Hall-Lew_ICPhS_2011

The Completion of a Sound Change in California English
Lauren Hall-Lew
University of Edinburgh
Lauren.Hall-Lew@ed.ac.uk
*Travel support provided by:

Overview
Analysis of the fronting of /u/
a.k.a.goose,boot, /u:/, or (uw)
Analysis with respect to speaker age, gender, & ethnicity:
Asian American vs. European American

/u/-fronting in English
A widely documented sound change:
United Kingdom(Cruttenden 2001; Gimson 1962; Harrington, Kleber & Reubold 2008; Hawkins & Midgley 2005; Schneider 2004)
Southern Hemisphere(Lanham 1978; Lass 1995; Mesthrie 2010; Schneider 2004)
North America(Fridland & Bartlett 2006; Hall-Lew 2005; Ohala 1981; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Labov, Yaeger & Steiner 1972; Thomas 2001)
& specifically, in California(Fought 1999; Godinez & Maddieson 1985; Hagiwara 1997; Hinton et al. 1987)

/u/-fronting in California English
No documentation (in urban environments) prior to 1987(no mention of it inDeCamp1953)
As in most varieties, /u/-fronting first appeared in the environment following anterior coronals (see Flemming 2003).
In earlier studies, /u/-fronting among older Californians only occurred after coronals.

Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006)
The Atlas of North American English
Post-coronal /u/,
or too, is fronted across most of the United States.
Non-post-coronal /u/, or koo, is mainly fronted across the Southern U.S., but is also found in the Midwest & West.

/u/-fronting in California English
/u/-fronting generally occurs within the vowel nucleus, not the vowel off-glide.
Off-glides remain backed, resulting in increased diphthongization.
Fronting is inhibited by a following /l/
(The single lexical exception, cool, appears limited to the informal, non-temperature evaluative adjective & social uses, such as taking particular stances. More on this later…)

post-coronal /u/
San Francisco,
Irish American,
Female, 65yrs

elsewhere /u/
San Francisco,
Irish American,
Female, 65yrs

pre-liquid /u/
San Francisco,
Irish American,
Female, 65yrs

/u/-fronting & Ethnicity in California
Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, CA produce /u/ further back than European Americans (Godinez & Maddieson 1985).
Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, CA produce a wide range of /u/ realizations, with frontedness varying more with network, gender, and social class (Fought 1999).

/u/-fronting & Gender in California
Hinton et al. (1987) found that /u/-fronting was a feature of a gendered ‘mock California’ persona, e.g. ‘Valley Girl’.
Today’s analysis:
this indexical association is weakening
the correlation with gender is also weakening
the change is nearing completion

Fieldwork
Spring & Summer 2008
Guided spontaneous speech from sociolinguistic & ethnographic interviews
San Francisco’s largest residential neighborhood, the Sunset District:
roughly all ‘middle class’
approximately 50% Asian American,
45% Euro American, 5% Other

Speakers Analyzed
16 Asian Americans & 14 European Americans
17 females, 13 males
Ages 16–76
The Asian Americans:
(12) Chinese
(1) Filipino
(1) Japanese
(2) ‘Mixed’

Speakers Analyzed
All dominant English speakers since at least age 5.
Asian Americans’ heritage language self-reports:
(11) Cantonese
(1) Shanghainese
(1) Northern Mandarin
(1) Taiwanese Mandarin
Asian Americans’ bilingualism self-reports:
(3) active, (3) intermediate, (3) passive
(7) monolingual English
(1) Japanese
(1) Tagalog
(1) Ilokano

Data Collection
Including tokens
All instances of /u/ that occurred 15 minutes into the interview, onwards, were collected.
Tokens were classified as too or koo.
Tokens preceding /l/ (cool) were classified separately.
Excluding tokens
Any vowel following a /j/ glide historically or in other dialects (dew, cute) was excluded.
Any vowel preceding a rhotic was excluded.

Measuring Fronting
F1 & F2 values obtained automatically by a script written for the AkustykPraat add-on (Plichta 2006).
18% of the data checked by hand.
Measurements were taken at:
the temporal midpoint
the off-glide (near a boundary placed two glottal pulses from the end of regular voicing)

Measuring Fronting
Fronting, for each speaker, was calculated as the average distance in F2 between /u/ and /i/.
NB: Since the onset is most influenced by the place of the preceding consonant, the midpoint data underestimate the full extent of fronting.

Normalization & Statistics
Conversion & Normalization
All data was Bark-converted (Syrdal & Gopal 1986) and Lobanov normalized, using NORM(Lobanov 1971; Thomas & Kendall 2007).
Mixed-effect Model (word & speaker as random)
independent social factors:
speaker age (continuous)
speaker ethnicity (binary: Asian / European)
speaker gender (binary: M / F)

Results
Nothing new here:
The midpoint of post-coronal /u/ (too) is significantly further front than /u/ in other environments (koo).
The midpoint of both too & koo are significantly further front than /u/ before /l/ (cool).

