Salience in Sociolinguistics

Salience in Sociolinguistics A quantitative approach Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. vorgelegt von PéterRácz aus Budapest Wintersemester 2012/2013 Indem wir vom Wahrscheinlichen sprechen, ist ja das Un- wahrscheinliche immer schon inbegriffen und zwar als Grenzfall des Möglichen, und wenn es einmal eintritt, das Unwahrschein- liche, so besteht fürunsereinen keinerlei Grund zur Verwunderung, zur Erschütterung, zur Mystifikation. (Frisch: Homo Faber) Contents Foreword ix 1 Preliminaries 1 1.1 Aims and concepts . .2 1.1.1 On the notations . .5 1.1.2 Salience in sociolinguistics . .5 1.1.3 Salience as low probability . .9 1.2 Structure of the dissertation . 14 1.2.1 Methodology . 14 1.2.2 Chapter structure . 17 1.2.3 The case studies . 21 1.3 Concluding remarks . 28 2 Defining Salience 31 2.1 Salience as a general term . 32 2.1.1 Salience in sociolinguistics . 34 2.1.2 Salience in visual cognition . 43 2.1.3 Selective attention in hearing . 48 2.2 Operationalising sociolinguistic salience . 49 2.2.1 Preliminaries . 49 2.2.2 Defining salience . 50 2.2.3 Exemplars and transitional probabilities . 53 2.3 Concluding remarks . 59 v CONTENTS 3 Methodology 61 3.1 General considerations . 62 3.2 Step-by-step corpus editing . 65 3.3 Calculating transitional probabilities . 71 4 Definite Article Reduction 75 4.1 Background . 76 4.1.1 Details of the process . 76 4.1.2 DAR as a salient variable . 80 4.2 Analysis . 80 4.2.1 Methods . 81 4.2.2 Salience from token frequency . 82 4.2.3 Salience from transitional probability . 84 4.2.4 Further arguments for phonotactic distinctiveness . 87 4.3 Concluding remarks . 92 5 Glottalisation in the South of England 95 5.1 Background . 96 5.1.1 Two recent studies . 97 5.1.2 Salience and glottalisation . 100 5.2 Analysis . 103 5.2.1 Methods . 104 5.2.2 The London-Lund Corpus . 106 5.2.3 The Spoken Corpus of Adolescent London English . 108 5.2.4 Modelling results . 112 5.3 Concluding remarks . 116 6 Hiatus resolution in Hungarian 119 6.1 Background . 119 6.1.1 The perception of hiatus resolution: Methods . 123 6.1.2 The perception of hiatus resolution: Results . 124 6.1.3 Hiatus resolution and na¨ıve linguistic awareness . 128 vi CONTENTS 6.2 Analysis . 129 6.2.1 Corpus results . 130 6.2.2 Main points . 132 6.3 Concluding remarks . 133 7 Derhoticisation in Glasgow 135 7.1 Background . 136 7.1.1 Social stratification and social awareness . 137 7.1.2 Derhoticisation in Glasgow . 140 7.1.3 /r/ in Glasgow . 141 7.1.4 Studies on coda /r/ ..................... 153 7.1.5 Interim Summary . 160 7.2 Analysis . 162 7.2.1 The FRED study . 163 7.2.2 Transitional probabilities in coda /r/ realisation . 165 7.3 Concluding remarks . 169 8 Salience and language change 173 8.1 Speaker indexation in sound change . 175 8.1.1 Approaches to speaker indexation . 176 8.1.2 Simulations on the role of indexation . 179 8.2 Salience in the propagation of a change . 185 8.2.1 Glottalisation in England . 186 8.2.2 Derhoticisation in Scotland . 188 8.3 Concluding remarks . 189 9 Conclusions 191 9.1 The source of salience . 191 9.1.1 From cognitive properties to language use . 192 9.1.2 Consequences for phonological modelling . 194 9.2 The predictability of salience . 196 9.2.1 Types of phonological change . 196 vii CONTENTS 9.2.2 Consonants and vowels . 198 9.2.3 Overview . 199 9.3 Concluding remarks . 200 German Summary { Deutsche Zusammenfassung 221 viii Foreword I used to have a little game with people in Freiburg resolved to know what I do for a living. I asked them to name a few differences between their own native dialect (usually Standard German with some Southern colouring) and Swiss German. Now, as no second language German learner would hesitate to tell you, the Alemannic dialects subsumed under the moniker of Swiss German differ from Standard German in everything. This only made it more interesting to see what speakers of the less self-conscious of the two dialects in question, Standard German, would single out. Unsurprisingly, most people mentioned various lexical items, such as the ever-recurring Swiss greeting, Grüetzi { which is regarded so much as a stereotype that the Swiss supermarket chain Migros has Grüetzi written on its shopping bags in Germany { as well as examples like Velo for Fahrrad, Töff for Motorrad, or Depot for the centrally German notion of Pfand. These examples are, in a way, less interesting, not only because they come from the most conscious linguistic level, the lexis, but also because they might come up in Swiss Standard German, the variety of Standard German used in German-speaking Switzerland. To a phonologist, the really exciting answers concerned