Broadly speaking, my research is concerned with the social meaning of linguistic variation. Recent approaches to variation have demonstrated that variation patterns do not merely correlate with membership in predefined social categories; they encode the meanings from which social categories are derived. Rather than focusing on demographic categories such as female or working-class, or even locally salient social identities like nerds or jocks, the social meaning approach targets stances and characteristics, like ‘tough’ and ‘prissy,’ that accrete into locally meaningful identities. This strand of research began with Labov’s groundbreaking work on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1960s, but has only recently witnessed a resurgence of interest among variationists. In an effort to better understand the social and linguistic dimensions of the social meaning approach, my work seeks both to develop a theory of social meaning and to explore different methodologies for tapping into the social meaning of variation. To this end, I have over the last few years been working on a framework for conceptualizing the indeterminacy characterizing the link between linguistic form and social meaning. I have explored this framework by drawing on a range of data and data collection methods, each offering different insights into what variables mean. Read on for brief descriptions of some of my current projects.
dc project | politicians | sociophonetics | tag questions | social meaning | npsr
Language and Communication in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area
I have recently been co-directing (with Natalie Schilling-Estes, Georgetown University) a large-scale project on language and communication in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Through this project, I aim to explore the extent to which the social meaning of variation patterns typifying different communities of practice (corresponding roughly to neighborhoods) circulate across the Washington, DC speech community. Sociolinguistics students in our department have amassed a databank of thirty-five sociolinguistic interviews, a rich corpus through which to begin exploring this local-global connection. In the first variation study arising out of this work, I have examined coronal stop deletion patterns among twenty-four DC residents. This work is designed to carry on the pioneering work of Ralph Fasold (Georgetown University), who examined (-t/d) deletion patterns in DC’s African American population nearly forty years ago. The current study, in addition to examining the speech of African Americans, additionally considers white, Latino, and Asian American speakers in DC. Recent work on the social construction of identity, particularly race and ethnicity, emphasizes relationality, whereby group identities are linguistically built not so much by employing a objectively distinct code or dialect, but by contrasting (or aligning) with the linguistic practices of other racial groups.
Variation in the Speech of US Politicians
As sociolinguists have recently demonstrated, a perceptual methodology can be effectively employed to gain access to listeners’ interpretations of social meaning. I am currently conducting, with my research assistant (Jermay Jamsu, Georgetown University), a study of attitudes toward variation in the speech of ten US politicians, focusing in particular on the significance of released [t] in word-medial and word-final position. Using digital manipulation of audio recordings, it is possible to replace an unreleased stop (or flap) in one clip with a released stop copied from another section of the recording, and vice versa. We can, for example, have two different pronunciations of a phrase like ‘our national security,’ with one featuring a released variant (securi[th]y), and the other a flapped variant (securi[D]y). Employing a cross-listener design, we can examine the extent to which the political affiliation, race, and sex of speakers (i.e., US politicians) and listeners (i.e., subjects in the study) influence ratings of various social attributes, such as articulateness, which is particularly relevant to recent political discourses in the media. The design of the study will also enable us to investigate whether the social meaning of a linguistic feature (released stops) is mediated by its linguistic environment (medial or final), an important issue which has thus far not been addressed in the literature. Future studies will employ the same methodology to investigate the efficacy of politicians’ use of Southern American English dialect features.
Phonetic Detail in Sociolinguistic Variation
In my dissertation, Phonetic Detail in Sociolinguistic Variation, I argued that if sociolinguists intend to explore the social meaning of phonological variables, they must consider their phonetic properties. Outside of vowels, variationists typically focus solely on variation across phonological categories, often failing to recognize the significance of the considerable phonetic variation within categories. By examining phonetic and phonological variation at three levels of phonological analysis – the segment (variation in the realization of word-final coronal stops), prosody (variation in declarative contour shape and phonetic implementation), and voice quality (variation between falsetto, modal, and creaky phonation) – I showed that phonetic details at all three levels encode social meanings that are inaccessible through a solely categorical analysis. For example, two of the speakers studied used falling (H*L%) declaratives equally frequently across speaking situations, but the phonetic properties (e.g., fundamental frequency range and slope) characterizing falling declaratives differed significantly across contexts, with more acoustically extreme falls used in some social situations in which speakers indexed an ‘animated’ meaning. The methodological approach I took in my dissertation, in which I conducted long-term participant observation of three gay professionals, enabled me to locate social meaning in social practice, cross-situational variation, and interactional/discourse context. This micro-level ethnographic approach is one fruitful methodology for studying the social meaning of variation.
