An Intonational Analysis of Imitation Speech in AAE
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1 Karen Eisenhauer NCSU ENG 528 “Way too Much Ghetto for Me at the Moment”: An Intonational Analysis of Imitation Speech in AAE 1. Introduction In the field of sociophonetics, Supra-segmental features such as stress, intonation, and timing has received comparatively little attention. The prosody of African American English (AAE) in particular has not been adequately examined, despite the robust literature covering other aspects of the dialect. The specific aspects of AAE intonation have been frustratingly difficult to pin down, although it’s apparent from several studies that speakers cue into intonational features to help identify ethnicity of speakers with high degrees of accuracy (Thomas 2015, Thomas & Reaser 2004). This paper contributes to the literature on AAE intonation by examining imitation speech. Imitation, also referred to as “performance speech,” is defined by Betsy Evans (2010) as “the conscious use of a variety that is not the speaker’s usual vernacular.” (p.379). Natalie Schilling- Estes (1998) similarly describes it as “that register associated with speakers’ attempting to display for others a certain language or language variety, whether their own or that of another community…such a speech event is characterized by a focus, whether overt or covert, on how people speak rather than on what they say” (p. 53). There are very few sociolinguistic studies on imitation – most studies are concerned instead with developing methods that study un-self- conscious speech. However, scholars who have studied imitation have found that imitative speech need not be grossly stereotypical. Dialect performance, especially if the imitator has had exposure to the target person or variety, is patterned. Furthermore, those patterns “are not 2 necessarily different from, or less regular than, those observed in non-self-conscious speech” (Schilling Estes 1998 p. 62). In this paper I will examine imitations of vernacular AAE (AAVE) in the comedic sketches of the online comedian Hartbeat. Hartbeat is a woman of color and a native speaker of AAE. Through her sketch performances, she manipulates certain features of her language to assume different personas, one of whom is a comedic stereotype of black femininity named Michellé. Based on previous literature about AAE prosody, I compare intonational features of the performer’s personal voice with the performance speech she associates with black femininity. I will use the measures of excursion, pitch accent frequency, and peak delay to delineate the intonational features which are socially salient markers in Hartbeat’s speech. 1.1 Intonational aspects of African American English Some previous scholars have made an attempt at describing the distinct intonational aspects of AAE. The first and most influential of these studies was Tarone (1973), who posited several key differences between AAE and European American speech in Seattle, WA. One thing Tarone found was that speakers of AAE used a significantly wider pitch range than European American speakers. She also found more frequent use of falsetto. These observations have been confirmed by several subsequent studies (Hudson & Holbrook 1981, 1982, Loman 1975, Jun & Foreman 1996). There have been some findings to the contrary, but Thomas (2015) attributes this difference to the fact that these acts are probably only used in certain informal/possibly competitive registers (a distinction that wasn’t taken into account in previous studies) (p. 425- 26). Because this is one of the more well-supported claims about AAE intonation, I utilize it as the basis for one of my tests. An overall comparatively lower fundamental frequency has been 3 reported in African American males, as well as some vowel quality differences. However, these findings aren’t applicable to this study because it concentrates solely on female speech Loman (1975) described another feature of AAE that occurs within the level of the intonational phrase (IP), which is the relatively high frequency of “primary stresses” found in black speakers. He was using an outdated system of intonational transcription, but modern readers can take this to mean that AAE speakers have a higher frequency of pitch accents per intonational phrase. This finding has been tentatively supported by several studies (Thomas 1999, Wolfram & Thomas 2002, McLarty 2011). Lastly, Thomas (1999) and McLarty (2011) have found that one of the most distinctive features of AAE to be the relatively high occurrence of L+H* pitch accents, and more generally, “a tendency of tonal peaks to occur later within syllables for AAE than for European American English.” (Thomas 2015 p. 426). Both findings will be tested in this study. Most researchers agree that segmental phonology, prosody, and voice quality are the most useful to listeners when it comes to accurate perception of dialects. This is partially because these features are available on shorter order than “larger scale” features such as discourse style or lexicon. Additionally, in the specific case of AAE, speakers tend to retain intonational and phonological qualities across registers (Thomas & Reaser 2004). Prosodic features have been pointed to in particular by Spears (1988) as one of the sole distinguishing characteristics of Standard Black English (Spears 1988). While others don’t make such a strong claim, it has been shown by many studies that intonation is one of several phonetic cues that influences the ability of listeners to accurately identify the ethnicity of a given speaker (Thomas et al 2010, Foreman 2000). 1.2. Linguistic Performance and imitation 4 Imitation, or performance speech, is understudied in the field of sociolinguistics. This sets the field apart from other speech-related fields, such as speech pathology or cognitive science, both of whom have robust literatures on the topic. Linguists who do study imitation point to Labov’s “vernacular principle” as the cause of this oversight (Labov 1972). Following Labov’s paradigm, most of the effort in sociolinguistic study has been spent developing research methods meant to elicit un-self-conscious speech in subjects (Evans 2010, Schilling-Estes 1998). In fact, for many years, the belief was that speakers could not successfully disguise their voice or meaningfully imitate other dialects, and that perhaps bi-dialectal speakers didn’t even exist. However, these studies often had speakers imitate dialects they weren’t familiar with - it stands to reason that those speakers may have a less robust understanding of the mechanics of the target dialect (Preston 1996, Bell 1992, Butter 1993). A few studies have been performed on speakers’ self-conscious performance of their own dialect, or a dialect they are intimately familiar with through culture or geography (Evans 2010, Schilling-Estes 1998). The findings showed that imitation can in fact be a patterned, nuanced phenomenon. For example, Schilling-Estes (1998) found in her study on speakers in Ocracoke, North Carolina that residents have developed styles of “self-performance” concerning their own traditional dialect that mirror non-performance vernacular speech. She and others make the point that not only is performance patterned, but that it is common, and it is often key in social positioning work. Discounting it because it is somehow unnatural seems to be both essentialist and fallacious. Schilling-Estes also makes the point that imitation has ties to perception that are underutilized by linguistic researchers. Labov laid down the foundation for this insight with his observation that asking subjects about their linguistic perceptions will yield unreliable results, as it “depends on the doubtful assumption that informants have free mental access to their 5 language” (Labov 1994 p. 352). This is especially true of any linguistic meta-knowledge lower than pragmatic and lexical levels. Schilling-Estes proposes that the study of performance speech is a good way to gather perceptual knowledge indirectly: When speakers attempt to "put on" a dialect for an audience, they have available to them only those features they can perceive; further, there is evidence that the greater perceptual awareness speakers have of a given language feature (whether this awareness is at the conscious level or not), the greater the extent to which the feature will figure in their demonstrations and discussions of the language variety in question (Silverstein 1981, Preston 1996). Thus, through examining performance speech, we can gain insight into which aspects of linguistic production are most salient to the performer. (Schilling Estes 1998 p. 64) In this way, a study of the imitation of AAVE by a speaker intimately acquainted with the dialect may yield two important contributions. The presence of a patterned intonational feature in imitation may first be tentatively considered as a viable source to support its presence in non- performance versions of the target dialect. And second, the presence of a feature in imitations indicate the salience of that feature in socially indexing the target identity. 1.2 Comedic performance as a site for sociolinguistic analysis Among the few studies done in imitation, most have concentrated on either professional interpreters in tightly controlled environments (e.g. Zetterholm 2002) or on non-professionals in informal contexts (e.g. Evans 2010). However, there is also a growing body of work concerning public performances and identity-construction. These studies have accepted performance as a natural and even central feature of discourse, and seek to