Social and Perceptual Dimensions of the Southern Vowel Shift

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The increased mobility and expanding networks characterizing the modern U.S. have led language researchers to assess the effect such national dialogue and contact may have on the dialects that have historically separated the U.S. into three broad dialect regions: North, South and West. From recent studies of the changes affecting Northern varieties (labeled the Northern Cities Shift), the emerging picture of regional change suggests both continuity and discontinuity of dialect boundaries. The South and West are characterized by what appear to be unique changes in their vowel systems, and all three regions show intra-regional variation among ethnic groups and sociological categories such as age, gender and class groups. At the same time, changes such as high back vowel fronting and the low-back vowel merger are increasingly found across regional varieties. Such conflicting data suggest that it is important to examine both the social diffusion of the shifts and the functioning of the shifts for speakers within each region and their contribution to the spread of such changes in and across regional speech varieties.Understanding how these incoming changes are distributed and identified within the regions, and whether these changes are serving to further distinguish the dialects spoken in the U.S. or to make them more similar, is one of the key objectives of this research. The linguistic focus is the Southern Vowel Shift, a series of radical changes in the position of the nucleus in both the high and mid front and back vowels in Southern speech. Using a three-phased approach involving data collection and analysis, a matched-guise attitudinal survey and a perceptual dialectology task, the research examines the role of social identity and linguistic factors in predicting whether a shift will become a new norm for the community, and whether it reflects a conscious move away or toward speech norms in other dialects. This project will examine the social embedding and the perceptual salience of each shifted vowel class to local speakers, assessing the regional and national pressures affecting dialect variation in a mid-sized mid-Southern community and the function of incoming norms.