Cross-dialectal vowel mapping and glide perception

Formant transitions from a high front vowel to a non-high, non-front vowel mimic the formant signature of a canonical [j], resulting in the perception of an acoustic glide (Hogoboom 2020). We ask if listeners may still perceive a glide when canonical formant transitions are absent. We investigated the mapping of an Appalachian English (AE) monophthongal [aɪ] in hiatus sequences, monophthongal [aɪ.a]. If participants map this monophthongal [aɪ] to a high front position, they might perceive a glide that is not supported by the acoustic signal, which we call a phantom glide. Ninety-six participants (45 of which were native AE speakers) heard 30 different English words ending in [i], [ə], or monophthongal [aɪ] (i.e. tree, coma, pie) that had been suffixed with either [-a] or [-ja]. They were asked to identify which suffixed form they heard. Participants in both dialect groups sometimes perceived a glide that was truly absent from the speech stream. In these cases, participants mapped static formants in monophthongal [aɪ.a] stimuli to a diphthongal /aɪ/ with a high front endpoint, causing the perception of the necessary F1 fall and subsequent rise of a [j]. Using recent models of speech processing, which encode both social and acoustic representations of speech (e.g. Sumner et al. 2014), we discuss the mapping of monophthongal [aɪ] to a privileged diphthongal underlying form.

The Importance of Rootedness in the Study of Appalachian English

The relationship of a speaker’s language to their sense of place has been a focus of much of the sociolinguistic literature and dialect studies. However, the use of differing methodologies and measures makes comparison and contrast of the importance of place across different communities and social contexts problematic and drawing overarching conclusions challenging. To resolve this, the current article presents a way to quantitatively measure place-attachment using a Rootedness Metric that is both adaptable and comparable, permitting more nuanced understandings of place and language. Through three case studies, the author presents evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness of the Rootedness Metric to better understand how attachment to place impacts the phonetic variation in Appalachia. Inclusion of rootedness helps to explain why demographically similar speakers have divergent production, while the production of dissimilar speakers patterns alike.

An effect of residual T-to-C movement in varieties of English

This chapter examines verb-second (V2) cross-linguistically in closely related varieties of English: Older Scots, displaying general V2; present-day Appalachian English and African American English, displaying residual V2. Discontinuous subjects (analysed as instances of transitive expletives) and negative auxiliary inversion are shown to involve verb-movement to Focus in the two present-day varieties of English, unlike the general V2 found across Germanic languages, which involves TopicP. The area of overlap among V2 phenomena in the varieties of English studied is FocusP, which encodes the V2 associated with wh-elements in all three varieties (Older Scots distinguishes between Topic, for regular V2 and transitive expletives, and Focus, for wh-elements). It is suggested that perhaps the loss of generalized V2 is tied to a shift in the inventory of triggering features. In some varieties of English, such as Appalachian English and African American English, Topic triggers may have given way to Focus triggers.

Linguistic and object-based stance-taking in Appalachian interviews

This article uses data from interviews conducted in western North Carolina in order to examine the ways in which speakers enact authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances to construct individual identity. In this data, we find a subtle interplay between the content of explicit statements, narrative content, and the use of grammatical features associated with Appalachian English (e.g.a-prefixing, nonstandard past tense), and the use of physical artifacts as sources of stance-taking. This article focuses on two speakers' use of (present and not-present) physical artifacts (a placemat, a Civil War era sword, a lock of hair, and a piece of wood with a bullet hole in it) to enact stances that construct individual versions of an Appalachian identity. What this analysis suggests is that it is not just linguistic choices that contribute to stance enactment, but physical objects as well. (Sociolinguistics, stance-taking, Appalachian English, material culture, language and idenity)*