,
such
that
women ma
de
up much of the sample. Thus, it may very well be the case
that social class
conditioning is only relevant for women, as would be expected given that
(Labo
v 2001: 321)
.
6.1
Gender and
A
llophonic
C
hange in Lansing
It is worth specifying here that it is likely the case that the specific leaders of this change are
white
-
collar women. I was not able to control for gender in th
e sub
-
phonemic judgement task
,
since the respondent count in the earlier generations is too low for a statistical analysis and male
Lansingites are underrepresented in the sample
(see
Table
7
)
.
Gender, however,
is an important
condition
ing factor in
the acoustic distribution of /æ/ (see
Chapter 4
for details).
A visual
inspecti
on of the distribution of responses
during the sub
-
phonemic judgement task
appears to
point to
this same finding.
Figure
22
displays the distribution of responses to Condition 1 pairs
only, by generational cohort (x
-
axis), social class (side facet; white
-
collar on top), and gender
(top facet; female respondents on
left).
133
Figure
22
Distribution of responses to pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral pairs of /æ/ over generational time, by social
class (White Collar respondents at the top), and gender (women on the left).
The crucial thing to note her
e is that in Generation X, men of both social class groups and blue
-
collar
wo
men pattern the same: although some respond that pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ are
different, this only occurs 20% of the time for these groups. Generation X white
-
collar women
seem
to distinguish between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/, with
different
responses almost at 40%.
From this, it appears that white
-
collar women are driving this change. In the subsequent,
Millennial generation,
different
responses increase for
white
-
collar men and women and for blue
-
collar women, although the proportion of responses is more substantial for the white
-
collar
respondent
s than the blue
-
collar respondents
.
Again, these observations are based on a small
134
number of respondents in each
group and should be interpreted with caution. It
suggests, though,
that
any study examining this change in this community would find
that white
-
collar women
were the first in Lansing to posit this rule, while other community members are on the trailing
en
d of this change. And, in line with the acoustic analysis
in
Chapter 4
, blue
-
collar men are not
yet participating.
This provides an avenue for futur
e studies examining the Actuation
,
Embedding, and
Transition probl
e
ms of this and perhaps any other allophonic change.
6.2
Internally
M
otivated
C
hange
f
rom
A
bove
Given the results of the sub
-
phonemic judgement task (
Chapter
5
), allophonic change in Lansing
appears to be a change from above; with white
-
collar women leading. There are two findings that
give me pause in this conclusion, however. First, in
Chapter 2
, I showed that in
-
migration from
other dialect/language areas and non
-
White groups was limited in Lansing
;
therefore nasal
allophony is likely an inte
rnally motivated change, which seems to go against the description of a
change from above. This may not be a problem, as some studies have shown that changes from
above can be internally motivated
(Schilling
-
Estes & Wolfram 1999)
. Another issue for the
account that this is a change from above is that the acoustic analyses
of spontaneous speech in
the Lansing Speech Corpus (
Chapter 4
) did not reveal an effect of social class
this includes the
analysis of per
-
speaker toke
n distributions. This latter issue may be accounted for if we consider
that the Lansing Speech Corpus was composed of only 36 speakers. Perhaps with more speakers
in the sample, social class might prove significant. What is clear from this discrepancy i
n
results, however, is that contact (or lack thereof) is perhaps more important than social
conditioning in differentiat
ing
abrupt versus gradual changes.
135
6.3
Contact
as
a
C
onditioning
F
actor
The departure of the results of the current analysis from those of
the few studies supporting a
theory of abrupt phonologization bring up what I suspect is a crucial fact about the mechanisms
of allophonic phonologization
perhaps both abrupt and gradual phonologization are possible
(as is the case in the literature on p
honemic mergers) and the likelihood of either one occurring
in a community is dependent upon some external/social conditioning factor(s). I put forth a
conditioning factor here: the presence of inter
-
dialect contact and the impact of awareness on the
chan
ge. We know from previous studies on allophonic change that variable realizations lead to
reallocation of phonetic environments whereby
a phoneme assumes one target in one
environment and another target in another environment
(Britain 2002; Baker, Archangeli &
Mielke 2011; Mielke, Baker & Archangeli 2016; Trudgill & Foxcroft 1978)
. The crucial
difference between contact
-
induced phonological changes and those tha
t are internally motivated
is the difference in magnitude of the difference between realizations
, and relative awareness of
the change
. In changes from above, variable
pronunciations
are prominent upon contact, and
thus phonologization is expected to occu
r abruptly, given the right social circumstances. In
internally motivated changes, however, variable realizations are less likely to
gain social
awareness and
occur so rapidly.
As discussed in
Chapter 1
,
we
know that in the literature on
changes towards phonemic mergers, inter
-
dialect/language contact
and
awareness condition
whether a change is abrupt or gradual. Mergers that are abrupt are character
istic of communities
undergoing change via contact, while mergers that progress gradually and under the level of
awareness occur in communities where inter
-
dialect/language contact is low
(Guy 1990)
. There
is no reason why allophonic changes would
Fruehwald
(2013,
2016) finds that allophonic change in Philadelphia was abrupt, and though there is no
136
evidence of in
-
migration in the statistical analysis he performed on his sample of Philadelphia
-
born residents,
it is
still likely that contact can account for abruptness in his data, as Philadelphia
is a large city that like other cities in the US have experienced in
-
migration throughout the 20
th
century.
The results of the analysis of nasal allophony in this
diss
ertation
finds that the
allophonic rule developed gradually, i.e. after the phonetic changes were occurring. Crucially,
Lansing is not a contact city and allophony appears to be operating below the level of awareness.
