The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation in a Mexican Immigrant Community
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Mexican Immigrant Community Marielle Lerner University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons Recommended Citation Lerner, Marielle, "The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Mexican Immigrant Community" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2420. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2420 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2420 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Mexican Immigrant Community Abstract In language change originating within the speech community, child acquisition begins with “faithful transmission of the adult system” (Labov 2007:346). On entering their peer group, children participate in incrementation of change. Input from multiple generations of speakers is arguably necessary for children to advance a language change. With stable variable input, children are reported to acquire their parents’ probabilistic usage, then maintain it among peers. This dissertation asks what can be learned about the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation from a case where children receive limited generational evidence about their community’s linguistic variables. I examine whether these youngest speakers participate in incrementing change, or whether they reinterpret the pre-existing variation. Study participants are six families of immigrants from Puebla in the Philadelphia Mexican community, consisting primarily of a first generation of young adults and a growing second generation of children. Participants themselves recorded day-to-day family interactions, including speech from both caregivers and children. I analyze the acquisition of two variable features: a morphological alternation in the 2nd person singular preterit inflection between standard aste, iste and non-standard astes, istes; and frication and deletion of the voiced alveolar flap /ɾ/ in syllable-final position. Addition of non-standard preterit –s is widely reported in other Spanish varieties; change in progress has not been previously observed. Frication of syllable-final /ɾ/ has previously been reported as undergoing change. I find that children use the standard [ɾ] variant of syllable-final /ɾ/ significantly less frequently than their parents. This study also provides the first report of syllable-final /ɾ/ deletion in Central Mexican Spanish, present among both parents and children. Furthermore, the younger generation deletes much more frequently while producing the fricative infrequently or not at all. Children also use the non-standard preterit suffixes significantly more frequently than caregivers, a development that would be atypical of the acquisition of stable variation. I show that even with reduced generational input for the children of this community, they are participating in language change. This study also replicates the finding that both caregiver and peer group influences are detectable in the variable aspects of children’s grammars in the process of language acquisition. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Linguistics First Advisor Gillian Sankoff Keywords Acquisition, Change, Spanish, Variation Subject Categories Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2420 THE ACQUISITION OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION IN A MEXICAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY Marielle Lerner A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation _______________________ Gillian Sankoff Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Graduate Group Chairperson _________________________ Eugene Buckley, Associate Professor of Linguistics Dissertation Committee Jennifer Smith, Professor of Sociolinguistics Meredith Tamminga, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Charles Yang, Associate Professor of Linguistics THE ACQUISITION OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION IN A MEXICAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY COPYRIGHT 2016 Marielle Lerner This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I cannot give enough thanks to my advisor and dissertation supervisor, Gillian Sankoff. She contributed thoughtful feedback, careful editing, inspiration, and encouragement at every step of this research. Gillian went above and beyond her job description even after retirement, and I thank her for her constant warmth and generosity. I am grateful to my committee members, Jennifer Smith, Meredith Tamminga, and Charles Yang. Jennifer inspired this project with her own innovative research, and I thank her for her advice and enthusiastic support from afar. I thank Meredith for her support, first as a fellow student, and then as a professor and committee member. Meredith’s suggestions were crucial to guiding my data analysis, and her encouragement was equally valuable. I thank Charles for providing thoughtful feedback, ranging from the details of presentation of results to considering the bigger picture and making connections to other areas of research. I cannot count the ways that I am indebted to Sue Sheehan, whose official title was Linguistics Lab administrator, but who has been a friend, mentor, research assistant, and much more. The numerous ways that she offered support (a list which is surely incomplete) include helping to select and acquire fieldwork materials, test equipment, write instructions for participants, prepare interviews and training for transcribers, checking on my progress, and offering moral support. I thank Bill Labov for providing support at many stages of my fieldwork, including acting as principal investigator for my Institutional Review Board protocol and providing the means to hire student transcribers, not to mention his ever-ready contributions of inventive iv suggestions for fieldwork methods or thought-provoking questions to pursue. I am grateful to Andrés de los Rios for his hard work and reliability as a transcriber, and his enthusiasm for the project. I thank María Teresa Escobar for her dedication as a transcriber and for her constant offers of support and encouragement. I thank Hilary Prichard for her moral support and patient help with perfecting the Python scripts that facilitated my data analysis. I thank my fellow students Lauren Friedman, Jana Beck, Dimka Atanassov, Yong-cheol Lee, Soohyun Kwon, and Sabriya Fisher for being available for study sessions, happy hours, commiseration, and essential moral support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Monica Jutkowitz for her persistence in convincing me to confront my fears and insecurities and to take it one day at a time. I thank my parents, Catherine Iselin Lerner and Stuart Lerner, who have always supported me in every way. I thank my husband, Javier Escobar, for building the wall that gave me an office to work in, and for all the other ways he has supported me. I owe great thanks to the people at Puentes de Salud, especially Steve Larson, Daphne Owen, Elvis Almanzar, and Esther Morales, whose collaboration and trust allowed me to connect with the Mexican community of South Philadelphia. And of course, last but not least, I am in deep gratitude to the participants in this study. As is evident in the following pages, they generously shared their time for this research, welcomed me into their homes, and entrusted me with recordings of personal moments in their lives. I was honored by the trust they placed in me, and humbled by their generosity. Les agradezco con todo mi corazón por darme confianza, por acogerme en v sus casas, y por su gran ayuda con mi investigación. Les deseo todo lo mejor y espero poderles devolver el favor algún día. Any errors that remain are my own — cualquier error que persista aquí es mío. vi ABSTRACT THE ACQUISITION OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION IN A MEXICAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY Marielle Lerner Gillian Sankoff In language change originating within the speech community, child acquisition begins with “faithful transmission of the adult system” (Labov 2007:346). On entering their peer group, children participate in incrementation of change. Input from multiple generations of speakers is arguably necessary for children to advance a language change. With stable variable input, children are reported to acquire their parents’ probabilistic usage, then maintain it among peers. This dissertation asks what can be learned about the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation from a case where children receive limited generational evidence about their community’s linguistic variables. I examine whether these youngest speakers participate in incrementing change, or whether they reinterpret the pre-existing variation. Study participants are six families of immigrants from Puebla in the Philadelphia Mexican community, consisting primarily of a first generation of young adults and a growing second generation of children. Participants themselves recorded day-to-day family interactions, including speech from both caregivers and children. I analyze the acquisition