Tag Questions in the Speech of Adolescent Girls in Northwestern England
I have been collaborating with Emma Moore (University of Sheffield) to elucidate the link between rather specific social meanings tied to discourse contexts and much more general social identities. Moore and I have combined our specializations in morphosyntactic and phonological variation, respectively, to examine the use of tag questions in the speech of adolescent girls in a working class community in northwestern England. While most analyses of tag questions take a purely discourse analytic approach, due to Moore’s 40 hours of conversational data (including 800 tag question tokens), we were able to examine tag questions from a quantitative variationist perspective. Coding for a number of discourse, morphosyntactic, and phonological factors, we find that although all four groups of girls studied – Townies, Populars, Geeks, and Eden Village girls – use tag questions with a similar ‘conducive’ pragmatic function, the linguistic composition of the tags differs greatly across groups. For example, the prototypical Popular tag question is characterized by a feminine 3rd person subject, typically referring to someone located outside of the Popular group, and the interlocutor usually explicitly agrees with the proposition expressed in the declarative preceding the tag. In other words, Popular tags are about other girls – more specifically, they describe, evaluate and position Populars individually and collectively relative to other people in their school. Popular tag questions are used to build walls, negotiate borders, and regulate and monitor norms. In sum, the many linguistic components of tag questions index a variety of social meanings which combine to construct identities through stance accretion.
The Indeterminacy of Social Meaning
In another collaborative effort, I have worked with Elaine Chun (University of South Carolina) to develop a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the widespread indeterminacy characterizing the social meanings of variables. We have suggested that the ambiguity and underspecification of sociolinguistic meaning may be resolved along three contextual dimensions. First, forms do not occur in isolation, but within the linguistic context of other variables, each contributing its own meaning to a style. For example, a medical school student may make use of frequent stop releases to index a ‘competent’ meaning while at the same time using rising declaratives to signal a ‘non-threatening’ stance toward his patient. The meaning of one feature is vivified by the meaning of the other, and together they compose a caring-doctor persona. Second, socially meaningful situations inspire and constrain linguistic interpretation. For example, while stop releases uttered by a gay medical school student can index a ‘competent’ or ‘prissy’ meaning, the situation of a medical examination would foreground the ‘competent’ meaning and render the ‘prissy’ meaning highly unlikely. Finally, speakers negotiate meanings in interaction. In conversations among Korean American youths, for example, rising intonation can be interpreted as constituting a preppy ‘white girl’ style or one mocking the same style. The ambiguity is resolved after the rising intonation is assigned a new meaning, and crucially, such assignments of meaning are achieved collaboratively. Finally, although we argue that indeterminate social meanings can be partly disambiguated, we suggest also that speakers can lively peacefully or even exploit indeterminacy to index multiple social meanings simultaneously. For example, the Asian American comedian, Margaret Cho’s Mock Asian style is both racist and subversive, and both meanings must be noted in order to comprehend her social commentary. Indeed, indeterminacy is a crucial component of the art and humor of language.
Non-Pronominal Self-Reference in Japanese
Sakiko Kajino (Georgetown University) and I have been investigating the social meaning of non-pronominal self-reference (NPSR, or the use of one’s first name to refer to oneself) in Japanese. We examine patterns of NPSR use in child language, Japanese anime, women’s fashion magazines, a Japanese pop star’s speech over an eight-year span, and three women across a range of social and professional situations to explore the feature’s range social meanings. We find that NPSR originates in child language and as a result carries connotations of youthfulness, and the association between NPSR and youthfulness is evident in and reproduced by the media. For example, immature anime characters categorically use NPSR, while their mature counterparts use only traditionally feminine first-person pronouns. Similarly, a Japanese pop star’s use of the form declines over time as she presents a more mature and serious self. At the same time, NPSR is often interpreted as heterosexually feminine. One of the participants in the study, for example, discusses having received unwanted romantic attention from a man who intimates that her NPSR use ‘suits [her] well.’ The meaning of NPSR is thus currently under contestation; NPSR users traverse a sociolinguistic terrain composed of youthfulness, femininity, and their interrelations. While most studies on the linguistic practices of Japanese women locate femininity in relation to masculinity, this study reveals the importance of an orthogonal dimension of identity – youthfulness, and in particular its fetishization – in constructing femininity.