Although there was considerable in
-
mi
gration from other Michigan towns into Lansing until the
middle of the 20
th
century, there is no indication that large numbers of speakers from other
dialects or languages have migrated here. If contact and awareness are indeed relevant for
allophonic phonologization
and I believe they are
it is unsurprising
then that
phono
logical
change was gradual
in Lansing
but abrupt in Philadelphia
. Berkson et al. (2017) do not address
any aspects of contact or social conditioning on
/a
/
phonologization
, so I am not sure if this
distinction holds
.
However, given the apparent differenc
es between
the
Philadelphia and
Lansing
results
, my position is that
there is
a relevant component to our theory of
allophonic
phonologization that can be tested in the future,
and that has been attested in the literature on
phonemic mergers in progress (s
ee
Guy 1990; Herold 1997)
namely that there are two
mechanisms by which allophony can arise
abrupt
and
gradual
and
the incidence of each is
dependent on when variable realizations and social conditioning are introduced into the
community. To be more explicit:
I
hypothesize
that
allophonic
change
is
abrupt in communities
where there is contact between dialects/languages with different realiza
tions of the target
phoneme and perhaps some social evaluation but gradual in non
-
contact communities where the
change is relatively unnoticed. This statement can thus account for all phonological changes
including changes toward phonemic mergers and al
lophonic splits.
137
6.4
Methodological Considerations
There are a few aspects of this research that I might consider if I were to conduct this research
again. I address some of them below and hope that future studies will take them into account.
6.4.1
Awareness of Variable Phonologies
We know from previous studies that sociolinguistic awareness of a phonological change can
impact behavior on judgement tasks. An explicit example of the effect of awareness on
examination of two mergers in progress in
Charleston, South Carolina. Baranowski showed that while the community was moving towards
both the
cot
-
caught
and
pin
-
pen
mergers, participants behaved differently during the judgement
tasks that involved these vo
wels. While participants were willing to judge
cot
-
type and
caught
-
type words to be the same, they were unwilling to judge
pin
-
type and
pen
-
type words to be the
same even though many of the speakers displayed a clear merger of the two sounds. Unlike the
cot
-
caught
merger, the
pin
-
pen
merger is a marked feature of the South and thus socially
undesirable in Charleston. The
cot
-
caught
merger, however, is progressing well below the level
of awareness in the community. As such, in Charleston, judgements mat
ched the production
data for the
cot
-
caught
merger but not for the
pin
-
pen
merger. Participants negatively evaluated
pin
-
pen
and were thus less likely to say they were the same sound. What this shows is that the
use of a judgement task on phonological c
hanges that operate above the level of awareness in a
community is not useful. While, as I speculated earlier, raised /æ/ has possibly risen to the status
of a marker in the Inland North, in contrast, nasal allophony does not appear to be operating
above
the level of awareness in Lansing or anywhere else in North America. So, it is assumed
here that the issue of awareness is not relevant for this change in progress. Future research on
138
phonological change will do well to ensure that the variable in questio
n is operating under the
level of awareness when utilizing a same
-
different judgement task.
6.4.2
Acoustic Salience vs Representation
One potential confound of this study is that participants may be judging different productions of
pre
-
oral /æ/, since each g
eneration has been exposed to different relevant exemplars across
individual lifespans. From the
trajectory
analysis in the previous chapter, we saw that Silent
generation
speakers
produce pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ in the same way, with the tongue higher
and more forward in the mouth. Generation X
speakers
, however, produce pre
-
oral /æ/ with a
slightly lower and much farther back realization than pre
-
nasal /æ/. So, for Silent generation
respondents in the judgment task, the two conditioning environments
produce similar acoustics,
while for Generation X respondents, the two sounds are acoustically different from one another.
Thus, though we find differences between these generations for the judgement task, it is unclear
whether the results do indeed refl
ect a difference in phonological representation or phonetic
realization. What this appears to suggest is that the current analysis falls short of discerning
whether for a given respondent, their
different
judgements are the result of a phonetic difference
between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ or if that difference is indeed phonological. I a
rgue, however,
that the current analysis is indeed indicative of representational knowledge.
I
f these judgements were about phonetic (rather than phonological) opposit
ion between
pass
and
pa
ck
), 3 (
pen
and
peck
), and 4 (
pet
and
peck
) to be different. We do not see this in the data.
Respondents consistently judge the pairs in these con
ditions to be the same even though some of
these are realized acoustically different from one another. I would argue that this is because the
distinction between two separate realizations of the same phoneme
is
merely the result of
139
phonetic implementation
, but for those who report a difference, pre
-
nasal /æ/ is phonologically
distinct from that in these other environments. This suggests to me that though the phonetic
distinction between pre
-
nasal and pre
-
oral /æ/ is indeed much sharper for Millennial gene
ration
respondents than for Silent generation respondents, acoustic salience alone within a phoneme
cannot account for the difference in responses by the two groups in this task. If indeed this task
is only indicative of phonetic opposition, perhaps the o
ther diagnostics utilized in this
dissertation to tease apart phonological from phonetic allophony (bimodality, and divergent vs
lockstep trajectories) are better suited for questions regarding phonologization.
6.4.3
Orthography in American English
Another pot
ential confound in this study involves the issue of orthography. One of the problems
with presenting words in American English to a participant is the grapheme
-
phoneme mismatch.
It is likely that many of the participants in this study would have taken or
thography as a cue and
made their judgements of lexical pairs accordingly; they would have judged Condition 1 pairs
(
pan
and
pat
) to be the same because they share the same character
regardless of whether the
corresponding pronunciation of that
character in the two words was indeed the same sound to
them. This is a common issue with presenting visual stimuli in studies examining phenomena at
the phonetic
s
/phonolog
y
level. As discussed in Chapter 3 (section
3.3.2.1
), I attempted to reduce
the likelihood that this would happen by including words whose vowel character, , could
correspond to a different phoneme in American English (compare
ma
ke
and
mack
), and by
including pairs of lexical items whose graphemes did not match but whose pronunciations may
be similar in the community, e.g.
lot
and
thought.
