SECOL 2023 at the University of Mississippi

2023 SECOL Abstracts

[Download a .pdf file of abstracts]

Keynote Speech
Two Cultures Way Up North in Ontario There:
The English, They Sound Like the French!
 
Sali A. Tagliamonte
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE is Canadian, born and raised in the near north of Ontario and Quebec. She wrote and published poetry as a teenager but when she went to York University (Ontario) in the late 1970's she discovered Linguistics. She went to graduate school in Ottawa in the 1980's where she worked under the supervision of Shana Poplack on dialects of English spoken by people of African descent in the Caribbean and Canada, graduating in 1991 and taking up a post-doctoral position for several years. She spent her early academic career at the University of York (England) where she worked on dialects from the far north shore of Scotland to Devon in the southwest (1995-2001). She returned to Canada in 2001 to take up a position at the University of Toronto and has been working on Ontario dialects ever since. She lives in East York (Toronto) on an oak ravine with her husband and two cats. She has five children aged 19 to 39, and 2 grandchildren.

In Northern Ontario, Canada, Anglophones and Francophones have been living together in a situation of long-term contact since colonial settlement. In the early 20th century Francophones were in the minority and held mostly blue-collar jobs; however, they have increasingly entered white collar professions, populations have increased, and bilingualism has become the norm.
Two characteristic linguistic features of English in Northern Ontario are: subject doubling, as in (1) and non-locative use of adverbs in utterance final position, as in (2). 

(1) Maurice he couldn’t talk a word of French.
(2) I like your outfit there

Using comparative sociolinguistic techniques, mixed effects models and conditional inference trees I will demonstrate the influence of social and linguistic factors on the use of these features.
For subject doubling, analysis of parallel samples from Anglophones and Francophones revealed no difference in the frequency of subject doubling; gender, education and job type were not significant. For discourse-pragmatic there, the strongest predictor of usage is date of birth, but no other social factors are significant. The two phenomena share many patterns: both are favored among middle-aged speakers and are linguistically constrained demonstrating that they are vernacular norms of Northern Ontario English. Where it is possible to directly compare Anglophones and Francophones, both groups pattern similarly. Further, discourse pragmatic there, is most frequent in communities with a higher proportion of Francophones.

Why do two the heritage language groups sound the same? A reasonable explanation is grammatical convergence; however, that cannot be the case. While both features are typical of French, they are also attested in English in the history of English so both grammars have the same phenomena in their structure. Instead, I argue that cultural, political, and economic changes have led to positive social interaction between groups producing a situation of social alignment between Francophones and Anglophones. Language use in the community reflects this development. Through systematic analysis of the frequency and patterns of variant choice, the linguist can discover trends in society.

ABSTRACTS

TITLE: A Morphosemantic Approach to Loanword Frequency Prediction
AUTHOR:
Timur Akishev, University of Mississippi, tbakishe@go.olemiss.edu

This study proposes a model for predicting the frequency of occurrence of loanwords (Loanword Frequency Prediction Model) based on morphological and semantic characteristics. The findings demonstrate that both the number and nature of inherent component lexemes and the familiarity or novelty of the borrowed concept to the adapting culture may influence the loanwords’ capacity for developing a derivationally productive behavior in the recipient language.  The acquisition or absence of this productivity characteristic as a result of the loanword adaptation process may in turn affect the frequency of occurrence of loanwords in a corpus-based environment. This study focuses on the discussion of the interplay between various inherent or acquired characteristics of loanwords with the ultimate goal of elucidating the complex nature of loanword adaptation.

TITLE: Apology in the United States and Saudi Arabia
AUTHOR:
Jwahr Alotaibi, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, jwahr.alotaibi1@louisana.edu

This paper proposes explications for speech act verbs that express an apology in Saudi and American cultures within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. I present some Arabic apology terms and related words, such as atather, meyanah and aasif, along with some American terms like “apologize,” “I am sorry,” and “sorry.” I also explain their various meanings and functions. Those explications offer insight into the beliefs and traditions of Saudi and American cultures. I draw my examples from Saudi Arabic literature, Arabic Corpus (KACST), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COC).

TITLE: From Face-to-Face Classrooms to TikTok Videos: How Instructional Language of English Teaching Has Changed
AUTHOR:
Veysel Altunel, Louisiana State University, valtun1@lsu.edu
Xiaoli Yu, independent researcher, rocklilyy@gmail.com
Fanyi Zhao, Stevens Institute of Technology, fzhao12@stevens.edu

This study aims to describe the linguistic features of instructional language in English teaching/learning TikTok videos and compare them with the traditional face-to-face instructional language in classrooms. A corpus containing the top 500 most viewed English-teaching TikTok videos was compiled to analyze the speakers’ instructional language based on Biber’s (1988) Multi-Dimensional (MD) framework. Employing this framework in the current study may establish an initial example of analyzing social-media-based instructional language. In terms of the comparison of instructional languages between face-to-face and social-media-based teaching, results from previous empirical studies (e.g., Barbieri, 2015, Hora & Ferrare, 2013; Lee, 2011) will be considered to conduct a qualitative comparison. The results will provide some insights regarding the uniqueness of instructional language on social media platforms, leading to further evidence-based comparison of instructional language between social-media-based and face-to-face English teaching and the corresponding learning effects.

TITLE: Derivational Morphology and Compounding: toward Enhancing the Teaching and Learning of Gungbe
AUTHOR:
Horeb Anthony, University of Mississippi, hmanthon@go.olemiss.edu

This descriptive exercise examines the different procedures through which words are coined in Gungbe (a language spoken in the western region of Africa, especially in Nigeria and in Benin) and compares the similarities and differences between the Gungbe and English morphological systems. The goal of this study is to set Gungbe linguistics on the map of world languages; as understanding the morphological process of a language can help native speakers and learners to increase their lexical capacity and be able to coin new words in their daily use of the language.  This study answers questions relating to the creation or formation of words in Gungbe and also examined headedness in Gungbe compounding in comparison to standard American English. Words, phrases, and sentences from day-to-day discussions and songs from a native perspective were selected according to targeted linguistic signs. The results revealed that Gungbe employs prefixation (Otò ‘country’), suffixation (mítọn‘our’) compounding (Gbé-kanlin ‘wild animal’), reduplication (dagbedagbe ‘very good’), calcquing (Sȩnami ‘God gave it to me’), clipping under calcquing (Mìjoședo and Miɖọmìtọn, two names derived from the sentence Mì jo șe do bo ɖọ mìtọn), and borrowing (Blȩdi ‘bread’) in its morphological system. While most compound words in Gungbe are found to be right-headed (gbékanlin ‘wild animal’), some are also either left-headed (Dunú ‘eat’) or neither (fọngú). Even as more data is needed for amplification, the outcome from this study opens doors to a better teaching and learning of Gungbe as a second language and more research on the lexical innovation of Gungbe.

TITLE: ‘What’s your sign for CRAWFISH’? Language Variation and Documentation in Mississippi’s Deaf Community
AUTHOR:
Corey Blount, University of Mississippi, corey@olemiss.edu

American Sign Language (ASL) is a manual language used by many deaf people in the United States and Canada, recognized as an autonomous language and the subject of sociolinguistic research since the 1960s. Social demographics, such as ethnicity, geographic location, age, gender, and socioeconomic status, influence variations in ASL. Most sociolinguistic research in ASL consists of large-scale regional and national studies conducted since the 1990s. Limited studies have been conducted that investigates ASL variation within the geographic boundaries of a state. To address this research gap, this study examines phonological and lexical variation of ASL in Mississippi through a series of Atlas-style interviews with informants from across the various regions of the state. The interviews include informal conversational questions and structured target item identification questions. Many of the lexical targets solicited in this study have been identified in previous studies as items with lexical and phonological variants (Lucas, Bayley, & Valli 2003: 18-53; Palmer, Reynolds, & Minor 2012). This study uses the three semantic categories of kinship terms, animal signs, and signs for countries and regions in the analysis. The study finds that an informant’s age is the dominant factor for ASL variation across the regions of Mississippi.

As a linguistic and cultural minority, the Deaf community has been underserved historically in linguistic investigatory research. New technology and trends in education toward the virtual classroom have increased the social reach of many rural ASL users far beyond their local communities. As a vibrant yet under-researched language, such studies are important to capture the scope of language variation and evolution of ASL.

TITLE: “Totally different dialect altogether”: Perceptions of Linguistic Variation within Southwest Virginia
AUTHORS:
Adam Bowen, Virginia Tech University, abowen1018@vt.edu
Kenza Kadiri, Virginia Tech University, kenzakadiri@vt.edu
Caleigh Hampton, Virginia Tech University, caleighh@vt.edu
Charlotte Koogle, Virginia Tech University, charkoogle@vt.edu
Sheree Ann Shuler, Virginia Tech University, sheashuler18@vt.edu
Abby Walker, ajwalker@vt.edu

The Appalachia Regional Commission splits Southwest Virginia (SWVA) into Central and South Central regions. In the present study, we investigate whether residents of SWVA believe there are linguistic differences within the region, and our results suggest that SWVA (like parts of Eastern Kentucky (Greene 2010)) should probably be categorized as belonging to the Inland South dialect region (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:146).

To investigate perceptions of regional variation, we audio and video recorded hands as participants sorted place names into piles based on their perceived linguistic similarity (Tamasi 2003). We recruited 21 people for the study who grew up in Southwest Virginia and who completed the study in a lab. We also collected data from 43 participants in more Western parts of the State (Abingdon, Lebanon, Grundy, Big Stone Gap), setting up in public outside of stores.