the differences in how the two languages sound. Someone was able to point out, though not in such elaborate terms, that Swiss German uses a diphthong instead of a monophthong in words like müsli (müesli in Swiss German), but monophthongises Standard German /aI/ and /OI/ { hence the Swiss German name for the language, Schwyzerdütsch, instead of Schweizer Deutsch. ix Foreword A feature that many people mentioned, though, was that Swiss German is full of `weird throat sounds'. The state of affairs they likely had in mind > results from two independent processes. On the one hand, there is [kx], which, due to the proper implementation of the Second Germanic Consonant Shift, occurs word-initially in words where the Standard German cognate has a [k]. The realisation of this sound varies in German-speaking Switzerland: Basel German does not have it at all, and in quite a few dialects it is realised as [x]. On the other hand, /x/ lacks its (Standard German) allophone [ç]. The diachronic processes responsible for the spirantised stop and the absence of the palatal allophone proliferate velar fricatives in Swiss German dialects. (Calling all these fricatives `velar' is somewhat simplifying: In Bern, for instance, /x/ is usually realised as a uvular [X], making it even more prominent for German ears, but that is more or less irrelevant here.) The omnipresence of the velar fricative, then, seems like a salient charac- teristic of Swiss German, at least to speakers of Standard German { so much so, that it is also giving rise to explicit commentary, as in the following joke: {Wie sagt man Banane in der Schweiz? {Banane-ch. An odd thing about this, though, is that Standard German itself has the weird throat sound as a regularly occurring, contrastive segment in words like Buch ([bux]) or machen ([maxEn]). This certainly does not help Chuchichäschtli ([xux:ixæStli]), the affectionate Swiss German term for `kitchen cupboard', but we still have to say that the source of these comments on Swiss German wallowing in velar fricatives is not its absence from Standard German. It has to be sought elsewhere. While phonetic differences, like in the Bernese example, certainly play a role, one likely cause of this perceptible difference between Standard and Swiss German is the relative frequency of the velar fricative in the latter compared to the former. It occurs more often, and, more importantly, with a distinct distribution: it might, for example, show up word-initially or after front vowels, which it would never (or hardly ever) do in Standard German. A difference in frequency, then, seems to be a good reason to find some other x dialect saliently strange. Asking people to report on their perception of how other people speak is obviously quite hazardous. For instance, intonation might be a very good marker of a dialect, but speakers benefitting from a letter-based alphabet are more in command of the vocabulary to talk about segments than about supra-segments. That said, a difference in consonantal distributions can be a reliable source of salience between related dialects { even if it is obviously not the only one. This work looks at cases where it is not the presence or absence of a particular sound segment that is used as a dialect marker, but the difference in the distributions of its realisations. To give another example from English, debuccalisation, glottal realisation of the fortis coronal stop /t/ is strongly stigmatised in the South of England, word-medially between vowels (as in [siPI], [lEP@] for `city', `letter'), but no-one seems to care if /t/ ends up glottalised word-medially before a consonant (as in Àtlantic', [æPlæntIk]), or even word-finally. The glottal stop is there in both cases, but it shows up in a different pattern. Speakers seem to find it difficult to pick up on a difference in one instance, when it is phonetically fine-grained, but are strongly aware of the same difference in another, where its distribution is more bi-modal, as is the case with rhoticity in Glasgow and in New York City. Examples like these make more sense if we assume that distributional differences of near-categorically realised segmental variants result in speaker awareness to a particular dialectal variable. This might sound nebulous at first, but the present work sets out with the precise aim of fleshing out the idea. Despite the Swiss red herring, this book concentrates on English dialects, mostly because the relevant literature is predominantly based on evidence from English and because English dialects are indeed very well documented, making it easier to base even more literature on them.

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