Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T19:24:39.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The social motivations of reversal: Raised bought in New York City English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2014

Kara Becker
Kara Becker*
Affiliation:
Reed College, Department of Linguistics, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202, USAkbecker@reed.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents a variationist analysis of the bought vowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates that bought is lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raised bought gathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raised bought that comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest that bought's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. (bought, New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , September 2014 , pp. 395 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Becker, Kara (2009). /r/ and the construction of place identity on New York City's Lower East Side. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(5):634–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara (2010). Regional dialect features on the Lower East Side of New York City: Sociophonetics, ethnicity, and identity. New York: New York University dissertation.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara (2014a). (R) we there yet? The change to rhoticity in New York City English. Language Variation and Change 26(2): 1–28.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara (2014b). Linguistic repertoire and ethnic identity in New York City. Language and Communication (35):43–54.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara, & Wong, Amy Wing-mei (2009). The short-a system of New York City English: An update. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2):11–20.Google Scholar
Berger, Marshall D. (1968). The internal dynamics of a metropolitan New York vocalic paradigm. American Speech 43(1):40–50.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David (2009). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.1.05). Online: http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2011). White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn (2009). The nature of sociolinguistic perception. Language Variation and Change 21:135–56.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn (2010). The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change 22:423–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coggshall, Elizabeth L., & Becker, Kara (2010). The vowel phonologies of African American and white New York City residents. In Yaeger-Dror, Malcah & Thomas, Eric R. (eds.) African American English speakers and their participation in local sound changes: A comparative study, 101–28. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cutler, Cecilia (2008). Brooklyn style: Hip-hop markers and racial affiliations among European immigrants in New York City. International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1/2):7–24.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie (2010). Sociophonetic variation in speech perception. Language and Linguistic Compass 4(7):473–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2004). The meaning of style. Texas Linguistic Forum 47:41–53.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:87–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fought, Carmen (2006). Language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, Yakira (1948). The speech of New York City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan dissertation.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judith T. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Irvine, Judith T., Gal, Susan & Kroskrity, Paul V. (eds.), Regimes of language, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, & Drager, Katie (2007). Sociophonetics. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:89–103.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. (2010). ‘Today there is no respect’: Nostalgia, ‘respect’ and oppositional discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) language ideology. Pragmatics 2(3):263–80.Google Scholar
Hubbell, Allan F. (1950). The pronunciation of English in New York City: Consonants and vowels. New York: Columbia University King's Crown Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2012). Rbrul (Version 2.05). Online: http://www.danielezrajohnson.com/rbrul.html.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara (2009). Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84(2):157–89.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19:273–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. 2nd edn.Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2):344–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; & Boberg, Charles (2006). The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology, and sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William; Rosenfelder, Ingrid; & Fruehwald, Joseph (2013). One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89(1):30–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambert, Wallace E. (1967). A social psychology of bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23:91–109.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez (2007). Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36:533–54.Google Scholar
Mather, Patrick-Andre (2012). The social stratification of /r/ in New York City: Labov's Department Store study revisited. Journal of English Linguistics 40(4):338–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mele, Chrisopher (2000). Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, real estate, and resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, & Milroy, Lesley (2012). Authority in language. 4th edn.London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley (2004). Language ideologies and linguistic change. In Fought, Carmen (ed.), Sociolinguistic variation: Critical reflections, 161–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Niedzielski, Nancy A., & Preston, Dennis R. (2003). Folk linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (1992). Indexing gender. In Duranti, Alessandro & Goodwin, Charles (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4):478–504.Google Scholar
Scherer, Klaus R. (1972). Judging personality from voice: A cross-cultural approach to an old issue in interpersonal perception. Journal of Personality 40:191–210.Google Scholar
Thomas, C. K. (1942). Pronunciation in downstate New York. American Speech 17(1):30–41.Google Scholar
Thomas, C. K. (1947). The place of New York City in American linguistic geography. Quarterly Journal of Speech 33(3):314–20.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik (2011). Sociophonetics: An introduction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik, & Kendall, Tyler (2007). NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. Online: http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter (1972). Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society 1(2):179–95.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel; Labov, William; & Herzog, Marvin L. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, Winfred & Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics, 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Westmore, Thomas H. (1959). The low-central and low-back vowels in the eastern United States. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt (2007). Sociolinguistic folklore in the study of African American English. Language and Linguistic Compass 1:1–22.Google Scholar
Wong, Amy Wing-mei, & Hall-Lew, Lauren (2014). Regional variability and ethnic identity: Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York City. Language and Communication 35:27–42.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (2008). Why dat now? Linguistic-anthropological contributions to the explanation of sociolinguistic icons and change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):432–52.Google Scholar
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, & Thomas, Erik R. (eds.) (2010). African American English speakers and their participation in local sound changes: A comparative study. (Publications of the American Dialect Society 94.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia (1997). Spanish in New York. In Garcia, Ofelia & Fishman, Joshua A. (eds.), The multilingual apple: Languages in New York City, 167–201. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Zhang, Qing (2005). A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the constuction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34:431–66.Google Scholar
Zhang, Qing (2008). Rhotacization and the ‘Beijing Smooth Operator’: The social meaning of a linguistic variable. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(2):201–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar