[Somean] Friday: Nicolai Pharao
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
kbck at ling.ohio-state.edu
Mon Sep 19 13:29:56 EDT 2011
Hey So Meaners!
This Friday Nicolai will talk to us about the plans he's been developing
while here to use the IAT technique to look at stylistic clustering in
Danish. A relevant abstract is below. We'll also talk about what we want
to do this quarter.
-K
------
Exploring the social meanings of Copenhagen Danish /s/
Tore Kristiansen, Marie Maegaard, Janus Møller & Nicolai Pharao, LANCHART,
University of
Copenhagen, Denmark (correspondence to: Nicolai Pharao,
nicolaip at hum.ku.dk)
In Copenhagen Danish, the standard articulation of /s/ has an alveolar
place of articulation, alongside the less common fronted variant, [s+].
The fronted variant is associated with female speech in popular discourse.
This association is supported by research that shows that the use of the
fronted variant is strongly connected to female speakers. However, a
recent investigation of Copenhagen Danish (Maegaard (2007)) has shown that
the fronted variant is also common in male speech in a speech style
associated with young speakers in culturally and ethnically heterogeneous
environments, henceforth Urban Youth Style (Møller (2009)). Whereas the
presence of fronted [s+] in male speech in other speech styles is often
associated with gayness, it is unknown whether this association is also
made when the variant occurs in a sample of the Urban Youth Style. This
opens up for the possibility that the social meaning potentials of the
fronted variant may vary partly as a function of the stylistic context in
which it occurs, despite the strong connection to gender at the
macro-level of social meaning.
In the present study, we carry out a controlled manipulation of the
(s)-variable in order to examine the role of context and listener. Samples
of Copenhagen male speech are manipulated using cross-splicing of
spontaneously occurring tokens. This generates samples containing only
alveolar variants of (s) and samples containing only fronted variants.
Using an open questionnaire format we ask whether samples containing the
fronted variant are classified differently than samples containing the
standard variant, and whether the effect is different as a function of
accent (cf. Campbell-Kibler (2007)). Furthermore, we use different
listener groups in order to examine the role of the listener in ascription
of social meaning. By using teenagers from more or less culturally and
ethnically heterogeneous environments, and by comparing responses from
teenagers who self report to be speakers of the Urban Youth Style and
teenagers who do not, we aim to investigate the effect of group membership
and accent on linguistic perception and attitudes.
References:
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn (2007) “Accent, (ING), and the social logic of
listener perceptions” American speech 82,1, pp. 32-64
Maegard, Marie (2007) Udtalevariation og –forandring i københavnsk, danske
talesprog 8, C.A. Reitzel, Copenhagen, Denmark
Møller, Janus (2009) “Stereotyping categorisations of speech styles among
linguistic minority Danis in Køge” in Maegaard, Gregersen, Quist &
Jørgensen (eds.) Language, attitudes, standardization and language change.
Novus: Oslo. pp. 231 – 254.
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