I excluded from the analysis any participant
who judged pairs like
make
and
mack
to be the
same. I cannot definitively say, however, that
those who judged pairs with words like
make
in them to be different, were not relying on
140
orthography while they were judging the target pairs. So, orthography remains a possible
confound in this study, the
effects of which might be eliminated with the replacement of visual
stimuli with auditory stimuli.
One might argue that a
n auditory perception task might also resolve the issue of
Millennial and Silent generation respondents making judgements for differen
t pronunciations.
For this, participants might be presented with a raised/fronted pre
-
nasal and a lowered/retracted
pre
-
oral /æ/. Upon asking them to judge whether these sounds are the same or different, a Silent
generation respondent who does not posit a
n allophonic rule should judge these as the same
while a respondent who posits an allophonic rule should judge them as different. The
presentation of auditory stimuli would eliminate the two possible confounds in the current study
but
is likely to introduc
e another confound.
I purposefully chose not to present participants with
pre
sentation of auditory stimuli would be a sound solution for the current analysis. I leave this
for future research.
6.5
Inland North
D
ialectology
While the results of this dissertation further confirm some previous findings regarding the
linguistic patternin
g of /æ/ as part of the NCS (raising, fronting, diphthongization, unconditioned
system), the generational change and social conditioning results offer some confirmation of some
existing claims in the literature, and some new information for our knowledge b
ase about the
NCS.
141
/æ/
-
raising is a rather new phenomenon in Lansing, MI
:
The results of this dissertation show that
NCS /æ/
-
raising was adopted in the middle of the 20
th
century, which is well after the period
identified in the account of Inland North /æ/
-
hypothesis is that /æ/
-
raising developed in upstate New York in the early 1800s due to leveling
across multiple
/æ/
systems an
d spread westward to other Inland North locales. As Gordon and
Strelluf (2017) point out, if this scenario held, raised /æ/ would be evident in western locales at
least by the turn of the 20
th
gene
rations for /æ/ to raise (also see
Kerswill & Williams (2000)
for a discussion of leveling
taking two generations). This dissertation finds that the raising pattern occurred in Lansing at
ith recent studies
in Chicago, Buffalo, and Grand Rapids (Gordon and Strelluf 2017) where /æ/
-
raising is not well
attested in speakers born at the turn of the 20
th
century. One caveat here is that Lansing is a mid
-
sized city. If the NCS spread to Lansing
via a cascade model of diffusion from larger cities to
smaller towns, we would expect Lansing to have adopted NCS features later than larger cities
(Callary 1975)
-
raising, then the larger cities of Chicago, Buffalo, and Grand Rapids should have acquired /æ/
-
raising much earlier than is reported in the literature. Thus, I conclude that /æ/
-
raising is a more
recent phenomenon in the Inland North than su
ggested
by Labov
(2010)
. It is still unclear
whether Lansing acquired /æ/
-
raising from these larger cities. If it did, this was a recent
phenomenon, likely happening at the turn of the 20
th
century
.
Where are the NCS speakers?
:
T
he third contribution of this dissertation is a suggestion for
future Inland North researchers. For contemporary scholars looking to investigate the NCS, this
study and other recent studies show that the available subject pool is waning. The NCS is no
142
lo
nger prevalent in Inland Northern cities. The more likely carriers of the NCS in the Inland
North are speakers born prior to the 1980s, young blue
-
collar speakers, and perhaps rural
speakers (cf Gordon 2001). Though the latter two groups may also be part
icipating in the supra
-
local changes,
no recent studies have ruled these speakers out as possible NCS torchbearers
.
Indeed, Durian and Cameron
(2018)
find that the NCS has remained among blue
-
collar speakers
in Chicago.
Michiganders are not as peculiar as we once thought
:
The los
s of NCS features in the middle of
the 20
th
sociolinguistic awareness. The social conditioning observed in this chapter, accompanied by the
commentary and style
-
shifting d
iscussed in Chapter 1,
suggest that Inland Northerners are
somewhat aware of NCS /æ/ and that they assign it indexical social meaning. This can lead us to
re
-
interpret some earlier studies of sociolinguistic attitudes to
/æ/
in the Inland North. For
exampl
e,
Niedzielski (1999)
found that when asked whether a fellow Detroiter had produced a
lower or higher variant of /æ/, Detroit n
atives picked out the low variant from a provided range.
Although to our knowledge, most white Detroiters at that time exhibit advanced NCS features
themselves, including raised
/æ/
led them t
speech. Therefore, their social evaluation of their dialect as correct/standard overrode their
performance on this task. For Niedzielski, this was evidence that the NCS w
as well under the
level of awareness. Considering more recent studies like the current one and others in the dialect
area which show that the NCS version of /æ/ has been retreating for some time, it seems more
imply aware at some level that a community lowering
of
/æ/
had begun. These perception studies were conducted on college students born in the
143
1960s and 1970s, the same generation in which NCS features began to decline in Michigan. This
suggests that it m
ay not have been entirely the case that social evaluation was overriding
performance on the perception task. It appears to be likely that exposure to within
-
generational
social reality
more lowered variants available in the community
was affecting per
formance
on the task.
From an indicator to a marke
r:
Changes in the social conditioning over time for /æ/ suggest that
NCS realizations have come to be negatively evaluated in Lansing, which points to a possible
social motivation for these changes, as di
scussed in
4.7
. Given the available evidence in the
literature, the NCS was progressing well below the level of awareness in the earlier half of the
20
th
century. Women led in the advancement of NCS /æ/ char
acteristics. The subsequent
decline in NCS
/æ/
realization by women (while men continued to advance) in the transition
from the Baby Boomer generation to Generation X suggests that NCS /æ/ in Lansing might have
gained social salience as a local
marker
. L
abov (1972) defines a marker as a sociolinguistic
variable that not only has an interspeaker social distribution (e.g. across social class,
neighborhoods or ethnic groups), but is also subject to intraspeaker variation. To confirm that
NCS
/æ/
has become a
marker in Lansing, we would therefore need to conduct an analysis of
style
-
shifting. If the hypothesis is accurate, I would expect speakers born in the middle of the
20
th
century to exhibit less NCS
-
like /æ/ features in their more formal speech, e.g. whe
n reading
a word list, as compared to in their conversational speech.
Thiel and Dinkin (2017) show that
while older speakers in Ogdensburg do not style
-
shift, younger speaker
s
shift away from NCS
features
in their more formal speaking style. I suspect th
e same pattern to emerge in Lansing.
I
leave examination of style
-
shifting in my data for a future project.
144
Another possible avenue for investigating social motivations for these changes is an
implicit attitudes test.
Labov (2001:229)
, citing
Sturtevant (1947)
, suggests that the social
motivation of linguistic change is that the form becomes associated arbitrarily with social traits
of the originating group. If this is the case, then we might expect the NCS version of /æ/ to be a
marker of older local Lansin
g identity. If one were to conduct an attitudinal study, I would
expect Michiganders to rate NCS /æ/ in the speech of an older local
more
favorably
than
if heard
in the speech of a younger (maybe even middle
-
class) local.
6.6
P
honological
R
epresentations in
the Inland North
(more questions)
Structural account of the LBMS in Lansing
:
I noted earlier that two components of the LBMS
shift are underway in Lansing
pre
-
oral /æ/ lowering and retraction, and the low
-
back merger.
The structural account of the LBMS is one of a pull chain whereby /
hich pulls /æ/ and the other short front vowels, /
/ and /
/. Though there is
evidence of these components occurring in Lansing
(
Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason under rev
ision)
,
it remains to be seen if the LBMS in the Inland North is a pull or push chain. The absence of
Generation X speakers made it difficult for us to speculate. The present analysis shows that /æ/
retracted in Generation X. I look forward to examin
ing movement of
/
to better
address this question.
Tense/Lax distinction
:
The Inland North version of /æ/ is described as [tense] because it moves
upward along the periphery of the vowel space and is described as diphthongal
(Labov 1994)
. In
Lansing, and in other Inland Northern cities, /æ/ is either no longer moving along the periphery
of the vowel space and/or is no longer diphthongal. This leads to the hypothesis that there has
been a shift in this pho
neme from tense to lax. I test this hypothesis in
Nesbitt (2018b)
by
examining whether Inland Northerners treat /æ/ as they
do traditionally tense vowels or lax
145
vowels in a syllable parsing task. For this, I asked whether Inland Northerners parse a consonant
that followed /æ/ as they would one that followed a tense vowel or a lax vowel. The logic behind
this is that intervoc
alic consonants in American English are conditioned by the tenseness of the
preceding vowel, i.e. when preceded by a long/tense vowel, English speakers will parse them as
onsets of the following syllable. The hypothesis was that older Inland Northerners w
ould treat
/æ/ as they do tense vowels, but younger Inland Northerners would treat it as a lax vowel. The
preliminary results of this analysis suggest that indeed, older Inland Northerners treat /æ/ as they
do tense vowels, while younger Inland Northerner
s treat it as a lax vowel. This analysis is
preliminary, though, because results are based on a comparison of just 10 lexical items. In any
case, there appears to be a trend towards a change overtime in tense vs lax associations for /æ/ in
the dialect ar
ea. I therefore look forward to exploring this question in a future project.
6.7
North American Dialectology
This dissertation joins the growing literature on the decline of regional speech patterns in North
America. One of the most substantial contributions
of this analysis to the field is that one of the
the
unconditioned raising of /æ/
regional /æ/
configuration in place of the nasal system is not confined to the Inland North. We
see this trend in various locations across North America, in for example, Kansas City
(Strelluf
2014)
, Cincinnati
(Boberg & Strassel 2000)
, New Orleans, L
A
(Labov 2007)
, New York city
(Becker & Wong 2009; Becker 2010)
, various cities along
the east coast between Philadelphia
and New York city
(Ash 2002)
, Philadelphia
(Labov, Rosenfelder & Fruehwald 2013; Sneller
2017; Sneller 2019)
, and New England
(Stanford 2019)
, inter alia. Thus, short /æ/ appears to no
longe
r be a reliable metric for distinguishing regional dialects in North America, at least for
146
speakers born since about 1990. I also noted in Chapter 1 that the second pivot point
low
-
back
merger vs distinction
appears to be diminishing as more regional vari
eties move towards
merger. Therefore, dialectologists must either look to other features that distinguish regional
varieties of North American English, or entertain the idea that rather than divergence, we are
witnessing dialect levelling. The movement t
owards the supralocal patterns of low
-
back merger
and the nasal system in various regions suggest the latter.
6.8
Mid
-
20
th
century and Loss of Regional North American Features
The transition from the Baby Boomer generation to Generation X appears to have be
en a crucial
period for changes to regional varieties in North America. Researchers elsewhere in Michigan
have observed the same decline in NCS features over the same period of time
(Morgan et al.
2017; Rankinen, Albin & Neuhaus 2019)
. Loss of local speech features in the mid
-
20
th
century
is not restricted to the Inland North dialect area. It ha
s been reported in various locations across
North America, in for example, Ohio
(Durian 2012)
, Philadelphia
(Labov, Rosenfelder &
Fruehwald
2013), New England (Stanford 2019), Raleigh, NC (Dodsworth & Kohn 2012)
, inter
alia. One wonders what similar social conditions were in place in such disparate areas to have
motivated the apparent leveling of dialects at about the same time. A few pos
sible explanations
include (1) a rise in face
-
to
-
face contact between speakers of different varieties brought on by
increased mobility, (2) the spread of Western regional phonology through increased exposure to
television, (3) the shift to an economy incr
easingly dominated by service jobs that would require
of all three. I leave it for future work to investigate the social motivations behind this broader
trend.
147
APPENDICES
148
APPENDIX A
Recruitment Flyer for 2018/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
Attention Lansing natives!
Earn $15 for Talking to a Linguist for 1 Hour.
My name is Monica Nesbitt. I am a PhD student and researcher in the Michigan
State University
Sociolinguistics Lab. Our research team is currently interviewing Lansing natives as part of our
Lansing Speech project and would like you to participate!
The Lansing Speech project aims to better understand Lansing speech and culture by
interviewing those who were born and raised here. The recordings from this project will
contribute to our growing collection of oral histories of native Lansingites.
Each interview lasts about 1 hour, during which we will discuss with you your
experiences
growing up in Lansing and have you play a few short language games. Though our interviewers
will come prepared with topics to discuss, we are also interested in hearing about whatever
interests you.
Interviews will be scheduled until the end o
f August 2018.
If you are interested in participating, please make sure you satisfy the below qualifications and
then contact me via email nesbit17@msu.edu, a private message on Facebook Messenger, or by
cell (909) 997
-
2375 so that we can schedule an inter
view.
Please help us spread the word and share this with as many native Lansingites that you know.
We are especially interested in hearing from multiple generations of the same family!
Compensation
$15
Qualifications
a) +17 years old
b) From within 15 m
iles of the MI state capitol
-
Lived there from around age 2 to at least around age 17
-
Left the area for no more than 4 years
c) Self
-
identify as white (we will interview non
-
white residents later in the year!)
d) Native speaker of American English
e) No
history of a hearing or speech disorder
149
APPENDIX B
Consent Form for 2018/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
Thank you for contributing to this research project. Our research team at Michigan State is
interested to hear about life and language in
Lansing. I can tell you more about the project once
the end of this session.
and experiences
growing up, how your community has changed in your lifetime, how you think it compares to
other areas of Lansing specifically and Michigan in general. I have topics and questions
fe and the perspectives that
you
think
and then ask you to read aloud a short list of words that have distinctive pronunciations across
the U.S. Altogether,
the interview will take no more than one hour.
Because it will be difficult for me to write down everything you say, I would like to audio
-
record
before we start
.
Before you begin, I would like to inform you that participation in this research project is
voluntary. You have the right to stop participating in this study at any time, and you also have a
right to not answer specific questions.
You may change your
mind at any time and withdraw.
There will be no penalty or disadvantage to you under any of these circumstances. You must be
18 or older to participate.
Please email me at nesbit17@msu.edu if you have any questions regarding the procedure.
If you have con
cerns or questions about this study, such as how the data will be used, how to do
any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact my supervisor, Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner, at
(517) 355
-
9739, or e
-
mail wagnersu@msu.edu or regular mail at B
-
401 Wells H
all, 619 Red
Cedar Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824.
If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like
to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you
may contact,
Protection Program at 517
-
355
-
2180, Fax 517
-
432
-
4503, or e
-
mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail
at 4000 Collins Rd, Suite 136, Lansing, MI 48910.
150
APPENDIX C
Interview Questions for 2018
/2019 Sociolinguistic Interviews
General
What is your pseudonym?
What is your birth year?
What is your gender identity?
What ethnic group (race) would you say you belong to?
Have you ever spoken any language besides English? Do you at home?
Where were you
born and raised?
Family
Who do you live with at home?
Do you have children?
How old are they?
Where are do they live now?
Where did they go to school?
Are you married?
Where is your spouse from?
What do they do for a living?
How did you meet your
spouse?
How about your parents?
Did you live with them growing up?
Where are they from?
What did they do for a living?
How did they meet?
School and Work
What high school did you go to?
What middle school did you go to?
What elementary school did you go t
o?
Were you involved in any activities when you were in school? Sports, clubs, etc?
What sorts of things did you and your friends do outside of class?
What do you think was the racial make
-
up of your schools?
151
Were inter
-
racial friendships normal?
What abou
t social class? Were the students from blue
-
collar or white
-
collar families?
What about training after high school? Did you attend college or anything?
What university did you go to ?
What do you do for work?
How long have you worked in your current posit
ion?
How did you get into this line of work that you do now?
What other kinds of jobs have you had?
Neighborhood
Where were you born?
What neighborhood did you grow up in?
Did you go to your neighborhood schools? Did your friends?
Describe your
childhood neighborhood. What kinds of families lived there? Were they blue
-
collar or
white
-
collar? What was the racial make
-
up of your neighborhood? Was it a close
-
knit community? What
sorts of activities did the neighborhood do? Did all the kids attend th
e same schools? Was your
neighborhood the same or different from other neighborhoods in the area?
Would you describe it as your typical Michigan neighborhood?
What neighborhood do you live in now? Why did you move?
Where do your friends and family live
now? Why did they move?
Have you noticed any changes to the neighborhood that you grew up in?
How about Lansing? Has it changed at all?
Localness
What do you think of Lansing as a place to live? Would you recommend it?
Which Lansing neighborhoods do you
think are the best and which ones are the worst?
What sorts of things are there to do in Lansing?
Are there any other places in Michigan worth checking out?
Are they better than Lansing?
Did you or did any of your friends and family work for any of the a
uto plants in town? What did they do?
How long did they work there? What do they do now?