A cluster analysis of the piles reveals that the primary split made by participants is between a group of relatively isolated mountain towns at or to the west of the Central and South Central Appalachian boundary (e.g., Grundy, Tazewell) and all other towns, with some participants referring to the former group as “the true Southwest Virginia dialect”. 9 participants explicitly referenced /ai/-monophthongization before voiceless consonants as a feature or the area, which is also the canonical Inland South feature (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:246). And while some participants described the dialect as Southern, many participants emphasized contrasts between general stereotypes of Southern speakers as slow and polite and a “fast”, “blunt” SWVA style.

TITLE: The Intersection of Nationality and Religious Identity in Digital Spaces: Social Indexicality and Identity Construction on Twitter
AUTHOR:
Bailey Brown, North Carolina State University, bbrown6@ncsu.edu

Within a couple of decades, digital space has created a global interconnectivity that allows for new categories of social indexicality. With Twitter being one of the most high-profile social platforms as of July 2022 according to data analyst S. Dixon at Statista.com, the limited discursive tools allotted to users of the platform create a niche environment for intercultural interaction and identity construction. By examining members of the American Christian chronotope, the British Muslim chronotope, and the Chinese Religious Affiliate chronotope through the lens of critical discourse analysis, I discovered a pattern of identity construction on Twitter which includes the indexical strategies of the Principle of Relationality, Iconization, and Narrative Techniques such as affective stancetaking and alignment. Each of the aforementioned chronotopes employ similar patterns of performance to index themselves into their own preferred categories, separate and at times contrary to the other. By choosing notable associates of each of the categories studied in this analysis, I can ensure the data is representative of the public persona of the American Christian, the British Muslim, and the Chinese Religious Affiliate. Given Twitter’s inherently political atmosphere, the popularity of each of my subjects implies their national and religious identities involve political indexing. This leads me to conclude that none of the chronotopes referenced here are appropriate representations of their associated religious or national groups outside of digital space. Rather, I propose that public identity construction in digital space constitutes a level of inauthentic performance curated by the discursive restrictions in place according to the limits of the application and at times the censorship of powerful figures.

TITLE: English as an Additional Language in Brazil: Political and Sociolinguistic Implications in the Low Rate of International Academic Mobility
AUTHORS:
Ivonete Bueno dos Santos, State University of Goias, ivonetebs@live.com
Olira Saraiva Rodrigues, State University of Goias, olira.rodrigues@ueg.br

The internationalization of higher education has presented multiple possibilities for development through technological insertion, cultural, political, and social processes, and above all, language issues, for example, proficiency in English - the official language of science and technology. Thus, international scientific collaboration has been a reality for most universities around the world. In such a manner, it is essential to think that academic communities need to understand this phenomenon as a whole, as well as its implications in the change that they add to the interactional dimension of their fields. Taking this into consideration, the study emphasizes proficiency in English as an essential instrument in the process of international academic cooperation. It also aims to present through a bibliographical, descriptive, exploratory and quali-quantitative research method, the level of English proficiency in Brazil according to a world ranking from 2011 to 2022 editions. Furthermore, this paper describes and analyzes the impact and importance of mastering the English language for an international mobility process for professors and students of undergraduate and graduate courses. The notions of internationalization of higher education, the Digital Humanities and the mastery of a foreign language are derived from studies by authors such as Brown and Taylor (2006), Orlandi (2003, 2007), Scaramucci (1997)); 2000; 1999/2000; Vasudevan (2010), Santaella (2021) among others. To conclude, the results indicate that English proficiency has become one of the greatest challenges, and an obstacle that collaborates and corroborates the low rate of international academic mobility in Brazil.

TITLE: Understanding Appalachian Englishes in the 21st Century: Integrating Production and Perception
AUTHORS:
Allison Burkette, University of Kentucky, allison.burkette@uky.edu
Jennifer Cramer, University of Kentucky, jennifer.cramer@uky.edu

Perceptual dialectology is not the only linguistic area interested in connections between language and geography. Dialectology, and specifically Atlas-style dialect study (e.g., Kurath 1949), has its foundations in providing geospatially referenced lexical and phonological data, with a focus in regional language variation. The Linguistic Atlas Project, which includes more than 90 years of production data is the gold standard for representing the linguistic variation present within American Englishes.

In our estimation, no linguist has integrated what we know about how people perceive language in a perceptual dialectology framework and how they produce it within an Atlas-style interview setting to gain an understanding of how and where perceptions and productions interact. This paper seeks to do just that, focusing our investigation on the Appalachian Mountain region. A great deal of research (e.g., Wolfram and Christian 1976, Hazen 2020) has showcased the fact that Appalachian Englishes possess an array of linguistic features that distinguish them from other American Englishes. And yet, the rich history of language in the United States has created a wealth of linguistic resources though immigration, contact, etc., providing the environment for Appalachian Englishes to grow and adapt in ways that are also like other varieties.

Our investigation entails the presentation of Linguistic Atlas Project data mapped against perceptual dialect maps. The juxtaposition of these data types allows us to demonstrate how the linguistic information that people use in their perception tasks relates to real world findings from empirical research on linguistic production. Our findings suggest that the experiences of non-linguists and the production of Appalachian Englishes are intertwined in ways indicative of the history, cultural practices, and broader understandings of the region.

TITLE: Spanglish in the Miami Workplace: Language Attitudes toward Spanish-English Codeswitching in Professional Settings
AUTHOR:
Mary Cancilla, Florida International University, mcanc023@fiu.edu

Bilingualism is generally considered to be a highly valuable trait in the workplace, but little research has been done into the actual rewards and/or repercussions of speaking two languages at work. This research project aims to discover the opinions, attitudes, and emotions of bilingual Spanish-English speakers in Miami businesses and workplaces. Specifically, I will be examining language attitudes towards codeswitching, which is a linguistic phenomenon where bilingual speakers “mix” both languages in one sentence or conversation. Codeswitching likely happens in all multilingual speakers, but has often been viewed in a negative light, as some people believe it to be an insult to the “purity” of a language. In a place like Miami, where “Spanglish” is a normal and everyday part of life, one expects to find more positive attitudes towards codeswitching in the workplace. However, at this time there appears to be little or no published research on the specific question of codeswitching in the workplace in Miami. This research will serve to close that gap, giving insight into the day-to-day life of being a bilingual professional in Miami, as reported from bilingual speakers themselves. Ultimately, the knowledge gained from this research may be useful in determining equitable language policies in multilingual workplaces in Miami and other diverse cities.

TITLE: Different Phonographic L1 Effects in Processing L2 Chinese Characters: The Role of the Phonology and the Orthography in the Lexical Entry
AUTHOR:
Shuang Cheng, University of Mississippi, scheng1@olemiss.edu

This study focuses on whether and to what extent readers of phonographic L1 writing systems with different types and depths have different processing patterns in recognizing L2 Chinese written word recognition. The results of this study indicate that the L1 orthographic processing path influenced the recognition of logographic L2 written words. In addition, participants with “shallower” L1 writing systems encountered more difficulties in recognizing logographic L2 Chinese characters.

TITLE: Language Acquisition in the American South: Does Language Variation Play a Role in Language Development?
AUTHOR:
Christiana Christodoulou, University of Mississippi, cchris26@olemiss.edu

Southern English (SE), Southern African-American English (SAAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) are three varieties of English that coexist in most communities in the southern United States (Green 1995). Though previous research focuses mainly on the differences between AAE and MAE, there has been little research that compares the acquisition of all three varieties. Children speaking AAE have often been referred to a speech language pathologist for further assessment and rehabilitation, because some of the characteristics of SE and AAE—omission of auxiliary and copular be, omission of the 3SG morpheme -s/-es, etc.—highly resemble the speech of children with Specific Language Impairment.

Results from a recent study revealed high percentages of risk for a language disorder for their SAAE- (60.5%) and SE-speaking (37.6%) populations (Christodoulou & Tsimpli 2021). Similar results are reported by Moland & Oetting (2021). In this study, I investigate language development in these three varieties of American English, and ask whether missing inflection is the result of dialectal properties or the outcome of a language disorder.

TITLE: Comprehension of Wh- Questions and Passive Voice in Southern African American English and Southern English
AUTHORS:
Christiana Christodoulou, University of Mississippi, cchris26@olemiss.edu
Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge, imt20@cam.ac.uk
Arwa Alquayb, University of Mississippi, amalquay@go.olemiss.edu

African American English (AAE) and, to a smaller degree, Southern English (SE) have been socially stigmatized linguistic varieties, despite the extensive research showing that what is often misperceived as lack of grammatical knowledge, is in fact a characteristic of the dialect (Green 1995, Oetting 2015). A small body of literature on the developmental patterns in child AAE suggests stark contrasts but also similarities across AAE and Mainstream American English (MAE) (Green 2011, Green 1995, Oetting 2015).

We investigate the comprehension of wh- questions and passive voice in 45 Southern AAE- speaking children and 162 SE-speaking children from Mississippi, aged 2-13, from various socio­economic backgrounds. Our first task tests the participants’ comprehension of wh- questions, while the second task focuses on the comprehension of passive voice.
Results confirm that the two examined varieties of American English have comparable development with wh- questions and passive voice, with a minor deviation noted with progressive passives. Analysis on additional data on the comprehension of wh- questions across two additional experimental methods is also underway, along with data from a group of MAE-speaking participants raised in the same area.

