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Cardiffians’ perceptions of English in the UK
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In: J Linguist Geogr (2020)
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Old Stereotypes "Live Free or Die": Addressing the Evaluation Problem of non-rhoticity in New Hampshire
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Abstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020 ; Recent research examining New Hampshire English has demonstrated that the traditional Eastern New England features are dissipating among New Hampshirites (Nagy, 2001; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005; Nagy & Irwin, 2010; Stanford, Leddy-Cecere, & Baclawski, 2012; Stanford, Severance, & Baclawski, 2014; Stanford, 2019). The most salient feature of the Eastern New England dialect is nonrhoticity, and the aim of this dissertation is to empirically and systematically address the “evaluation problem” (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968) of nonrhoticity in New Hampshire. The process of an evaluative response is broken into three steps: noticing, classifying, and imbuing (Preston, 2010a). Three studies were conducted to examine each step in the evaluative process individually, paying particular attention to variation in the evaluative process. The first study in this dissertation addresses noticing using a seven-step continuum of rhoticity. The purpose of this study was to determine the proximity of F2 and F3 necessary for a listener to notice the speech signal as rhotic. New Hampshirites were compared to Washingtonians to determine if the perception of rhoticity was dependent on the speech community an individual is from. The findings from the noticing study suggest that the majority of participants tend to perceive rhoticity when the distance between F2 and F3 is 980 Hertz, with F3 lowering to 2520 Hz, and F2 raising to 1540 Hz. Further, participants tend to perceive the signal as nonrhotic when the distance between F2 and F3 is 1501 Hz. This proximity was constant between New Hampshirites and Washingtonians, suggesting the task of noticing rhoticity is not influenced by regional factors of the listener. The second study addresses classifying, utilizing a geographic open-ended classification task. The guises for classification consisted of a three-step continuum between rhoticity and nonrhoticity. The purpose of this study was to determine where New Hampshirites associate rhoticity and nonrhoticity. The results from this study demonstrate that those with lower socioeconomic status scores and those with higher regionality scores (Chambers & Heisler, 1999; Chambers, 2000) are more likely to view nonrhoticity as a widespread New England feature, whereas those with lower regionality scores and those with higher socioeconomic status scores are more likely to view nonrhoticity as a feature of Boston. This suggests that the step of classifying is influenced by social factors of the listener. The third study addresses imbuing, using an online implementation of the draw-a-map task (Preston, 1986). The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which New Hampshirites evaluate the pleasantness, correctness and similarity of English in Boston and other areas of New England. New Hampshire participants were asked to draw regions in New England that have a distinct or identifiable way of speaking, and then rate the regions that they drew in terms of pleasantness, correctness, and similarity. Results from this study demonstrate that the evaluations of Boston are not monolithic, but instead, the rating of pleasantness depends on a person’s regional- ity score (Chambers & Heisler, 1999; Chambers, 2000): those with higher regionality scores rate Boston higher for pleasantness than those with lower regionality scores. The results from these studies contribute to the literature surrounding New Hampshirites’ perception of nonrhoticity and evaluations of Boston. Further, taken together, these results contribute to the understanding of language regard, addressing the evaluation problem of linguistic change. Finally, the results from this dissertation provide evidence for the structured heterogeneity of eval- uations of a linguistic variant.
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Keyword:
language attitudes; language regard; Linguistics; perceptual dialectology; Sociolinguistics; variationist sociolinguistics
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/45511
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