If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
Would you rather live in a big city or a small town? Why?
Would you describe Lansing as a big city?
Do you get out of La
nsing much? Ever go to Detroit or Chicago? Anywhere else?
152
Narrative Prompts
Do you think the winters in Michigan are getting worse or better?
Do you think the roads in M
ichigan are worse than anywhere else?
Why do you think roads are such an ongoing issue here?
Is there anything else you would like to share about your ex
periences related to living in Lansing or
otherwise?
Post
-
interview questions:
When you travel, has any one picked you out as being from Lansing or Michigan by the way you talk?
What do they notice?
Do you take it a plus or minus from their point of
view? Form your own?
What do you think makes a Lansing accent?
Is that different from a Detroit accent?
Is that different from anywhere else in Michigan?
153
APPENDIX D
Table 15
Speaker Demo
graphics
Lansing Speech Corpus plus 21 Millennials from Wagner et
al.
(
2016
)
*(Millennials were not included in statistical analyses due to demographic imbalance)
Subj
#
Name
Sample
Birth
Year
Generation
Gender
Social Class
1
MarvinGrinstern
Oral Histories Collection
1923
Silent
male
blue
-
collar
2
JackDown
Oral Histories Collection
1924
Silent
male
white
-
collar
3
MarilynShadduck
Oral Histories Collection
1924
Silent
female
blue
-
collar
4
LeslieMitchell
Oral Histories
Collection
1925
Silent
male
blue
-
collar
5
MabelMcQueen
Oral Histories Collection
1925
Silent
female
blue
-
collar
6
VernonCook
Oral Histories Collection
1927
Silent
male
blue
-
collar
7
ShirleySanborn
Oral Histories Collection
1930
Silent
female
white
-
collar
8
FrancesWest
2010 Sociolinguistic Interview
1932
Silent
female
white
-
collar
9
GayleGooslin
Oral Histories Collection
1937
Silent
female
blue
-
collar
10
JohnDean
Oral Histories Collection
1938
Silent
male
white
-
collar
11
MaudeRobinson
2010 Sociolinguistic Interview
1939
Silent
female
white
-
collar
12
RichardBudd
Oral Histories Collection
1941
Silent
male
white
-
collar
13
DeanPotter
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1946
Boomer
male
white
-
collar
14
LindaMaxon
Oral
Histories Collection
1947
Boomer
female
blue
-
collar
15
AnnePotter
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1948
Boomer
female
white
-
collar
16
KarelTaborsky
Oral Histories Collection
1948
Boomer
male
blue
-
collar
17
JosephAbraham
Oral Histories
Collection
1951
Boomer
male
blue
-
collar
18
CherryBomb
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1952
Boomer
female
blue
-
collar
19
GeneralEisenhower
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1953
Boomer
male
white
-
collar
154
20
MikelLienhart
Oral Histories Collection
1953
Boomer
male
blue
-
collar
21
JuneLowe
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1956
Boomer
female
white
-
collar
22
RandyThayer
Oral Histories Collection
1956
Boomer
male
white
-
collar
23
ConnieStevens
2018/19
Sociolinguistic
Interview
1957
Boomer
female
white
-
collar
24
SharonDecker
Oral Histories Collection
1961
Boomer
female
blue
-
collar
25
AaronPeters
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1965
Generation
X
male
blue
-
collar
26
BillMummy
2018/19
Sociolinguistic
Interview
1969
Generation
X
male
white
-
collar
27
ViolaMatt
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1970
Generation
X
female
white
-
collar
28
JackPierce
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1974
Generation
X
male
blue
-
collar
29
SarahMary
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1976
Generation
X
female
blue
-
collar
30
Serendipity Miller
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1977
Generation
X
female
blue
-
collar
31
AmandaNelson
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1982
Generation
X
female
white
-
collar
32
KingLlama
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1982
Generation
X
male
white
-
collar
33
SamHill
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1982
Generation
X
male
white
-
collar
34
StaceyMiller
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1982
Generation
X
female
blue
-
collar
35
KenWinters
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1984
Generation
X
male
blue
-
collar
36
BunnyLlama
2018/19 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1984
Generation
X
female
white
-
collar
37
VickyPine
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1990
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
155
38
ChelseaWalsh
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1992
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
39
EllenBordner
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1992
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
40
EmmaAllen
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1993
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
41
MelodyWilliams
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1993
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
42
MichelleRaggle
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1993
Milllennial
female
blue
-
collar
43
SarahStone
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1993
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
44
BenLangdon
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
male
white
-
collar
45
JenniferMason
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
female
blue
-
collar
46
JessicaTawnee
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
47
KarenPeterson
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
48
KarenTimmons
2014/15
Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
female
blue
-
collar
49
LucyGarth
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1994
Milllennial
female
blue
-
collar
50
BriDixon
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1995
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
51
KatherineShort
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1995
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
52
CarolineTonks
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
53
EdBrand
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
male
white
-
collar
54
HelenSmith
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
156
55
MegPaxton
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
56
PeteShaw
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
male
white
-
collar
57
StephanieWilson
2014/15 Sociolinguistic
Interview
1996
Milllennial
female
white
-
collar
157
APPENDIX E
Consent Form for Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
Research Participant Information and Consent Form
Thank you for
contributing to this research project. My name is Monica Nesbitt. I am a Ph.D.
d in, but if you
contact me at the email provided below, I will be happy to answer any questions that you might
have.
For this experiment, there are two short tasks. For these tasks, you will answer questions about
the words that appear on your computer screen.
Before you begin, I would like to inform you that participation in this research project is
voluntary. You hav
e the right to stop participating in this study at any time, and you also have a
right to not answer specific questions.
You may change your mind at any time and withdraw.