TITLE: Authentication in Isleño Spanish Narratives
AUTHOR:
Felice Coles, University of Mississippi, fcoles@olemiss.edu

When giving advice or predictions, an accomplished Isleño Spanish storyteller validates his pronouncements by inserted sequences of highlighted elements of his identity that verify his authenticity and knowledge. When the advice or prediction is controversial, the storyteller asserts his status in Isleño Spanish through age (born and raised within the Isleño ethnic enclave, inheriting his authenticity from the social circumstances of his birth), experience (his lifelong socialization as an Isleño), and his ability (God has granted him the ability to speak the truth with the intelligence and the emotional maturity to discern what is right). Within the insertion sequences, the narrator uses yo ‘I’ to signal his authority for the narrative for the authentication, especially when the audience, signaled by usted/ustedes ‘you’, is perceived as inexperienced or outside the community, before the narrator returns to the conclusion of his story.

TITLE: Body Part Terms and World-Wide Features of English-Lexifier Creoles: Focus on stronghead
AUTHOR:
Micah Corum, University of North Georgia, Dahlonega, mlcorum@ung.edu

In this presentation, I provide an analysis of body part terms, like sweetmouth and stronghead in Bislama and Jamaican Creole, which are used metaphorically and metonymically by speakers to convey cultural and ethnopsychological notions (Enfield & Wierzbicka 2002; Goosens, 1990). Drawing on global, as well as areal and culture-specific trends in lexicosemantics, the study of body part terms allows for a nuancing of current discussion on universality and relativity in Creole studies. The presentation underscores the important historical work that has been done on body part terms that convey ethnopsychological notions in Creoles and pidgins, and at the same time it offers semantic analyses of constructions that include images of the body to highlight the regular and unsurprising nature of the mind’s creative capacities when it comes to languaging.

TITLE: A Matter of Space: The Acquisition of Motion Encoding by English-Portuguese Bilinguals across Proficiency Levels
AUTHOR:
Jean Costa-Silva, University of Georgia, jeancosta@uga.edu

This study investigates the acquisition of L2 motion encoding lexicalization patterns by late bilinguals in two typologically distinct languages: Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English. This typological classification follows Talmy’s (1985) and Slobin’s (2004) distinction between satellite-framing languages, i.e. those that encode Manner in the main verb and Path in a satellite; and verb-framing, i.e. those that express Path in the main verb and Manner in optional adverbial structures. Participants (n=192), consisting of L1 BP and L1 English speakers as well as L1 BP/L2 English and L1 English/L2 BP learners, provided acceptability ratings of satellite and verb-framing constructions drawn from two large internet corpora. To identify the acquisition of L2 lexicalization patterns across language levels, L2 speakers took a self-reported proficiency exam that placed them into three proficiency bands.

Results show that L1 English speakers show preference for Manner+Path, Path+PP[Manner] (henceforth V+PP) and Path+AC[Manner] (V+AC), in this order. L1 Brazilian Portuguese speakers, however, favor V+PP over V+AC and Manner+Path, respectively. Ratings from L2 English speakers show that learners begin to show similar acceptability ratings of Manner+Path and V+PP patterns to L1 English speakers as early as at the Intermediate level. However, L2 English bilinguals provide higher ratings of V+AC structures than monolinguals. L2 BP speakers’ ratings match those of L1 speakers for Manner+Path and V+AC, also starting at the Intermediate level. They do, however, seem to be less accepting of V+PP structures. Besides providing an insight into the development of mental representations in late bilinguals (Pavlenko, 2005; Athanasopoulous, 2009; Hasko, 2009), these results offer empirical data for the field of Second Language Acquisition and language instruction.

TITLE: The Discourse of Jim Crow: A Case Study of the (Un)Intended (Re)Marginalization
of African-Americans in a Library of Congress Ethnographic Interview
AUTHOR:
Bruce Craft, Southeastern Louisiana University, bruce.craft@selu.edu

This ethnographic interview serves as primary source documentation of “field hollers,” traditional songs used to communicate across large farms in the Deep South. Lomax’s interview of Ledbetter is unique among the Lomax recordings because it consists primarily of questions and answers rather than merely a singing performance. Lomax’s interview of Ledbetter when studied in its entirety shows nuances about race relations in the Jim Crow South of 1940. A discourse analysis of Lomax’s audio recording of Ledbetter shows how the interview created (un)intended (re)marginalization of its subject. Whether Lomax’s motives were intentional or not is debatable, hence the parenthetical (un)intended. Analysis of how Lomax’s interview marginalizes an already socio-economically marginalized Bob Ledbetter speaks volumes about the subtle but powerful ways that ethnographic interviews even by seasoned academics can further marginalize their subjects, hence the notion of (re)marginalization.

The purpose of this presentation is not to ferret out Lomax’s intent from historical or socio-cultural context. The opposite is true: to show through discourse analysis how ethnographic interviews and institutional talk can (re)marginalize an interview subject regardless of an interviewer’s intent. As Lomax’s work is still sought out and cited in folklife studies, and considering that the Ledbetter interview is a critical item in his priceless Library of Congress collection, a reappraisal of how Lomax’s interview operates as (un)intended (re)marginalization is important to future scholarship in Southern culture and folklife studies.

TITLE: The Gap Between High School and University in Learning English in a Saudi University
AUTHOR:
Samah Dulli, University of Mississippi, smdulli@go.olemiss.edu

This study investigates the reasons for some difficulties that students face in the first year of their university experiences. It shows the effect of the students’ and their parents’ educational backgrounds and investigates if the students are prepared to pass the year successfully in learning the English language. This study examines whether the students’ educational backgrounds and their parents’ educational levels affect their English language proficiency. Of particular interest was the students’ preparedness in English and their readiness to pass their first year of university successfully.

This study aims to find solutions that can bridge the gap between high school and the first year of university, focusing on the suitability of English programs in the pre-professional year of the university for students’ needs.

TITLE: Is Inclusive Language in Spanish an Unheard-of Imposition of New Morphology?
AUTHOR:
Jabier Elorrieta, New York University, je52@nyu.edu

This paper considers whether the spread of proposals for inclusive language, such as nouns ending in –es for the plural referring to all genders is indeed a top-down imposition from academic groups that goes against the nature of the Spanish language. On the contrary, a study of normative guides that teach a “better” language in fact shows that top-down imposition of morphological change is actually a tradition well documented in publications by the Real Academia Española.

This paper will show that academics are walking on thin ice when suggesting that morphological changes cannot be imposed from above. A study of the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas and of Fundéu will show that they definitely routinely seek morphological readjustments in the speech. Chief among them are the push for –d as a marker for the second person plural command (comed, venid), when Lapesa (1981) himself showed that testimonies of final –r (venir, comer) as a command were in fact general in popular and written speech in the 16th century. Orally forms ending in –r constituted the overwhelming majority of uses in 1960s Spain. Final –d has lately become more widespread, and it now competes orally with final -r. This kind of top down imposition and others regarding leísmo show that the Academy cannot seek refuge in the supposed impossibility of imposing morphological changes as a reason to oppose inclusive language ending in –e.

TITLE: Location Event Structure Metaphors in Hupa (Dene; California)
AUTHOR:
Ramon Escamilla, University of Central Arkansas, rescamilla@uca.edu

Conceptual metaphor theory has argued that event structure is understood via two major systems of Event Structure Metaphors (ESMs). The Location ESM family involves mappings between the domains Motion-in-space and Events (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 179). The Location ESM “includes such submetaphors as states are locations, changes are movements [change is motion], actions are self-propelled movements, and causes are forces” (Ahlers 1999).

Analysts have documented and described the linguistic expression of ESM systems in many unrelated spoken and signed languages – e.g., English, Lakoff & Johnson 1989; ASL, Roush 2016; Hungarian, Kövecses 2010; Chinese, Yu 1998 – “thus supporting the claim that ESMs are universal.” (Roush 2016: 389). The current descriptive work fleshes out a description of the ESM systems in Hupa based on published texts and on fieldwork with a native speaker, building on insights from Ahlers (1999). The findings demonstrate that the Location ESM system in Hupa is pervasive and can be observed systematically at the level of the lexical item, the phrase, and the multi-clausal construction.

TITLE: Cognitive Performance and L2 Spanish Verb-Clitic Processing
AUTHOR:
Maria Fionda, University of Mississippi, mifionda@olemiss.edu

This study investigates how vocabulary size and various cognitive abilities (Working Memory, Executive Functions and Speed of Processing) contribute to low-proficiency adult second language learners of Spanish noticing ungrammatical word order in the Spanish verb-object clitic construction. As research in L2 acquisition and processing has shown that low-proficiency learners exhibit difficulty in both the comprehension and production of the Spanish clitic object pronouns, including their placement with respect to the verb (e.g., Lee & Malovrh, 2009; Liceras, 1985), it is crucial to examine contributing factors in the early stages of their acquisition. The results indicate that low-proficiency adult learners of Spanish experience difficulties when processing L2 verb-object clitic constructions, and suggest that a general ability in exhibiting delays in reaction times when completing tasks under pressure positively contributes to added attention to detail in cases of L1/L2 differential syntax. 