Results
*Some New Stuff:
Differences between three phonological contrasts also obtain for off-glides.
Impressionistic percept of off-glide ‘backness’ may be due to rounding (to be tested in future work).
too & koo are not significantly different with respect to F1, but both are significantly higher than cool.
Not due to raising, but rather mergers-in-progress among pre-/l/ back vowels.
* = not in the ICPhS Proceedings Paper

San Francisco,
Chinese American,
Female, 16yrs
22

Results: Social factors
Midpoint data, for all /u/ combined:
Significant correlation between fronting and speaker age (F[1,29]=6.9, p<0.05)
Slight trend effect of gender (F[1,9]=3.3, p=0.081); females > males
No effect of ethnicity
No interaction effects
No qualitative patterning with heritage language and/or level of bilingualism

For just too:
No correlation of speaker age.
For just koo:
Main effect of speaker age (F[1,29]=8.7, p<0.01)

age: p < 0.01
age: n.s.

For just too:
Actually, no correlations for any social factor.
For just koo:
Trend effect of gender (F[1,29]=3.2, p=0.089)
females > males
Trend effect of ethnicity (F[1,29]=3.3, p=0.085)
Asian Americans > European Americans

Gender & fronting of koo

Ethnicity & fronting of koo

Ethnicity & fronting of koo
NB: The finding that a non-European ethnic group is not lagging with respect to a sound change in progress is unusual in U.S. English (cf. Labov 2001:506).
Here, not only are Asian Americans not lagging, but the speakers with the highestkoo-midpoint F2 values are all Asian American (specifically, Cantonese American).

Discussion
Age is still a significant correlate of /u/-fronting in California English.
There is still a change in progress.
However, the change is nearing completion.
Age is no longer significant for /u/-fronting in post-coronal environments – the environment where the sound change initially began.
All speakers of all ages front /u/ after coronals.
The sound change is limited to elsewhere contexts.

Discussion
Even in non-coronal contexts, /u/-fronting no longer significantly correlates with gender.
Full participation by Asian Americans also suggests community-wide entrenchment (cf. Fought 1999 for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles).

Discussion
Indexical associations between /u/-fronting and ‘Valley Girl’ personae also appear (impressionistically) to be fading.
*Interestingly, apparent exceptions seem to be:
occurrences in particularly rare phonological environments, like cool.
occurrences in potentially newer aspects of the change, such as off-glide fronting (shoes as /ʃɪz/, cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA).

Implications
*As a sound change proceeds:
the socio-indexical meanings that were attached to earlier phonological environments fade,
and similar or related socio-indexical meanings become (re)assigned to the newer phonological environments where the sound change is still progressing.

Selected References
Flemming, E. 2003. The relationship between coronal place and vowel backness. Phonology, 335–373.
Fought, C. 1999. A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3: 5–23.
Fridland, V. & K. Bartlett. 2006. The social and linguistic conditioning of back vowel fronting across ethnic groups in Memphis, Tennessee. English Lng. & Ling., 10: 1–22.
GodinezM,Jr, & M Maddieson. 1985. Vowel differences between Chicano and General Californian English. Int’l Jrnl of Soc. & Lang. 43–58.
Hagiwara, R. 1997. Dialect Variation and formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited. JASA, 102: 655–658.
Hall-Lew, L. 2005. One shift, two groups: When fronting alone is not enough. PWPL, 10.2: 105–116.
Hall-Lew, L. 2010. Ethnicity and Sociolinguistic Variation in San Francisco. Lng. & Ling. Compass. 4(7): 458-472.
Hall-Lew, L & R. L. Starr. 2010. Beyond the 2nd Generation: English use among Chinese Americans in the SF Bay Area. Eng. Today, 26(3):12-19
Harrington, J., F. Kleber, & U. Reubold. 2008. Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound change in standard southern British: An acoustic and perceptual study. JASA, 123(5): 2825–2835.
Hawkins, S. & J. Midgley. 2005. Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers. Jrnl of the IPA, 35: 183-199
Hinton, L., S. Bremner, H. Corcoran, J. Learner, H. Luthin, B. Moonwomon, & M. Van Clay. 1987. It’s not just Valley Girls: A study of California English. BLS Proceedings. 13.117–127.
Labov, W. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors (Vol 2). Malden, MA: Blackwell. (p506)
Labov, W., S. Ash & C. Boberg. 2006. Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology, & sound change. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lobanov, B. M. 1971. Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. JASA, 49: 606–608.
Mesthrie, R. 2010. Socio-phonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English. J. of Socioling., 14(1): 3-33.
Ohala, J. 1981. The listener as a source of sound change. In C.S. Masek, R.A. Hendrick, & M.F. Miller (eds.), Papers from the parasession on language and behavior. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society. 178–203.
Reed, D., & A. A. Metcalf. 1979 [1952-1959]. Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast. Berkeley, CA.
Stevens, K. H. & A. S. House. 1963. Perturbation of vowel articulations by consonantal context: an acoustical study. JSHR, 6:111–28.
Syrdal, A.K. & H.S. Gopal. 1986. A Perceptual Model of Vowel Recognition Based on the Auditory Representation of American English Vowels. JASA, 79: 1086–1100.
Thomas, E.R., & T. Kendall, 2007. NORM: The Vowel Normalization and Plotting Suite: An online tool for sociophonetic vowel normalization.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English 1 – an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall-Lew_ICPhS_2011

by Lauren Hall-Lew on Sep 02, 2011

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