There will be no penalty or disadvantage to you under any of these circumstances. Y
ou must be
18 or older to participate.
If you are taking this for extra credit, you will receive 1% extra credit towards your final course
grade for participating in this experiment. You will receive another percentage point if you have
a family member tha
t is your grandparent's age complete this survey. If you wish not to
participate in this study, your instructor has an equivalent non
-
research assignment which may be
done in place of research participation.
Please email me at nesbit17@msu.edu if you have
any questions regarding the procedure.
If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as how the data will be used, how to do
any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact my supervisor, Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner, at
(517) 355
-
9739, or e
-
mail wagnersu@msu.edu or regular mail at B
-
401 Wells Hall, 619 Red
Cedar Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824.
If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like
to obtain information or offer input, or would like to
register a complaint about this study, you
Protection Program at 517
-
355
-
2180, Fax 517
-
432
-
4503, or e
-
mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail
at 4000 Collins Rd, Suite 136, Lansi
ng, MI 48910.
You indicate your voluntary agreement to participate by navigating to the next page.
158
APPENDIX F
Social Media and Email Recruitment Script for Sub
-
phonemic Judgement Task
Do the vowels in BOT and BOUGHT sound the same to you? Whatever
the
answer, the Sociolinguistics Lab at Michigan State wants to hear from you!
from as many places, generations, and ethnic backgrounds
.
please share with
all of your friends and family.
159
APPENDIX G
Table 16
Pairs of Lexical Items for Sub
-
Phonemic Judgement Task
Condition
Lexical Items
Vowel
Final Cons Nasality
1
FAN
FAT
æ
nasal
-
oral
1
TRAM
TRACK
æ
nasal
-
oral
1
RAN
RAG
æ
nasal
-
oral
1
PAM
PASS
æ
nasal
-
oral
1
BAN
BAT
æ
nasal
-
oral
2
PASS
PACK
æ
oral
-
oral
2
RASH
RAT
æ
oral
-
oral
2
PACK
PAT
æ
oral
-
oral
2
RAT
RAG
æ
oral
-
oral
2
SAP
SACK
æ
oral
-
oral
3
RENT
REST
nasal
-
oral
3
PEN
PET
nasal
-
oral
3
TEN
TECH
nasal
-
oral
3
KIM
KIT
nasal
-
oral
3
BIN
BIT
nasal
-
oral
4
REST
LET
oral
-
oral
4
PECK
PET
oral
-
oral
4
FETCH
FED
oral
-
oral
4
KISS
KIT
oral
-
oral
4
BIT
BIG
oral
-
oral
160
5
BOSS
BOUGHT
oral
-
oral
5
TOT
TAUGHT
oral
-
oral
5
STALK
STOCK
/
oral
-
oral
5
CAUGHT
COT
/
oral
-
oral
5
DAWN
DON
/
nasal
-
nasal
6
REST
COT
/
oral
-
oral
6
PIN
PEN
/
nasal
-
nasal
6
BOMB
BIT
nasal
-
oral
6
SAT
SAW
æ/
oral
-
oral
6
MAKE
MACK
e
/æ
oral
-
oral
161
APPENDIX H
Table 17
Pillai
-
Bartlett and Mean F1, F2, and DQ Values for Each Speaker in the Lansing
Speech Corpus
pl
us
21
Millennials from Wagner et al. (2016)
*(Millennials were not included in statistical analyses due to demographic imbalance)
Name
Allophone
F1 (Hz)
F2
(Hz)
DQ (Hz)
Pillai
-
Bartlett
MarvinGrinstern
pre
-
nasal
727
1995
236
0.261
MarvinGrinstern
pre
-
oral
809
1850
128
0.261
JackDown
pre
-
nasal
736
1982
141
0.04
JackDown
pre
-
oral
769
1917
182
0.04
MarilynShadduck
pre
-
nasal
712
2204
450
0.152
MarilynShadduck
pre
-
oral
807
2047
303
0.152
LeslieMitchell
pre
-
nasal
742
1996
108
0.075
LeslieMitchell
pre
-
oral
730
1865
119
0.075
MabelMcQueen
pre
-
nasal
722
2009
198
0.038
MabelMcQueen
pre
-
oral
740
2150
201
0.038
VernonCook
pre
-
nasal
697
1972
191
0.079
VernonCook
pre
-
oral
757
1905
156
0.079
ShirleySanborn
pre
-
nasal
646
2059
176
0.27
ShirleySanborn
pre
-
oral
789
2013
177
0.27
FrancesWest
pre
-
nasal
666
2080
326
0.272
FrancesWest
pre
-
oral
812
1875
182
0.272
GayleGooslin
pre
-
nasal
712
1938
320
0.091
GayleGooslin
pre
-
oral
798
1833
178
0.091
JohnDean
pre
-
nasal
678
2111
134
0.371
JohnDean
pre
-
oral
833
2012
155
0.371
MaudeRobinson
pre
-
nasal
605
2179
692
0.351
162
MaudeRobinson
pre
-
oral
728
1907
368
0.351
RichardBudd
pre
-
nasal
609
2050
177
0.428
RichardBudd
pre
-
oral
789
1825
167
0.428
DeanPotter
pre
-
nasal
703
2108
346
