NYU Linguistics

The Sociolinguistics Working Group is hosting a talk by Ronald Beline Mendes of the Universidade de São Paulo this Friday, April 17, on "Language change from within: from auxiliary verb to prefix in Brazilian Portuguese".

Time: 11 AM - 12:30 PM.
Place: NYU Linguistics Dept. Classroom, 726 Broadway, 7th floor

Jennifer Bloomquist

"'Girrrl, my car needs warshed!' Regional dialect accommodation by African American English speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley"

Friday, October 17 at 1pm
Department Conference Room

Abstract:

When members of minority groups migrate to majority communities, their rates of assimilation (or non-assimilation) to the majority culture are dependent on several factors including, but not limited to, the following: 1) the degree of physical, social, and economic isolation experienced by the migrants in their new location, 2) the history of the migration and ways in which the newcomers are received by the members of the established community, 3) the construction of a new community identity, and 4) the strength of the connection the migrants maintain to their former community.

This study examines the socio-historical acquisition and non-acquisition of the regional dialect by African Americans who are at least second generation residents (i.e., natives) of Pennsylvania's Lower Susquehanna Valley (the area that includes Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster) and investigates the reasons contributing to differences found among these speakers in terms of the degree to which they have acquired the local variety. The linguistic factors that are considered are region-specific elements of lexicon, syntax, and phonology; social and historical factors involve the migrant African Americans' relationships to the European American community including physical location (rural vs. urban, integrated vs. segregated), socio-economic status, rates and types of contact among speakers, and the connections maintained by the relocated members to their home communities.

Findings suggest that while rates of dialect accommodation are somewhat location specific (rural vs. urban), they are also influenced by the ways in which members of each community identify (or resist identifying) both locally and with larger, nearby African American communities. The results also challenge long held assumptions regarding the supra-regionality of African American English and the ways in which regional varieties have influenced the development of
AAE.

Wednesday, September 17 @ 10:30am
Linguistics department
Talk: Jen Hay
Speech Perception with Attitude: Adventures on a fush/feesh continuum

This talk describes three studies designed to follow up on Niedzielski's (1999) work which seems to show that the perceived dialect area of a speaker can affect a listener's perception of their vowels. Experiment 1 replicates this general effect with New Zealand listeners - the labels 'New Zealander' or 'Australian' on an answer sheet affect vowel perception. Experiment 2 demonstrates that this effect is not, in fact, driven by listeners' overt beliefs about the speaker. It can be replicated by placing stuffed toys in the experiment room (kiwis in one condition, or kangaroos and koalas in the other). Experiment 3 explores the degree to which listener attitudes can affect perception - demonstrating that exposing participants to 'good' facts about Australia shifts their perception in a different direction from exposing them to 'bad' facts about Australia. Together, the results demonstrate subtle but robust effects of sociolinguistic 'style-shifting' in perception, and illustrate that these effects are, in fact, relatively automatic.

NWAV Practice Talks: schedule
October 4, 11:00am - 3:00pm

Tara Sanchez:
Workshop: TBA
Norma Mendoza-Denton (University of Arizona)
Friday, February 15

Click on the links below for schedules and abstracts from talks organized by the NYU Working Group in Urban Sociolinguistics.

Fall 2006
Spring 2006
Fall 05
Spring 05
Spring 04
Fall 03
Spring 03
Spring 02
Fall 01
Spring 01
Fall 00
Spring 00