TITLE: An Updated Look at Variation in Interdentals in Varieties of Georgia AAE
AUTHORS:
Meg Fletcher, University of Georgia, meg.fletcher@uga.edu
Jon Forrest, University of Georgia, jrforrest@uga.edu

After the early works, interdental fricative variation received less attention. To fill this gap, the current study examines variation in production of [θ] and [ð] in African American English varieties in Georgia. Our major goals are 1) to determine what the interdental fricative variants are for Georgia AAE speakers today 2) to examine if the same internal constraints found in older works are still present 3) to assess whether gender or community affects which variant is present in AAE speakers. The data comes from interviews with 23 African-American speakers in Georgia: 14 from Valdosta and 9 from Roswell. All instances of [θ] and [ð] were impressionistically coded as either: theta, eth, stopped ([t] or [d]), fronted ([f] or [v]), or deleted. Logistic mixed-effects models were constructed for analysis. The best-fitting model for theta includes word position as an internal constraint and a significant interaction between age group and gender. The best fitting model for eth includes word position as an internal constraint and gender as a social constraint. Variation in the production of theta nearly exclusively occurs in word-final position and for eth occurs in word-initial position. For theta, gender distinction is the widest in the youngest age group (ag2), with significantly less gender-based variation for older speakers. For eth, male speakers had more variation than the female speakers. No differences are found between Valdosta and Roswell, despite a theorized coast/inland split in previous literature (Fasold & Wolfram 1972). This result suggests that the geographic distribution of TH-fronting may have changed over time.

TITLE: An Exploration of Mixed Race and the California Vowel Shift
AUTHOR:
Kaela Fong, North Carolina State University, kafong@ncsu.edu

The California Vowel Shift (CVS) has been the study of much acoustic linguistic inquiry since it was first noted in the 1980s. It has since been grouped in with other like patterns which have arisen independently under the name, Low-Back-Merger-Shift (LBMS), though California will be the focus of the present study, which builds on previous literature by investigating acoustic vowel quality within a neighborhood in San Francisco, while also working to fill the gap of studies which take into account and specifically highlight mixed-race peoples. Using 81,271 tokens of vowel F1 and F2 automatically generated measurements taken from informal interviews with 27 speakers from The Sunset district in San Francisco, a primarily white and Asian neighborhood, the vowel spaces of these speakers were examined.

The aim of this project was to determine if racial/ethnic status as monoracial (Asian or White) or mixed-race had a significant effect on speakers' vowel quality and their level of participation in the CVS. The back vowels /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /u/, and /o/ and the low front vowels /æ/ and /ɛ/ were the phonetic variables of interest in this study.

Quantitative analysis found that all speakers' vowel systems do exhibit the characteristics of CVS in varying degrees. For the back vowels, differences between speakers of mixed-race and their white counterparts were found to be statistically significant. This study demonstrates the importance of including mixed-race peoples in research in California and beyond as mixed-race peoples exist both between and beyond the normative categories of race/ethnicity. 

TITLE: Perception of Dialectal Allophone by Spanish L2 Learners
AUTHOR:
Raúl Antonio Gamboa García, University of Mississippi, ragamboa@go.olemiss.edu

This study investigates whether the aspirated coda /s/ perception in Spanish is equally challenging in all phrases and sentences environments. The population consisted of 60 L1 English-L2 Spanish learners in three groups: beginners, advanced, and linguistic. They listened to and chose from phrases and sentences distinguished only by the aspirated coda /s/. The statistical analysis consisted of a logistic regression and several pairwise t-tests. The advanced and linguistics groups succeeded at perceiving the aspirated coda /s/ in the within-word environments but not in the between-word environments. This finding suggests that full perception of the aspirated allophone likely requires greater exposure to the target phone. Resyllabification and aspiration in the same syllable account for the degree of difficulty posed by the between-word environments.

TITLE: Language Attitude Influence: Association of Quechua with English Enhances Positive Attitudes toward Quechua
AUTHOR:
Erin Hannahan, University of Georgia, eeh62299@uga.edu  

Through an online Qualtrics survey, this study investigated the possibility of ameliorating negative attitudes and enhancing positive attitudes toward Quechua by associating it with the newly arrived language of power in Peru, English. Quechua and English have little in common grammatically, historically, or culturally, but they share two small surface similarities in their grammar and phonology (stop consonant aspiration and prenominal adjectives) that this survey emphasized in order to create an association between Quechua, a stigmatized language, and English, a prestige language, in an attempt to raise the prestige of the former by associating it with the latter. Participants (n=56) currently resided in and had spent the majority of their childhood in Peru, which has the largest Quechua-speaking population of the Andean countries. After assessing initial language attitude and initial language association of English and Quechua, the survey presented two English-via-Quechua mini-lessons, the first focused on phonology and the second focused on syntax. After the lessons, participants completed the same language attitude items and the same language association items to assess whether a change in language association and/or language attitudes had occurred. The changes to the language attitude item responses were significantly less dramatic than the changes to the language association item responses because of the ceiling effect. 32.1% were at ceiling in their initial answers to the language attitude items before the English-via-Quechua lessons.

This study demonstrates that association of Quechua with English can enhance already-positive attitudes toward Quechua and presents preliminary evidence that such an association can ameliorate negative attitudes toward Quechua. The model of comparative grammar instruction developed for this survey could be replicated to similarly raise the prestige of potentially any stigmatized language or dialect.

TITLE: Apologies and Non-Apologies in “I’m Sorry”
AUTHOR:
Mark Honegger, University of Louisiana Lafayette, honegger@louisiana.edu

One phrase that distinguishes English from other languages is the ubiquitous “I’m sorry” and “Sorry.” Researchers have shown how difficult it is for second language learners to master the intricacies of its socially appropriate use, because it feels to L2 speakers like Americans are apologizing all the time for the things that they would never apologize for in their first language and culture (Al-Hami 1993; Rizk 1997; Al-Zumor 2003). This paper will discuss the polysemous nature of this phrase to show how it is used for both apologizing and for other important social practices in American English. For my analysis, I will use Natural Semantics Metalanguage (NSM) to analyze three uses of this phrase.

The common use is when Americans navigate near others’ personal space. Another characteristic of this use is that speakers may actually use it more with strangers than with people they personally know. A second use is for expressions of sympathy and condolences. A third use conveys a true apology.

What makes sorry expressions intriguing linguistically is the public lack of awareness of the non-apology use of sorry. There is currently an ongoing discussion in American culture decrying the fact that some people “apologize” too much, much of which is based on the frequency of “I’m sorry.”

TITLE: When Russian and Ukrainian are Intertwined: Surzhyk in Ukraine
AUTHOR:
Valentina Iepuri, University of Mississippi, vbiepuri@olemiss.edu

The combination of two Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian, is referred to as cуржик (surzhyk). Although surzhyk has existed for several centuries, it became the object of linguistic, anthropological, sociological and sociolinguistic research only in the early 1990s, after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in 1991. Since this linguistic phenomenon has not been extensively studied, there is no agreement among scholars as to its definition or its linguistic classification. Scholars also disagree on whether it is a single variety or a system of contact phenomena ranging from lexical borrowings to code-switching or language mixing (Kent 2010: 38). Linguistic analyses of surzhyk are also frequently connected with language attitudes and ideologies. This presentation will outline scholars’ opinions on typology of surzhyk, will provide information about its regional prevalence in Ukraine, and will analyze some examples of surzhyk used in different Ukrainian regions.

TITLE: Sociolinguistic Analysis of Adverbial Intensifiers Muy (‘very’), Bien (‘good’) and Súper (‘super’) in Two Spanish-speaking Communities: Puerto Ricans in Louisiana and Mexicans in Oregon
AUTHOR:
Vivian Marcela Hurtado Iles, Louisiana State University, viles1@lsu.edu

This study analyzes the use of the intensifiers muy (‘very’), bien (‘good’) and súper (‘super’) in two Spanish-speaking communities in the United States: Mexicans in Oregon and Puerto Ricans in Louisiana. This research is combined with social variables such as origin, age, gender and educational level. It is also analyzed with a linguistic predictor such as adjectival connotation (positive and negative) the participants’ oral discourse.

Multiple studies are found on the intensifiers as linguistic resources in oral and written discourse. However, due to the limited research of the Hispanic speakers’ perspectives in the United States, this project contributes to the field of lexical variation based on adverbial intensifiers. The purpose of this analysis seeks to answers the question: What is the level of variation presented by these adverbial intensifiers as a function of each community and according to the social predictors applied?

This topic broadens the understanding of the Spanish spoken in two dialectal groups located in diametrically opposed geographical areas and whose speech is affected by different phenomena such as immigration, linguistic contact, labor or family conditions. Hence, social variables are determinant to verify the central hypotheses and the guiding question, through the quantitative and qualitative data provided by the Language Variation Suite software.

The result is a significant sample of a diverse behavior in the use of intensifiers, described in each Spanish-speaking community; considering the frequency, the context, its functionality and the intention in the discourse.

TITLE: Health Communication Discourses: Keywords in CDC, NHS, and WHO Tweets
AUTHOR:
Katherine Ireland, University of Georgia, katherine.ireland@uga.edu

What do keywords reveal about the priorities involved in health and science communication? This study draws from a corpus of CDC (Centers from Disease Control and Prevention), NHS (National Health Service), and WHO (World Health Organization) Twitter accounts during 2020. This study uses computational and corpus-based methods, with the R programming language, to compare the communication and linguistic patterns across all three organizations. Each organization’s tweets include approximately 1 million tokens, with key distinctions and priorities.

Keywords are useful for revealing “trends across time” (Kretzschmar et al. 2004) and underscore both differences and similarities in communication by the CDC, WHO, and NHS. Keywords also often underscore grammatical and lexical characteristics of the texts being analyzed (Culpepper 2009: 43-44). They reveal larger discourses associated with health, science, and risk communication (Regidor et al. 2007), in addition to distinctive differences in the priorities of these organizations. Finally, this study concludes with some recommendations for health communication using Twitter, in addition to further questions raised by this notable and important dataset.

