Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift

Podesva, Robert J.; D’Onofrio, Annette; Hofwegen, Janneke Van; Kim, Seung Kyung

doi:10.1017/s095439451500006x

Cited by 66 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(60 reference statements)

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“…These findings demonstrate that, with respect to a linguistic sense of place, spaces can acquire linguistic meaning at numerous scale levels, with speakers' neighborhood-based, city-based, and region-based identities often interacting with one another (see e.g., Becker 2009). Podesva et al (2015) found that Redding-area speakers' orientation to "town" vs.…”

Section: Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Villarreal

2018

Journal of English Linguistics

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Research on social meaning, which links language variation to the wider social world, often bases claims about the social meanings of linguistic forms on production (i.e., speakers' situational use of meaningful forms). In the case of the California Vowel Shift (CVS), an ongoing restructuring of the vowel system of California English that takes place below the level of conscious awareness, previous production research has suggested that the CVS carries social meanings of carefreeness, femininity, and privilege. Left unclear in these production-based claims is whether listeners actually pick up on and recognize the social meanings that speakers apparently utilize the CVS to transmit. In this research, a dialect recognition task with matched guises (California-shifted vs. conservative) forms the basis for exploring Californian listeners' reactions to the CVS, and how these reactions are mediated by perceptions of dialect geography.In short, this research focuses on listeners' reactions to the CVS in order to address a more fundamental question: How do listeners and speakers together participate in the construction of social meaning?Stimuli for the main study task were drawn from excerpts of sociolinguistic interviews with 12 lifelong California English speakers from three regions of the state: the San Francisco Bay Area, Lower Central Valley, and Southern California. Guises were created from interview excerpts by modifying the F2 of each TRAP and GOOSE token via source-filter resynthesis methods.Californian guises featured backed TRAP and fronted GOOSE; conservative guises featured fronted TRAP and backed GOOSE. Ninety-seven Californians participated in a perceptual task in which they attempted to identify speakers' regional origin and rated speakers on affective scales.iii The results indicated that Californians recognize the CVS as Californian, as California-shifted guises were less likely to be identified as from outside California (but more likely to be identified as from Southern California). Listeners rated California-shifted guises higher on the scales Californian, sounds like a Valley girl, and confident, indicating a core of social meanings indexed by the CVS. Among listeners from the San Francisco Bay Area, the CVS indexes masculinity, but among Southern California listeners, the CVS indexes femininity. Listeners from across California also rated speakers who they believed to be from the same region as them higher on Californian, familiar, and sounds like me.This research demonstrates that the social meanings of linguistic forms do not reside only in speakers' situational use of these forms, as listeners did not associate the CVS with carefreeness, femininity, or privilege, the social meanings of the CVS suggested by previous studies of California English production; instead, I propose an account of the indexical field that links perception and production by placing the core social meanings of the CVS uncovered by this research (Californian identity, sounding like a Valley girl, and confidence) a...

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Section: Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Villarreal

2018

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…Campbell‐Kibler ; Podesva et al. ) has shown that hearers perceive meanings as a function of their perceptions of the context of utterance. This work is extremely promising, but in its early stages.…”

Section: Fields Of Evidence For Social Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…in press); the parallel fronting of /ow/ after coronals ( Toe ) and non‐coronals ( Boat ) and of /uw/ after coronals ( Too ) and non‐coronals ( Boot ) (Eckert ; Podesva et al. ).…”

Section: Fields Of Evidence For Social Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetics, phonology and social meaning

Eckert

Labov

2017

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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Linguistic variation has consistently been found to have social meaning in its association with the status and stance of speakers in the context of interaction. This indexical function of variation can contribute to the advancement of ongoing linguistic change. Style shifting in individual sociolinguistic interviews is an indirect indication of social meaning, but the clearest demonstrations are found in studies of speakers in a range of social contexts. We explore and clarify the nature of social meaning in variation, and its relation to linguistic change. Phonological variables are most readily adapted to convey social meaning by their frequency, flexibility and freedom from referential functions. After providing several kinds of evidence of social meaning in phonological variation, we argue that meaning accrues specifically to concrete soundsto phonetic elements and not to the phonological structures in which those sounds participate. Mergers, near mergers, splits, chain shifts and parallel shifts are not generally objects of social perception, conscious or unconscious, and are motivated by more abstract principles of change. FOREWORDThe authors of this article approach the study of social meaning from a joint background in the approach to linguistic variation as 'orderly heterogeneity,' reflecting the influence of Uriel Weinreich at Columbia University in the 1960s. We both spent our youth immersed in the sociolinguistic currents of New Jersey's Bergen County, where we learned early that the exponents of social class were realized as distance from local phonology, and where we experienced similar day-to-day interaction with socially distinctive and classrelated character types. In the years that followed, Labov has studied the larger structure of variation with a focus on linguistic change, as evidenced by studies of random samples, neighborhoods, and small group interaction. Eckert's focus, based on long-term ethnographic studies, has been on meaning as evidenced in the use of a wide range of variables in the stylistic construction of socially located personae. The variables we consider in this paper are those that coincide in our workvariables that have been found to show both clear macro-social patterns and stylistic sensitivity to interpersonal context, particularly sound changes in progress. And while the authors continue to debate issues of awareness and agency in this process, our differences are independent of the observations that follow.

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“…But recent work has also found the feature in speakers from less‐urban, inland communities in California as well, though to a lesser degree than on the coasts (Podesva et al. in press). Thus, while the change appears to have originated in urban, coastal communities of California, its wide reach makes the feature associable with the state as a whole.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Persona‐based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley Girls and California vowels

D’Onofrio

2015

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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This paper investigates the effect of persona-based information on implicit linguistic perceptions of a sociolinguistic featurethe backed TRAP vowel. TRAP-backing is associated both with macro-social region (California) and with a particular persona that inhabits this region (the Valley Girl). An eye-tracking paradigm is used to examine these associations in early, automatic stages of perception. One group of listeners was told the speaker was from California, while another group was told that the speaker had been described as a Valley Girl. Findings demonstrate that both the California information and the Valley Girl information caused listeners to expect the speaker to exhibit TRAP-backing. While previous studies have highlighted the influence of macro-sociological categories on linguistic perception, the present study suggests that persona-based social meanings can also serve to influence perception, supporting theories that foreground personae as social constructs crucial to interaction.

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Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift

Cited by 66 publications

References 42 publications

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Phonetics, phonology and social meaning

Persona‐based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley Girls and California vowels

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