POSTVOCALIC /R/ in NEW ORLEANS: LANGUAGE, PLACE and COMMODIFICATION by Christina Schoux Casey BA, St. John's College, 2001 MA, G
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POSTVOCALIC /R/ IN NEW ORLEANS: LANGUAGE, PLACE AND COMMODIFICATION by Christina Schoux Casey BA, St. John's College, 2001 MA, George Mason University, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Christina Schoux Casey It was defended on April 12, 2013 and approved by Dr. Connie Eble, Professor, Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Amanda Godley, Associate Professor, Department of Education, University of Pittsburgh Dr. Claude Mauk, Director, Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center, University of Pittsburgh Dr. Barbara Johnstone, Professor, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Scott Kiesling, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh ii Copyright © by Christina Schoux Casey 2013 iii POSTVOCALIC /R/ IN NEW ORLEANS: LANGUAGE, PLACE AND COMMODIFICATION Christina Schoux Casey, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 From silva dimes to po-boys, r-lessness has long been a conspicuous feature of all dialects of New Orleans English. This dissertation presents a quantitative and qualitative description of current rates of r-lessness in the city. 71 speakers from 21 neighborhoods were interviewed. R- pronunciation was elicited in four contexts: interview chat, Katrina narratives, a reading passage and a word list. R-lessness was found in 39% of possible instances. Older speakers pronounce /-r/ less than younger speakers, and those with a high school education or less pronounce /-r/ far less than those with post-secondary education. Race and gender did not prove to be significant predictors of r-pronunciation. In contrast to past studies, many speakers in the current study discuss their metalinguistic awareness of /-r/ and their partial control of /-r/ variation, discussing switching between r-fulness and r-lessness in different contexts. In New Orleans, this metalinguistic awareness is attributable in part to the devastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the near-disappearance of the city intensified an already extant nostalgia for local culture, including ways of speaking. Nostalgia and amplification by advertisers and popular media have helped recontextualize r-lessness as a variable associated with a number of social meanings, including localness and authenticity. iv These processes help transform r-lessness, for many speakers, from a routine feature of talk to a floating cultural variable, serving as a semiotic resource on which speakers can draw on to perform localness. This dissertation both closes a gap in research on New Orleans speech and uses New Orleans as a case study to suggest that the social meanings of linguistic features are created and maintained in part by a constellation of interrelated social processes of late modernity. Further, I argue that individual speakers are increasingly agentively engaged with these larger processes, as part of a global transformation from more traditional, place-bound populations to more deracinated individuals who choose to align themselves with particular communities and local cultural forms, particularly those that have been commodified. v Dedicated to William Gordon McLain, III, whose faith that ethics begins with engagement and whose profound love for New Orleans shine through this work, as they do through so many lives, like a beacon. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE..................................................................................................................................XIV 1. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................1 1.1 R-LESSNESS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH........................................2 1.2 R-LESSNESS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN SPEECH........................5 1.3 POSTVOCALIC /R/ IN NEW ORLEANS.............................................8 1.3.1 Previous research on /-r/ in New Orleans..................................10 2. NEW ORLEANS BEFORE AND AFTER KATRINA................................................16 2.1 "A DISTINCTIVE CULTURAL ENTREPÔT".................................19 2.1.1 A Note on Creole..........................................................................20 2.1.2 Back to 1803..................................................................................24 2.1.3 A Note on Cajun...........................................................................26 2.2 NEIGHBORHOODS AND RACE.........................................................29 2.2.1 A Note on Uptown and Downtown.............................................30 2.2.2 Back to Neighborhoods and Race...............................................35 2.3 AFTERMATH OF POST-HURRICANE FLOODING.......................40 2.3.1 Population Upheaval....................................................................42 2.3.2 Neighborhood Upheaval..............................................................46 2.3.3 Cultural Upheaval........................................................................48 2.4 ONLY IN NEW ORLEANS....................................................................53 2.5 SUMMARY..............................................................................................56 vii 3.0 DATA AND METHODS.................................................................................................58 3.1 FIELDWORK......................................................................................................58 3.1.1 Interviews......................................................................................59 3.1.2 Rapid and Anonymous Survey...................................................62 3.2 THE SAMPLE.....................................................................................................63 3.2.1 Neighborhoods.............................................................................63 3.2.2 Contacting Participants...............................................................65 3.3 DEMOGRAPHICS OF PARTICIPANTS: SOCIAL FACTORS...................66 3.4 PHONETIC AND DISCOURSE VARIABLES................................................79 3.5 SUMMARY..........................................................................................................81 4.0 FRENCH QUARTER RAPID AND ANONYMOUS SURVEY.................................83 4.1 RESULTS.............................................................................................................84 4.2 SUMMARY..........................................................................................................89 5.0 QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS: WHO, WHEN, WHERE?.........................................90 5.1 LOGISTIC REGRESSION ANALYSIS...........................................................91 5.2 LINGUISTIC RESULTS....................................................................................98 5.3 SOCIAL RESULTS...........................................................................................107 5.4 DISCUSSION.....................................................................................................121 5.5 SUMMARY........................................................................................................126 6.0 QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS: WHY?.........................................................................128 6.1 LANGUAGE AND PLACE..............................................................................131 6.1.1 Creating Place through Language........................................................131 6.1.2 The Mediation of Language and Place................................................136 viii 6.2 COMMODIFICATION OF LOCAL LANGUAGE......................................139 6.3 LANGUAGE, DISAPPEARANCE AND NOSTALGIA...............................147 6.4 LOCAL LANGUAGE AS PERFORMANCE................................................152 6.5 SUMMARY........................................................................................................154 APPENDIX A.............................................................................................................................157 APPENDIX B.............................................................................................................................159 APPENDIX C.............................................................................................................................160 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................167 ix LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 R-lessness in New Orleans LAGS speakers...................................................................14 Table 4.1 Rapid and anonymous survey demographic information..............................................84 Table 4.2 Rapid survey r-variation by age group..........................................................................85 Table 4.3 Rapid survey r-variation by race....................................................................................87 Table 4.4 Rapid survey r-variation by gender...............................................................................89 Table 5.1 Overall r-variation..........................................................................................................90 Table 5.2 ANOVA comparison between null and full models......................................................93