0.352
DeanPotter
pre
-
oral
806
1948
223
0.352
LindaMaxon
pre
-
nasal
654
2223
269
0.042
LindaMaxon
pre
-
oral
734
2115
289
0.042
AnnePotter
pre
-
nasal
690
2334
564
0.155
AnnePotter
pre
-
oral
717
2120
335
0.155
KarelTaborsky
pre
-
nasal
729
2062
231
0.318
KarelTaborsky
pre
-
oral
843
1920
193
0.318
JosephAbraham
pre
-
nasal
679
2030
212
0.273
JosephAbraham
pre
-
oral
822
2007
193
0.273
CherryBomb
pre
-
nasal
642
2294
350
0.371
CherryBomb
pre
-
oral
747
1945
233
0.371
GeneralEisenhower
pre
-
nasal
652
2165
320
0.479
GeneralEisenhower
pre
-
oral
788
1783
174
0.479
MikelLienhart
pre
-
nasal
771
1957
205
0.16
MikelLienhart
pre
-
oral
811
1802
158
0.16
JuneLowe
pre
-
nasal
651
2115
318
0.419
JuneLowe
pre
-
oral
790
1831
208
0.419
RandyThayer
pre
-
nasal
651
1986
131
0.186
RandyThayer
pre
-
oral
775
1889
157
0.186
ConnieStevens
pre
-
nasal
646
2194
433
0.244
ConnieStevens
pre
-
oral
715
1895
206
0.244
163
SharonDecker
pre
-
nasal
591
2109
217
0.279
SharonDecker
pre
-
oral
719
2036
221
0.279
AaronPeters
pre
-
nasal
578
2080
261
0.424
AaronPeters
pre
-
oral
779
1960
249
0.424
BillMummy
pre
-
nasal
735
1927
151
0.031
BillMummy
pre
-
oral
719
1825
175
0.031
ViolaMatt
pre
-
nasal
667
2175
453
0.38
ViolaMatt
pre
-
oral
767
1723
186
0.38
JackPierce
pre
-
nasal
649
2199
376
0.363
JackPierce
pre
-
oral
780
2078
222
0.363
SarahMary
pre
-
nasal
628
2150
332
0.541
SarahMary
pre
-
oral
795
1742
211
0.541
Serendipity Miller
pre
-
nasal
607
2094
428
0.589
Serendipity Miller
pre
-
oral
778
1801
142
0.589
AmandaNelson
pre
-
nasal
616
2226
474
0.722
AmandaNelson
pre
-
oral
816
1634
163
0.722
KingLlama
pre
-
nasal
617
2086
210
0.507
KingLlama
pre
-
oral
742
1871
137
0.507
SamHill
pre
-
nasal
679
2001
160
0.347
SamHill
pre
-
oral
783
1811
186
0.347
StaceyMiller
pre
-
nasal
716
2159
363
0.401
StaceyMiller
pre
-
oral
805
1831
183
0.401
BunnyLlama
pre
-
nasal
633
2152
255
0.684
BunnyLlama
pre
-
oral
757
1781
232
0.684
KenWinters
pre
-
nasal
689
1967
153
0.36
164
KenWinters
pre
-
oral
762
1700
155
0.36
VickyPine
pre
-
nasal
599
2144
281
0.448
VickyPine
pre
-
oral
732
1898
150
0.448
ChelseaWalsh
pre
-
nasal
703
2132
325
0.503
ChelseaWalsh
pre
-
oral
817
1808
164
0.503
EllenBordner
pre
-
nasal
648
2114
244
0.615
EllenBordner
pre
-
oral
783
1788
144
0.615
EmmaAllen
pre
-
nasal
709
1941
297
0.614
EmmaAllen
pre
-
oral
866
1627
138
0.614
MelodyWilliams
pre
-
nasal
703
2050
193
0.574
MelodyWilliams
pre
-
oral
845
1717
133
0.574
MichelleRaggle
pre
-
nasal
666
1928
195
0.26
MichelleRaggle
pre
-
oral
778
1690
157
0.26
SarahStone
pre
-
nasal
597
2145
233
0.635
SarahStone
pre
-
oral
821
1754
155
0.635
BenLangdon
pre
-
nasal
627
2170
114
0.552
BenLangdon
pre
-
oral
788
1893
208
0.552
JenniferMason
pre
-
nasal
644
2174
218
0.71
JenniferMason
pre
-
oral
796
1709
150
0.71
JessicaTawnee
pre
-
nasal
634
2024
292
0.562
JessicaTawnee
pre
-
oral
790
1782
139
0.562
KarenPeterson
pre
-
nasal
681
2088
232
0.551
KarenPeterson
pre
-
oral
760
1782
128
0.551
KarenTimmons
pre
-
nasal
661
2101
178
0.499
KarenTimmons
pre
-
oral
796
1729
153
0.499
165
LucyGarth
pre
-
nasal
693
1912
212
0.42
LucyGarth
pre
-
oral
808
1661
130
0.42
BriDixon
pre
-
nasal
585
2165
240
0.722
BriDixon
pre
-
oral
812
1791
151
0.722
KatherineShort
pre
-
nasal
620
2091
358
0.558
KatherineShort
pre
-
oral
802
1796
162
0.558
CarolineTonks
pre
-
nasal
622
2037
172
0.445
CarolineTonks
pre
-
oral
825
1811
180
0.445
EdBrand
pre
-
nasal
746
2069
116
0.297
EdBrand
pre
-
oral
785
1761
145
0.297
HelenSmith
pre
-
nasal
660
2150
186
0.561
HelenSmith
pre
-
oral
799
1719
139
0.561
MegPaxton
pre
-
nasal
653
2145
270
0.623
MegPaxton
pre
-
oral
816
1708
153
0.623
PeteShaw
pre
-
nasal
590
2066
103
0.645
PeteShaw
pre
-
oral
834
1919
155
0.645
StephanieWilson
pre
-
nasal
690
2200
221
0.424
StephanieWilson
pre
-
oral
797
1881
155
0.424
166
APPENDIX I
Figure 23
Per Token Diagonal Measurement of /
æ
/ in Five Following
Phonological Contexts by
Speaker Birth Year in the Lansing Speech Corpus (
p
lus
21
Millennial
s
from Wagner et al.
(2016))
167
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