TITLE: Those Are Some Funny-Ass Jokes!: Linguistic Insight from Professional Comedians in the Undergraduate Classroom
AUTHOR:
David Johnson, Kennesaw State University, djohnson@kennesaw.edu

This presentation analyzes how humor can introduce linguistic principles to undergraduate students. Dubinksy and Holcomb (2011) comment on the usefulness of humor in linguistics courses. Using their basic concept, I update it with different and more contemporary examples that appeal to undergraduates. I discuss how comedians (particularly non-native English speakers) analyze linguistic phenomena as part of their comedic routines, often without realizing the linguistic import of their observations/jokes. I contend that comedians’ “naturalistic” observations about linguistic phenomenon can invigorate undergraduate linguistics courses.

Undergraduates have become accustomed to short videos due to TikTok, YouTube, and similar social media. Pedagogically, there is “no going back to the old way” before social media existed. Instructors of linguistics must endeavor, at least in part, to meet student where they are. Therefore, using short video clips of linguistic observations by professional and well-known comedians can engage students in a way that traditional linguistics lectures cannot. In addition, these observations by comedians (i.e., non-linguists) can also provide fresh insight into linguistic analysis. I illustrate this pedagogical technique and these unique perspectives by analyzing the following documented linguistic phenomena in English:

• ass as an intensifier for attributive adjectives
• phrasal verbs (My mom passed out vs. My mom passed away)
• -ish as a class-maintaining derivation suffix (I’ll see you at 8:00ish.)
• glottal stop for /t/ in British English
• modifiers and affixes that are restricted (lukewarm, hanky panky, chit chat, wishy washy, underwhelmed, overwhelmed, *whelmed)

TITLE: The Turkish Language: Resistance and Acceptance of Foreign Words
AUTHOR:
Onur Kaya, University of Mississippi, okaya@go.olemiss.edu

It is significant to focus on language theories dealing with the foreign words integration into a language. It is important to emphasize the geographical location of the country. In this perspective, it will be presented how Turkey is on the way of different routes connecting east to west and has landed on Europe where a variety of languages are spoken, and Asia where many languages are spoken. Afterward, the language qualities of Turkish and its language family groups qualities are put forth. Then, how the formal process and informal processes evolve in the process of the foreign words getting into the Turkish language is dealt with. For this, the authorized and sole institution for the Turkish language, Turkish Language Associations’ qualities, responsibilities, and official process are focused on. The most common ways and languages of foreign words needed to the Turkish language are dealt with. Afterward, the most common foreign words taken into the language are presented. The data is analyzed based on accepted, resisted, or changed transferred words in Turkish.

TITLE: Re-Gendering French: Beyond the Masculine and Feminine Binary
AUTHORS:
Alyssa Langlois, University of Mississippi, aclanglo@go.olemiss.edu
Daniel O’Sullivan, University of Mississippi, dosulliv@olemiss.edu

Human gender identity has always been fluid and is viewed differently across the world. It is constantly evolving as we deepen our understanding of who we are. However, language, also ever-changing, has not always reflected these feelings and identities. We adapt language around the human experience. Derived from Latin and its three grammatical genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter, Romance languages now mostly utilize only the first two, relying on masculine forms to represent mixed or neutral groups. In standard French, the official rule is “Le masculin importe sur le féminin” [‘masculine imposes or takes place over feminine’]. If there are 1,000 women in a room, but only one man, the group is referred to using the masculine plural pronoun ils, as well as masculine agreement.

However, new language is becoming more and more popular. Many people use the neopronoun iel as a gender-neutral alternative. Descriptive adjectives have also evolved to be more inclusive. The public has had mixed reactions. Also, both Canada and France have official language offices, who have both commented on the validity of this language. This research focuses on identifying what gender-neutral language already exists, what do people in the gender non-conforming community think is missing, and how can we promote the use and acceptance of this language.

TITLE: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation to Study Foreign Languages
AUTHORS:
Teresa Lee, University of Mississippi, teresa902lee@yahoo.com
Manuel Campbell, University of Mississippi, mcampbe8@go.olemiss.edu
Katelyn Doss, University of Mississippi, kmdoss@go.olemiss.edu
Jacqueline Hibbard, University of Mississippi, jwhibbar@go.olemiss.edu

This study reports on the results of a survey questionnaire, which was conducted to get a glimpse into what motivates students to take foreign language classes. The data were collected over the span of four years (2019-2022) and participants were those who were enrolled in the first half of a beginning-level Korean course at a four-year university located in the South of the US.
In order to see how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation plays out with those who take Korean classes, thirteen survey items were presented on a scale of 1 (not really) through 5 (very much). The following seven items were listed to gauge intrinsic motivation: interest in 1) Korean culture, 2) the Korean language, 3) learning languages in general, 4) Korean food, 5) Korean pop music, 6) Korean dramas, and 7) Korean beauty items. The first three items were included to obtain a general sense of student interest and the remaining four items were included with an aim to pinpoint specific areas of interest. Regarding extrinsic motivation, the following six items were included: 8) to fulfill the foreign language requirement, 9) to have/make Korean-speaking friends, 10) plan to study abroad in Korea, 11) plan to work in Korea after graduation, 12) to have better future job opportunities, and 13) my parents told me to do so.

TITLE: Ethnicity Affecting Accommodation in Exemplar Priming: An Analysis Based on Korean /i/ Epenthesis in English
AUTHOR:
Hyunjin Lee, University of Georgia, hl66904@uga.edu

Speakers change their speech production in response to variability in the speech input, and this phenomenon has been referred to by various names, such as accommodation (Babel 2009) and convergence (Pardo, 2006). Previous studies (Beebe, 1981; Namy et al., 2002) have focused on a listener as a factor affecting accommodation. Beebe (1981) presents an interesting case of a listener’s ethnicity as a factor affecting accommodation. Ethnicity itself may be a significant mediating factor in accommodation based on his experiments with Chinses-Thai bilinguals. In Beebe (1981)’s experiments, when the interviewer was ethnically Chinese, participants used a Chinese accent in Thai even though the Chinese interviewer spoke Thai without a Chinese accent. This result can be explained by exemplar theory (Hay et al., 2006). Individual exemplars may be indexed to age, regional, gender labels, and other potential factors including linguistic details (Hay et al. 2006). When the interviewer is ethnically Chinese, Chinese-Thai bilinguals are exposed to the concept of ‘Chinese’, and exemplars indexed with ‘Chinese’ are activated. Thus, Chinses-Thai bilinguals use a Chinese accent even when talking with the Chinese interviewer without a Chinese accent. The present study aims to test whether the accommodation of English-Korean bilinguals is affected by ethnicity itself. Many studies have focused on linguistic factors affecting English-Korean bilinguals’ accommodation, so this study may help to look at English-Korean bilinguals’ accommodation from a different perspective.

TITLE: Raising Students’ Awareness: A Video-Recording Viewing Activity
AUTHOR:
Teresa Lee, University of Mississippi, teresa902lee@yahoo.com

This study discusses a classroom activity whose aim was to raise students’ awareness of their oral performance skills in a foreign or second language (L2). The activity was conducted with ten students, who were enrolled in the second half of an Intermediate Korean language course at a four-year university in the US.

According to previous research, knowledge and beliefs that learners have about learning an L2 or foreign language is one of the factors that affects the learning outcome (Wenden 1991). The role of metacognitive awareness has been explored in different areas of language learning such as listening, reading, vocabulary, and writing. Previous research has shown that specific strategies may differ from one area to another, yet the overarching positive impact of metacognitive awareness is observed across the board.

As for logistics, the present study consisted of the following four stages: in-class cultural presentations, viewing of presentation recordings, writing of a reflective essay, and a post-activity survey. First, participants completed an in-class cultural presentation (three minutes per person) on a topic of their group’s choice in the target language, which was video-recorded for later viewing. Upon completion of each presentation, participants were asked to view their portion of the video-recording and write reflections (one-page, single-spaced, in English) on what they observed with regard to their performance. Then, a short survey was conducted to gain insights into participants’ thought on the effectiveness of the reflection activity.

TITLE: Conditioned Shifts: An Analysis of Factors Shaping Participation in the AAVS in Jackson, MS
AUTHORS:
Tom Lewis, Tougaloo College, tlewis@tougaloo.edu
Ané Scott, Tougaloo College, alscott@tougaloo.edu

This paper presents a description of African American Language (AAL) in Jackson, MS, focusing on key factors shaping speakers’ participation in the African American Vowel Shift (AAVS) (Thomas, 2007; King, 2016; Jones, 2020). Recent research has indicated substantial regional and interspeaker variation in AAL (Kohn & Farrington, 2015; King, 2016, 2018; Kendall, 2018; Jones, 2020). Jones (2020) proposes an AAL dialect region extending along the Mississippi River towards the Great Lakes, delineated in part by participation in the AAVS. Our data indicates that Jackson residents do tend to participate in at least certain features of the AAVS. Speakers show a tendency towards reversing the nuclei of /e/ and /ɛ/ and towards the fronting and raising of /æ/. However, significant interspeaker variation is evident in the sample. Inferential analysis identifies that several sociolinguistic variables significantly shape this variation, including gender, social network density, and participant generation. The overall picture that emerges is that of a community in flux, with younger generations being the most likely to adopt AAVS features. We argue that these patterns may indicate a contextually conditioned shift in progress towards AAVS shaped realization among Jackson residents.

