Emerging from below the social radar: Incipient evaluation in the North West of England

Bailey, George

doi:10.1111/josl.12307

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This phenomenon consists of the conservative realization of etymological ŋɡ as [ŋɡ] rather than [ŋ] in positions where it is not followed by a vowel belonging to the same stem-level domain, so that si[ŋɡ]-er rhymes with fi[ŋɡ]er (Bermúdez-Otero 2011: 2020-2025Bermúdez-Otero & Trousdale 2012: 697-699). In a recent matched-guise experiment, Bailey (2019a) found that Velar Nasal Plus is becoming available to carry social meaning: older speakers exhibit identical responses to [ŋɡ] and [ŋ] guises, but younger speakers show an incipient evaluative distinction. At the same time, sociolinguistic interviews show an increase in the use of [ŋɡ] in apparent time.…”

Section: Granularity Variancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, sociolinguistic interviews show an increase in the use of [ŋɡ] in apparent time. It transpires, however, that the ongoing incrementation of Velar Nasal Plus is not driven by its incipient indexicality: natural and laboratory data reveal that this incrementation is strictly confined to prepausal position (Bailey 2019b), whereas social evaluation attaches to the [ŋɡ] variant in all contexts, including those in which the variable remains stable (Bailey 2019a).…”

Section: Granularity Variancementioning

confidence: 99%

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The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning

Bermúdez-Otero

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This article presents a theory of the initiation and incrementation mechanisms whereby individual phonetic innovations become community-wide sound changes. The theory asserts that language learners are community-oriented and momentum-sensitive: they are community-oriented in that they acquire and obey a mental representation of the collective linguistic norm of their speech community, rejecting individual idiosyncrasies; they are momentum-sensitive in that their mental representation of the community norm includes an age vector encoding linguistic differences between age groups. The theory is shown to fulfil four critical desiderata: (i) it accounts for the sporadic and localized occurrence of community-wide sound change, (ii) it incorporates Ohala's prediction of a lawful relationship between the strength of the phonetic biases driving individual innovation and the typological frequency of the corresponding sound changes, (iii) it explains how community-wide sound change advances by intergenerational incrementation producing adolescent peaks in apparent time, and (iv) it reliably generates monotonic-including sigmoid-diachronic trajectories. Moreover, the hypotheses of community orientation and sensitivity to momentum, combined with the mechanical effects of density of contact, suffice to explain several macroscopic phenomena in the propagation of sound change, including class stratification, the curvilinear pattern in change from below, and the existence of change reversals. During propagation, linguistic variants do acquire indexical value, and so social meaning, but this produces only small-scale attitudinal effects; it is not the force that drives the intergenerational incrementation of sound change.

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Section: Granularity Variancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Granularity Variancementioning

confidence: 99%

The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning

Bermúdez-Otero

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…The role of social meaning in driving forward the incrementation of language change has been called into question in cases of sound change specifically (see e.g. Bailey 2019, and Bermúdez-Otero 2020 for a more general discussion of these issues), but it is possible that such causal relationships are more likely in the case of lexical/semantic changes for the reasons discussed above.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language change is wicked: semantic and social meaning of a polysemous adjective

SANDOW,

BAILEY,

BRABER

2023

English Language and Linguistics

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As a result of an ameliorative shift-to-opposite, the polysemous adjective wicked is an auto-antonym, having two senses opposite in meaning, that is, ‘evil’ and ‘good’. We discuss two studies which explore the social life of this word, with the first focusing on its production and the second on its perception. In the first study, conducted in Cornwall, United Kingdom, we find that young men are most advanced in the use of wicked ‘good’ while young women appear not to contribute to the incrementation, that is, the advancement, of this change. In the second study, conducted online across England, we find wicked ‘good’, relative to its synonym good, to be perceived as less young and to be evaluated positively across disparate characteristics relating to status and solidarity, particularly by older men. We find wicked ‘evil’, in contrast to its synonym evil, to be evaluated higher in status-type characteristics. This newly uncovered indexical field of wicked presents a possible explanation for the observed changes in production, contributing to ongoing questions about the role of social meaning in driving the incrementation of change. More generally, this article adds to the growing yet limited literature which explores semantic variation through the lens of variationist sociolinguistics.

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“…This prosodic emphasis in the form of primary accent can also be found in the format tie (line 40/ 41 "tickin' /ticking). Thus the velar serves to construe Amelia as a competent teacher (on the association between formality or professionalism and the velar variant see production and perception work on ing, for example Eckert 2018, p. 157 with reference to Campbell-Kibler 2007Schleef, Flynn and Ramsammy 2015;Barras 2017, andBailey 2019). In the light of the prosodic prominence of some of the velar ing tokens it could be additionally said that the velar draws attention to Amelia's utterances.…”

Section: Alveolar-velar Format Tiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation and change in the sociophonetic variable ing in format ties

Eiswirth

Bergmann

2022

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Format ties, “partial repetitions of prior talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, p. 207), are interesting from an interactional perspective with respect to their functions relating to, for example, (dis-) agreement/alignment or humour, and for scholars of Language Variation and Change because they offer uniquely comparable phonological contexts in naturalistic speech. The present paper investigates the distribution of the sociolinguistic variable ing in format ties in a set of dyadic interviews of six speakers from the North-East of England who were recorded two or three times throughout their twenties – those career-building years during which we often see a change from the predominant use of the alveolar variant (“in’”) to the velar (“ing”). The analysis offers possible interactional and stylistic explanations for the community-level stability and the speaker-level variation and change of ing by focusing on contexts in which speakers format tie. It shows that the use of the highly frequent and thus less marked alveolar variant tends to occur in aligning contexts, while the few velar cases occur in moments where speakers disalign on some level. This argument contributes to work combining interactional and variationist endeavours, in particular with respect to the variable ing.

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Emerging from below the social radar: Incipient evaluation in the North West of England

Cited by 8 publications

References 42 publications

The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning

The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning

Language change is wicked: semantic and social meaning of a polysemous adjective

Variation and change in the sociophonetic variable ing in format ties

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