Doctoral Dissertation Research: High school choice and the social meanings of a sound change in language

博士论文研究：高中选择与语言健全变化的社会意义

• 批准号: 2116957
• 负责人: Annette D'Onofrio
• 金额: $ 1万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-08-01 至 2023-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2116957&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; choice; social

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Understanding how and why language change occurs is central to understanding the nature of human language. Recent work among adults has found that the type of high school an individual attends can influence how that person engages with place-linked linguistic features (such as regional accents). However, although adolescents often lead linguistic change, the impacts of high school choice remain under-examined among high school students themselves. This doctoral dissertation project builds upon previous work on an important regional sound change currently occurring in American English by examining how the social associations adolescents attribute to the features undergoing change relate to their own use of these features and how the social environments within different types of schools might influence the social meanings that are associated with these and other regional linguistic features. In addition to the training of a doctoral student, results will be shared publicly with participants and community members. Through sociolinguistic interviews, social evaluation tasks, and perceptual dialectology tasks with adolescents in different types of high schools, this project provides new and deeper insights into the social meanings that high school students attribute to a specific set of regional accent features. The exploration of how adolescents' own understandings of the social meanings of linguistic features relate to their social environments in school and their placed, racialized, and classed identities will in turn enhance our understanding of the mechanisms – both social and linguistic – at work during the course of language changes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。理解语言变化的方式和原因是理解人类语言本质的核心。最近在成年人中进行的研究发现，一个人就读的高中类型会影响他与地点相关的语言特征(如地区口音)的接触方式。然而，尽管青少年经常导致语言变化，但高中选择的影响在高中生中仍然没有得到充分的研究。这一博士论文项目建立在之前关于美国英语中发生的一个重要的地区性语音变化的工作的基础上，通过研究青少年对正在经历变化的特征的社会联想如何与他们自己对这些特征的使用有关，以及不同类型学校的社会环境如何影响与这些和其他地区性语言特征相关联的社会意义。除了博士生的培训外，结果还将与参与者和社区成员公开分享。通过对不同类型高中的青少年进行社会语言学访谈、社会评价任务和知觉方言学任务，本项目为高中生归因于一组特定的地区口音特征的社会意义提供了新的和更深入的见解。探索青少年自己对语言特征的社会意义的理解如何与他们在学校的社会环境以及他们的安置、种族主义和分类身份相关联，将反过来加强我们对语言变化过程中社会和语言机制的理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。