Settlement patterns and the eastern boundary of the Northern Cities Shift

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
New York State ◽  
Early History ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This paper examines the dialectology of eastern New York State. Data are considered from twelve cities and villages bridging the gap between the Inland North dialect region (home to the Northern Cities Shift [NCS]) and the Western New England region. Communities are classified as belonging to the Inland North “core,” the Inland North “fringe,” or a non–Inland North region. The settlement history of these communities is used to explain the boundaries between the dialect regions; presence of the NCS is found to correlate well with heavy migration from southwestern New England early in a community's history. Looking in detail at the different distributions of the individual sound changes involved in the NCS across the dialect regions established in this paper makes it possible to posit a reconstructed early history for the NCS and make hypotheses about the phonological character of the different sound changes.

scholarly journals Weakening resistance: Progress toward the low back merger in New York State

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Status ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Phonetic Distance ◽  
New Community

AbstractThis paper examines the status of the low back caught-cot merger in Upstate New York. Most of this region is subject to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and therefore, according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), ostensibly “resists” the spread of this merger. It is found that the phonology of this region is indeed trending toward the merger in apparent time, in terms of both phonetic distance between the two phonemes and speakers' explicit judgments. It is argued that the fronting of the cot vowel in the NCS region is not sufficient to withstand the spread of the merger because fronting a low vowel is a “reversible” sound change (Labov, 2010). It is further argued that the expansion of a merger to new communities may take place indirectly, through launching a sound change in the direction of merger rather than causing merger to take place immediately in the new community.

The History of Public Welfare in New York State, 1867-1940

1942 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 146
Author(s):  
Samuel McCune Lindsay ◽  
David M. Schneider ◽  
Albert Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
York State ◽  
History Of

Escaping the Trap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-398
Author(s):  
Anja Thiel ◽  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Young People ◽  
Older People ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Time Change ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Small City ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities

AbstractWe examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document