TITLE: Has Your Accent Changed a LOT? Phonetic and Phonological Second Dialect Acquisition of English-Speaking Migrants
AUTHORS:
Andres Lopez, Virginia Tech University, andresl@vt.edu
Casey Branson, Virginia Tech University, baseycranson@vt.edu
Sara Carter, Virginia Tech University, saraccarter2022@vt.edu
Abby Walker, Virginia Tech University, ajwalker@vt.edu

Previous studies have shown that an individual’s accent can change after living in another dialect region for an extended period of time (Siegel 2010), but researchers often find different degrees of second dialect acquisition depending on the particular variable being analyzed (Chambers 1992). In this study, we investigate the realization of the LOT vowel by English migrants to the US, and US migrants to England. We are interested in the vowel’s phonetic realization: British speakers’ surface realizations of the LOT vowel are traditionally represented using the IPA symbol /о/, while American realizations are transcribed as /а/, reflecting that the American pronunciation is more fronted and unrounded. We are also interested in this vowel’s distinction from the THOUGHT vowel, since most speakers of U.S. English have the cot-caught merger.

TITLE: “You will never be” - Exclusionary Tactics and Stance Cohorts in Transphobic Hate Speech
AUTHOR:
Griffin Lowry, North Carolina State University, jglowry@ncsu.edu

The study examines the discursive contexts surrounding the usage of the phrase “you will never be a woman” (YWNBAW) on Twitter. Transphobic hate speech can include prejudice, discrimination, erasure, and exclusion of trans people. YWNBAW is an enregistered phrase that either explicitly or implicitly indexes specific qualifiers of womanhood and the ideologies that come with them. This study defines three commonly indexed qualifiers (biology, beauty, femininity), analyzes specific examples, visually demonstrates evaluations being made and stances being taken, and identifies stance cohorts that use the YWNBAW phrase. The framework for the visual representations come from Wortham and Reyes’ (2015) narrative event graphics based on contemporary nationalist news media in Italy and the US, as well as a combination of Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle with Bax’s (2018) definition of stance cohorts. Within the collected tweets, a point of interest lies in the overlap between indexed qualifiers in transphobic discourses, and how that causes alignment between stance cohorts. The stance cohort of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) actively upholds patriarchal norms via their exclusion of trans women. This coincides with previous literature on transphobia and TERFs (Elliot & Lyons 2017; Blythe & McRae 2018; Derecka 2019; Upadhyay 2021; Breslow 2022). Both the TERF stance cohort and the “non-feminist transphobe” stance cohort align with one another by indexing biology and their ideologies surrounding biological sex/gender when evaluating the trans subject.

TITLE: Change in /o/-Fronting in Raleigh
AUTHOR:
Sean Lundergan, North Carolina State University, slunder@ncsu.edu

Back vowel fronting is a widespread phenomenon in American English, but whereas /u/ and /o/ in other regions are back-gliding, in much of the South these vowels also have fronted glides (Thomas 2001, Koops 2010). Although /o/ fronting is traditionally associated with white speakers, it has been observed in Black speakers (Wolfram and Thomas 2002) and Lumbee speakers (Bissell and Wolfram 2022) in Eastern North Carolina. This study investigates the change in /o/ (GOAT) in Raleigh during the twentieth century and its social variation, using sociolinguistic interview data from NC State’s Raleigh corpus. Findings suggest that Raleigh generally retains a fronted /o/ nucleus, but the glide has become significantly backed, especially among more highly educated speakers.

TITLE: If-Constructions in Letters to the Editor
AUTHORS:
Theresa McGarry, East Tennessee State University, mcgarry@etsu.edu
Tuck Ledbetter, East Tennessee State University, ledbetterte@etsu.edu

This research investigates the use of if-constructions in letters to the editor (LTEs) in two national newspapers and demonstrates that culture and, more strongly, writer’s purpose, determine the use and positioning of the constructions. While often referred to as (the most protypical) conditionals and associated with a tendency to weaken a speaker’s commitment to a proposition (e.g. Mondorf 2004), analysis from an increasing variety of data suggests that they instantiate a range of functions beyond the prototypical factual or counter-factual condition on truth value.

The limited varieties of English studied in this regard could also plausibly be biasing findings. Accordingly, we analyze a corpus of several hundred LTEs appearing in a Kenyan and a Sri Lankan newspaper in the first decade of the 21st century. As an argumentative genre that helps to shape the discourses of the community (Magnet and Carnet 2006, Richardson 2001) whose instantiation varies culturally and linguistically across speech communities (Pounds 2005, inter alia), LTEs evince specific discursive patterns regarding if-constructions.

TITLE: Speech Decoding of Aural Input in L2 Spanish: Facilitative or Detrimental Factors
AUTHORS:
Almitra Medina, East Carolina University, medinaa15@ecu.edu
Gilda Socarrás, Auburn University, socargm@auburn.edu

In order to develop effective listening strategies to teach L2 learners, it is necessary to understand factors that influence auditory processing (e.g., Medina et al., 2020). Whereas researchers have identified variables that may influence listening comprehension in L2 — such as listeners’ L2 proficiency, the speed of aural input, and the ability to replay the audio (e.g., Bloomfield et al. 2010; Imhof & Janusik, 2006) — few studies have found empirical support of a causal connection between these factors and L2 listening comprehension (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). Notably, even fewer still have examined how texts or listener factors influence speech decoding, one of the underlying mechanisms of listening comprehension. Therefore, the present study empirically explores the role that speech rate and L2 oral proficiency have on speech decoding, operationalized here as the ability to segment aural input into syllables.

The participants were native English speakers enrolled in upper-level Spanish courses at a southeastern university. Recordings of 32 sentences in Spanish were played, of which 16 were articulated at a normal speech rate and 16 were accelerated to a fast rate. Listeners wrote down in L2 Spanish what they heard for each sentence. Speech decoding was scored based on syllable accuracy. A linear mixed-effects model is fit in R that includes speech rate, oral L2 proficiency, and the interaction term as predictor variables. We hypothesize that accelerated sentences will be more detrimental to speech decoding than sentences delivered at a normal rate. We also hypothesize that L2 speaking proficiency will attenuate the speed results.

TITLE: Comparing Palatalization of /t d/ across Word Boundaries in UK English
AUTHORS:
Sara E. Miller, University of Georgia, betsy.miller@uga.edu
Margaret E. L. Renwick, University of Georgia, mrenwick@uga.edu
Austin Brailey-Jones, University of Georgia, austin.jones25@uga.edu

In many varieties of English, the coronal stops /t d/ may palatalize before /j/ in and across word boundaries, e.g., what you [ˈʍʌtʃu] and did you [ˈdɪdʒu]. Previous research of palatalization mostly focuses on phonological motivations. However, Preston’s (2021) elicited Midwestern US acoustic data demonstrate that palatalization decreases with formality and among middle-class speakers but is more prevalent among men than women. To complement this research, we utilize the Audio BNC to argue that in addition to phonological constraints, social, regional, and contextual constraints all impact speakers’ production of palatalized forms of /t d/.

TITLE: Pronominal Apposition, It Could Be Useful: Bringing Back an Abandoned Variable in Sociolinguistics
AUTHOR:
Leah Nodar, Purdue University, lnodar@purdue.edu

This study investigates pronominal apposition, which occurs at a high rate and with some unusual qualities in interviews with Kossula, the only remaining survivor of the last slave ship to arrive on America (Hurston 2018). Pronominal apposition is a syntactic construction in which a noun phrase precedes a sentence, and the sentence contains a pronoun which is coreferential with that noun phrase. For example, in “Den all de chiefs, dey go back an' takee dere seats again” (Hurston 2018: 31), “all de chiefs” is the dislocated preceding noun phrase, and “dey” is the coreferential pronoun, which occurs in the subject position where that dislocated noun phase would be expected. I argue for revitalizing pronominal apposition as a dialect feature worthy of sociolinguists’ attention. I first propose a set of guidelines for consistently measuring pronominal apposition occurrences and environments, and second describe three ways in which pronominal apposition can vary enough to distinguish between dialects. These are (1) the rate of occurrence, (2) the types and positions of nouns that can be affected, and (3) whether the pronominal apposition can be embedded. The last is of special interest, because embedded pronominal apposition has been argued to be impossible in the theoretical syntax tradition, but several examples are found in the Barracoon corpus.

TITLE: Old Data, New Tricks: Exploring New Methods and Approaches Toward Linguistic Atlas Project Data
AUTHOR:
Nicholas "Angel" Passarelli, University of Kentucky, npassarelli@uky.edu

The Linguistic Atlas Project of North America (LAP) is a compendium of interviews collected over the last 100 years detailing the speech of informants across the U.S. and Canada. In addition to compiling lexical, grammatical, and phonetic variables (“targets”), the LAP also catalogs data that generally go overlooked in research projects, including transcripts and audio recordings of interviews, informant biographies, and fieldworker notes. Several recent projects have explored new ways of working with Atlas data: Burkette & Antieau (2022) have examined the social and indexical use of a-prefixing throughout the LAP, and have also considered the value of using previously discounted LAP data generated from written surveys (2023), while Cramer & Burkette (2023) have recently proposed integrating LAP data into perceptual dialectology research projects.

This presentation will expand on these approaches and focus on how researchers might incorporate interview transcripts and informant biographies into LAP projects, sharing sample data and evaluating potential methods for analysis. For example, conversation analysis of interview transcripts could investigate how lexical targets are negotiated rather than simply elicited. Additionally, ethnographic analysis of fieldworker-written informant biographies could be used to examine the sociocultural context in which these linguistic data were produced, and the complicated ways that informants juggle language, identity, and ideology within the LAP interview task itself. I will also share the preliminary results of some questions I am investigating as part of my thesis, including how analysis of metapragmatic discourse in interview data might allow us to see traces of enregisterment codified in the LAP. Ultimately, by showing how researchers can apply previously unused methods toward underutilized data, I argue that the LAP and linguistic atlas projects more broadly remain a rich resource for sociolinguistic inquiry.

