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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 728

Part of Session 167: Fine phonetic detail and sociolinguistic ethnography (Other abstracts in this session)

Narratives of social change as predictors of sound change

Authors: Hall-Lew, Lauren
Submitted by: Hall-Lew, Lauren (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)

Ethnographic studies have provided invaluable evidence that speakers use phonetic variability as an everyday resource for the construction of styles and identities (e.g., Eckert 2000, Mendoza-Denton 2008). The macro-social structures that characterize a given locale emerge from the iteration of these (and other) micro-social actions. This process is quite evident for stable linguistic variables, but is somewhat more complex for changes in progress, which may be both “less well-defined” but “leave more room for local interpretation” than stable variables (Eckert 2008:471). Independent of any theoretical interpretation, it can be observed that linguistic changes will always co-occur in parallel with social changes, simply because the available linguistic resources in a community shift in tandem with the relevant social meanings; it is then just a correlational fact that the available social meanings of a given sound change in progress are, at least potentially, always slightly different at different stages of change. An important and entirely open empirical question is if, for a phonetically gradual change, it may be possible for very fine-grained phonetic differences to index very fine-grained indexical differences. If so, the question is how fine-grained these differences can be, both socially and phonetically.

In this talk I focus on one piece of this puzzle, which concerns modeling the differences between community members’ representations of their community’s social history. While there are some broad narratives that unite individuals, there are also many differences between how individuals conceive of the development and change in their community. These differences in narrative cluster in interesting ways with locally meaningful social groups, which may be at least part of the reason sound changes in progress are often so well-correlated with macro-social categories. The present analysis takes speakers’ contrasting understandings of social history as the primary social variable in a quantitative model of phonetic variability, in order to (begin to) test the hypothesis that very fine-grained phonetic differences in a sound change in progress may index very different social meanings at different stages of social change. The results suggest that, at least for some speakers, one’s narrative of local history may be more important in accounting for one’s production of a sound change in progress as is one’s membership in the usual macro-social categories. Such a result follows from an ethnographically sensitive understanding of the relationship between sound change and social change, and the observation that the construction of locally salient macro-social categories is more of a consequence of that relationship than it is a driving force.

References:

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the Indexical Field. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4):453-476.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2008. Homegirls. Oxford: Blackwell.