Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Variation and Change in the Geographies of Suburbs

超过50%的美国人住在郊区。然而，研究语言变异和变化的语言学家通常将城市和郊区视为统一的大都市区。这个项目的立场是，如果我们不了解郊区的语言变异和变化模式——无论是沿着地理、人口还是意识形态的路线——我们就不了解美国的变异和变化模式。它试图建立在以前在郊区和大城市地区的社会语言学工作的基础上，研究郊区的语言使用和语言变化如何与城市的模式联系起来。该项目以圣路易斯大都市区为案例研究，该地区以其广泛的郊区化和白人迁徙而闻名。84名参与者，其中28人分别来自圣路易斯市的一个社区，一个是20世纪30年代发展起来的郊区，另一个是20世纪70- 80年代通过城市扩张发展起来的郊区。他们将完成一份调查问卷，并参与社会语言学访谈，包括单词列表和阅读文章。在访谈和问答中获得的几个元音的声学分析将与问卷数据一起使用，以确定郊区的语言模式。该项目将社会语言学文献与其他领域的大都市地区的当前方法进行了对话。此外，它有助于理解联邦和地方住房政策在郊区化和居住隔离模式中所起的作用。美国直到最近才开始努力应对这些政策的影响（例如，参见2014年密苏里州弗格森圣路易斯郊区的抗议活动），该项目将对这些政策影响的研究扩展到语言和文化领域。

More than 50% of Americans live in suburban areas. However, linguists studying language variation and change typically treat cities and suburbs as a uniform metropolitan area. This project takes the position that if we do not understand patterns of language variation and change in suburbs -- whether along geographical, demographic, or ideological lines -- we do not understand patterns of variation and change in the US. It seeks to build on previous sociolinguistic work both in suburbs and larger urban areas, with a research question of how language use and language change in suburban areas relates to patterns found in cities. This project uses the St. Louis metropolitan area, a site well-known for its extensive suburbanization and White flight, as a case study. Eighty-four participants, twenty-eight each from a neighborhood in the City of St. Louis, a suburb that developed in the 1930s, and a suburb that developed through urban sprawl in the 1970-1980s, will complete a questionnaire and engage in a sociolinguistic interview, including a word list and reading passage. Acoustic analysis of several vowels obtained in the interview and elicitations will be used alongside the questionnaire data to ascertain linguistic patterns in suburbs.This project brings the sociolinguistic literature into conversation with current approaches to metropolitan areas in other fields. Additionally, it contributes to understanding the role that federal and local housing policy have played in patterns of suburbanization and residential segregation. The US has only recently begun to grapple with the impacts of these policies (see, for example, the 2014 protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri), and this project extends research on their impacts to the linguistic and cultural realms.