TITLE: Place Matters: Velar Nasal Fronting in Northeast Tennessee
AUTHOR:
Paul Reed, University of Alabama, pereed1@ua.edu

One of the most well-known features of English is variation in the realization of the velar nasal in the suffix (ing): the alveolar /ɪn/ and the velar /ɪŋ/. Since Fischer (1958), studies have examined both the social and linguistic contexts that contribute to nasal fronting. Factors such as gender/sex, age, ethnicity, and even identity aspects all increase the likelihood of the presence of fronted alveolar nasal (Wolfram & Schilling 2013). Previous research on Appalachian varieties have shown a wide variety of nasal fronting, from almost absent to almost categorical fronting (Hazen 2008). The present study will examine velar nasal fronting in a variety of Appalachian English from northeast Tennessee.

Data for the present study are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with 24 speakers from Northeast Tennessee (12 men/12 women). Speakers covered the age spectrum, ranging from 27-92, and were balanced for educational attainment (college/no college). To determine whether the token was alveolar or velar, a combination method of auditory coding with spectrographic support was utilized. Token counts were analyzed using a chi-square analysis, and logistic regression was utilized to determine social and linguistic factors that contributed to nasal fronting. Preliminary data suggests that older populations and men front their velars more often. Overall, speakers fronted velar nasals 67% of the time. In particular, older speakers fronted 85% of the time, whereas younger speakers did 58% time. When looking at other factors, men fronted 78% of time while women fronted 61% of time. The differences tokens counts were statistically significant. Further, age and gender emerged as significant factors for fronting. Rootedness, a measure of local place-based attachment, was a significant factor in interactions with the main effects of age and gender. Based on these preliminary results, we hypothesize in the full sample of data that these trends will be maintained.

TITLE: Perceived Benefits and Barriers on the Implementation of the Mississippi Seal of Biliteracy in Two Schools in North Mississippi
AUTHOR:
Rosalynn Rutland, Blue Mountain College, rrutland@go.olemiss.edu

The Mississippi Department of Education adopted the Mississippi Seal of Biliteracy (MSSoBL) in 2019 changing our state’s educational language policy from English-only to English-plus another world language elevating Spanish and other world languages to a status closer to English in the districts the MSSoBL has been adopted. This presentation identifies the perspectives held by Mississippi educators on the implementation of the Mississippi Seal of Biliteracy at a high school that has adopted the MSSoBL and a high school that has not adopted the MSSoBL. This presentation will focus on data collected from questionnaires on the perceived benefits and perceived barriers held by educators in the implementation of the MSSoBL in two schools in the North Mississippi region. The data provide meaningful information to the limited existing literature on the implementation of the MSSoBL from the perspectives of school personnel.

The data gathered for this presentation employs a qualitative method of data collection with questionnaires seeking to answer these two questions: (1) What perceived learning benefits/outcomes has the Mississippi Seal of Biliteracy generated or will generate? (2) What perceived barriers and roadblocks can educators experience or could experience in the implementation of the Mississippi Seal of Biliteracy? This study has a two-fold purpose. First, educators identify the perceived roadblocks to be overcome for newly adopting schools. The identification of perceived barriers provides awareness that certain resources should be in place for stakeholders to support the MSSoBL implementation. Second, these educators recognize how the benefits of MSSoBL outweigh any of the perceived roadblocks. Likewise, the data on educator perception not only positively affect our schools but provide information beneficial for the policy cycle of MSSoBL as it continues undergoing positive changes. The MSSoBL is a policy that supports home language maintenance by recognizing language as a resource in students’ high school transcript.

TITLE: The Subtle Art of Saying Goodbye in the American South
AUTHOR:
Iuliia Rychkova, University of Mississippi, irychkov@go.olemiss.edu

Greeting and leave-taking practices vary across cultures and may seem confusing when greeting or parting with someone from the unfamiliar area. Such conversation episodes often become a topic of comic shows and sketches that highlight peculiarities of region customs (Barrett, 2000). The American South, historically referred to as a culture of honor, is famous by its super politeness, which is especially manifested in opening and closing strategies (Cohen et al, 1999). The goal of this study is to investigate farewell discourse in the American South and analyze how polite leave-taking is portrayed in a humorous, but non-insulting way. This case study is based on the analysis of two comedy sketches from the YouTube channel “It’s a Southern Thing”, specifically “There’s No Escaping a Southern Granny” and “A Southern “Goodbye” Never Ends”, produced in Alabama. The results suggest that the sketch scriptwriters focus on positive stereotypes of Southern customs when depicting polite leave-taking, such as hospitality, friendliness, care, good food, etc. The humorous effect is achieved through incongruent joke structure, as well as by targeting the previous knowledge the viewers have about the South. The findings seek to contribute to the field of Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnography and to shed light on regional leave-taking practices.

TITLE: Neurodivergent Japanese Speech Styles and Translanguaging in Entertainment Media
AUTHORS:
Vance Schaefer, University of Mississippi, schaefer@olemiss.edu
Tamara Warhol, University of Mississippi, twarhol@olemiss.edu

The current study is part of a larger forthcoming study on the usage of linguistic codes and styles in Japanese entertainment media. We examine language usage of a protagonist on the autism spectrum with savant syndrome in the Japanese show guddo dokutaa (The Good Doctor) and compare it to the American version. Preliminary results show that the protagonist’s language usage matches descriptions of neurodivergent speech in Japanese as noted in research. Our results have implications for accepted descriptions of styles and translanguaging in Japanese society, Japanese-to-English translations of subtitles and dubbed dialogues, and the usage of TV shows to teach styles and translanguaging for learners of Japanese as a second language.
This presentation overviews the following:

• Common neurotypical styles and codes in Japanese and translanguaging patterns, cues, and effects.
• Features of neurodivergent speech styles and translanguaging in Japanese.
• Implications for other areas such as translation and Japanese as a second language.

TITLE: Tones and Tone Sandhi in Yangxin Gan
AUTHOR:
Lysander Schleh, Tulane University, lschleh@tulane.edu

This paper concerns the initial stages of a documentation project of Yangxin Gan, a variety of Gan spoken in Huangshi, Hubei, China. This is a particularly understudied variety, especially compared to the prestige variety spoken in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China, and is losing younger speakers to the dominant national language, Mandarin. The primary focus of this paper is the tone inventory and tone sandhi of this language variety based on recordings of monosyllabic and disyllabic items. Recording data shows the presence of four lexical tones in Yangxin Gan: a mid-level tone, a low-dipping tone, a low falling tone, and a high-rising tone. Furthermore, I note three contexts in which tone sandhi occurs. When two low-dipping tones are adjacent, the preceding tone becomes a low-falling tone. When a low-dipping tone precedes a high-rising tone, the preceding tone also becomes a low-falling tone. And when two high-rising tones are adjacent, the preceding tone becomes a low-dipping tone. I suggest this sheds light on Yangxin Gan tone as a system, but, furthermore, discuss implications for the study of tone across the Gan-speaking area.

TITLE: The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit: New Data
AUTHOR:
Asmaa Shehata, University of Mississippi, akshehat@olemiss.edu

Previous studies have shown that native language backgrounds of both talkers and listeners affect speech intelligibility. According to Bent and Bradlow (2003), non-native listeners can find speech from a non-native talker at least as intelligible as speech from a native talker. This study explored the so-called interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) which refers to the intelligibility advantage that nonnative listeners have over native listeners when they listen to L2 speech produced by speakers wih the same first language. More specifically, it looked into the ISIB as it relates to the Arabic spoken by both native Arabic and English speakers. To this end, 15 native speakers of Arabic and 15 English learners of Arabic listened to Arabic produced by two groups of talkers (5 native Arabic speakers and 5 native English speakers) and were asked to identify the words they heard. Results showed evidence for the ISIB for listeners (i.e., native English listeners were more accurate at identifying English-accented Arabic speech). However, no evidence for the ISIB for talkers was found. That is, native English listeners did not find English-accented speech more intelligible than native Arabic speech.

TITLE: Mechanisms of Reduction in Diphthongs: What Gets to Be Reduced?
AUTHOR:
Irina Shport, Louisiana State University, ishport@lsu.edu

This study investigates reduction of the /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ diphthongs produced by Southern U.S. speakers by analyzing relative duration and centralization of sequential diphthong parts, the nucleus and the offglide. Specifically, I compare the duration and spectral ratios of nuclei and offglides in diphthongs varied in stress and in voicing of the following segment. Twenty-three speakers from Louisiana (fifteen females, eight males) recorded themselves reading a list of 52 words with the /aɪ/ diphthong and 35 words with the /aʊ/ diphthong in an online Qualtrics survey. Diphthongs were segmented in the recordings; duration and formant measurements were extracted in Praat. Both diphthongs were longer in primary-stressed syllables than in other ones (234 ms vs. 103 ms for  /aɪ/; 241 ms vs. 134 ms for /aʊ/), and were longer in pre-voiced than pre-voiceless contexts (165 ms vs. 129 ms for  /aɪ/; 187 ms vs. 161 ms for /aʊ/).

Next, I will analyze nuclei and offglides similar to Pycha and Dahan (2016). Nucleus boundaries will be identified from the diphthong onset to the point of maximum first formant (F1). The nucleus-to-offglide duration ratios and the F2/F1 formant ratios for nuclei and offglides will be calculated to examine diphthong reduction patterns. For the pre-voiced versus pre-voiceless diphthong comparison, nucleus-to-offglide duration ratios are expected to be greater, nuclei more peripheralized, and offglides more centralized (Pycha & Dahan, 2016). Whether the same pattern is observed in the stressed versus unstressed comparison is to be determined.

The findings will address what gets to be reduced in unstressed diphthongs and diphthongs followed by voiceless segments: nuclei, offglides, or both. The study may contribute to our understanding of reduction in a regional English variety where ungliding (e.g., /aɪ/-monophthongization) occurs, and may contribute to the phonological discussion of diphthongs as having two sequential targets or a dynamic target.

TITLE: Defining Language Nutrition as a Human Right
AUTHOR:
Ralf Thiede, University of North Carolina Charlotte, rthiede@uncc.edu

Language processing in the aging brain is influenced by the individual’s history – from the quality of language acquisition to the frequency of interactions in complex social situations. Language is the human brain’s operating system, integrating both sensory perceptions across modalities and a variety of cognitive associations and processes into narrative coherence. On those premises, it makes medical and economic sense to make sure that especially children and ageing persons have access to books, conversations, and storytelling. Language is nutrition for the brain; starvation effects have been observed medically in orphanages and nursing homes alike. Linguistic malnutrition at an early age can predict language deficits and cognitive decline in the elderly.

Applied linguists match scientific detail to big picture. They can extend the definition of universal linguistic human rights beyond inclusion, preservation, revitalization. Making the case for language as a nutrient provides a theoretical foundation for including access to language (in quantity and quality, including literacy) as a universal human right, along with access to good and sufficient food, water, and living space. It can also help define linguistic malnutrition as a medical condition for purposes of treatment and insurance. As entire nations are ageing, there is increasing urgency in focusing on linguistic brain health.

TITLE: Purpose, Adaptability, Creativity, and Enjoyment (PACE): Four Lessons Learned Using Task-Based Language Teaching
AUTHORS:
Latasha Valenzuela-Hernandez, Louisiana State University, tashavale@lsu.edu
Margaret Weston Piccoli, Louisiana State University, mwesto4@lsu.edu

The purpose of this research was to explore the benefits of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in an intensive beginning college-level Spanish course. This case study adhered to the sequence and elements of the required course text; however, TBLT served as the framework (pre-task, task, and feedback structure) of instruction and assessment of the unit. In this study, seventeen students completed a series of input and output-based pre-tasks over four days, and, in groups, they successfully performed a culminating output-based task that also served as the final unit assessment. Following the lesson, an anonymous survey was given to the students to gather their opinions of task-based learning. Eighty-two percent of the students reported that they enjoyed the task-based lessons. The same percentage agreed that these lessons helped them speak more confidently, and they learned skills that they could apply to real-life situations. Eighty-eight percent students also reported they liked that they were able to choose the content and direction of the activities and conversations.

Based on the students and instructor feedback, student artifacts, and outside evaluators’ comments of the students’ final task performance, four overarching themes surfaced through the application of TBLT: Purpose, Adaptability, Creativity, and Enjoyment (PACE). These four factors are key to effective second language instruction and provide an optimal environment for language acquisition (Muñoz-Restrepo, A. et al., 2020). This presentation will outline the pre-task, task, and feedback activities, show the students’ artifacts, and provide both the students and instructor’s perspectives. Finally, we will show how TBLT can be seamlessly incorporated into a face-paced college-level World Language curriculum.

TITLE: Generational Differences in the Use of Switch-Reference Marking in Kakataibo (Pano)
AUTHOR:
Daniel Valle, University of Mississippi, dvallea@olemiss.edu

The present study investigates an inter-generational language variation by analyzing the use of switch-reference markers in Kakataibo, a Panoan language spoken in Peruvian Amazon. Kakataibo shows a highly complex system of switch reference signaled by 19 verbal suffixes that attach to non-main clause predicates (Valle 2017). These switch-reference suffixes encode three main categories: (i) co-referentiality or lack thereof between verbal arguments of a matrix and a dependent clause, (ii) core grammatical relation of the targeted argument in the matrix clause, (iii) and temporal relation between dependent and matrix clauses.

However, when analyzing naturalistic discourse from younger speakers (ages 20 and below), the number of switch-reference suffixes used by this age group reduces from 19 to 12 or less, with the switch-reference suffixes that express an equivalent functional load the first to be lost followed by the least frequent ones in the speech of older speakers. This simplification in the system of switch-reference morphemes does not entail a reduction of reference-tracking in the language since younger speakers tend to rely more on analytic strategies rather than synthetic ones compared to older speakers. In addition, younger speakers, as opposed to older speakers, tend to have a lesser use of complex sentences both in the number of clauses per sentences as well as the number of sentences with more than one clause. This linguistic behavior, in turn, feeds into the reduction of the morphological inventory of switch-reference markers in the speech of younger Kakataibo speakers. The study helps in providing a deeper view of the grammar of the language by showing two co-existing grammatical systems in the language, which otherwise would not have become apparent. 

TITLE: Discursively (De)constructing Bipolar Identity in Blogs about Bipolar Disorder
AUTHOR:
Tamara Warhol, University of Mississippi, twarhol@olemiss.edu

This paper considers how expertise is discursively constructed and deconstructed in narratives of personal experience on the bpHope Blog, a blog about living with bipolar disorder. The American Psychiatric Association (2022) characterizes bipolar disorder – also known as manic depression – as “a brain disorder” and states that “people with bipolar disorder experience intense emotional states that typically occur during distinct periods of days to weeks, called mood episodes. These mood episodes are categorized as manic/hypomanic (abnormally happy or irritable mood) or depressive (sad mood).” Many people with bipolar disorder receive treatment in the form of medicine and psychotherapy from psychiatrists; some also turn to online venues – social media, blogs, etc. – to help manage their diagnosis and treatment (Thompson 2012). These online venues not only present information and advice about bipolar disorder, but also may offer narratives about living with bipolar disorder. Moreover, these stories often serve as exemplars of the advice and information offered. Yet, these stories do not necessarily use “folk” categorizations of bipolar disorder. Instead, they employ a medical register to index expertise, creating a circulating language ideology about how bipolar disorder “should” be discussed (Wilce 2009). Analyzing a year of blog posts, this paper specifically examines how some authors of the bpHope Blog – who themselves have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder – entextualize the language of psychiatric diagnoses and recontextualize it in their personal narratives to establish expertise about their own condition. In doing so, these authors reify a medicalized model of bipolar disorder.

TITLE: Is Intensification in Spanish a Morphological or a Periphrastic Phenomenon?
AUTHORS:
Sydney Whitfield, Louisiana State University, swhitf7@lsu.edu
Rafael Orozco, Louisiana State University, rorozc1@lsu.edu

Intensification in Spanish constitutes a complex and frequently occurring, yet largely unexplored phenomenon that comprises both morphological and periphrastic variants. A well-known morphological option is the suffix -ísimo, as in fuertísimo ‘very strong.’ Periphrastic options are formed with adverbs such as muy ‘very,’ demasiado ‘too,’ bien ‘well, quite’ and súper ‘super.’ This empirical sociolinguistic study explores the use of intensifiers in the city of Medellín, Colombia. This study investigates whether speakers favor morphological or periphrastic means of intensification. We analyzed 1478 tokens extracted from the socially stratified PRESEEA Medellín Corpus. Our speaker pool consists of 36 speakers (18 women and 18 men) whose ages range from 18 to 78 years old. The results reveal that Medellín speakers overwhelmingly favor periphrastic intensification mechanisms over the morphological option. From among the periphrastic alternatives, muy ‘very,’ is the most frequently used intensifier with bien ‘well, quite’ tan ‘so,’ and súper ‘super’ also occurring frequently. This study expands our collective knowledge of the role that intensifiers play in language variation and change as well as provides baseline data for studies of intensifiers in other Spanish-speaking communities.

TITLE: Language and Embodiment: Prioritizing the Language User
AUTHOR:
Kelly Elizabeth Wright, Virgina Polytechnic University, kellywright@vt.edu

I will present an innovative methodology designed to elicit metalinguistic commentary stemming from such positionality-based awareness: the metalinguistic method of sociolinguistic interview. This method was first applied with 17 Black professionals from Detroit, Michigan and provides further evidence (see King 2021) that racialized individuals do more than perform race linguistically; they are full people with full lives, minds, and linguistic experiences and who orient to the complete tapestry of linguistic variation. More than this, metacommentary elicited throughout this method—especially that examined in close detail through three case studies—reveals the theoretical concept of sociolinguistic labor (Holliday & Squires 2020) does not fully capture these Black professionals’ reported motivations for style shifting. Rather, the notion of sociolinguistic labor can be enriched to include linguistic actions which are taken not only to satisfy others, but also to satisfy the self and in service of others.

Metacommentary from these interviews informed a speech perception experiment targeting three non-Standard variables–fortition via TH-stopping (they versus dey); metathesis (ask versus aks); and consonant cluster reduction (trend versus tren)–which asked: if Black people choose to produce racialized varieties more often at work, are their identities as professionals more likely to be rejected by audiences? Across all conditions, the overwhelming majority of listeners preferred sentences with fewer non-Standard variables to those with more such variables from a Black professional speaker. These findings indicate that when a Black speaker shifts towards the Standard—be that Black-Accented Standard (as tested) or White Standardized spoken English—their style appears to align with listener expectations of professionalism; this indicates that Black professionals are less successful in conveying professionalism when features of non-Standard racialized varieties are present.